Maybe one of the qualifications for President in the Constitution should be: “Has the common sense not to expose everyone’s personal information to the world.”
T.C. Sottek reports:
Jeb Bush, a rumored 2016 Republican presidential candidate, just decided to publish hundreds of thousands of emails sent to him during his time as governor of Florida. On its face it seems like a great idea in the name of transparency, but there’s one huge problem: neither Bush nor those who facilitated the publication of the records, including the state government, decided to redact potentially sensitive personal information from them.
Read more on The Verge, and then riddle me this:
If this was his correspondence as Governor, then these are, indeed, public records. Except Florida law,
Section 668.6076, F.S., requires that any agency as defined in s. 119.011(1), F.S., or legislative entity that operates a website and uses electronic mail must post the following statement in a conspicuous location on its website:
Under Florida law, e-mail addresses are public records.
If you do not want your e-mail address released in response to a public records request, do not send electronic mail to this entity. Instead, contact this office by phone or in writing.
That law was signed into law in 2006 by then-Governor Jeb Bush. That means that anyone who wrote to him before then did not get that warning, and may have provided information not knowing it would be treated as a public record.
And under Florida’s public records law, should any SSN included in e-mails be held confidential? The statutes list conditions under which disclosure is permissible (See (5)6.), but I don’t see how any of those conditions are met here.
Of course, I am not a lawyer, and I’d welcome any legal analysis of whether what Jeb Bush did constitutes a breach under Florida law by a state agency. And if it is, will the state send breach notifications?
But even if this is not legally a breach, I think anyone who would do what Jeb Bush has done is just too stupid to be President. Seriously.