Data work ‘benign,’ Faist says

Comment from Toronto

It was merely “benign, or custodial” work that Peter Faist performed on computers in former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty’s office, Faist told the criminal trial of his spouse, Laura Miller, and her former boss, David Livingston, on Monday.

Miller and Livingston, who were respectively McGuinty’s deputy chief of staff and chief of staff, are pleading not guilty to three charges each in connection with their alleged destruction of records relating to two controversial cancelled gas-fired power plants.

The alleged destruction occurred in early February of 2013, as the McGuinty government was leaving office and the Kathleen Wynne government was taking over.

The plants were cancelled, in 2010 and mid-election 2011, by the McGuinty government at what has turned out to be a $1-billion cost to Ontario taxpayers.

The issue — the government’s decision, the cost and the Opposition demand for the rationale behind the decision and the documents that explained it — was the single dominant hot potato for the McGuinty government.

Faist was the one hired to do the job of erasing about 20 hard drives in the former premier’s office.

As Miller’s spouse and someone who had done other IT work for both the Liberal Party and the Liberal Caucus Service Bureau in the past, Faist was a familiar face.

But he was neither on staff nor a security-cleared contractor, and the premier’s office with the cabinet office had its own dedicated IT unit. Some of its members have testified at Miller and Livingston’s trial, and said they prided themselves on being faster and more responsive than the regular government IT department.

In cross-examination with Scott Hutchison, who represents Miller, the innocent nature of Faist’s work was emphasized.

For instance, Faist used software from a company called White Canyon, which bills itself as a leader in “data destruction.”

But the particular product he used is called “SystemSaver” because, as the White Canyon website says, it allows a user to “securely and permanently delete all company or personal data” while leaving the operating system intact.

Early on in his questioning, Hutchison began using the “SystemSaver” name, and by the time prosecutor Tom Lemon began his brief reexamination of Faist, he too was using the phrase.

Hutchison pointed out that Faist carried out his work in the open during normal business hours over three days in February of 2013 and that there was nothing covert, least of all sinister, about what he was doing.

And, Faist told Hutchison, using the software did nothing to the servers. It was “a relatively simple undertaking,” Faist said.

In fact, he said, “there were OPP officers present in the premier’s office when we were working there.”

These, it turns out, were plainclothes officers attached to McGuinty’s security detail, people who, like most laymen, wouldn’t have a clue what Faist was doing.

But couple that with Faist’s claim to have done contract work for the OPP’s major crimes division, and it leaves the impression that he was, de facto, unofficially security-cleared: He wasn’t.

Faist was able to wipe the hard drives only because Livingston had obtained for him special administrative rights that allowed him to sign in and access all 90 of the computers in McGuinty’s office.

He was assisted in the work by Miller’s former executive assistant, Alexandra Gair, who followed Faist to the witness box.

She was assigned to help Faist by Miller, she said, and also given a list of hard drives to wipe (or systems to save, in Hutchison’s language) by Miller.