Governor Sued For Deleting Email

Legal Issues

from the bad-governor dept

The Governor of Utah has been sued by news organizations for deleting his email. Apparently, he deletes all of his email after three days. The news organizations say that he is destroying public records. The legal issue is really whether email is a document or a transient conversation like a telephone call. This, of course, is the same reason why President Bush had to stop using email entirely. I think this is silly. Email is an effective way to communicate – and if we’re going to handcuff our elected officials into making email useless, we’re doing more harm than good. Anyway, if I were an elected official (and hopefully, I never will be), I would just get myself a Hotmail or Yahoo mail account and use that most of the time.