While the switch from paper to email should make government more transparent, new research shows that the era of Big Data does not necessarily mean the public gets a better view of its government. New technology doesn't guarantee political transparency.

In theory, the changeover from paper to email should make government more transparent. The cost of archiving documents should be lower, because data can be housed on relatively small hard drives rather than in spacious warehouses. Likewise, the time expense of retrieving that data should be reduced, because it can be obtained through a few keystrokes rather than a tedious search of file cabinets.

Consequently, open records requests should be far easier to fulfill, because electronic correspondence and memos are keyword searchable. Yet two New York politicos are showing that the era of Big Data does not necessarily mean the public gets a better view of its government.

The first is Hillary Clinton, the Empire State's former senator. According to reports this week in The New York Times and Associated Press, Clinton avoided using a government email address as U.S. Secretary of State, instead conducting State Department business through a personal account on her own private server. The Times notes that "the practice protected a significant amount of her correspondence from the eyes of investigators and the public."

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Authors Bio:

David Sirota is a full-time political journalist, best-selling author and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist living in Denver, Colorado. He blogs for Working Assets and the Denver Post's PoliticsWest website. He is a Senior Editor at In These Times magazine, which in 2006 received the Utne Independent Press Award for political coverage. His 2006 book, Hostile Takeover, was a New York Times bestseller, and is now out in paperback. He has been a guest on, among others, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and NPR. His writing, which draws on his extensive experience as a progressive political strategist, has appeared in, among others, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Baltimore Sun, the Nation magazine, the Washington Monthly and the American Prospect. Sirota was a twice-a-week guest on the Al Franken Show. He currently serves in a volunteer capacity as the co-chairperson of the Progressive States Network - a 501c3 nonpartisan organization.

In the years before becoming a full-time writer, Sirota worked as the press secretary for Vermont Independent Congressman Bernard Sanders, the chief spokesman for Democrats on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, the Director of Strategic Communications for the Center for American Progress, a campaign consultant for Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer and a media strategist for Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont. He also previously contributed writing to the website of the California Democratic Party. For more on Sirota, see these profiles of him in Newsweek or the Rocky Mountain News. Feel free to email him at lists [at] davidsirota.com Note: this online publication represents Sirota's personal views, and not the official views of the organizations he works with.