Penn Should Have Used Carrier Pigeons

Reflecting on Josh's memo haul, Fallows contemplates the danger of e-mail:

...the perfection of the technology for spreading and sharing written material has made writing weirdly less useful for conveying private thought. It's risky as a way to share thoughts about running a political campaign; it's reckless as a way to say anything about any other person you might not want him or her to hear. The evolution of technology may return us to the era when the no-tech face-to-face meeting, or the hard-to-copy handwritten note, is the most secure means of communication. And when written statements, even in the "privacy" of email, are necessarily blanded-down by pre-knowledge that they could turn up somewhere unexpected months or years or decades later.

And that's why we may never know at all what Dick Cheney has really been up to these past eight years. Which is how he likes it. I prefer the indiscreet Clintonians.