John McCain is running for president. Obama doesn't need someone else to get people excited to vote for him.

... for regulatory reasons.

The officially sanctioned email is available.

*Everything* else - yahoo, gmail, hotmail, the works - is actively blocked.

Yes - this is harder to do on mobile devices. But it might actually be doable, given that opposing such a move would leave the easy inference that you want government to be secret.

See they learned from Iran Contra.

Palin's under an ethics investigation. Might the investigating attorneys subpoena Yahoo to get copies of her email?

Kwame Kilpatrick will go to jail on Thursday because he used official City of Detroit cell phones for his text messages. If he had used his own phone, he still would be Mayor.

This proves Sarah is smarter than Kwame, but that's not saying much. We already have all Kwame's text messages, by subpoena and by other means (not all public yet). So, if Sarah ever communicated with Kwame, you might be able find out what they talked about.

I guarantee Kwame never sent copies to his wife, as Sarah sent copies to her husband. Many of Kwame's messages are X-rated talk with his girlfriend(?). What would Kwame and Sarah talk about?

That's what I meant to write.

You might also want to have the legal scholars check whether there are any national security issues raised by using Yahoo or other personal email accounts for federal government communications, given that they (presumably) have lower levels of security than federal government servers.

This practice must be outright made illegal. Period. Barring that, it must be made clear that any use of non-governmental email accounts while serving in any official governmental capacity renders them official business accounts too, with all records laws and FOIA laws attaching. No skating the rules by using yahoo or hotmail.

The real question is, "Is it legal for them to be conducting government business with a personal account."

I'm pretty sure the answer is no.

I would think using a personal email account for government might put government information at a serious security risk. Am I naive to think that government email servers are better protected than Yahoo's?

And the Republicans have been working this "private accounts" scam for years.

On the state and city levels, the offical accounts go through the same e-mail providers that private accounts go through. The cities and states just bid them out. So, there is no extra security.

As the founder and past CEO of Certified Electronic Mail I can assure you Yahoo, Google, Netzero, AOL, are much better places to post your email than your local ISP. I had an ISP boast about his security and even argue with me about his security schema.... 10 minutes later I entered his server changed his passwords and locked his entire staff out of their server. Most ISP's and Gov sites are not secure, much less impregnable. I am voting for Obama but on this one Ms. Palin seems to have stumbled into or taken some good advice.

Am I naive to think that government email servers are better protected than Yahoo's?

We shouldn't forget those several million emails missing from the white house, in violation of the Hatch act, when answering your questions?

The White House emails are held to extremely crisp and well understood standards. If it's there, it's a known entity. Public email, not so much and the account holder can easily claim "I lost the account name" or "I lost the password" and private companies are EXTREMELY loath to release that information. Hell, families of dead GI's had to take Yahoo to court over just this.

Just because THEY can read YOUR email without a warrant doesn't mean that YOU can do it to them.

@Can Yahoo be subpoenaed for her email?

@Utruth (You're seriously a professional? Don't quit your day job, dude.)

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/478

In every situation where emails need an expectation of privacy, they should NOT be sent or received through third party email servers, like those provided by Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Netscape, Blackberry, etc.etc.

Bottom line: United States residents have NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY when they use third party email services.

And, yes, Yahoo could and should be subpoenaed for any and all email messages sent to and from Palin's account with them. After all, these quasi-public messages may hold important government information irresponsibly compromised by Palin's ignorant use of the service.

The real question is, "Is it legal for them to be conducting government business with a personal account."

No, the real question is whether it's ethical for our employees, these politicians, to hide what they are doing while working for us.

If I started using an external address at my job, I'd be immediately told to stop, and fired if I did not.

That the gubmint can now spy on us, while we now can't even subpoena the communications of a growing number of the crooks in power. How ironic, so ironic it makes me wish they'd all DIAF and then burn in hell, and I don't even believe in hell.

Eventually they become part, in part, of the public record. The Yahoo account of some ditzy chick with a moose head on her desk, does not. there is a two fold reason for this. One is plausible deniability and the other is the ability to rewrite history at will after the fact. The Bush administrations biographies, years or decades in the future, will be written by partisans who will be spoon fed specific private snippets of information. Likewise the Palin/McCain blip is looking to be able to avoid any factual basis in the future.

You can't compare a STRATEGIC decision to use a webmail account for the explicit purpose of evading public records laws (a la Rove, Palin and other Republicans) with Gavin Newsome using his iPhone during an emergency situation. It's just not the same.

But of course, since "journalists" are now taught to smear Democrats with the same brush they use on Republicans to be "fair," it's important to go through the ritual of saying "both Republicans and Democrats do this."

Unless, of course, you want more discerning readers to take you seriously.