Technology develops faster than law.  This maxim has implications across society, but one place it has particular purchase is in federal recordkeeping and the public’s right to access government information.  The two primary federal statutes that require government to preserve records and then allow the public to access those records are the Federal Records Act (“FRA”) and the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”).  Federal agencies, unfortunately, do not always live up to their obligations under these laws and government-oversight organizations turn to the courts to seek relief.  The public’s right to sue under the FOIA is well established.  However, courts rarely compel agencies to fulfil their FRA obligations.  My organization, Cause of Action Institute (“CoA Institute”), is currently involved in two important FRA lawsuits that may shape the future of agency obligations under the FRA for decades to come, as information technologies continue to change.

Both lawsuits arose from Secretaries of State failing to preserve their emails in compliance with the Federal Records Act.  Former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s email travails are well catalogued.  But former Secretary Colin Powell also used a non-governmental email account to conduct official government business.  The factual difference between these two cases is that while Secretary Clinton primarily used a personal email service with a server in her basement, Secretary Powell used an AOL account.  But Secretary Clinton also used a BlackBerry email account for the first two months of her tenure as Secretary of State.  So, from these two cases the same legal issue arises: what is an agency’s FRA obligation to recover unlawfully removed federal email records that are housed on commercial email servers?

This question is important to the future of federal recordkeeping law and public access to information because we are already seeing an explosion of non-email methods of electronic communication.  Some of these methods of communication store information locally, such as on a phone or computer, and some store them on commercial servers.  For example, FOIA requesters have been battling for access to text messages for years, agency employees use various forms of instant messaging while at work, and we’ve now seen the rise of the surreptitious use of phone applications such as Signal and Confide that do not always preserve the communications.

In Armstrong v. Bush, the D.C. Circuit recognized two cognizable private rights of action under the Federal Records Act.  First, a plaintiff may bring a case against an agency if that agency does not have the requisite recordkeeping policies in place or if the policies are insufficiently clear so that an employee does not know what type of records he is required to save.  Second, a plaintiff may bring a case to compel the head of an agency or the Archivist of the United States to recover records that have been unlawfully removed from the agency.  If the agency head or Archivist is either unable or unwilling to perform that duty, then the FRA requires them to “initiate action through the Attorney General for the recovery” of those records.  To our knowledge, no such referral to the Attorney General has ever occurred.

At stake in CoA Institute’s Clinton and Powell cases is whether a plaintiff can force the agency head and Archivist to refer the matter to the Attorney General when, through their own actions, they have failed to recover all the missing records.  In both cases the State Department asked representatives of Secretaries Clinton and Powell to recover the unlawfully removed records and return them to the agency for historical preservation and for response to FOIA requests.  In both cases those representatives responded that they were unable to obtain copies of the records that were housed on BlackBerry and AOL servers, respectively.  The State Department and Archivist have responded in the ongoing suits that those efforts are sufficient and that they are not required to use legal process or refer the matter to the Attorney General for more forceful efforts at record recovery.

CoA Institute’s case related to Secretary Clinton has already been to the D.C. Circuit once and the appellate court held that the agency is only absolved of its Federal Records Act obligations if it can establish the “fatal loss” of the records in question.  The State Department and Archivist have not made a sufficient affirmative showing that BlackBerry, and AOL in the case of Secretary Powell, do not have, and cannot recover, these email records.  They have offered no statements from either company or detailed efforts by those companies to recover and return the federal records.

Whether the district court compels the current Secretary of State and Archivist to make such an affirmative showing or requires them to refer the matter to the Attorney General for him to attempt record recovery could set an important precedent.  This decision will shape the future of agency responsibilities under the Federal Records Act and the public’s ability to have access to its government’s information as communications technology continues to change.

James Valvo is counsel and senior policy advisor at Cause of Action Institute.  He is counsel in both cases discussed in this article.  You can follow him on Twitter @JamesValvo.