News International Under Scrutiny for Routine Email Deletion Requests

A technology firm told members of British Parliament that its client, News International, requested the deletion of hundreds of thousands of emails since April, 2010.

The firm, India-based HCL, revealed this information in a letter to the Home Affairs Select Committee of U.K. Parliament, which is investigating News International over the phone hacking scandal.

In the letter [PDF], HCL lists nine times it was asked to delete emails between April 2010 and July 2011.

HCL handles the live email systems for News International. That means that the vast majority of emails it manages were sent during the last 15 days. Messages older than 15 days are managed by a different provider. In essence, HCL helps deal with situations that are beyond the client support desk’s skills.

Most of the deletion requests appear to be normal email management tasks. One request, in April 2010, for instance, was to delete more than 200,000 delivery failure messages. In this incident, HCL says that the messages were successfully removed by the News International help desk before HCL could do anything.

Other requests covered common email maintenance tasks like deleting public folders or clearing clogged outboxes. If you have ever managed a mail system for a large organization, you know it can often require lots of tweaks.

The only incidents that could raise questions about News International’s intentions would be those in September 2010 and January 2011, when HCL was asked about deleting historical email.

In the first case, HCL was asked to work with a third party vendor to delete archived email from News International’s systems. The rationale by News International was that cleaning up the archived databases for the mail servers would make email more reliable and more manageable.

In January 2011, News International asked HCL if it would be able to truncate an email database — that is, delete or compress parts of the data in the database. HCL was unable to do this and told News International to talk to a third-party vendor.

We’ve already seen so many ethical lapses in the phone hacking scandal, it’s easy to immediately look at any requests for email deletion, no matter how innocuous, with suspicion.

That’s certainly how some of the British MP’s see the situation. The Guardian quotes one member of Parliament as saying, “It certainly looks as if … News International were deliberately thwarting their investigation.”

In a statement, News International said that “[it] keeps backups of its core systems and, in close co-operation with the (police’s) Operation Weeting team, has been working to restore these backups.”