In the name of transparency, former Florida Governor and likely 2016 Presidential candidate Jeb Bush just published all of his email correspondence from his tenure running the state.
“In the spirit of transparency, I am posting the emails of my governorship here. Some are funny; some are serious; some I wrote in frustration. But they’re all here so you can read them and make up your own mind,” says Bush on the new site, jebemails.com. The site contains a searchable database, filterable by time period. Bush has also made the emails available as original outlook files and has even published the emails as an e-book.
You can check that out here.
It’s clear that Jeb Bush sent a lot of emails during his time as the Governor of Florida.
“Now that the campaign was over, how could I keep track of what Floridians were thinking? I needed their energy and passion and wisdom. Email. Everyone could email me. So they did,” he reminisces in the new e-book preface. “Millions of emails came in through our website, but it was when I made my personal email – [email protected] – public that I earned the nickname ‘The eGovernor.'”
When I was governor, I often used email to correspond. I hope you find these notes as interesting as I did: http://t.co/QYBqGClV7F
— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) February 10, 2015
According to Bush, he spent 30 hours a week emailing citizens. And he may have just pissed off a good swath of them.
Go take a look at the email database. You’ll see emails spanning nearly a decade, dozens every single day. What you won’t see are any redactions. Not a single one.
Every email has been published as is, including the full names and email addresses of the Floridians who emailed Bush from 1999 to 2007.
Now, it’s unclear whether or not these people had any expectation of privacy when emailing a public figure – especially one in the state government. Especially when it’s the Governor himself. But if I had to guess, I’d say plenty did.
I’m sure it would only take a few minutes to find handfuls of emails that contain some sensitive content – controversial opinions perhaps. Now those opinions are public, and tied to people’s names and email addresses.
It just makes you wonder why the Jeb Bush staff didn’t employ some black bars. Someone should’ve seen how this could be an issue.
