Preserving Digital History in the Time of Trump
By: Rusty D. Pickens
Tags: President Obama, Presidential Records Act, Digital, Donald Trump, Government

Twitter is fun, but what about emails?

Butter Emails 🙄

Beyond Twitter, the PRA raises additional ethical, operational and security concerns. Cases in point: Where is the line drawn around using personal email accounts for official government business? Sound familiar? We will save the Twilight Zone of a certain email server operating out of the basement of a candidate’s home for another day. This is a much simpler exercise: What about White House staff and the First Family?

Well, again, the law is very straightforward. For most unclassified email sent around the EOP, it’s all processed by various arrays of back-office enterprise email servers. And for most of our time under Barack Obama, everyone lugged around those clunky Blackberries which helped ensure the PRA obligations were met.

Blackberries and enterprise email servers are an easy to wrangle in this situation for PRA purposes— archiving technology simply makes a copy of each message anyone sends on the system and tucks it safely away in another database that none of the users can ever access or tamper with. Simply put: In order to do your job, you used the official device and the PRA archive was just handled automatically by the system.

But sometimes extenuating circumstances happen. Maybe it’s late on a Saturday night and news breaks or something unexpected happens and a staffer is out with friends and needs to do some urgent work — but they left their Blackberry at home because who wants to be tethered to the damn thing 100% of the time — even if you work at the White House? Well, still simple enough: If — under extreme and rare circumstances — you just use your personal email to get the job done until you can get back to your official device. Virtually all of the unclassified work most folks at EOP do, while sensitive and necessary to protect with basic encryption and authentication methods, isn’t classified or of national security importance should it be intercepted or leaked. So in those cases, our guidance was that it was usually that it was “acceptable” — though frowned upon — to use your personal email for an emergency. But even then, we were required to ensure the record was kept by forwarding a full copy of the thread or CC’ing our official accounts on whatever email traffic was generated on our personal account — thus ensuring that a proper PRA record was logged and kept even if we didn’t use official White House hardware to send it.

I’ll be just fine if I never, ever have to use one of these relics again. No really, you can keep it. (Source: Wikipedia)

This became less of a problem in the last few years of the Obama Administration when some cool technology came along that would let us install fully partitioned apps on our personal devices that would securely connect to EOP unclassified messaging systems and allow us to use email from our official accounts while not substantially risking leaking that data or leaving copies in places they didn’t belong. But the new apps also gave us incentive to not use personal email accounts because they were right there on our personal devices that we were much more likely to have with us most of the time. It was a huge game changer that allowed most of us to go back to carrying just one phone.

But, as with most things regarding technology security and record keeping, it all comes down to the intent and purpose of the user. There have been many reports — even after the kerfuffle that personal email created all throughout the 2016 campaign cycle — that members of the First Family who are also acting in official capacities as White House staff and advisers to the president have insisted at times on using their personal or commercial email accounts to conduct official business. And beyond those occurrences being acceptable but rare, they were a matter of operational approach that persisted for quite some time.

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

By many accounts, these weren’t official EOP accounts running on secured apps on personal devices, but personal or commercial accounts that never traversed the EOP unclassified email systems. This is cause for grave concern where adherence to the PRA is concerned. It is entirely possible that the bulk of these emails will never be properly captured — as required by law —for preservation as presidential records for future examination. We can only hope that the officials on the receiving end of those emails have properly archived them (or that the staffers do a thorough and complete transfer of all these emails before the separate from government service) such that we will one day see the whole picture of those conversations.

Further, it’s not just being a concern that the PRA has been violated and records may be lost to the sands of time, this is also a grave national security issue. There is no guarantee those personal devices and accounts being used by the family of a sitting president of the United States have been secured to the proper standards required by an officer of the government of their standing and level of access.

Who will be the new poster-child of warning against using personal email accounts for official use? (Source: WikiLeaks Twitter)

As soon as a foreign intelligence service became aware (or made a reasonable guess) that the First Family was using personal devices and email accounts for official business, those accounts became high-value targets for cyber attack and social engineering attempts.

We can only hope that those accounts haven’t been breached by our enemies — and if they have, that the users were diligent enough to not discuss anything of importance in those communications.

As you can see, co-mingling of personal versus official accounts is a very slippery slope that brushes up against not only presidential record keeping issues, but also matters of national security in some cases. It’s best to err on the side of caution and let the policy and statute guardrails that a lot of very smart people have worked on for decades protect you from yourself.