By Ed Williams, Searchlight New Mexico |
5 hours ago
Don J. Usner/Searchlight New Mexico
Secretary Brian Blalock of the Children, Youth and Families Department in his office in Santa Fe in 2020.
The New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department has fired two high-level employees who raised concerns about the agency’s practice of encrypting and summarily destroying records.
A Searchlight New Mexico investigation has found that over the past year, the CYFD used the secure text messaging app Signal to discuss a wide range of official business, including the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the care of children in state custody and concerns about private contractors. Department leadership then set many of those communications to automatically delete, rendering them forever inaccessible to attorneys, members of the public and journalists.