Mayor: Cop IT Dept didn't erase copiers

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - A Buffalo City Attorney has been fired just days after a CBS News investigation uncovered startling information on a discarded city copier.

The Mayor says Diane O'Gorman's firing has nothing to do with the copier situation even though it comes hours after one of her legal letters appeared on TV. CBS News investigators bought four used digital copiers in a New Jersey warehouse, two of them were old Buffalo Police copiers with sensitive police information still left on the hard drive.

The City Attorney who handles police matters, Diane O'Gorman, sent CBS this letter saying, "Our department was unaware that confidential information was being retained on hard drives of copiers that we leased from Toshiba." Now, O'Gorman has been fired.

Mayor Brown said, "I know that the Corporation Counsel has decided to move in another direction and bring in another member of his staff." When asked if the firing had something to do with the copier situation, the Mayor responded, "Not a thing."

We've learned that those two police copiers were taken away in the same week in January that City Hall swapped out all of its copiers. It was approved as a lease of copiers citywide, a five-year deal with Toshiba, costing the city $119,000. But the Mayor says all city copiers are not believed to have sensitive information still on them.

Mayor Brown said, "The city's Information Technologies department has a system whereby the memory of the copiers is erased between one day and 30 days. Unfortunately, the Police Department had its own internal IT and was not utilizing the same process as Buffalo City Hall was."

Toshiba tells News 4 it has located and is in possession of all of the hard drives from their previous fleet and is working with them to eradicate all of the data on the hard drives.

The Mayor says the Law Department continues to investigate this, but it appears the Police Department's own internal IT department was responsible for clearing that information that was not cleared off the hard drive.