04.02.19a. Manuel Miranda's Farewell Note to Senator Hatch. The latest chapter in the wimpiness of Senate Republicans is the odd resignation of Manuel Miranda, an aide of Senator Hatch, which has resulted from his learning, as a result of Democratic carelessness in leaving their memos (some of them scanned in here, I learn from David Wagner) exposed on a common computer system, about sleazy Democratic behavior on the Judiciary Committee. As he very neatly says in a memo printed in National Review , nobody can point to any specific law or rule that has been broken-- they just make vague-- and, indeed, slanderous-- allegations of illegal behavior. I hope Mr. Miranda goes public with some of the even sleazier things he must have learned while serving in the Senate. I think the Senate's shabby treatment of him has released him from the duty of silently holding his nose about the seamy side of politics.
In brief, when I worked on the Hatch staff a young colleague brought to my attention that we could freely access documents from the Judiciary shared network on our desktops through an icon called "My Network Places." Although I never discussed this with any other colleagues, I knew that other Hatch counsels and staff came to know about the glitch and that some had concluded that the access was not unlawful.

I determined for myself that no unlawful, unauthorized hacking was involved in reading these unprotected documents. I knew that in law the duty falls on the other party to protect their documents. I also considered and studied the propriety or ethics of reading these documents. I knew that in legal ethics there is no absolute prohibition on reading opposition documents inadvertently disclosed and that these ethics are stricter than our situation in government service. I knew that there is no privacy expectation to documents on a government server, documents that are regularly backed up and stored in a government facility. I knew that these were not confidential or classified documents. I knew that I was not in a relation of confidence to the Senators or documents in question.

Finally, I was told that the Leahy staff had been informed of their negligence, which solved the only possible ethical consideration left to me. In short, they did nothing to protect their documents, as the law requires, either before of after being informed, and in an obviously adversarial context.

I have recently studied the Code of Ethics of Government Service. In my opinion, a prohibition on the reading of such documents would signify duties and obligations antithetical to the letter and spirit of the Code.

[in full at 04.02.19a.htm .      Erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

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