Kobach's email account

[Joods]

After all the hating on Hillary for her email scandal take a look here at what I found thanks to a link in another thread: 

Kobach is using a personal email account

One might think that any politician who paid the slightest bit of attention to the 2016 election might be wary of using a personal email account for government business. But Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is the vice chairman of Donald Trump's voter fraud commission, is  a personal Gmail account and intends to continue to do so. His argument is that he is on the commission as a private citizen, not as a Kansas official, so there is no problem using his Gmail account for commission work. His real reason for doing so is that Gmail accounts are not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. Consequently, public interest groups cannot sue to get them. ProPublica has said that since he is working on a government commission, private citizen or not, he must comply with federal records retention laws, but clearly he has no interest in complying and it is unlikely that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is going to do anything to make him.

One thing that Kobach is probably not thinking about (but should be) is the possibility of emails leaking. Probably only one or two people had access to Hillary Clinton's email server and nothing leaked. A Gmail account is very different. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of system administrators and other Google employees no doubt have access to all the Gmail accounts. They need that access to keep the servers running. Of course, they are strictly forbidden by company policy from leaking any emails sent using the service, but sometimes stuff happens. It's also worth noting that part of what kept Clinton's mail server (reasonably?) safe was the fact that virtually nobody knew it existed; this is sometimes called "security through obscurity." On the other hand, everyone knows about Gmail, and now everyone knows that Kobach has an account. That makes him quite a juicy target for ill-doers worldwide, as well as insiders. (V)

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