The Warren County Legislative, Rules and Governmental Committee is revising the Warren County Computer Usage Policy, and violations of the policy could be criminal. This revision has been in the works for nearly a year and the original policy goes back to at least 2008, although recent leaks of emails to the press have brought the issue again to the fore.
"We can’t comment about specific situations involving Warren County personnel,” said Warren County officials when asked if changes were affected by the recent incident involving Supervisor Peter McDevitt of Glens Falls. McDevitt is a Democrat who was censured by his own party in the city for releasing emails to the editor of the North Country Gazette.
The policy is not related to Supervisor McDevitt, Committee Chairman John Strough of Queensbury reiterated in an email.
The policy outlines many rules such as the need for secure passwords, the requirement to use government computers for government business and to keep games and illegal files off government computers.
However, there is also language that says county employees may only access data necessary to perform their own jobs as determined by their department head or the county administrator, but no other data, and “The Director of the Information Technology Department, or the designee from within the IT Department, shall be the only County officer or employee authorized to access email archives when authorized by this policy.”
This last edition seems to stem from an incident in 2021 in which county supervisors were accused of reading emails and releasing potentially private information. However, most emails are public documents and can be released via a Freedom of Information Law request.
[Read the Post-Star coverage of this issue here.]
The revised policy states: “An officer or employee may be held accountable for any breaches of the security measures set forth by this policy, or for violating confidentiality requirements through the unauthorized release of County owned computer information and data.”
The punishment for violating the policy could be criminal.
Violations of the policy may result in the filing of a criminal complaint against an employee or an elected officer. Employees may also face disciplinary action, reprimand, fines, demotion in grade and title, dismissal from the job or other actions. For elected officials the disciplinary action may include action provided under Public Officers Law, or by rule or resolution of the Board of Supervisors.
The policy does not outline exactly in which situations the criminal complaint might be brought but defers to state law.
It also outlines a process by which a supervisor must request records within the county government, which requires the OK of a list of department heads including the county administrator, the county attorney and perhaps the human resources director if the information contain health or personnel data.
According to Supervisor Ronald Conover of Bolton, the whole idea behind this policy was to create a good process of checks and balances.
“All three of those departments are taking a look at it,” said County Attorney Larry Elmen during the recent committee meeting.
“This definitely moves us that much further,” said Conover during the committee hearing.
Conover was the first to bring up in the meeting that there should be a documented record for FOIL Requests, specifically who made the request for documents, and why.
“Incidentally, I have the same exact observation,” Strough agreed. “Any request has to be in writing, so there’s a record.”
Supervisor Michael Wild raised a concern that there might be too many people involved in the process.
“Are we going to get bogged down dealing with these requests?” Wild asked the rest of the committee. “The whole purpose here is to stop the political tomfoolery. Is this a political request or a county business request? We have to get out of politics and back to doing our work.”