The breadth of the North Carolina Public Records Law and the explosion of digital public records have resulted in frequent and voluminous requests for public records. Such requests are time-consuming and often include records that exist only on the personal devices of individual employees and officials. In these situations, the agency must rely on those […]
Posts Tagged ‘email’
Email as Public Record: Five Things You Should Know [Updated]
Monday, February 20th, 2017This is an update of my January 27th, 2010 blog post on this topic. You probably already know that the definition of public records in our state law is extremely broad, and certainly includes electronic records like email. This means that email is subject to both the public access and records retention aspects of that law. Here’s […]
Using Private Email for Public Business: Is it Illegal in North Carolina?
Thursday, March 12th, 2015News about Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of private emails and a “homebrew” server raised both political and legal issues. I’ll leave the political issues to the pundits, and I’m not an expert in federal records retention requirements. But I thought our readers might be interested in how these issues would play out under North Carolina’s […]
Email Subscriber Lists: A New Exception to the Public Records Law
Wednesday, July 6th, 2011In this blog post about citizen information, I noted that some local governments had obtained local legislation to protect email subscriber lists from some kinds of public access. Effective April 21, 2011, that law now applies to all local governments. This post summarizes its provisions.
A Reasonable Search of Employee Records: City of Ontario v. Quon
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010In this post about access to emails, I described three categories of public employee emails: 1)emails that are public records and subject to public access; 2) emails that are public records but an exception either prohibits disclosure or eliminates the right of public access; and 3) emails that are private (do not relate to the transaction […]