White House staffers have been using their own, non-governmental email (from off-the-shelf email providers) as a means of evading subpoenas. That means that critical, secret emails are being kept off the critical, secure servers that the US taxpayers bought, and are instead being managed on Crazy Ed's Discount House of Email and Subpoena Evasion.
It also means that there's no executive privilege for these emails.
A reader who has a security role at a federal agency writes, "On the issue of using outside/unofficial e-mail address from official sites, the CIO at [redacted] has expressly forbade the practice for security reasons as it is all too easy to put sensitive information in an e-mail. … Needless to say, hearing that the WH does not mandate that practice and lets [Rove] do 95% of his e-mailing from a blackberry, presumably with access to an unofficial address, is quite shocking. Still find it absolutely amazing that his clearance has not been revoked."
(Thanks, Bill!)
