Monday 26 January 2009

Thanet District Council’s Censorship Department

In these stark economic times we appear to be paying for council officers to censor email sent to other council officers and councillors.

I couldn’t believe this at first and have read the correspondence through several times click here to read it, it’s a bit drawn out as it shows the way things came about my emails in red those from the council in black.

If any of the councillors I communicate with would like to send me a personal email address please do so, please indicate whether you would like me to publish it on the councillors contact details page on my website.

I any of the council officers I communicate with would like to send me a personal email address please do so obviously this is something I will treat with the strictest of confidence.

3 comments:

  1. There is still no satisfactory reply to the FOI request for details of the disciplinary meeting Cllr Margaret Mortlock called against Cllr George Maison.

    At that meeting he admitted to running a mail intercept (or snoop) by council officers useful to him. (My source was Cllr Mortlock)

    At that time Mr William True had instructed solicitors about lax policing and lax planning enforcement against the 6th Thanet Gun Range. And Sericol (Maison's then employer) had recenetly discovered their three decade contamination of the aquifer with cyclohexanone.

    Why might George have wanted to snoop on mail to the council mmmmmm

    That's a toughie.


    Back to retirement Best wishes

    ReplyDelete
  2. An interesting situation, Michael. What I find quietly amusing about all of this TDC 'care' and 'caution' is the time officers spend e-mailing funny pictures, jokes and material amongst themselves, KCC and to friends all over the place, that have nothing whatsoever to do with TDC's work or business. I drew this to the attention of a Councillor about 15 months ago and yet it seems to continue. Nothing wrong with 'filters' with those attachments!

    (Rick, glad to see you commenting still!)

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  3. I have just updated the correspondence as I have had a reply from TDC IT and have replied to it.

    I feel that the problem here relates to the way that government handles IT. It is obvious that councillors and council officers need official government email addresses so that people can’t impersonate them. It is also obvious that the email should pass through an anti spam program that they can access and control.

    It is also obvious that is should have any computer viruses removed.

    Any further interference with their emails is bound to spread distrust, it is hardly surprising that so many councillors prefer to use email addresses for council business that do not involve the councils email server.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.