Dallas City Council members spent hours last week upbraiding top City Hall officials for their failure to disclose a four-month-old bit of bad news: A city IT worker had accidentally deleted about 8 terabytes of police data, potentially including evidence that could disrupt pending criminal cases. Dallas’ elected officials had to hear about it from the media or from Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot, who learned of the potential evidence loss only a week before they did.
This time, they didn’t have to wait for the bad news. On Friday afternoon, Elizabeth Reich, the city’s chief financial officer, emailed the mayor and council members with an update. In reviewing the data loss, “our audit team has identified an additional 15 terabytes of missing files from data archives affecting DPD and the City Secretary’s Office.” And there could be more, Reich says. “As we continue this audit, we may find additional files are missing.”
Reich says in the email that data recovery specialists are looking to see whether any of the missing files can be found stored elsewhere, “and whether any additional systems citywide have been affected.” She does not say what type of data may have been compromised. We have asked the city for more information and will update when we hear back. Following the first data loss, the City Council was briefed privately in executive session before a public hearing.
In a subsequent email to elected officials, Reich says that the city on Friday fired the IT worker who accidentally deleted the files. The deletion occurred back in March, while the employee was trying to move the data from the cloud to a city-owned server.
In a hearing last week, city officials said the employee had been investigated for criminal wrongdoing and cleared. “Additional information collected during the course of the internal audit demonstrates a pattern of error on the part of the employee which substantiates and justifies the termination action,” Reich wrote Friday.
City officials had earlier said the employee lost about 22 total terabytes of data, but IT workers were able to recover about 14 terabytes. With the newly discovered data loss, the current tally is now up to 23 terabytes of lost data.
Reich, Assistant City Manager Jon Fortune, and City Manager T.C. Broadnax learned of the data loss in April. They told council members last week they didn’t report the incident to the mayor or other elected officials—with the exception of Jennifer Staubach Gates, who apparently kept it to herself and left office in June—because they didn’t think it was an exceptionally big deal, and believed most of the data could be recovered.
How big a deal is a terabyte? According to the Dallas Morning News, 8 “terabytes is the same amount of data as about 2 million photos or 3,200 hours worth of HD video. Most laptop hard drives can range in memory from about half a terabyte to two terabytes.” So a pretty big deal.
The city and some outside experts are reviewing the loss to find out what exactly was deleted and whether any criminal cases will be affected. A murder suspect about to go on trial was released on bond earlier this month while police figured out if they had all the evidence they needed. They did, Police Chief Eddie Garcia told City Council members last week, but the trial had already been delayed.
Public defenders in Dallas County have called for an independent audit of the data loss.
The DA’s office emailed over a statement Monday afternoon: “We’re going to look at each case and make certain we have everything in every case.
