State lawyer's firing puts heat on governor's e-mail policy

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Sending private e-mails from an office computer has long been an occupational risk many employees are willing to take.

Gov. Matt Blunt's office is no exception. But on the second floor of the Missouri Capitol, the latest concern isn't over fantasy football rosters or eBay Christmas shoppers.

Instead, a dispute over some electronic messages presumed private by their senders has snowballed into a public battle seemingly with no end in sight -- save for the courtroom or the 2008 campaign trail.

At the center of the storm is former Blunt deputy legal counsel Scott Eckersley. The 30-year-old lawyer said he was fired in late September for warning Blunt officials, including chief of staff Ed Martin, that they were breaking open record laws by deleting certain e-mails.

Blunt, Martin and the other two top aides asserted a legal right to routinely discard those documents. And when it came to rebutting Eckersley's assertions, they used the ex-employee's own e-mails to mount their defense.

Tipped off that Eckersley had taken his concerns to the press, Blunt aides provided reporters with an unsolicited stack of personal and work-related e-mails designed to show he deserved to lose his job.

They accused him of using his work computer to access a sexually oriented dating Web site -- what Blunt aides called a "group sex" site -- as well as spending an excessive amount of the state's time on a family business venture.

Eckersley said the sexually oriented e-mails were Internet spam, and noted that his supervisors gave permission to work on the family business from his state office.

Now he is accusing his former bosses of breaking into his private e-mail account after his termination. Blunt's team counters that Eckersley intentionally forwarded several e-mails to his old state account "as a form of harassment" -- and points to what it calls computer-generated evidence for proof.

At the core of the dispute is a Missouri law written in the pre-Internet legal wilderness, and only slightly modified since.

The Missouri Sunshine Law specifically defines a "public record" as "any record, whether written or electronically stored" that is retained by a public governmental body.

Open government advocates say that broad definition clearly includes e-mails.