Edinburgh Sucks! | Illegality cover-up in Children & Families hits Yahoo! and Microsoft

Alistar Frater

Illegality cover-up in Children & Families hits Yahoo! and Microsoft

By The Basa ⋅ May 22, 2006 ⋅

After EdinburghSucks.com highlighted the fact that the Council’s pisspoor website myEdinburgh was as secure as an open meadow and that employee’s and probably councillor’s emails were being read by “Rosendale’s Fraudsters”, namely Mike Rosendale, David Hillson, Pete McDougall and Alistar Frater, the council quickly closed down the myEdinburgh mail system - an act of closing the stable door not only after the horse has bolted but after it had then taken a leisurely stroll around the world and finally ended up in a glue factory.

To make matters worse and muddy the waters, Children & Familes spindoctor, aka Communicatons Manager Joyce Nisbet sent the following email around all staff:

**Do you need to get your e-mails outside of the office?

Do you forward your work e-mails to your personal external e-mail address such as Yahoo, Hotmail or myEdinburgh? If you do, you may be placing Council data at risk.

By forwarding your e-mails to a ‘public’ system, it is possible that they could be intercepted, read, modified or even, disclosed to a third party. As the Council is not directly in control of the administration of these systems, you cannot guarantee your e-mails or any documents attached to them are safe.

*What to do if you need to see your e-mails when out of the office

You must use the Council’s Remote Access service. This is specifically designed for this purpose and will ensure that e-mails are kept secure. In addition, if you access the internet through this system, you will be protected by the Council’s internet filtering systems as you are when in the office. This service gives you access to e-mail, intranet and internet (provided you are setup for these systems at work) This system will be available to Children and Families establishments, eg schools at a later date.

Please discuss your needs with your departmental ICT representative and line manager. See the information on the intranet (select ICT Services from the ‘jump to’ menu on the home page then select How do I get things done? where you will find information on the Remote Access service and how to request it. You will also find contact details for departmental ICT rep is on those pages too.

This of course is all very fine and dandy until you start bringing in Microsoft’s Hotmail and Yahoo’s mail and accusing it of being just as insecure as the dodgy system that they themselves built. A quck highlight of the lies:

If you do, you may be placing Council data at risk. Only at the exact same risk if you send any email over the internet, excepting of course myEdinburgh because it is council employees who will be reading your email by illegally breaking into your email box.
By forwarding your e-mails to a ‘public’ system, it is possible that they could be intercepted, read, modified or even, disclosed to a third party. - Same as above except for the word modified. It is only on the myEdinburgh system where the council employees could modify your email. This could not happen on Yahoo! nor Hotmail as the logfiles can prove the original.
This is specifically designed for this purpose and will ensure that e-mails are kept secure. But is only available to certain people. Now that we have highlighted the illegality of ‘Rosendale’s Fraudsters’ they are now scrambling to have remote access for everyone which they should have had about 5 years ago.

EdinburghSucks.com have passed a copy of this email to Microsoft’s Hotmail division and also to Jerry Yang, the Chief Yahoo. When Yang heard the complete story of why his company was dissed because of the cover-up of illegal activities of a few council employees he was said to be fuming and taking the matter to his board - which may well see legal letters flying in to the Council Chambers from Silicon Valley.

Maybe a better email should have been sent out by Joyce. May we suggest:

Have you used myEdinburgh for email? You will have noticed that we had to close the email system on that sucker down. We are extremely sorry to have inconvenienced you, but as you will probably now know, those bastards at EdinburghSucks have given us more pukker information and this time it’s a bit worse than we thought. It seems that we employed Rosendale, Hillson, McDougall and Frater as our IT gurus. We didn’t know what we were doing and it turns out that those buggers knew even less.

Anyhoo, it now seems that they may well have been reading all your emails for years and we are scrambling to get everyone on to this newfangled Council Remote Access thingy. Apart from keeping your email secure as far as we are concerned, we also can track everything you do with your email and that, of course, is the sort of system we like (we can also then track when the naughty ones amongst you send your little messages to The Basa).

I know what you are all saying, we really should do is get rid of the culprits. However, we could well end up in more industrial tribunals and I am sure you would agree, we don’t want ‘Rosendale’s Fraudsters’ singing like canaries to outside people. God knows where it would all end! We just have to plod along.

Whilst we are having this nice chat, could I please plead with more of you to turn up to the “Have your Say” meetings. Jobson is getting well pissed off turning up in the hope of seeing a huge audience however when he enters the hall he finds only two people standing at the back of the room. That is why we sent Rosendale out a few times as substitute to punish you. If we need someone to speak to nobody, Rosendale is our guy - It’s better than nobody is there to hear any lies.

One final matter. I know some of you, OK pretty much all of you, are kind of pissed off that Hillson is working on the Modernising Pay/Job Evaluation project with the job evaluation team. We understand your pissed offedness. We have to give him something to do whilst investigations continue, so that we can then push him out of the door. Another reason if we keep him going round the focus groups then it keeps him out of our hair.