I remember reading years ago that George W. Bush didn’t use email in the Oval Office because of the latent danger that these communications might one day be subpoenaed or otherwise become public (IIRC this was in light of the troubles Bill Clinton had).
Emails by nature are like spoken conversation: Much more informal and candid, you expect privacy and express thoughts you would never put into writing under the official letterhead of your organization.
So is the President allowed to use electronic mail under the premise that the emails will remain sealed forever? Or would he be violating any law when he deletes certain or all emails?
Does the President haven an email account which only he uses personally and to which no assistant and clerical staff have access?
Well, I guess it won’t be betraying the trust between the President and I to show this to you. He emails me regularly, and we’re even on a first name basis.
He turns to me occasionally when he needs my support because, well, he believes in me and often the outcomes of his important goals depend on me.
The expectation of privacy for emails is not like a conversation. It is like any other written correspondence. It is as private and confidential as the parties involved make it. But the information can be subpoened if I judge orders it. Of course when it comes to presidential emails that is complicated by the fact that some may be classified if it has to do with national defense. It would be very smart to limit emails to what may become public later.
Maybe not. I work for a government agency and am very aware that my emails may be subpoenaed. I therefore do not express any thoughts in emails that I would not put on letterhead. The only thing informal about my emails is the writing style. If I want privacy , the email consists of “call me”.
I have heard that the governor avoids email and uses Blackberry messages instead for this exactly this reason.
Not just government employees. I think that in the US all business of a certain size at least are required to retain the information in their emails. I know my place of work archives its emails. I often wonder if 5000 identical copies of that spam we all got is in there.
Good question. By extension does he have a gmail account? For family and close friends. What about ebay? Or Zappos? He’s got to buy his Nike’s somehow.
Some years ago, there was this scandal about a kid who hacked into Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo Mail account (more precisely: he guessed the correct answer to a question used for password recovery).
Palin was later criticized because she apparently had used this private mail account for official business when she was Governor of Alaska.
When Obama was first elected I remember some articles about him wanting to keep his access to his blackberry (my how the world has changed in four years) so he could continue to email his friends, etc. There were some serious security issues around doing this but the White House IT team was working on it. I have no idea how that turned out, nor do I have cites for the articles…
He keeps up with his friends by snail-mail too. I got friendly snail-mails from my friend Barry also.
ETA: One can hardly slam the door on an old friend, can one? If my buddy Barry ever finds himself in a financial bind, he’s welcome to come sleep on my couch for a few days.