Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Legislature / Politics / Woods Keeping Secrets: Legislative Email May Become Confidential
Posted by Jeff Woods on Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 5:34 AM
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State legislators are up to their old tricks again this session, trying to close as many government records as possible to public view. Let's see, so far they've singled out handgun permit records for special confidential treatment. That's an effort to keep the public in the dark about crimes committed by the 200,000 supposedly law-abiding citizens who are licensed to pack heat in Tennessee. Then there are the hunting and fishing license records that Sen. Mae Beavers wants to close for reasons that escape Pith. That bill is on a Senate committee's agenda today.
Now comes Rep. Henry Fincher, a Democrat from Cookeville who wants to keep the media from looking at legislative email. A House subcommittee considers his bill today, too. We asked Fincher to explain why he thinks his email box should be off-limits:
I did some thinking about it. We have a lot of constituents who send stuff all the time. We're dealing with people's Tenncare matters. We're getting Social Security numbers, dates of birth, all this sort of stuff coming through. We have people saying this official is jerking them around and that person is doing this, and they're telling it to us with an expectation of privacy. They just want us to fix their problem. This is a good way to help foster that.
But the same logic would apply to snail mail, wouldn't it? Does Fincher want to keep letters secret too? He says email is different.
It's more like a telephone call. Email has kind of become the phone call of today. I get three or four phone calls a day from folks. I get 20 or 30 more email when session's going on. People shoot emails out. When you think about how most people treat their email, it really is more like a phone call than a letter. No one's ever ask to tap into our phone lines and listen to them. I don't think it's too much to ask to keep this sort of correspondence back.
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