E-mail is incredibly insecure. Here’s why the president should still use it.

[Commentary] Given the apparent security risks of e-mail, should the President be using it? There are some flaws with the argument that keeping the President off e-mail altogether will make communications more secure. First is that even in this recent set of breaches, the most secure of government digital messaging systems appears to have remained intact. At least publicly, agencies targeted by the recent wave of attacks have said that only their unclassified systems were compromised: Classified digital messages are largely kept in an entirely separate system, which officials have said remained safe. Plus, even if the president isn't sending or receiving his own e-mails, unless the entire White House were to switch to typewriters like the Russian intelligence service reportedly did after the revelations about the National Security Agency's digital spying powers in recent years, the people around him will still be his proxies -- creating a digital record of what's going on inside the administration.

And that digital record is actually the most compelling reason the President should use e-mail. Having e-mails that show how the President's positions developed over time will help provide perspective insight into how the country worked decades and potentially centuries down the line. Unfortunately, there's already evidence one President's aversion to e-mail was at least partially driven by an attempt not to leave that much of a trail. In a 2013 C-SPAN interview President Bush cited a fear of "congressional intrusion" as a reason he avoided e-mail. He even wistfully addressed the loss that choice caused the public: "A lot of history’s lost when presidents are nervous about their personal papers being subpoenaed."