Less than a month after a New Hampshire court ruled that Internet history logs are public information under the Freedom of Information Act, plaintiff James M. Knight was back in court. This time, the father of four was seeking sanctions against the Exeter Region Cooperative and the Exeter school districts for concealing that almost two years’ worth of logs he had sued to see no longer exist.
“You have to wonder when they were actually deleted,” Knight said in the December 5 Exeter News-Letter, characterizing their erasure as “of extreme bad faith on [the districts’] part.” But school-district attorney Stephen G. Hermans contended that such logs have always been retained for a limited time and that Knight’s suit actually caused officials to save more than 10,000 pages of records from August 27 to November 2, 2000, that “would otherwise not have been retained.” Besides, Hermans added, “the issue was a right to see this file” and not whether the district had logs dating back to January 1, 1998.
Posted December 11, 2000.