Governmental e-mail questions

[DemocratSinceBirth]

First let me preface my remarks by saying , sadly, I have very little expectation that what I do on the internet is private. On the other hand I don't believe I'm important enough to attract the gaze of the government.

Can someone explain to me what it means when someone says that all internet correspondence of a governmental official, whether he or she uses his or her private or governmental address, is or should be archived ?

Does that mean a governmental official who sends a hot, i.e., sexy e-mail to his or her wife, girlfriend, husband, lover, on his or her private e-mail address is going to have that correspondence archived?

[leftofcool]

1. No. All worked related emails sent from either a private server

or a .gov address will be automatically archived from either sender or receiver. Private emails from sender since not sent to a government address will not be archived which is why the Ben Gawzi nitwits would like her server. They want to see all of her private emails as well as they ones already saved and archived. My husband uses his private server for any official/confidential emails to government officials all the time. We have had ours for over 10 years and it has never been hacked neither has their ever been any attempt at an intrusion.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

3. I'm still a bit confused

Say I am the ambassador to China and I go back to my Beijing home and send a sexy e-mail to my wife or girlfriend on my gmail account. That's not subject to be archived, am I right?

[metalbot]

4. That's correct

However, if I am the ambassador to China and I use my gmail account to drop a note to someone relating to my official capacity as ambassador, that note is supposed to be archived. The challenge is that it relies on self-reporting of things that should be in the archive. There's no good solution here - public officials should still have an expectation of privacy relating to private things, but the public should have an expectation that official activities be archived, whether they take place by "official" or "private" channels.

[LiberalFighter]

2. It absolutely should not!

Only official government business should be. When government supplies or services are used they should only be used for official government purposes.

Hillary can't be accused of using government services for personal use in this case. Since she did both government and personal on her own privately paid server.

What many forget too is that Cabinet Secretaries and others in top level power don't have defined periods of time that are personal or business. They overlap or mesh at times.

The press is reporting this story as if email is the only way that Hillary (Cabinet Secretaries) communicate with people. And only she does the communication. If that were the case she wouldn't need the staff she had that handled incoming and out going calls. Or write letters and reports. Actual hard copies in many cases. How many of her staff do have govt email and the critical work goes through them?