By JOSH RESNEK
Two weeks ago, an investigation was ordered when a City Council tape of a racially charged meeting disappeared, was destroyed, or was stolen.
When a Boston Globe reporter asked the City Communications director for a copy of the Zoom recording, she was informed that someone had hacked into the City of Everett server and deleted the recording of the meeting and the post-meeting assault fest.
Many expressed first thoughts that went like this: what an amazing coincidence? Of all the files that could have been deleted, that was the one file that miraculously vanished.
The attacks on Councilor at Large Gerly Adrien had been erased, or so it appeared.
An Immaculate Deletion?
This should come at no surprise to anyone, as this is the transparency policy of the DeMaria administration and the City Council under the weak and ineffectual leadership of Council President Rosa DeFlorio.
Those of us who have been in the newspaper business for a long time, have a number of trusted friends in government.
A close friend, who is in a senior position in cybersecurity for the federal government, claims that the deleted Zoom recording of Councilor Adrien’s shameful treatment has not been lost forever.
If the recording were deleted from the computer that was managing the Zoom meeting, it would be in the computer’s Recycle Bin. No one in the City of Everett IT Department is smart enough to delete it from there as well.
If it were deleted from the Recycle Bin, it would still reside somewhere on the computer’s hard drive and even an amateur forensic examiner should be able to find it in about 15 minutes.
If the file was deleted from the City’s server, it should still reside in the server’s Recycle Bin. In the unlikely event that the file was also deleted from the server’s Recycle Bin, it would still be on the server.
Another source in cybersecurity tells me that Zoom also has another copy of the file saved to the cloud.
It would be a simple matter for one of the Mayor’s communications experts to request a copy from Zoom. But we all know that is not going to happen. The big issue here is not that the Mayor and most members of the administration are more than comfortable lying on a daily, or even an hourly, basis than telling the truth; but, for how long will the good people of Everett stand for it?