By Brian Wright | Casa Grande Dispatch
On Thursday Pinal County Sheriff’s Office Director of Administration Tim Gaffney said Sheriff Paul Babeu would send a letter next week to the Board of Supervisors about “issues and concerns” he had with County Manager Fritz Behring.
Babeu decided to speed up the process.
The letter was sent to the supervisors Friday morning and details what Babeu calls several instances of email “security breaches” by Behring. In the letter, Babeu also accuses former county Information Technology Director Richard Jones and former Deputy County Attorneys Joe Albo and Chris Roll of security breaches against the PCSO.
“It is my recommendation that the Pinal County supervisors have an audit con- ducted by an outside third party, regarding alleged misconduct by Mr. Behring and his staff related to security and operational breaches,” Babeu wrote.
In the letter, Babeu details sevral occasions in which he claims Behring obtained emails that contain “law enforcement sensitive,” “confidential” or “attorney-client privilege” information.
An instance with PCSO employee Andrew Goode involved Behring’s release of more than 22,000 documents, approximately 6,000 of which included sensitive information, after Goode submitted a “confidential” public request to Behring, Babeu said.
In response to those actions, PCSO Chief Deputy Steve Henry sent a letter to FBI agent Kurt Remus in May 2012. The letter included an accusation of Behring’s releasing protected or confidential information — even “highly sensitive national security information, including GPS coordinates and terrain features that pinpointed the exact location of hundreds of ‘underground sensors’ placed by the United States Border Patrol,” Henry wrote.
Henry’s letter also stated that former Pinal County Attorney’s Office Chief Deputy Richard Platt said the conduct had the “potential to compromise active criminal investigations” at the PCSO and national level and had “the potential to put lives in danger” for law enforcement.
Babeu claims Behring denied his request to have two employees transferred from Pinal County IT to the Sheriff’s Office so he could “maintain the email system we currently utilize.” Babeu said this was necessary in order to complete background checks on employees who have access to “law enforcement sensitive” and “criminal jus- tice” information.
On Oct. 26, 2012, Babeu wrote another letter to Behring that addressed concerns the sheriff had with security issues surrounding the Pinal County IT office. He said Behring again denied requests made in the letter.
Babeu also alleged Behring received confidential emails improperly when Behring asked IT employees to provide him with copies of all emails pulled from any Sheriff’s Office employee.
“(Behring) wanted emails provided to him before they were turned over to our office for review,” he said.
In a phone interview Friday, Behring said he was aware of Babeu’s letter but hadn’t had time to look it over extensively. As for Babeu’s recommendation of a third-party audit of his allegations against Behring regarding emails, Behring said he’s fine with that course of action.
“If the Board of Supervisors finds that necessary, I have no problem with that,” he said. “I would love that.”
On Nov. 5, 2012, Behring sent an email to Babeu in response to the sheriff’s request to make changes in the county’s IT staff.
“The IT department is ready, willing and able to cooperate with PCSO to address any issues or concerns about the resources used by PCSO,” he said in the email.
But making the changes Babeu recommended, Behring said, would be “a major departure from current practice and would require action by the Board of Supervi- sors” to implement the change.
Behring also said the request reminded him of a similar situation that happened between the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and Maricopa County in recent years — a request MCSO made, he said, to “exert greater control over just one aspect of the computer network” utilized by MCSO and supported by Maricopa County’s IT department.
“The MCSO effort resulted in a lawsuit in which the Sheriff’s Office spent more than $600,000 on attorney’s fees before deciding to give up and return to the same structure for utilizing the system that had been in place for many years,” Behring said. “The effort was wasteful of time, management resources and taxpayers’ money. It would be a mistake for Pinal County to experience that same waste.”
In a letter sent Tuesday to “clients and law enforcement agencies,” County Attorney Lando Voyles said county employees need to be careful about email
correspondence through the county email system. He said the way email requests are processed at the county left him worried about dis- closing sensitive information.
“I became concerned that the potential for inadvertent disclosure of attorney-client communications or other confidential information … could materialize with such a process,” he said.
However, Voyles, who ran with Babeu as a “Law and Order” team on the Republican ticket in November’s general election, didn’t say he had witnessed any security breaches since taking office last month — contrary to the allegations made by Babeu against Behring and other county employees.
“Again, this is not to imply that any wrongdoing or inappropriate action has occurred by any party involved in this process; it is merely to make you, as the client and law enforcement agencies, aware so that you can take appropriate precautions,” Voyles said.
