San Francisco grand jury examines city Information Technology system

By Brent Begin, Bay City News Service

May 26, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) - Two civil grand jury reports issued yesterday fault San Francisco for maintaining a sluggish and inefficient information technology system, except when it comes to protecting personal data.

The first report urged San Francisco officials to find the money to improve their individual computer and telephone networks, while the second report commended the city on its handling of sensitive personal information.

"We need to get into the 21st century, and right now, the city is lagging," grand jury member Jean Ellingsen said yesterday. "It's embarrassing to be so close to Silicon Valley, and ... for our city government to be lagging."

Among the findings in the first report, the grand jury criticized the city for ignoring previous recommendations to create a competent, central information technology agency. The grand jury found the city's acting central agency, the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services, to be unreliable, expensive and rife with employee problems.

The department's director, Chris Vein, agreed with the grand jury recommendations.

"The report supports much of what I've been pushing for in the city," Vein said yesterday. "I've spent a lot of time with the mayor and the Board of Supervisors trying to implement these policies."

The report calls for the mayor to create a chief information officer position to oversee all of the city's technology systems and training. The city is also encouraged to help smaller departments without the proper funding to upgrade systems, which in some cases are run on software like Windows 97, Ellingsen said.

For the most part, the grand jury urged the city to stop outsourcing the management of its information technology, except in the case of handling personal information in financial transactions, which was the subject of the second report.

San Francisco has generally done a satisfactory job of protecting individuals against identity theft, mainly because larger, established companies specializing in credit card sales are hired to handle agency transactions, according to grand jury member Hal Feuchter.

The investigation began in response to a slew of large personal data leaks around the country and in the Bay Area. In March 2005, for example, the records of almost 100,000 graduate students, past applicants and alumni at University of California, Berkeley were compromised in a computer breach.

The grand jury confined the investigation to computer theft within five different agencies in San Francisco. It found no instances of city-caused identity theft.

Both reports are available online on the San Francisco government Web site http://www.sfgov.org.

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