Computer experts said Wednesday it was no accident that Mayor Ray Nagin's entire email mailbox prior to June 2008 was deleted.
Several weeks ago, the City of New Orleans hired information technology professionals to try to recover missing data. The Louisiana Technology Council said it found the Mayor's entire calendar dating back to 2004, but still thousands of Nagin emails are gone.
The LTC said a city server that stored the Mayor and city staffers' email mailboxes in june of 2008 had a catastrophic failure.
"During the course of our recovery work on the Mayor's office mail servers we discovered that although many mailboxes were still present at least one had been removed at some point in the past. That mailbox was the Mayor's," said Mark Lewis, LTC President.
The LTC said the data was deleted sometime between June 2008 and May 2009.
"This was not data that disappeared because of damage to the store or by accident. It had to be something that someone would actually do," said Chris Reade with Carrollton Technology Partners, a company advising the LTC.
The LTC said the deletion was deliberate and that it took someone highly competent with administrative level access to the server.
Reade also said, "on May 5th the same day we had our conference call 22 gigabytes of data were removed from that same mailbox store. I cannot speculate whether the Mayor's mailbox was among that data. All I can say is that 22 gigabytes of data was removed on that same day."
The LTC also mentioned that the deletion of data could not have been the result of a damaged server because all 59 mailboxes on the system "were restored" with one exception, that exception being the mayor's.
"You know obviously, I want them to be as impartial as possible. Whatever information they find, we want that information to be made available," said Harrison Boyd, New Orleans' Chief Technology Officer. He was surprised and frustrated to hear the LTC's findings, and said it was news to him. Boyd said he contracted LTC to conduct the investigation.
"The city has received copies of all of the data we have recovered up to this point," said Reade.
Wednesday's revelatation comes only a week after federal authorities confirmed a criminal investigation involving the city's technology office and crime camera contracts. "We were equally surprised taken by the actions of the FBI to seize data at City Hall. Neither the LTC or its advisors had any warning of any actions taken by the FBI," said Lewis.
So far the technology council has been unable to recover Mayor Nagin's sent or received emails, but its investigation is still underway. Meantime, Boyd says the IT office has implemented new procedures to make it impossible to delete data from a city server. "We do a process that's called journaling, and what journaling does is when you write an email it's already written on a Microsoft exchange server that's inaccessible to you so once you send it you no longer can even access it," said Boyd.
The LTC said the city's IT office has been very cooperative and that it has no reason to believe that anyone working with LTC at City Hall is involved in the deletion. The LTC expects to complete its investigation within the next week.
