Should Governor Kitzhaber and his fiancee used their own private email server?...

[cascadiance]

... and therefore not have the Governor felt he needed to have emails purged off of the government's servers that basically was the event that forced him to resign as governor the last month and Kate Brown to take over? Apparently a lot of he and her emails were on private servers. But enough of them were on our state computer system, that he was looking to get them purged.

He might be still governor now had he not have any of these particular emails he wanted deleted on state computers. From those who favored what Hillary Clinton did, I ask you then should he have done this and should he still be governor now? Would that be a good thing?

http://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-32896-hillary_clinton_under_fire_for_using_personal_email_account_for_public_business.html

It's a fair question to ask whether our government IT infrastructure is adequate to manage email communications effectively even for those who just want to use them properly and don't necessarily have anything to hide. I would argue that if someone feels that the government infrastructure isn't doing a good enough job to manage these operations, then it should be made a visible issue within government offices to get fixed, much like many of the state exchanges for Obamacare failing should have also be pushed on to be done more properly too.

However, just because our government infrastructure isn't doing a good job in some cases, doesn't mean that private email and IT infrastructure is doing better at protecting email from being hacked than government computers, especially if someone is running this infrastructure from one's own home and relying on personally hired personnel to administer it.

I had personal involvement of private industry IT infrastructure in the aftermath of the hacking of Sarah Palin's private email account, and it wasn't pretty either. Private industry make mistakes too, as they are human beings too, as honorable and professional as their intent may be, but at least we all worked together in a non-partisan way to help catch the hacker. and fix many of these problems. In other circumstances, other businesses might not have been as diligent, non-partisan or capable of doing that. And for our government security agencies to make sure that there are no security holes in the infrastructure of these private email firms and having the ability to track and fight such hacks likely would open up many of these private email services to a lot more government spying on our own emails when we use accounts on them. Is that what you all want?

[scscholar]

1. Sounds like you're blaming the whistleblower

The person that exposed Palin was a hero. Attacking him is attacking all whistleblowers.

[cascadiance]

2. He hacked in to private email accounts, which is a criminal activity...

... and arguably what did he provide to the public didn't really provide us much of anything, other than just pointing out that private email isn't always as "private" as it should be.

Sarah Palin using a private email account is a separate issue, and one that government and the people should judge her for in terms of whether she was using it properly or not. Definitely not smart of her to use this account if she was trying to be doing her job correctly, just as it wasn't smart for Clinton to do so. Whether they were using those private email setups improperly is another issue that should be investigated. It should also be prevented more in the future too, if government officials were to respect rules and the principles that government business should be done on public servers, whether they are Republicans or Democrats.