Palin's Gross Error in E-judgment

Consider the following question: what would be more embarrassing, a generally narrow public records release of official correspondence that may look bad, or a 1000 day quest to get access to a personal email account with a blend of the official and personal correspondence some of which might look bad but would bring others needlessly into the conversation: silly pictures and all?

The State of Alaska will today release some 24,199 pages of email correspondence between former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and others that were written from a private Yahoo email account. When email is received by or sent from a government domain, it becomes subject to public records laws, which vary from state to state, because that file interacts with a government computer. Alaska's public records law is AS 40.25.110.

There could be legitimate reasons for conducting business via a private account in lieu of the official state account: convenience and storage capacity are the first that come to mind.

Vast swaths of Alaska are remote places without easily accessible internet access and perhaps the Governor felt the best way to remain accessible was to maintain a private account she could access email on the fly, perhaps from her BlackBerry or public computer. It is possible that her state email account was not available remotely through a web browser, although unlikely. However, if it was available through web access, the possibility of leaving it connected compromises the account. One can easily imagine a harried governor using a public computer, forgetting to logout, and some subsequent user of that terminal gaining access to that account. For a conscientious professional not wanting work or decisions to pile up, it may make intuitive sense. Also, when coordinating a family, it may make sense to remain accessible when possible, so it could be a wise use of time to just have everything in one place.

It's also possible that even the governor had restrictions on storage space in her email account. Even as storage becomes less expensive, some IT departments restrict the amount of email available in each account. Most public records laws will prohibit the out and out destruction of public records for a significant period of time, requiring archiving. Perhaps finding her desire to have her email available to her for reference beyond the period of time or beyond the size restrictions placed on her account lead Governor Palin to seek an alternative means by which to keep her records accessible for searching and reference.

While those can be legitimate reasons for maintaining a private account, they are fundamentally bad reasons for doing so. The questions raised by the existence of conducting state business via a private account are more legitimate than the reasons for having conducted that business. "Sunshine Laws," as public records laws are commonly known, exist to allow the citizenry to know what business is being conducted by the state unless there are compelling reasons for withholding that information, "compelling" typically defined as the state providing a reason challengeable through litigation.

By maintaining a private account, and therefore removing the correspondence from the scope of the sunshine law, she replaces state policy regarding what may be compelling reasons for withholding the information with her own judgment and thwarts the intention of the law, transparent government. She has brought public suspicion on herself by allowing the questions about her integrity, reasons for maintaining a separate account, and what might be in those accounts in the first place. Once those questions are asked, she immediately suffers a loss.

More troubling, is that since that email exists on Yahoo! Servers, the email correspondence is owned and accessible by a private, corporate entity and is subject to that company's "TOS," terms of service, which can be changed without notice and, more importantly in this case, without any government process. All of the government business conducted via a Yahoo! Email account, is now accessible, stored, and owned by a private company without the state of Alaska having any public record of that business having been conducted. This is not to say Yahoo! would access the information contained in those messages, but it would certainly be stored on their servers and accessed, if in no other way, to provide advertising content delivered through computer algorithms which do access content.

If this was an attempt to thwart public records "sunshine" laws, it was misguided. Email through a private system, particularly a web-based systems such as Yahoo! or Gmail, is far more susceptible to hacking than a government account. While not technically more susceptible '" in fact, corporate branded accounts such as Yahoo! are probably more difficult to access '" hacking into government computers carry prosecution as a deterrent. In combining her personal and government business on a Yahoo! account, rather than gaining protection from the sunshine law, she has exposed her family and other personal contacts to scrutiny. Even the choice of user names '" gov.sarah and gov.palin '" invoke her official title, almost as bait to the wannabe hacker and definitely announcing business was being conducted.

Regardless of what information is or is not released in the 24,199 pages, the fact business was co-mingled with the personal, was conducted off-line of official Alaska servers and outside of the scope of the public records law will raise questions. The first question that should be raised is less about what was said and what business was conducted, those questions will be answered with the release and subsequent analysis of the content, and more about her judgment and decision making processes. Those are the initial attributes in question and so far the answer is unimpressive. Now that her account is being released, all of that personal information - albeit scrubbed information - will be available on the internet in perpetuity. So much for maintaining privacy.

REFERENCE MATERIAL:

LA Times, "The Sarah Palin email extravaganza: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/06/sarah-palin-emails-weekend-reading.html

Alaska to release Palin Emails: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/06/10/30193/

Sarah Palin Email Hack, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_email_hack

Alaska's Public Records Law: http://www.touchngo.com/lglcntr/akstats/statutes/title40/chapter25/section110.htm Yahoo! Terms of Service: http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173.html
Gawker, :Sarah Palins Personal Email": http://gawker.com/5051193/sarah-palins-personal-emails
Boingboing, "Palin's Yahoo email account hacked, contents posted to Wikileaks": http://boingboing.net/2008/09/17/palins-yahoo-email-a.html
MSNBC, "24,199 pages of Palin e-mails to be released Friday morning": http://openchannel.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/06/6797957-24199-pages-of-palin-e-mails-to-be-released-friday-morning
KTUU.com, "State to release thousands of Palin's emails": http://www.ktuu.com/news/ktuu-state-to-release-thousands-of-palin-emails-20110609,0,7088242.story