Hillary Clinton has dominated the news recently as her email scandal, and her subsequent attempt to explain it, angered both her critics and potential supporters. Clinton first came under fire when it was revealed that she used her private email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state.
While much of the outrage over the scandal seems nitpicky and should be dismissed as political theater, some of the criticisms against Clinton do hold water. One criticism of Clinton’s email management regards security. Conducting official government business using a personal network makes it nearly impossible to ensure the security of the information. Because she operated her own server, Clinton also put herself at risk because she would have been responsible for any breech in security.
Though security is important, the strongest criticism against Clinton’s handling of her email is that her own staff decided which of her personal emails to publish. When she first began to face this controversy, Clinton agreed to turn over thousands of emails after she deleted those that she deemed “personal.” While it is certainly possible that the emails were personal, her statement would have been more credible if a neutral party had determined which emails to delete instead of her own staff.
Ironically, there was one benefit of Clinton’s email snafu; it focused the public’s attention on the transparency of their elected officials, which has exposed other high-profile politicians. It turns out that Jeb Bush, who recently tweeted “transparency matters” in response to the Clinton email scandal, failed to comply with a Florida law that required state officials to turn over records at the end of his term. In fact, Bush, who is the Republican Party’s frontrunner for the 2016 presidential election, delivered his latest batch of 25,000 emails last year, a full seven and half years after he was required to do so by law. Like Clinton, Bush also used a private email address during his tenure as governor.
However, the scandals do not stop there. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s staff is in full damage control mode after his administration’s policy of deleting state workers’ emails after 90 days became public. Cuomo, who has already suffered from increased scrutiny this year due to the high profile corruption cases in Albany, has offered no rationale for his policy, sparking anger in Albany.
The fact is, deleting government emails completely undermines the ideal of a transparent government. Citizens that want to monitor their government should have access to information that would allow them to do so. Candidates that are trying to earn the public’s trust should be publishing emails, not deleting them.
As we move further into the digital age, more government communications will be conducted electronically. Since the government has demonstrated that it has the capacity to store unfathomably large amounts of regular citizens’ data through the NSA’s programs, it is time to apply that capability to hold politicians accountable for their actions.