Open government means e-mails are public’s business

Anybody who thinks his e-mail is guaranteed to remain private is reckless. E-mails can be forwarded, copied, pasted and possibly intercepted so easily that it pays to be discreet in every single one.

That’s true even for private citizens. For government officials to expect privacy in official e-mails is ludicrous.

Yet, as The Associated Press reported in a story published Sunday, officials in many states are fighting efforts to force the public release of e-mails, text messages and similar correspondence that could expose wrongdoing, or at least shed light on government decisions.

New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine is waging a court fight to prevent disclosure of e-mails between him and Carla Katz, a former girlfriend who leads a state workers’ union. In Missoula, Mont., though, the newspaper obtained e-mails that showed city council members were holding private side conversations during public meetings.

In Morgan County a couple of years ago, Sheriff Greg Bartlett and Revenue Commissioner Amanda Scott refused to make their computer hard drives available for inspection during an e-mail investigation. They said the drives contained sensitive information. This was despite a statement in the county’s personnel manual that no electronic communication is guaranteed to be private or confidential.

Electronic messages become a major loophole against open government unless they are treated as public records in the same fashion as paper records.

With rare exceptions that protect the personal privacy of citizens, all e-mails generated by government equipment ought to be public record. The same rule should apply to official correspondence generated on public employees’ private computers.