Idaho Statesman: State Dept: Most official email not auto-archived until Feb.

WASHINGTON — The State Department said Friday it was unable to automatically archive the emails of most of its senior officials until last month, which could mean potential problems for historical record-keeping amid criticism of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of a private email server while in office.

On the same day the department announced that it was temporarily shutting down parts of its unclassified Internet-linked systems, including email, to harden security in the wake of several hacking attacks, spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that only Secretary of State John Kerry’s emails had been automatically retained before February of this year. Kerry’s emails have been automatically stored since he took the job in February 2013, she said.

Psaki suggested the inability to automatically retain the emails of all but its most senior official before last month was because the department lacked the technical capability to capture them unless individual employees took action on their own. She said she could not be more specific but that the department hoped to be able to automatically archive all employees’ emails by the end of this year.

“Our goal is to apply an archiving system that meets these same requirements to all employee mailboxes by the end of 2016,” she told reporters. “It’s only natural that you’d start with the secretary, which we did in 2013, and that you would progress with other senior department officials.” Officials whose emails are now being automatically archived include the two deputy secretaries of state along with dozens of undersecretaries and assistant secretaries of state, Psaki said.

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