After a series of Democratic scandals in the New York state legislature, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is instituting a policy to have the emails of state employees automatically deleted after 90 days.
Apparently, Cuomo did not want e-trails of politicians' communications. Meanwhile, the former speaker of the New York state assembly, Sheldon Silver, faces charges of corruption and was forced by subpoena to turn over computer correspondence.
Under the Cuomo plan, a politician like Silver could delay and obfuscate for three months, and then safely assume that almost all of his communications had safely vanished -- in a fashion that pre-email politicians could never have imagined.
In December 2012, shortly after the re-election of Barack Obama, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson quietly stepped down without much public notice. Jackson, in apparent violation of the law, had been under federal investigation for fabricating a phony email persona, "Richard Windsor."
Jackson, using the Windsor persona, communicated in a way that allowed her to skirt federal record-keeping laws. But Jackson not only wished to exchange email beneath the radar of the federal government that employed her, she also wanted to create an alias that might weigh in favorably on her own agency's policies.
In surreal fashion, Jackson's self-created Windsor also received an award from the EPA for meritorious service -- perhaps the first case of a bureaucrat rewarding her own electronic alter ego.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now trying to explain away her own email scandal. During her tenure, she may have broken federal laws by creating several personal email accounts on her own private server.
