Elena Kagan's White House Emails | Hacker News Reader

Elena Kagan's White House Emails

elenasinbox.com

53 pointsrobg15 comments

Forgive my ignorance, but I cannot be alone on this one: Just exactly what the heck am I looking at?

Official White House email transcripts from when Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan worked as Bill Clinton's staff lawyer.

The clever bit: putting it in a webmail interface rather than making people scroll through a 1000 page pdf and double check every header.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/kagan-in-the-w...

I'd usually flag for lack of hack, but I have to admit this presentation is innovative and serves a worthwhile public purpose by making the information so accessible.

I'd argue that this is a wonderful example of civic hacking, but then again I'm biased, as I work for the guy who built this.

http://www.google.com/search?q=civic+hacking

What's with all the return receipts? Do people really use return receipts that much?

She's an attorney -- such audit/evidence trails are essential in her profession.

Email clients don't have to honor read receipts. In fact, apps such as Outlook, have an option where you can turn it off. And I've use a Lotus Notes macro that removed them.

Yea, and I doubt that the footers lawyers append to every email mean much in terms of disclosure, but that doesn't stop law firms from trying it anyway.

I think read receipts fall into the category of "good faith effort", and not much more.

Read http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2010/elenas-inbox/ -- this data is extracted from a PDF of data OCRed from a printout from a web interface to the actual email archive. Yuck.

Incredible, I love it. My first instinct is to say every public official should have this.

Then they'd stop using email. One of the nice things about email is that a lot of the time people don't realize they're on the record.

Federal employees know all emails are going to be kept. It's part of their training and it's required by federal law. I'm not sure though about individual state and local laws though.

And if they were going to stop using email, what would replace it? Personally, I can't see these busy individuals doing all business over the phone. Blackberries are also covered by federal law.

I seem to remember a certain VP nominee using her personal email for work purposes in a different public role...

This is an outbox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com