John O'Connell

Partly Cloudy Week is nothing to celebrate

Posted

Hillary Clinton and Andrew Cuomo could not have picked a better time to reveal their views on work-related emails.

Last week was the 10th anniversary of Sunshine Week, which was launched by the American Society of News Editors in 2005 to coincide with the March 16 birthday of the nation’s fourth president, James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution” and the author of the Bill of Rights.

The point of Sunshine Week is to remind us all — journalists and the American public at large — that in this country the people are sovereign, that we rule the government, not the other way around. From village mayors and trustees to the president of the United States — including governors and secretaries of state — all government officials, elected and appointed, cabinet member to bureaucrat, are servants of the public that employs them.

As the name implies, Sunshine Week is used to publicize open-meeting laws, the Freedom of Information Act, and retention requirements that enable public access to records, including emails, that public employees create, use, send, receive, process or possess.

Cuomo’s chief information officer, of all people, Maggie Miller, ordered state workers last month to delete emails in their computers that were older than 90 days. Such a policy had existed since June 2013 — coincidentally, just before Cuomo created the Moreland Commission to investigate public corruption (and eight months before he shut it down) — but was not generally enforced. Efficiency is the claimed motivation.

Clinton, for reasons unknown but certainly suspicious, not only deleted tens of thousands of emails she wrote and received that she decided were no one else’s business, but kept all her emails private — even from the government — by having her own account on her own email server while she was the head of the State Department, i.e., working for the public. Convenience is the claimed motivation.

Other than for national security and specific privacy reasons spelled out in the law, work-related emails of government employees are subject to public review. There are laws that mandate retention periods.

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