"You've got mail? You've got a problem," reckoned the Sunday Telegraph, one of several papers to counsel caution in the use of email following disclosures to the Hutton inquiry. More than 900 confidential government emails and memos were published over the weekend, including 44 emails specifically relating to the dossier on Iraqi weaponry, which were sent during a four-day period last September.
"In terms of cyber investigation, email is the new DNA," the paper said. "Hit delete? You might as well try to clean up a crime scene with a blood-soaked rag." It thought the emails the inquiry had published demonstrated how complacent we have become about electronic communication: "In conversation we blag and obfuscate. In letters we practice caution and observe formalities. Let loose on email we spill our guts."
The Observer's Nick Cohen agreed. "Email encourages people to blurt out their feelings. It's easier, and somehow more intimate, to bash out whatever crosses your mind than walk a few yards, close an office door and have a prudently deniable conversation away from witnesses," he said.
But some are more cautious than others. Cohen said ministers have been taking more care in their use of email after being caught out by gaffes in the past. "The higher you go up what Campbell calls the Downing Street 'pay-grade', the more cautious the written record becomes," he added.
Adam Nicholson was more concerned by the tone that email correspondence engendered. In the Daily Telegraph, he blamed the widespread shift to email for "the snappily acute and the harshened tone" and "the macho brevity and the non-official tone of voice" that he considered to be rife within the Downing Street machine. He regarded it as "a sign of the culture we now live in: demanding the instant and comprehensive answer; impatient with ambiguities ... email is the medium for the sexed-up century".
Only the Times saw cause for optimism. It viewed the disclosure of the emails as reason to argue for freedom of information more generally. The possibility of future missives surfacing in similar circumstances "may be enough to impose precisely the same costs in terms of changed behaviour that full disclosure would produce", it said. "We should be grateful when officials are honest and eloquent, and not take words or sentences out of intended context. If fear of attention becomes the guiding principle of government, we will be poorly governed."
