The Persistence of Email

Email is in the news these days, at least here in Boston and Massachusetts. Twitter, Facebook, and political blogs have elbowed their way in as organizing tools, yet incidents in the lowly world of email have had a huge public impact.

If you don’t live in Massachusetts, our local politics may not interest you and who can blame you. Bear with me a minute.

How long do email posts persist?

Here in Boston, missing emails from the computer of the Mayor’s chief adviser have become one of a handful of widely-discussed fall campaign issues. We have a mayor with a strong reputation for attention to all the details in all the neighborhoods, including perhaps emailing about them. And we have challengers focusing on the need for greater transparency and decentralization of decision-making. These have been somewhat abstract differentiators. Nothing like a chief aide’s apparent penchant for erasing all his email every day to focus the public attention.

What’s fascinating to me is how much public information about technology this incident has brought about.

Infrastructure: The public is learning stuff about the technical infrastructure of backing up emails on a server, also important in the second incident, below. Everyone should know now that it’s the norm for their email to exist in more one place. It’s not just on your desktop. Once it’s out there, a message’s traces may persist for a long time.

In this case, while things were not automatically and consistently kept in multiple places, emails that we’re cc’d or forwarded to others leave their own traces. Multiple computers leave traces. Sender’s outbound email leave traces.

While there has been a lot of discussion recently about what happens to personal details on Facebook and other social media, we all got a big fat reminder about the persistence of email.

Forensics: Second, on the technical side, those that could stand it learned more about computer forensics than you would in a season of 24. Maybe 2 seasons. Are things you erase from a hard drive really erased? Not if someone is willing to spending time and money recovering those electronic wisps and traces of the past. Typically, even if you reformat a hard drive, a lot of stuff is still there. When you are done with a computer, in addition to the environmental concerns about all the hardware, better be pretty sure what is going to happen with that hard drive.

Open Government: Third, given that some of the missing emails may factor in a corruption case involving another politician, if they are truly gone, this may violate the state’s public record laws. This may point to the most important public information side of the incident.

Transparency in government operations means more than just having cameras in hearing rooms. It means that the sum total of data collected and used—including emails—may be of interest to policy advocates and others. Tabular data on services provided and business status may have more direct value. And there may not be much to learn from plowing through tedious emails by the thousands from the desks of policy makers. Yet I can imagine that many people now imagining seeing a “power map” of the social web of who corresponds with who and in what frequency at City Hall and other government offices.

Email shows politics in charter school decision

The second email-ish political incident is playing out at the state level. We have had a look at highly embarassing “private” email correspondence between Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Secretary of Education Paul Reville. We see that a critical decision regarding a new charter school had as much to do with politics as pedagogy. What, politics in charter school decisions? This is like Captain Renault confronting Humphrey Bogart with gambling in “Rick’s Cafe” in Casablanca. Education activists have been trying to make this point for years, and one tiny email exchange blows it wide open for everyone.

Both incidents are lessons in the advocacy potential of Open Government.

The irony about all this is that it also reveals the twin headaches of email in IT or personal computer infrastructure. Email can be one of the hardest things to ensure safe back-up. Whether to tape, disk or off-site cloud storage, you generally need software specifically rated to back up an Outlook mailbox or Exchange server files. And if you have off-site hosted Exchange or use Google Apps webmail, you have even more complicated issues in insuring your organization controls and retains the archives it wants. Blackberries and such add even more complexity to infrastructure and back-up issues.

If the city issue shows that email archives can be harder to maintain than, say, a project document folder, the state issue shows that sometimes a email exchange you thought casual, ad hoc, and private may turn out to have a life of its own. Email copies may exist in many places aside from your own desktop, and they maybe there for a really long time, and they may get forwarded when and where you least expect it.

And both political problems also show that even if you take care in what you write, you can’t control what comes streaming into your Inbox unscreened every day. Things others send you can make trouble even if they’re not malware.

In the continuum of attention to what we write these days, Instant Messages or cell phone SMS texts sit at one end of casualness. A polished, multiply edited and vetted report or proposal lies at the other end. Tweets, blogs, social media participation, along with emails all occupy some middle ground. While quite old in Internet terms, email--whether person-to-person or broadcast out—needs new strategy, care and attention that reflects its continuing persistence.

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/e_phots/