The Politics of Government Email
BY Matthew Burton | Tuesday, November 11 2008
[With this post, we welcome to our expanding circle of contributing writers Matthew Burton, who is one part tech advisor to the intelligence community, one part government reform advocate, and one part recent graduate of New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. He made a splash earlier this year with a long essay called "Why I Help 'The Man' and Why You Should Too," arguing that open source developers should roll up their sleeves and help make government more tech savvy and efficient. We're looking forward to his contributions. The editors.]
A federal judge on Monday ruled in favor of transparency groups in their pursuit to acquire internal White House emails from 2003-2005. The emails in question are stored on backup tapes that, due to the White House's inadequate storage system, were recycled several times, resulting in the loss of up to 5 million internal emails.
Internal emails played crucial roles in multiple Bush Administration scandals, including Hurricane Katrina, the federal prosecutor firings, and the Valerie Plame affair.
Due to the ruling, the tapes will now be turned over to the National Archives upon Bush's exit, where they will be subject to FOIA.
Meredith Fuchs, the General Counsel of the National Security Archive (one of the plaintiffs), said this ruling will set a precedent for White House email transparency. "Number one, this ruling means that the Obama Administration needs to be conscious of having good records practices, because they will be subject to suit as well if they don't do the right thing. Also, it squarely rejects the notion that the public does not have a right to the see (internal White House) emails."
Email disclosure is useful not just for the sake of transparency, but for history as well. "Before e-mail, events and meetings were formalized in memos and letters," Fuchs said. Only official meetings were logged, while casual conversations were lost to history. But emails expose the decisionmaking processes of presidents, at both their best moments and their worst. As interesting as Katrina emails are today, they may be even moreso 50 years from now.
One problem: according to Fuchs, those meeting memos "were generally maintained in an organized manner," while emails "have rarely been properly managed." That is especially true of the tapes in question, where emails have been stored in .pst format, making them difficult to sort through. In order for the National Archives to disclose the tapes' contents, they'll first have to find someone willing to fund their retrieval.
After a very confusing eight years, the White House still does not have a quality email backup system. (See the whole chronology here.) A ruling on a related lawsuit is expected Friday. That lawsuit concerns the disclosure of internal White House emails regarding the email backup problem.