Editorial: Government e-mail missteps inexcusable

23 Jun 2007 // Two of the many problems with e-mail:

• People can find out things about you that you have the right to conceal.
• People can conceal from you the things you have a right to know.

Two recent stories in the news that shed light on both of these problems reveal the temptation e-mail presents to government officials.

First, White House officials are being investigated for allegedly skirting the Presidential Records Act by failing to maintain records of e-mails sent through accounts with the Republican National Committee. That act stipulates that all correspondence involving White House staff, no matter the medium, be preserved for eventual public release.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington learned that top White House staff routinely used the RNC accounts for official business, apparently to make correspondence less transparent to the public.

The systematic violation of the law is suggested in a 2003 e-mail exchange between Susan Ralston, then an assistant to Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and now-convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Ralston sent an e-mail to Abramoff asking that he e-mail her at ralston@georgebush.com. After an e-mail was accidentally sent to her on the White House account, Abramoff wrote, “Dammit. It was sent to Susan ... and was not supposed to go into the WH system.”

The law says that any correspondence related to official business conducted by government officials is public record. By using the RNC accounts, many of which have apparently not been recorded, that public record is lost. If this is true, then members of the Bush administration have been deliberately sidestepping the law and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of it.

In the second instance regarding the privacy/accessibility of e-mail, an appeals court ruled that federal agents broke the law when they searched stored e-mail accounts without a warrant in a fraud case.

The finding was important because the laws and court decisions that define the privacy of communication over the Internet are still evolving (and will continually evolve as advances in technology outstrip our ability to grasp how those advances affect our lives).

The three-judge panel in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals out of Cincinnati ruled:

“It goes without saying that like the telephone earlier in our history, e-mail is an ever-increasing mode of private communication, and protecting shared communications through this medium is as important to Fourth Amendment principals today as protecting telephone conversation has been in the past.”

The government’s position is that agents do not need a warrant to seize e-mails stored by Internet service providers.

Does that really make sense to anyone?

It didn’t to the court of appeals, which upheld a lower court’s decision and temporarily blocks investigators from such e-mail bank searches.

Local, state and government officials are bound by their constituents’ faith to understand and follow public record laws. It is their responsibility as elected and appointed officials to make their official correspondence transparent, and to make sure citizens are not victimized by unwarranted seizure of private e-mail.