I Spent a Day Opening Jeb Bush's Email

Jeb Bush has ​published nearly 300,000 emails he sent and received during the eight years he served as governor of Florida. It may be unprecedented, a presidential hopeful opening up his inbox this way; Bush built a website expressly dedicated to making the vast archive of messages searchable.

"In the spirit of transparency," reads said site, "I am posting the emails of my governorship here. Some are funny; some are serious; some I wrote in frustration. But they're all here so you can read them and make up your own mind."

Transparency is a noble aim, but ​critics argue this borders on intrusion. That's because the emails Bush posted also contain the social security numbers, email addresses, private phone numbers, personal opinions, and even detailed medical information of the Florida citizens who reached out to him, sometimes under the explicit guise of confidentiality.

Furthermore, every email included in the new searchable database was technically already available as part of the public record—those that weren't have been excluded, —thus making the toast to transparency ring a bit empty. The net impact of the project seems to be an incremental increasing in the ease by which one can obtain sensitive information about Florida's citizens.

So, I spent the better part of a day wading through the emails, and beyond playing like a time lapse of the decade past—Y2K, the election, 911, Terri Schiavo!—lived through the eyes of a top bureaucrat, a number of things leapt out of the poorly punctuated mess. First of all, Jeb Bush did in fact write a stunning amount of email. His staff says he'd spend 30 hours a week seeing to his public-facing Jeb@Jeb.org account, and that seems about right.

He wrote email to colleagues, to supporters, to critics, to crusaders, to striving functionaries, to job seekers and to angry racists. He answered the mayor of Tallahassee. He answered a convict requesting clemency. He did so politely, tersely, and sometimes very casually. That was probably the chief aim of this endeavor—to broadcast the regular guy-ness and tech savviness of Jeb.

One of my favorite exchanges takes place when an incredulous citizen writes back after a response and asks, "By the way, are you really Jeb or a staff member? Just curious."

The governor of the state of Florida responds, "I am jeb."

That's precisely the sort of interaction the GOP establishment wants to highlight, saddled as it is with reputation of being woefully behind the technological times. In doing so, however, Jeb has also highlighted a lot of very personal information about his erstwhile constituents' lives.

For instance, their Worker's Compensation forms, filled out in detail and replete with Social Security, addresses, and personal info attached in messages sent directly to Jeb. Now it's public, a convenient 'hack-me' jpeg for the criminally inclined. Or their Medicaid numbers, which some constituents emailed to Jeb along with their prescription info and identifying details.

Besides being a candy store for identity thieves, many the emails are excruciatingly personal. I read detailed accounts written by parents of ailing children, about seizures and cerebral palsy and struggles with sickness. I read about elderly women who'd been cut off from food stamps. I read a long racist rant about reverse racism.

Many of these emails included phone numbers and home addresses, too; many included a Social Security number. It can be difficult to read that sort of desperation—so hard-up that you're crossing your fingers that the governor himself or one of his people might call you up directly and fix the broken healthcare system that's screwing you—and now anyone can.

I read requests that the governor accept oil paintings from inmates who painted just for him, strung-out fears that the masses would descend on Florida after Y2K, and deeply felt exhortations to outlaw a license plate whose proceeds benefitted the Humane Society. It's kind of crazy what people will email governors.

One woman, apparently a stranger, emailed Jeb, with a subject line 'What is going on with me', and told him that she was getting divorced. Over the course of a few hundred words, she described her efforts to become a teacher, how she was going back to school as she held down a part-time job. "I know that some of my news is disappointing, but I hope you can also see the good things that I am doing for myself and that I am trying, despite everything, to be a good person," she wrote. "I have a lot of respect for you, and would hate to lose your respect for me."

Jeb replied. "I will try to help. I am sorry about the marriage. -Jeb"

So there is now a massive archive of revealing and potentially dangerous information about Floridians online—the Daily Dot spoke with one woman who wrote and email to Bush and ​now says she is embarrassed by its publication—but is any of it illegal? Maybe not.

"Generally speaking, when you send an email to any official body it becomes a public record,"  ​Michael Froomkin, a Professor of Law at the University of Miami, told me. Florida, he said, was the Sunshine State in more than one way: "We have the toughest open record laws in America."

The only means through which the publication of some emails might be illegal is if any of the information violated a specific exemption; like revealing the home address of a police officer, or a social security number included in a court document. But that doesn't mean it was a good idea.

"It's certainly an unkind thing to do," Froomkin told me, "and thoughtless and not considering people's privacy." Furthermore, if people are upset about the disclosures, they might not have a whole lot of recourse in Florida, either, unless, perhaps, a court were to decide that they were copyrighted, or if one of the published senders were to fall victim to cyber criminals.

"There is something negligent about putting someone's information online if it were to lead to identity theft," Froomkin said.

Even if it turns out to be totally legal, the endeavor seems liable to alienate large swaths of voters. Not just the people who trusted the governor with their ideas, pleas, social security numbers, hopes, dreams, and racist rants, but those who view upholding personal privacy as a guiding principle in general. The site is well-designed and highly functional, after all—some time and effort went into building it. It's hard to imagine Bush's team couldn't redact those social security numbers or details about citizens' medical histories, or obscure personal details.

Then again, this never was about your emails, which were primarily an accessory to the now-presidentially ascendent Jeb's. This goes back to the egoistic framing of the entire project: "I am posting the emails of my governorship here." That includes literally thousands of emails that Jeb never even responded to, that sat in his inbox, with an attached petition, or a photocopied Medicaid form, or an entreaty to toughen up on immigration, that have now been made public, unadorned, along with the clearest signal yet that Jeb is cleaning out his closet as he prepares to run for president.

Erik Franco contributed reporting.