A federal judge ruled on Wednesday in favor of one more search for Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta ordered the State Department to search its servers for emails related to the 2012 Benghazi attack. In particular, they are tasked with looking for anything Clinton sent to aides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, or Jake Sullivan at their state.gov addresses.

“Secretary Clinton used a private email server, located in her home, to transmit and receive work-related communications during her tenure as secretary of state,” Judge Mehta noted in his ruling. “[State] has not, however, searched the one records system over which it has always had control and that is almost certain to contain some responsive records: the state.gov email server.”

The ruling comes after the watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit calling for a renewed search. The group argued that the State Department had only searched outside sources, such as Clinton’s private server.

Lawyers for the department countered that an additional search is unlikely to turn up anything else. In addition, it would set a poor precedent for any future requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Judge Mehta responded that “this matter is a far cry from a typical FOIA case” and that the email scandal was “a specific fact pattern unlikely to arise in the future.”

He then ordered the department to give him a status report by September 22.

Previously, Clinton and her three aides surrendered more than 30,000 emails to the agency in 2014. The investigation found 348 emails relating to Benghazi sent to or from the then-Secretary of State.

Any emails she deleted off her private server, however, may not have a backup and are likely gone forever.

In contrast, as a government agency, the State Department would have server backups in place. Department officials, though, have admitted that there was no automated archiving system in place during Clinton’s tenure.

The State Department did not comment on the ruling. Tom Fitton, president of the Judicial Watch, said in a statement, “This major court ruling may finally result in more answers about the Benghazi scandal–and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in it–as we approach the attack’s fifth anniversary.”

Clinton cites the “emailgate“controversy and then-FBI director James Comey’s subsequent investigation as major reasons why she lost the 2016 presidential election.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Did Martin Shkreli send a mass email to just over 450 journalists about the recent Wu-Tang Clan album on Friday? That’s what reporters claim and they’ve taken to tweeting about the nightmarish experience all day. Whoever sent the email didn’t BCC the recipients, and a reply-all nightmare quickly unfolded. The incident quickly started trending. Here’s a recap:

Currently stuck on a reply-all chain started by Martin Shkreli, in case anyone is curious what hell looks like.

— Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams) August 12, 2016

Dear god. @MartinShkreli sent a press release to 450+ journalists… and didn’t bcc. The man is pure evil. pic.twitter.com/zS5LYSPAuc

— Kyle Jaeger (@kylejaeger) August 12, 2016

Often called “The most hated man in America,” Shkreli, the 32-year-old former hedge-fund manager, became world famous after acquiring the American rights to distribute a life-saving drug that many AIDS patients rely on. He raised the price by more than 5,000 percent, sparking an international backlash.

The mass-email reportedly claimed Shkreli would let recipients listen to a track from the Wu-Tang Clan album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.” Shkreli, maintaining his widely-hated persona, bought the sole copy of the album for $2 million in 2015. The email also said, “When I reach 200k followers on Twitter, I will drop another track.”

Martin Shkreli recently made the news when he claimed that Hillary Clinton has Parkinson’s disease, based only on his own observations.

Shkreli claims that he never sent the email, but if he did, it would be a pretty good publicity stunt as the story quickly trended online.

wasnt me https://t.co/8mtsCSfbXc

— Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) August 12, 2016

So far, the stunt has brought about mixed reactions:

BEING ON THIS MARTIN SHKRELI EMAIL CHAIN HAS CURED MY DEPRESSION

— Ali Segel (@OnlineAlison) August 12, 2016

Can’t get actual work emails to load on any device because of this stupid Martin Shkreli email chain I was oddly included on. #Help

— Lindsey Thiry (@LindseyThiry) August 12, 2016

Who knows what really happened, but this tweet sums up the situation many reporters find themselves in pretty well:

TFW you’re on an email thread with 500 journalists, started by a fake Martin Shkreli, and everyone hits “reply all” pic.twitter.com/Yz5sdWHcsa

— Arielle Pardes (@pardesoteric) August 12, 2016

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Did Martin Shkreli Start a Massive Email Chain With 450 Reporters? appeared first on Law Street.

If you’re sick of hearing about Hillary Clinton’s emails, clap your hands.

James Comey is right there with you. The FBI Director said Tuesday that the bureau is recommending to the Department of Justice that no charges be brought against Hillary Clinton for using a personal email server during her term as secretary of state.

Some people are pretty mad.

Declining to prosecute Sec. Clinton for recklessly transmitting national security info will set a terrible precedent https://t.co/URtm1pFIIB

— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) July 5, 2016

The Background

In 2012, Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in an attack in Benghazi, Libya, prompting a long string of investigations and questions about officials’ actions at the time–officials including a key player, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Part of the investigation was a look into Clinton’s email, which revealed that she had been using a personal server during her time heading up the State Department, which got more than a few people feeling uneasy. As secretary of state, she had access to a lot of classified information, which wasn’t supposed to be mixed in with her personal notes or hair appointment confirmations. This scandal has followed Clinton all throughout her campaign.

What’s Next?

 Comey said that the FBI didn’t find enough evidence to show that she intentionally mishandled the classified information, but did slide a little commentary in about how she was “extremely careless” with it. The Bureau is technically passing the case over to the Department of Justice to make a prosecutorial decision, but its recommendation essentially means there will be no prosecution.

While Hillary supporters are rejoicing, this recommendation is fuel for certain other candidates who don’t play nice with the Clintons and use “Crooked Hillary” in a good portion of their tweets.

FBI director said Crooked Hillary compromised our national security. No charges. Wow! #RiggedSystem

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 5, 2016

Samantha Reilly

Samantha Reilly is an editorial intern at Law Street Media. A New Jersey native, she is pursuing a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park. Contact Samantha at SReilly@LawStreetMedia.com.

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An independent audit into the private email account of Hillary Clinton–used during her tenure as Secretary of State–found her as acting irresponsibly in regards to repeated warnings from the State Department. The audit–78 pages in total–said Clinton ignored directives from the State Department in regards to private email as concerns about the legality of passing classified government documents through a private account were brushed aside. It also acknowledged that her private home server might have been breached by hackers, a point Clinton’s aides deny.

Other notable takeaways from the audit:

• Though she was briefed about cybersecurity risks in a memo in 2011, Clinton’s account did not meet minimum security guidelines as outlined by the State Department and as required under the Federal Records Act.
• Before her duties as Secretary of State ended in 2013, Clinton should have turned over all emails to the department. She released only half of those emails, and only after her use of a private server was revealed by media reports in 2015.
• Although Clinton and her aides have agreed to cooperate in an ongoing FBI investigation into the affair, none would comply with the independent audit. But on CBS’s “Face the Nation” this month: “I’ve made it clear that I’m more than ready to talk to anybody, anytime. And I’ve encouraged all of (my staff) to be very forthcoming,” Clinton said.

As expected, Clinton’s aides rushed to her defense and Republican critics seized the audit as proof she is unsuitable to be president.

“The inspector general documents just show how consistent her email practices were with those of other secretaries and senior officials at the State Department who also used personal email,” said Brian Fallon, Clinton’s campaign spokesman, in regards to the audit’s findings that previous secretaries–including Colin Powell–have used similarly private servers in the past. But according to the report, Clinton’s methods were “considerably more detailed and more sophisticated” than past secretaries.

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, saw the findings as more than a mere slip-up: “The stakes are too high in this election to entrust the White House to someone with as much poor judgment and reckless disregard for the law as Hillary Clinton,” he said.

What Wednesday’s report means for the ongoing FBI investigation into the matter is unclear, but as the November election inches closer into view, it’s an issue to keep an eye on in the coming months.

Alec Siegel

Alec Siegel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. When he’s not working at Law Street he’s either cooking a mediocre tofu dish or enjoying a run in the woods. His passions include: gooey chocolate chips, black coffee, mountains, the Animal Kingdom in general, and John Lennon. Baklava is his achilles heel. Contact Alec at ASiegel@LawStreetMedia.com.

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In the two years since former government contractor Edward Snowden released information about the extent to which the United States government was surveilling its citizens, the push to be able to protect private information has gotten much stronger. Protected email accounts and versions of the web existed well before Snowden’s leaks; however, discussions over how to truly protect online communication have proliferated since. One important aspect of these conversations is whether it’s appropriate to continue to allow the government to have access to citizens’ communications, but there’s simply no easy answer to these questions.

It’s within this wholly uncertain context that lawyers and law schools are beginning to address these questions. Southwestern Law School, a leading voice in media law located in Los Angeles, California, is one of the institutions tackling these issues head on. Recently, Southwestern Law’s Donald E. Biederman Entertainment and Media Law Institute hosted its annual online privacy conference, featuring a panel entitled “Government Access to Data: Surveillance, Privacy and Security After Snowden.” The panel featured leading voices in the field of online privacy: Jon Callas, a cofounder of both Blackphone and Silent Circle, and Timothy Edgar, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a visiting fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. It was moderated by Lee Tien, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Read on to learn about the panel’s discussions on the topic of private email and its role in the legal field.

Protecting Online Communication: A History

In order to explore the discussion about online privacy that the Southwestern Law panel undertook, it’s important to understand the context of protected communication. Even before Snowden’s leak, no one liked to imagine that their private communications were easily readable. More importantly, so many of us now store our most important information online–whether that is bank accounts, identification information, or medical records. Pieces of our personal information that used to be kept under lock and key in paper form are now stored in electronic, intangible ways. So it makes sense that ever since this kind of online storage has existed, some have sought to protect their information from prying eyes.

But after Snowden’s leak the urge to protect information became particularly focused on one set of prying eyes: the U.S. government. During the Southwestern Law panel, Tien introduced the complicated conversation about protected communication as follows:

That issue has come back in the post-Snowden world. Because one of the things that became really, really clear from his revelations is that the government spends a lot of time and energy thinking about how it can subvert and undermine the technology we use to protect our privacy.

Email Encryption

This brings us to the concept of encrypted email–one of the most basic building blocks of protected communication. There are multiple ways to encrypt email, but at its most simplistic form, encryption means that a message cannot be read by anyone who is not authorized to do so–whether it’s a government agency, employer, or a hacker looking for vulnerable personal information to exploit.

Encrypted email usually involves public and private “keys.” As the names indicate, public keys are available to the public–essentially anyone with whom you want to trade emails–and private keys are kept by the owner of the email account. Imagine Person A wants to exchange emails with Person B. Person A gives Person B her public key, and Person B writes an email, then uses the public key to encrypt it. When Person A receives the email, she needs to use her private key to unlock the email that has been encrypted with the public key–and because she’s the only one who has the private key, she’s the only one who is able to do so.

Of course, that is just encryption at a very basic level and it can be significantly more nuanced than that. The encryption described above requires some people to have keys–usually an account provider such as Gmail, for example. The next level of encryption that is said to be on the horizon will place the encryption process on the computer rather than on servers, so even the company providing the service won’t have the key. But that’s also where the legal concerns the Southwestern Law panel discussed start to come into play.

The Legality of Encrypted Email

There’s nothing inherently illegal about encrypting emails, but that hasn’t stopped those who create the programs and services from running into legal trouble here and there, particularly with the United States government. One case discussed by the Southwestern Law panel surrounded an email service called Lavabit, founded by entrepreneur Ledar Levison. Snowden used Lavabit, and when he fled the country after revealing information about the NSA’s surveillance program, the FBI wanted to access his account. However, the government requested the private encryption key for Lavabit generally in its attempt to access Snowden’s key. Lavabit provides encrypted email to nearly half a million people. Levison at first was unwilling to give that information, and chose to shut down the company after a very long legal back and forth in which he was served multiple times. The dominant narrative about what happened to Lavabit focuses on the complicated nature of what the FBI was asking for. During the panel, Tien explained the sheer difficulty of what the government was asking Levison to do:

After Lavabit shut down, some similar companies followed in its wake. SilentCircle, also offering encrypted email services, shut down in anticipation of similar issues with the government at some point in the future. Callas, a co-founder of SilentCircle, explained the decision to shut down while at the Southwestern panel, citing fear of a reputation hit, and saying that “when the house next door gets raided, you wonder if you’re next, and that’s when you make sure that your shredder is working.”

Despite Lavabit’s abrupt closure, companies haven’t stopped their quests to create truly private, encrypted email–they’ve just had to become more careful. One of the new companies that sprung up in the wake of the Snowden revelations and the subsequent focus on encrypted email is called ProtonMail. It promises that new frontier of encryption: a company that doesn’t have the keys to encrypted email. If a company doesn’t have the keys itself–the way Lavabit did–it can’t provide them when the government comes to call. Andy Yen, one of the founders of Proton Mail, explained:

We encrypt the data on the browser before it comes to the server. By the time the data comes to the server it’s already encrypted, so if someone comes to us and says we’d like to read the emails of this person, all we can say is we have the encrypted data but we’re sorry we don’t have the encryption key and we can’t give you the encryption key.

ProtonMail isn’t the only new service that’s attempting to make encrypted email even more private. Levison, along with a number of like-minded partners, created the Dark Mail Project, which is working on a new set of email protocols called Dime. Dime is specifically focused on metadata in addition to the actual messages being sent. Metadata includes things like location and time when a message was sent. That kind of information has also been highly coveted by the government. Again, like with ProtonMail, the logic is that if the provider doesn’t have the information the government is looking for, the government can’t go after the company.

Whether or not that’s strictly legal, however, does appear to be a gray area. Since some of these features are so cutting edge, it’s hard for American law to keep up with it. As Dailydot explains it:

As the law currently stands, people aren’t required to build online services that are accessible by a government request; but, if your service is in any way penetrable, the operators of those services can be compelled to turn over what information the government could theoretically access.

This lack of clear guidelines has sparked frustration from both email encryption companies and the government, which has led to the government asking for something called a “backdoor.”

Backdoors

A backdoor to encrypted email is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a special entrance for the U.S. government–normally the FBI–to use in order to access data in case it needs to do so. But whether or not they should be instituted is a contentious point of debate. While the Southwestern Law panelists tended to argue against backdoors, in order to understand their points, it’s important to acknowledge the arguments for backdoors purported mainly by the government.

Arguments in Favor of Backdoors

The FBI’s argument for a backdoor is multi-faceted, but it all essentially boils down to a single idea: national security and safety. The most compelling argument is that if these types of software are used to arrange terror plots or other nefarious acts, the FBI, or any other relevant agency, needs to be able to gain access to that information. As President Barack Obama put it in January 2015: “If we find evidence of a terrorist plot…and despite having a phone number, despite having a social media address or email address, we can’t penetrate that, that’s a problem.”

Those who espouse the necessity of backdoors also point out that it has nearly always been possible for the government–particularly the American government–to listen in on or read private correspondence between citizens if there is a national security issue at risk. While there are rules about reading citizens’ mail or wiretapping conversations, those options have almost always been open to government officials if the proper channels and rules were followed. The idea that a type of communication could be created in which the government simply could not access the messages is not consistent with American security practices to date.

Arguments Against Backdoors

One of the strongest arguments on this side is that creating a backdoor for the government weakens the system as a whole. There’s really no way to create a backdoor that only the U.S. government can use–it creates vulnerabilities that enterprising hackers, terrorist groups, or foreign governments can also exploit, albeit with a bit more difficulty. So, allowing the government to have access to encrypted emails in order to fight terrorism could backfire and weaken national security.

There’s also a counter-argument to the idea that the U.S. government has traditionally had access to our private communication. This argument posits that the government’s ability to search private citizens doesn’t entitle it to whatever it wants, but rather gives it permission to try to gain access. As Edgar put it during the Southwestern Law panel:

The FBI director has been making the government’s traditional argument, which is the government has a right to monitor communications as long as they get a lawful order for it, under whatever that legal standard is. And I’ve always thought, even since law school, that just gets it completely backwards. The government’s warrant isn’t a right, it’s a permission. It’s a judge saying you are permitted under the law to do something that if you were a private citizen would be illegal because we think it’s important for law enforcement or national security.

There’s also the concern that the U.S. government would use backdoors to continue one-size-fits-all surveillance on American citizens. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 73 percent of Americans think it is acceptable for the U.S. government to monitor suspected terrorists, yet only 37 percent of Americans think it’s acceptable for the government to spy on American citizens. Given the significant evidence that that type of monitoring was exactly what was happening, it makes sense that many would be hesitant to allow the American government in to monitor “terrorists” if that means giving it access to non-suspects as well.

So is it actually possible to have entirely private email?

It’s not an easy question to answer. Instead, it’s a matter of weighing priorities and sacrifices, and those aren’t consistent from person to person, let alone the American government as a whole. Southwestern Law, as well as other legal and academic institutions, is working to answer these questions, but it’s important to keep in mind that there may never be a cut-and-dry answer.

In order for communication to be completely and fully protected, we have to realize that we may get to the point where companies and developers are building systems so protected that no one can break them, not even their creators. That is viewed by some as deeply problematic, because there really will be no ability for surveillance or access for the government at that point.

While we aren’t yet at that point, it’s indubitable that Snowden changed the way that we look at privacy, national security, and communication, and his releases sparked a larger national debate about how to protect email. But the reality is that there may never really be an answer to the question of how to protect our online communications.

Resources

Primary

Southwestern Law: Biederman Institute: Online Privacy Conference

Additional

Lifehacker: How to Encrypt Your Email and Keep Your Conversations Private

Forbes: The Only Email System the NSA Can’t Access

Guardian: Secrets, Lies, and Snowden’s Email: Why I Was Forced to Shut Down Lavabit

Time: Hackers Unveil Their Plan to Change Email Forever

Center for Democracy and Technology: A “Backdoor” to Encryption For Government Surveillance 

Wall Street Journal: Obama Sides With Cameron in Encryption Fight

Slate: Obama Wants Tech Companies to Install Backdoors for Government Spying

Economist: Going Dark

Pew Research Center: Global Opinions of U.S. Surveillance

Southwestern Law School

Southwestern Law School, home of the #1 Entertainment Law program in the country, offers more than 60 courses, seminars, externships and clinics in entertainment and media law through its J.D. curriculum and LL.M. program in Entertainment and Media Law. Southwestern Law School is a partner of Law Street Creative. The opinions expressed in this author’s articles do not necessarily reflect the views of Law Street.

http://www.swlaw.edu/

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Right now there’s a controversy over emails in the U.S. government. It all started with the news that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal email address to conduct her job in the State Department. However, the controversy has continued with politicians and prominent figures from both sides of the aisle coming out in support or condemnation, and raising what could have been an interesting conversation about the use of email in our government.

In terms of Clinton’s emails, it’s unclear whether or not what she did was technically illegal. However, it’s definitely frowned upon, especially in light of the scrutiny that Clinton herself levied against the private email accounts used in the Bush Administration. That being said, Clinton has now turned over many pages of her correspondence, roughly 55,000 pages worth. Some of the criticism toward Clinton has to do with concerns that the American people still don’t have full information over the terrorist attack against the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya in 2012. However, Representative Aaron Schiff (D-CA) has said that the committee looking into the Benghazi incident got everything they asked for from Clinton, and that there was nothing that they found probative.

Colin Powell, another former Secretary of State, has also come to Clinton’s defense, explaining with regard to his emails:

I don’t have any to turn over, I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files. And, in fact, a lot of the emails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and the state.gov domain. But I don’t know if the servers at the State Department captured those or not. They were all unclassified and most of them, I think, are pretty benign. So I’m not terribly concerned even if they were able to recover them.

It’s not just her predecessors who are weighing in on this debate. While some Democrats have shown strong support, others have urged her to give an explanation for why her personal account was used during that period. Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), for example, declared that Clinton needs to explain exactly what happened with the email mix up, and emphasized that continued silence would just hurt her moving forward.

On the other hand, some Republicans have taken advantage of the confusion and controversy to slam the likely 2016 presidential candidate. That’s to be expected, of course, but some have also taken the opportunity to prove how different they are than Clinton–and presumably by extension, all Democrats. The most obvious example is Senator Lindsey Graham, who on “Meet the Press” this week told everyone “I don’t email. No, you can have every email I’ve ever sent. I’ve never sent one.”

In some ways I suppose that’s not that surprising. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post pointed out, 15 percent of American adults don’t use the Internet. That being said, Graham is also on the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, so his admission that he doesn’t use email could definitely be considered troublesome.

Graham wasn’t the only Republican figure who proclaimed that he shies away from e-mail. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) of 2008 election fame explained that he doesn’t use e-mail because:

I’m afraid that if I was emailing, given my solid, always calm temperament that I might email something that I might regret. You could send out an email that you would regret later on and would be maybe taken out of context And frankly, I don’t have any trouble communicating with my constituents without it.

This entire debate truly strikes me as odd, because what could have actually been a productive discussion about the ethics of communicating with private or business email addresses has sparked a lot of other, significantly less productive talking points. Besides feeding into the incredibly inane Benghazi speculation that seems like it will go on forever, our politicians are now bragging about their detachment from technology. Are we suddenly going to have all the potential 2016 candidates proclaiming whether or not they use e-mail? It’s a pretty ubiquitous tool that most of us use in daily life–I don’t think it’s really a political position.

I’ve long thought that the 2016 elections were going to be particularly nasty–even nastier than 2008 and 2012 in many ways. I think we’re starting to see the beginning of what will be a lot of highly publicized debates over, quite frankly, nothing of consequence.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Clinton Email Controversy: Here Comes the Partisan Bickering appeared first on Law Street.

From the faux outrage over President Obama’s “latte salute,” to every worker’s fantasy coming true in Germany with a possible ban on after-hours work emails, to people getting arrested for buying cold meds — for an actual cold — there was a ton of interesting news last week. ICYMI, here are Law Street’s top three stories from last week.

#1 The “Latte Salute” is a Latte of Crap

Earlier this week President of the United States Barack Obama made a fatal error. He drank a cup of coffee and saluted our troops…with the same hand. This incited media coverage somewhere on par with a natural disaster, or maybe an assassination attempt. In fact, some members of the media covered what has now been dubbed the “latte salute” scandal as though it actually was an assassination — namely the assassination of American patriotism. (Read full article here.)

#2 Germany Considers Bans on After Hours Work Emails

I’m sort of a walking stereotype. I have my phone in my hand at all times, I sleep with it in my bed even though I know that’s bad, and I’m constantly checking my texts, social media, and email. And that’s never really bothered me — it seems normal to me. I am used to being accessible essentially 24/7. I think that’s a norm that a lot of us Americans have gotten used to, and I doubt that that’s going to change, but apparently some of our European friends have started rejecting the concept of 24/7 connectivity. (Read full article here.)

#3 Careful When Buying Water and Cold Meds, You Might Just Get Arrested

Every time I see a law enforcement officer in public — mall cop, fashion police, regular 5-0 — I have the irrational fear that they are out to get me. (This is especially true of the fashion police, but my fear of them might not be that irrational as anyone who has seen my clothing choices could attest.) I’m never doing anything I’m not supposed to be doing (or at the very least, I’m never doing anything I’m going to admit to you), but that doesn’t matter: I am sure I am about to be thrown in handcuffs and taken downtown. Little did I know, instead of fearing this, I should have been hoping for it. Just ask Elizabeth Daly or Mickey Lynn Goodson. (Read full article here.)

Chelsey D. Goff

Chelsey D. Goff was formerly Chief People Officer at Law Street. She is a Granite State Native who holds a Master of Public Policy in Urban Policy from the George Washington University. She’s passionate about social justice issues, politics — especially those in First in the Nation New Hampshire — and all things Bravo. Contact Chelsey at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post ICYMI: Best of the Week appeared first on Law Street.

I’m sort of a walking stereotype. I have my phone in my hand at all times, I sleep with it in my bed even though I know that’s bad, and I’m constantly checking my texts, social media, and email. And that’s never really bothered me — it seems normal to me. I am used to being accessible essentially 24/7. I think that’s a norm that a lot of us Americans have gotten used to, and I doubt that that’s going to change, but apparently some of our European friends have started rejecting the concept of 24/7 connectivity.

Germany is considering a law to ban work-related emails after hours. The potential legislation is being pushed by labor unions, and recently the German Labor Minister Andrea Nahles ordered a study to look into the negative effects of work-related stress. While that study isn’t done yet, and legislation won’t even be proposed until those findings are released, Nahles stated,

There is an undeniable relationship between constant availability and the increase of mental illness. We have commissioned the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to work out whether it is possible to set load thresholds. We need universal and legally binding criteria.

Germany actually isn’t the first country to consider a late-night work email ban. Earlier this spring there were rumors that France had passed a similar law. France’s restrictions on work are actually very interesting already. Most workers are limited to a 35-hour work week. There’s actually no law restricting work emails after business hours, but there was an agreement signed earlier this year with some unions and employers agreeing to not contact employees outside of work hours.

So, if Germany and France are considering these email restrictions, will something similar ever make it to the U.S.? Nah, probably not.

A lot of it has to do with German and French culture in comparison to American. For many, the dominating idea in the United States is that the more you work, the more productive you are. Often employees who stay late are viewed as going the extra mile, while those who rush out the door at 5:00 are not as valued. But what a lot of people forget is that more work doesn’t necessarily mean more productivity.

The culture in nations like Germany and France is different though. In those countries, needing to stay after to finish your work creates the impression that you’re not productive enough during the day to finish your work in the time allotted. Thomas C. Kohler, a German legal expert explained, saying:

With Germans, while they’re at work, they only work — you’ll rarely hear a radio in the background. They consider it a sign of inefficiency if you cannot complete a day’s work in that day. So if you’re staying late at the office, it would often be regarded as a sign of your inability to get the work done.

So while some of our peer nations have shorter work weeks and are now moving toward no work emails after hours, I doubt it’s going to happen in the United States anytime soon. It would require too big of a cultural shift, and we Americans are just a little too attached to our smartphones.

—

Anneliese Mahoney (@AMahoney8672) is Lead Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Shreyans Bhansali via Flickr]

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

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