Letters from our Readers

Fading Memory
In his article ("The Fading Memory of the State," July 2005), David Talbot writes, "Saving the text of e-mail messages is technically easy; the challenge lies in managing a vast volume and saving only what's relevant. It's important, for example, to save the e-mails of major figures like cabinet members and White House personnel without also bequeathing to history trivial messages in which mid-level bureaucrats make lunch arrangements."

Even assuming the existence of a politically neutral way to mark certain messages as unworthy of archiving, this seems like a really bad idea to me. Historians and archaeologists have extracted understanding of policy, culture, and daily life from such minutiae from ancient Mesopotamia forward. Those lunch arrangements could someday shed light on shifting alliances within a bureaucracy or a change in the status -- as marked by the watering hole -- of a bureaucrat. They could even offer a statistical test of the "late-night pizza" hypothesis about government war planning and other major policy initiatives.