The idea of public access to government records may come with a new caveat in the information age: You can access them — as long as they haven’t been deleted.
Many U.S. government offices are intentionally deleting e-mails before anyone can read them, according to a new report just published by USA Today . The story quotes lawsuits suggesting some public officials, such as Missouri Governor Matt Blunt, have gone as far as ordering backups be destructed as well.
Any argument that e-mails are being deleted for space purposes is, of course, questionable. It doesn’t take much space or work to create a simple remote storage system that could easily retain the information.
So with the United States’ Freedom of Information Act, how could this be legal? Evidently, while laws requires government e-mails to be made available as public record, they also let the officials decide which e-mails should be turned over and which should be deleted.
Is it just me, or does that seem to defeat the most basic purpose of a public record? Would the idea of tossing out potentially relevant paper documents have flown a decade ago? Sounds a bit shifty.
