Palin & Email: Ethics Conundrums on Both Sides
A certain popular website, that I will not name or link to, posted a bunch of Sarah Palin’s government-related e-mails posted through private, non-government, non-archived accounts.
This is, to put it mildly, not according to Hoyle, and especially because there was even a conversation about how to keep prying eyes away from these posts by using “private” email.
Of course, as Palin found out, e-mail is never really private. It’s not a secure medium. It’s also not particularly reliable. and you shouldn’t expect to have any privacy.
However…while Palin had absolutely no right to conduct state business over non-government e-mail–and certainly no right to delete the emails and the account and thus destroy evidence of possible wrongdoing in the Troopergate scandal, I have just as big an ethical bone to pick with the site that unmasked her.: it listed the emails of her correspondents, in big print, and in hackable form.
I’m sorry, but it is not anybody’s right to have the personal e-mails of her kids and others who corresponded with Sarah Palin. These people will have to go through a lot of time and trouble to change their addresses, notify correspondents, etc.
Palin was wrong. But so was this website.
Investigation ought to be carried out against the web site that published (access to) these emails. I think that is the area of illegality, rather than which email account Sarah Palin was using. (But deletion? Mmm.. no archive. Shredding of files.) It is a breach of privacy. Sarah is young, but old enough not to be ‘a loose cannon.’ Intelligent, though needing moderation in some areas. Imagine Sarah as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces. It could happen. You need a leash on your spontaneous intelligence in that scenario. Geoff D.
Comment by Geoff Dodd — October 11, 2008 @ 12:18 pm