Government workers' private e-mails need some safeguards
WASHINGTON -- Like many information technologies before it, e-mail has found its way to the center of a Washington controversy. TV made Kennedy look better and the Vietnam War look worse. Tape recording helped do in Richard Nixon. An Internet video brought down Senator George Allen.
And now Congress is demanding that the Bush White House explain how it lost track of perhaps as many as 5 million e-mails, most of them sent or received by presidential aides on nongovernmental accounts.
With each advancement in information technology, the zone of privacy gets smaller. The types of information available to any investigator, be it a prosecutor or congressional committee chairman, are more numerous. And inevitably, government aides get caught doing, well, something. Most often they get caught covering up something that would have drawn far less attention if they had just admitted it upfront.
But while waiting to see whether the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Patrick Leahy, gets hold of White House adviser Karl Rove's nongovernmental e-mail account, it's worth remembering that presidential aides, like everyone else, deserve some privacy. And simply applying to e-mail the same rules that govern the release of printed memos may not provide enough privacy.
Leahy is trying to discover whether eight US prosecutors were fired for failing to follow a White House political agenda. But in addressing the issue of the missing e-mails, Leahy last week invoked the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which declared all documents created by White House aides public property. Legal specialists consider e-mails to be "documents." So if the White House destroyed the e-mails -- or even just allowed aides to use nongovernmental accounts as a way of subverting the law -- a much larger scandal could result.
Rove probably anticipated such a situation when he began using a nongovernment e-mail account. Although he carried the title of deputy chief of staff, Rove did almost exclusively political work. He was the chief Republican strategist for the 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2008 elections.
Obviously, Rove wanted to separate his political e-mails from other White House information traffic so they would never reach the hands of government archivists. Other aides appear to have done the same thing.
It's possible that Rove or the other aides chose to carve out some private e-mailing space to do some dirty White House business, such as scheming to fire uncooperative US attorneys.
But like most other people, the White House staffers probably also wanted to protect their normal back-and-forth with friends. This would include the ridiculing of colleagues that goes on in most offices -- e-mails of the "Dick Cheney looks a lot like Elmer Fudd in hunting clothes" variety.
Such banter is what makes most e-mailing different from composing official White House documents: It's conversational -- in some ways even more private than a conversation, which might be overheard -- and includes both serious work communications and catty, personal asides.
Presidential aides, of course, have been warned that their e-mail could be seen by eyes other than their own, and they had to know that using nongovernmental accounts might not be enough to keep the missives private. But the White House aides probably were indiscreet anyway, taking a certain amount of privacy for granted.
That is what apparently happened with the White House taping system. The people who knew about the bugs seemed to forget they were being taped. Nixon, who installed the system in 1971, was forced to resign after tapes showed him plotting the Watergate coverup, using shocking profanities and slurs in the process.
Nixon's predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, taped many of his phone calls, and knowing that he was being recorded didn't seem to curb Johnson's salty style.
Historian Michael Beschloss's book, "Reaching for Glory," a compilation of Johnson tapes, includes the president trashing three Southern states that went against him in the 1964 election: "Louisiana's a bunch of crooks, and Mississippi's too ignorant to know any better, and Alabama's the same way." So declared the first Southern president since Reconstruction.
There probably are many similar gems in the e-mail files of the Bush administration, but they all don't have to be preserved for posterity. President Bush has issued an executive order curbing the Presidential Records Act of 1978 to keep more White House documents private; Congress is seeking to undo the order through legislation, setting up a confrontation.
The time seems right for a reasonable compromise balancing the need to preserve the public record with the need to protect people's privacy -- even in the White House.
Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond. 