Getting a grip on government e-mail

[Commentary] Whatever Hillary Clinton’s personal motives, future public officials who seek to circumvent government recordkeeping may try to follow her example. If we value public recordkeeping, then we ought to find effective mechanisms to confine official deliberation to official channels. Technology has allowed governments to observe and surveil the public in ways that our existing legal infrastructure does not address. By the same token, there are technical mechanisms that can be used to monitor the government, on behalf of the public, that have not yet been incorporated into our system of government. We ought to be looking for ways that technology can strengthen accountability and oversight.

[Ariel Rabkin is a professional software engineer who received is PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley]