White House ordered to preserve all e-mail

CNN.com is reporting “a federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies of all its e-mails.” The White House email issue has been bubbling for a few months now. Some estimates claim over 5 million messages may have been removed and are unaccounted for. White House email must be preserved by law because the “Federal Records Act details strict standards prohibiting the destruction of government documents including electronic messages, unless first approved by the archivist of the United States.”

Times are changing; it’s no longer a viable strategy to delete email as a way to erase the past.