While it would be nice to think that this order would have some effect, confidence is extremely low. There is absolutely nothing in her past behavior or that of her handlers within the Republican party that suggests they give a rat's ass about the rule of law. Put me down for $500 that - oops - messages in those accounts have already gone missing and will never be recovered because, you know, it's too technically and computerific and whatnot to recover mail deleted from a Yahoo account ... or two.

To Palin and her crowd of self-described Palinestas, anyone who disagrees with them is a "hater". She holds rallies where audience members call Obama traitor, terrorist, and call for him to be shot -- and she lets the comments stand.

"McLeod's attorney contends the governor waived the privilege by routinely copying messages to her husband, Todd, who is not a state employee." I love it. I hope McLeod succeeds. Palin and her tactics, many copied from the Bush WH, are a danger to western democracy and the Constitution of the United States.

How do you want those emails preserved?

Given the stupid "folksy" responses that she makes, that's the kind of response you're likely to get.

failin'

Are the same kind of laws applicable under the freedom of information act in the UK?

I wonder what kind of can of worms would be opened if we reviewed all of Mr Bleh's old emails along with those of his successor and associates?

If we could access all of the private correspondence relating to say WMD, we should be able to find enough to keep the papers and the courts happy for the next decade.

We all know that electronic archiving has been performed at WikiLeaks so why worry?

I've proposed to my CIO that we dump our internal legacy mail system, save a bucketload of cash and use gmail for business. Surely the savings in administrators, power, software and so on would pay for the odd law suit?

So how do people know what is and is not offcial business? is someone going to read through all her emails to see what shes been saying?

I talk about work all the time, and I use personal accounts and I'm pretty sure everyone here does.

So unless someone is going to go though every email she sends using her yahoo account to check to see what she has sent I cannot see how this can work.

She seemed so great when she arrived. Common sense, sensible policies, her own opinions.... then she had to fit into the McCain viewpoint and she ended having to contradict herself:

Question: "Would you bomb inside Pakistan to get Al Qaeda"

McCain: no

Obama: yes

Palin: yes

McCain: erm I mean yes, I mean I would say 'no' but really mean 'yes' to fool the enemy... how dare Obama say 'yes' and mean 'yes' when he should say 'no' and mean 'yes'.....

Palin: erm, well, gee, gosh, I'm just a Hockey mom and McCain is a Maverik.

And PALIN gets the blame for that??? Why?

Now they have her doing that "Obama...terrorist?" thing, and she doesn't believe in it, and you can tell because her voice gets higher and higher and she gets this nasal whiny tone to it as she screws up her face. IT SOUNDS SO FAKE!

So disappointing.

And President Nixon only had a 18.5 minute gap!

The entire US political process is a reality show that should be entitled : Democracy, The Failure.

The Land of the Used To Be Free would be a lot more entertaining if it didn't have so many nukes.

Doubtless Mrs Palin will have deleted all the e-mails from every hooky account she has 'just as soon as I found out they weren't safe'.

The next challenge is going to be finding the new ones that have been set up.

(And why did she copy her husband into so many mails? Can the poor girl not think for herself?)

unfortunately Mr Bliar was far too smart to send emails about the decision to go to war or anything else, but we still know the truth don't we...

I would argue that as soon as she used an account for official business it effectively becomes an official account and all emails are fair game.

However, and I don't know exactly how the US system of publishing official emails works, I expect that all emails are vetted by some judicial process before release (or at least those the holder requests to be witheld) to ensure properly secret / sensitive / privileged mails don't end up in the public domain.

Yep, if McCain wins the next election, that's how far away she'll be from the White House and God Help America if that ever happens. People like this only ever get close to power if politics is reduced to some kind of twisted personality cult.

Even Paris would do a better job...

I thought it was more the case that Blair was incapable of working out how to "do" email

Pretty much correct, with a twist ...

Any official correspondence of any kind is subject to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. In most cases, this even includes non-official correspondence that was executed using public resources, like a government email account, or in the Palin case, the account(s) she used for official business ... including what probably started out as her personal Yahoo account (which is no longer personal, because she demonstrably used it for official business.)

All of that would, indeed, be vetted and redacted or suppressed, depending on its level of sensitivity to National Security. In the case(s) of Governors and lower-level government operatives, it is tough to claim that anything they do might compromise National Security, but it still gets filtered through that lens.

In the case of the U.S. Presidency, the President may claim Executive Privilege in order to shield correspondence from the public, however that will only work with correspondence directly relating to National Security, once they are out of office.

In the case of Palin's emails and other correspondence, things are further complicated by the fact that many (most?) of her correspondence CCs her husband, Todd, the "First Dude", for some reason. The sweet part about that is that since Todd is not a member of any government, but is a private citizen, then any correspondence to which he was privvy is no longer considered to be under the protection of National Security or any other suppressive rule, and must be released as any other non-sensitive, public document must be. After all, WE, the People, are our government's employers ... they serve at our whim ... so all of their work product, with very few exceptions, is discoverable under the Freedom of Information Act.

But none of those laws or regulations mean that we will actually get any of the emails. Even Federal subpoenas aren't enough to compel the current bunch of scallywags to render unto the public what is the public's.

"God Help America"?!? More like, "God Help The Planet"!!

Remember "we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" is a GOP mantra. If Palin becomes President (hell, I'd even believe McCain could do this), then "it's only a little mushroom cloud over Iran" could become a Palin quote. I mean ... Americans will still be okay, and Europe has France in it, so ...