Jan 18th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Modernize the PRA
As Ezra Klein says it’s stupid to have White House lawyers sitting around debating how things like email, text messages, and IM chats ought to be treated under the 1978 Presidential Records Act. In light of 30 years with of IT advancement we need to update the law rather than puzzle over its interpretation. Obama’s team should recommend some changes, and congress ought to hold hearings and write new provisions for dealing with new mechanisms.
If the conclusion of your legal analysis is that the President of the United States can’t have an email account or a Blackberry, then that means you need a new law.
20 Responses to “Modernize the PRA”
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January 18th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
of course the law needs to be updated. but your reasoning is way too simplistic. any new law with specific provisions for email, IM, and all other new technologies will still have to treat email as “written correspondence,” and thus subject to complete preservation. If email were exempted, then ALL WH deliberations would immediately shift to email, and we would have created the biggest loophole in the US legal code.
Also, the problem of the BlackBerry is only partly about preservation; the security of the President’s communications is at issue, too.
January 18th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
i just hope obama dont turn out to be Just another poly-trickster who happens to be black
January 18th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
How funny. We get people saying that there’s some sort of email scandal for the last administration at the same time they’re saying they don’t want those rules applying to the new administration.
None of this is new. Email has been in widespread use since before Matt was born. I mean, they used it in the Clinton years.
January 18th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Would it really be much of a burden for Obama to release his IMs 5 years after the end of his administration?
January 18th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
If the people who serve in any presidential administration would remember that they are there to serve the public, not themselves, and not the President, then they should not have to worry about what they say in their e-mails and other electronic communication.
The phrase often thrown around is that “they serve at the pleasure of the President.” The correct phrase should be “they serve The People at the pleasure of the President.”
January 18th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
At the very least, IM should be treated as akin to phone calls. We don’t wiretap the WH’s phone (under normal circumstances), so why IM? Document attachments, of course, should be treated differently.
As it pertains to security: I’d be surprised if Blackberry’s security were any worse than the WH’s (assuming they even have any)?
January 18th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
The law does need to be updated, but that’s obviously not something that can be taken care of before the Obama administration steps in. I agree that it should be something that the Obama administration should look into, and probably will (the Pres-Elect seems pretty keen on updating things around there to finally be up-to-date with the times and technology), but it’s an unfortunate necessity that while the old law is in place, you have to learn to deal with it. When in Rome, you know the rest.
January 18th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
You cannot have it both ways. If my memory serves me right, this law was put into by the Dems, after Watergate. Now the dems want it removed because there is a Dem president. This is just like Pelosi wanting to change the Contract with America, that she supported when the Repubs had the power.
Like the old saying goes, “Whets good for the goose, is good for the gander”
January 18th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Email has been in widespread use since before Matt was born. I mean, they used it in the Clinton years.
It was in use in the Reagan years. Didn’t Ollie North get tripped up because he was deleting emails? Something about when you delete things they aren’t really deleted just flagged for deletion and only deleted when the server needs space….
January 18th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Now the dems want it removed because there is a Dem president.
Uh, no, you idiot. It’s time to make the PRA meaningful. One important aspect of that: give it teeth. At the moment, there’s no sanction for a president who sends the archives to the shredder or the bit-bucket. It would presumably be an impeachable act, but the impeachment clause is dead.
And I think there’s room for demanding open standards for long-term data retention, both as an ongoing practice (for things such as congressional subpoenas) and for archiving. There’s a genuine problem with bitrot, whether it was the Clinton backup procedure that was fucked up by a case-sensitive system, or the mess of the transition between Notes and Outlook/Exchange. And that’s even before you deal with deliberate deletion, off-books email accounts and the other evasive stuff.
I’d be surprised if Blackberry’s security were any worse than the WH’s (assuming they even have any)?
The issue had been that RIM was based in Canada, but DoD declared the network not just safe but essential to national security.
January 19th, 2009 at 10:21 am
“You cannot have it both ways. If my memory serves me right, this law was put into by the Dems, after Watergate. Now the dems want it removed because there is a Dem president.”
I don’t think the phrase “have it both ways” means what you think it means.
Any check on executive power after Watergate was, for Congressional Democrats, a check ON a Democratic President, ’cause it was pretty inconceivable that a Republican would win in 1976 (or that it would even be as close as it was). And indeed, a Democrat DID win, and no one was agitating for an update. Nor did they agitate in 1993-2001, when another Democrat was in office (And really, no one is agitating for a change right now, Matt’s just suggesting it).
So there must be some other factor going on here. Hmm, what could it be? If only we could think of some change in archival and communication technology between 1974 and today…
But the fact that you can’t says more about you than about the motivations of a liberal blogger.
January 19th, 2009 at 11:16 am
If the conclusion of your legal analysis is that the President of the United States can’t have an email account or a Blackberry, then that means you need a new law.
Is that the conclusion? I thought the conclusion was that all records of his emails would have to be made public in five years. To conflate that with not being able to have an email account is questionable. And obviously emails should have to be made public, and that’s a good thing. IM is perhaps more questionable, but letting that not be archived seems like it opens up a sizeable loophole to an administration that wants to maintain secrecy.
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