text: Florida governor Jeb Bush bills himself as a tech-savvy politician, but he just made a major email etiquette mistake: Bush has published over 250,000 emails people sent to him as governor, easily searchable by date— and he hasn't redacted email addresses or the content of messages, meaning anyone who reached out to the governor now has their messages completely out in the open. 
   
   It takes seconds to find emails complaining about the Florida voting system following the fraught 2000 presidential election results to New Year's greetings from 2005. 
   
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   "In the spirit of transparency, I am posting the emails of my governorship here. Some are funny; some are serious; some I wrote in frustration. But they're all here so you can read them and make up your own mind," Bush's site reads. 
   
   Not mentioned: Whether Bush considered how the people who wrote to him felt about using their correspondences in a bid to appear transparent. 
   
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   In many of the messages, people left their full names and personal information, and their email addresses are plainly available. 
   
   While some of these emails are from other political players, many are from ordinary Floridians who wrote to the governor with the intention of communicating with their elected official through email, not through a published public correspondence. 
   
   One of the emails, which contains the full name and email address of a person who wrote in to Bush fourteen years ago, explicitly asks the then-governor not to publish his long, personal email: 
   
   And please do not make this email public to anybody. I do not want my privacy violated, especially by the media. 
   
   Awkward! 
   
   The Daily Dot talked to one woman whose AOL address is revealed in the emails. She said she'd never been asked for permission to publish the emails, and is embarrassed by how she comes across: 
   
   "I am fine with it on the emails concerning homeowners insurance," the woman added. Ones about "illegal immigrants," however, embarrassed her. "My feelings have changed on that subject and I wold hate to unduly upset anyone," she said. 
   
   Bush clearly does not get the internet like he says he does. This decision highlights a lack of understanding about reasonable expectations of privacy online. Yes, these people were emailing a public figure. By law, he can share what they wrote. 
   
   But they did not expect these emails to be released in such a public way. And while there's no law forbidding politicians from publishing their emails, it would've been easy to redact email addresses and full names and still keep the intention behind the project intact. This is a tone-deaf move. 
   
   But it's too late for take-backs: Even if Bush recognizes that this is a breach in trust, the emails are available to download in their original Outlook format, so he won't be able to take back all of the personal information he just released about his constituents. 
   
   
   
   Update: The Verge discovered that some of these emails contain social security numbers of the people who sent them. While it is true that the people who sent Jeb Bush their SSNs should have exercised caution and learned about Florida's stance on the emails of public figures before sharing their personal information, it is still a striking judgment lapse to publish this personal information voluntarily, in a high-profile forum. 
   
   
   
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   Transparency is in short supply in politics. This publication could've been a refreshing instance of a politician proactively sharing information with the public. But while the governor is a public figure, most of his constituents are not. Media organizations, including the New York Times, already had access to these emails thanks to public records requests. But they didn't go ahead and publish the identifying info of people who sent the emails, with good reason: That's a dick move. [Daily Dot] 
   
   [Image via AP Images] ||||| Jeb Bush, a rumored 2016 Republican presidential candidate, just decided to publish hundreds of thousands of emails sent to him during his time as governor of Florida. On its face it seems like a great idea in the name of transparency, but there's one huge problem: neither Bush nor those who facilitated the publication of the records, including the state government, decided to redact potentially sensitive personal information from them. 
   
   "In the spirit of transparency, I am posting the emails of my governorship here," a note on Bush's website says. "Some are funny; some are serious; some I wrote in frustration." Some also contain the email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers of Florida residents. The emails are available in Outlook format, and can be searched on the web at Bush's website. 
   
   The Verge did not receive a response from Mr. Bush or his Political Action Committee's office at the time of publication. 
   
   "In the spirit of transparency, I am posting the emails of my governorship." 
   
   We reviewed many of the emails released by Bush, and found a wide variety of communications — everything from religious parables, to praise of the governor's support of creationism, to routine bureaucratic correspondence. But some of the emails appear to be highly sensitive or personal. Many, like the one excerpted below, share tales of personal struggle or sorrow. 
   
   This is just a sharing...today..i feel beaten down... ... want to help many and hope I can get there some day....through my empowerment it will be a testament to my message and the ability to share my future resources...its a lonely road...so many seem actively against you...your back is to the wall...you have many another two months of business survival... P.S. this is just sharing with a friend... please no action or follow-up or any communications or assistance sought of nay kind...its my struggle to work through and find a way...just feeling "beaten" today...at 37 I feel like 60 today :).....and tomorrow will be better. Confidential communications intended for indicated recipient only 
   
   Other emails include potentially sensitive details about government operations. One email reviewed by The Verge discussed termination of a Florida Lottery employee; the email revealed the reasons for his termination, including "conduct unbecoming a public employee, insubordination, and neglect of duty." The employee had emailed then-governor Bush to appeal for reinstatement. Bush followed up with a lottery official to see if his request could be granted. 
   
   Some include personal appeals from citizens with medical or employment issues. And a subset of these messages contain sensitive data like social security numbers, as in the email shown below. (The redactions are our own.) 
   
   Another email, sent on behalf of a healthcare representative and shown below, contains information about a child with a life-threatening medical condition. The email exposes the child and mother's name, the mother's home state and phone number, her social security number, and her healthcare identification number. 
   
   Florida's freedom of information laws are very broad. As Bush notes in the signature of many of his emails, "Florida has a very broad public records law," and "your email communications may therefore be subject to public disclosure." However, social security numbers in particular are protected. As Florida private attorney Richard A. Harrison tells The Verge, social security numbers are "both confidential and exempt" from public disclosure under state law. "They can be released only for the limited purposes specified in that section, of which this is not one," Harrison says. "It doesn't matter how an agency or official obtained the information; once obtained it is a public record and the SSNs are confidential and exempt under the law." But that doesn't mean the former governor is legally responsible for the data leak. Harrison says the state's legal custodian of records is charged with ensuring no confidential or exempt information is released. 
   
   Under Florida law, that custodian might get off with just a scratch. Violation of the public records statute in this circumstance is considered a "noncriminal infraction" that's punishable by a fine "not exceeding $500." Someone who knowingly or willfully violates the privacy law is subject to harsher penalties — but it might be pretty easy to avoid those given the immense size of the records. 
   
   Jeb Bush's camp was quick to shift blame to the state. Kristy Campbell, a spokesperson for Bush, told BuzzFeed News that the release is "an exact replica of the public records on file with the Florida Department of State and are available at anyone's request under Chapter 119 sunshine laws." Of course, that statement isn't entirely true, since social security numbers are definitely exempt (and confidential) under that same chapter of the law. 
   
   Social Security Numbers are both confidential and exempt from disclosure under Florida law 
   
   Many of the same emails Bush released today may have already been available online as of December, 2014, thanks to a request made by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. Some publications, including The Washington Post and The Hill, combed the email records for policy insight, but did not appear to stumble upon sensitive personal information. 
   
   Obviously one of the lessons here is that you shouldn't email information to public officials that you want to keep private, at least not in Florida. But even if most of these emails are broadly subject to disclosure under the state's sunshine law, it's concerning that such a huge, indiscriminate data dump could include so much personal information. "Emails that bear on public decisions should be made public, but certainly emails with social security numbers or private medical information are not relevant to that," Bruce Jacob, a constitutional and criminal law professor at Florida's Stetson University told The Verge. "It's hard to imagine a court finding a persona guilty of a crime if it was a mistake, but certainly this is not a good thing for private information of that kind to be released." 
   
   At minimum, the data dump shows a serious ignorance of the volume of sensitive information in the records and a carelessness about their disclosure. And while a Florida bureaucrat may ultimately be to blame, it's not a good look for Jeb Bush — someone who called himself the first "eGovernor," and a man who may want to sit in the White House. 
   
   Update, 3:10 PM: This story has been updated to include additional emails from the archive, as well as prior reports on the archive from December, 2014. 
   
   Update, 3:22 PM: Updated with a statement by a spokesperson for Jeb Bush. 
   
   Update, 3:53 PM: Time reporter Zeke Miller, reporting from a Q&A with Jeb Bush, reported on Twitter that Bush is now aware of the personal information in the email dump, and that it will be removed. Miller reports that Bush's PAC posted only what is already in the public record, echoing the statement given by Bush's spokesperson to BuzzFeed News. We're not sure how long that will take, or if Bush's PAC will take down the emails temporarily in the meantime (it will presumably take a while to scan through hundreds of thousands of emails), but we'll keep you updated. 
   
   Jeb on private info in emails: "we’re going to take it off" — Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) February 10, 2015 
   
   Jeb says his PAC only posted what was in the public record but says they’ll remove the personal info — Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) February 10, 2015 
   
   Update, 5:35 PM: Researchers are now poring over the email dump for personal information. It appears Bush's team, and perhaps Florida state government, will have lots of work to do if they want to purge the data from the records — and some explaining about how this happened. It's more than a few bits of personal information. 
   
   Ran a few tools over the Jeb Bush emails. And...yeah. Pages of SSNs, DOBs, CCNs in the output. pic.twitter.com/7CxpWlHDUM — kamwoods (@kamwoods) February 10, 2015 
   
   Update, 11:00PM: The raw .pst files have now been removed from Jeb Bush's site. "We were informed that some personal information was available in the raw data so we removed these files," reads an error message. "You may still read these emails on the email calendar link, where we have redacted personal information we have been able to locate." ||||| Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush hasn’t even yet formally declared his desire to run for president in 2016, but he’s already started what appears to be a major privacy blunder. 
   
   His new project, the Jeb Emails, a massive, open database of correspondence to and from his jeb@jeb.org email address, publishes the names, messages, and email addresses of his constituents who emailed him during his eight years in office. 
   
   JebEmails.com 
   
   “I emailed Governor Bush when the state was going through the initial insurance crisis,” one woman, whose AOL email address was among those in the database, told the Daily Dot. “I have never [given authorization] to publish the emails, but then [they] never said they were confidential or proprietary property of the Governor's office. They were just emails.” 
   
   "I am fine with it on the emails concerning homeowners insurance," the woman added. Ones about "illegal immigrants," however, embarrassed her. "My feelings have changed on that subject and I wold hate to unduly upset anyone," she said. 
   
   It’s difficult to estimate how many different personal email addresses are in the database, and many come from Floridians’ work accounts. But the number is easily in the thousands and more likely in the tens of thousands. The governor’s office didn’t respond to an emailed inquiry about what information, if any, they did choose to redact, though it appears as though phone numbers have been obscured. 
   
   JebEmails.com 
   
   In his own introduction to the project, Bush touts his technical prowess, referring to himself as “The eGovernor” for how easy it was to email with him when he was in office. 
   
   This is the second Internet-related snafu in as many days from his campaign. In a tiff goof that now seems tame by comparison, on Monday, his office admitted that they had asked their new Chief Technology Officer to delete jokes he’d tweeted about “sluts.” 
   
   Update 2:15pm ET, Feb. 10: It gets worse. The Verge has uncovered emails that contain Social Security numbers, home addresses, and other personal information from Floridians. 
   
   Photo via World Affairs Council/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| On Tuesday, former Florida governor Jeb Bush published Volume 1 of an e-book detailing all of his official correspondence while in gubernatorial office. Although the e-book is edited and e-mail addresses have been redacted, the Governor's Office also published six Outlook files full of all of Bush's unredacted correspondence—creating a trove of full names connected with personal e-mail addresses, home addresses, phone numbers and even social security numbers, as The Verge first reported. 
   
   "This year I am releasing an e-book that uses my emails with Floridians as a guide to my eight years as governor. Here's a sneak peek at Chapter 1,” the former governor and possible presidential hopeful explains on his website jebbushemails.com. In the corresponding e-book, he continues, “Millions of emails came in through our website, but it was when I made my personal email—jeb@jeb.org—public that I earned the nickname 'The eGovernor.'” 
   
   Unfortunately, releasing the personal e-mails of his correspondents probably won't lead to the same jokey familiarity for them, and it could result in dangerous exposure to identity thieves and social engineering hackers. 
   
   The scope of the e-mails is vast and includes everything from automated messages to brief summaries of the state of Cuban refugees who arrived on Florida's shores to oddly personal e-mails from constituents. Some e-mails include correspondence that had not been addressed to Bush originally but showed up when part of an e-mail was forwarded to him. Other e-mails include personal information about people who aren't involved in the e-mail thread at all. “Did you get this? Eric's wife is being induced tomorrow a.m. so we'll be out of town for a while. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and your family!” one cheerily reads. 
   
   Other e-mails contain impassioned rants about Terri Schiavo, a woman who had been in a persistent vegetative state in Florida in 2005 whose guardians became embroiled in a legal struggle over whether Schiavo's feeding tube could be removed. Still others are messages of support from people who write as if they're on a first-name basis. Others are written as a last resort, hoping to sway the Governor in support of their everyday battles, as this e-mail, which contains full names in the original: 
   
   Dear Governor Bush, My name is [name redacted by Ars]. I am the mother of [name redacted by Ars], actually it is now [married name redacted by Ars]. She got married the Saturday after Thanksgiving. She and her Husband are expecting a daughter in March. She is a very sweet loving young woman who made a terrible mistake. She got a DUI. She has paid all of her fines, but, she is one month behind in her paperwork. She and our family tried to talk to her probation officer for an exstention, all that the officer said was were we trying to cause her to lose her job? I swear that was never implied. My daughter, with, permission, moved to Michigan, where she is still living. The officer said she would have to violate her. The clerk of courts office said that that could mean an arrest warrant. My daughters pregnancy has been a difficult one. She wanted to be here for Christmas. Her Dad and I couldn't be at her wedding, too much to fly there. He couldn't walk her down the aisle, I felt so bad for her. my daughter did an extremely STUPID thing. She is soooo sorry. She understands that she must follow the rules she just got behind. Please, can you help us. Please, don't let them send my child and grandchild to jail. I don't think she could make it in there. Honest to God, we really are descent people, but descent people mess up and of course should pay like everyone else. I understand that, I truly do. I am at a loss. Her probation officer is [name redacted by Ars]. She works in [Florida city redacted by Ars]. The judge she had was [name redacted by Ars]. Please tell me what to do. i haven't told you the whole story. It would take too much of your time. I'm sorry to have bothered you with this. Thank you. Sincerely, [Name and phone number redacted by Ars] 
   
   On a federal level, e-mails sent to a public official can be requested by anyone—US citizen or not—through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On a state level, Florida's Sunshine Law provides a similar level of access to correspondence with a state official. The FOIA and state open government laws theoretically provide some checks on what information can be freely accessible through an application process. And if you request FOIA information about an individual, the requester must generally provide identification "in order to protect your privacy and to ensure that private information about you is not disclosed to someone else," the FOIA website explains. In addition, it may not be immediately clear to many people who all e-mails sent to a public official may be reproduced publicly. 
   
   Although what Jeb Bush did may not be illegal, it shows a flagrant disrespect for the people who may have sent him information thinking it was in confidence. 
   
   Ars has contacted Jeb Bush (through the jeb@jeb.org e-mail address, no less) as well as Mr. Bush's Political Action Committee for comment, and we have not yet received a response. Bush's spokesperson did give a comment to CNBC, however, stating "This is an exact replica of the public records on file with the Florida Department of State and are available at anyone's request under Chapter 119 sunshine laws." ||||| DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — By posting online all of his personal email from his eight years as Florida's governor, Jeb Bush sought to show himself as a tech-savvy executive, in touch with constituents and an active administrator. 
   
   But tucked away in a small percentage of those hundreds of thousands of messages were the names, birthdates and Social Security numbers — the three pieces of information key to identity theft — of more than 12,000 people, according to an independent firm. 
   
   Bush's attempt to demonstrate transparency comes as he prepares for a likely presidential run in 2016. His political action committee, Right to Rise, wasn't involved in the email-posting effort, a Bush spokeswoman said. 
   
   "This was obviously very innocent," said Todd Feinman, the chief executive of data security firm Identity Finder who audited the Bush email database and provided the results to The Associated Press. "But now we have more than 12,000 individuals who are exposed to the risks of identity fraud." 
   
   Using the website jebemails.com, Bush posted the emails online Tuesday. While Bush's spokeswoman said the emails numbered about 275,000, Feinman said his audit showed about 333,000 messages. 
   
   By Thursday, the private information from all but a few hundred of the emails had been removed, Feinman said. 
   
   Bush spokeswoman Kristy Campbell wouldn't confirm Identify Finder's report that more than 12,000 people had their private information in the emails but said that "we have redacted every account that we have found." 
   
   Florida's public records law is among the nation's strongest, and the state's archive kept copies of every email sent to and from Bush's personal email address while he served as governor from 1999 to 2007. 
   
   Bush had taken some steps to keep some of the sensitive information in the emails out of the public's view. His team asked the Florida Department of State for the emails in order to set up the website. When doing so last May, his attorney specified "Social Security numbers of Florida citizens who contacted Gov. Bush for assistance" should be redacted. 
   
   A spokesman for the Florida Department of State did not reply Thursday to phone and email messages from The Associated Press. 
   
   Social Security numbers are confidential under Florida law, except under certain circumstances, including allowing such information to be shared between agencies. The vast majority of those included in Bush's emails were part of a spreadsheet tracking the number of people on a state family service waiting list, which was included in a PowerPoint presentation sent to Bush ahead of a 2003 meeting. 
   
   "This is the wake-up call to organizations, because they forget that hidden data is still there for the stealing," Feinman said. 
   
   The Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service and Federal Trade Commission, among other federal agencies, all warn consumers not to share such information, which in combination can allow thieves to open bank accounts, apply for tax returns and even apply for jobs. 
   
   It's a message that's been well received by the public. According to a November survey by the Pew Research Center, 90 percent of Americans consider Social Security numbers "very sensitive" — nearly twice the number of those who characterize their health care information that way. 
   
   While Bush was scrubbing what had been posted, there were still other ways to access the emails online as late as Thursday afternoon. Weeks before Bush posted the emails, others had also obtained them from the Florida state archive and made them available on the Internet. 
   
   One such group was the Democratic opposition research group American Bridge, which posted the emails to its website in December. Spokesman Ben Ray said Thursday that the group was in the process of removing the data. 
   
   "We want to be responsive to the privacy concerns," Ray said. 
   
   American Bridge took the page down late Thursday and was no longer linking to the files publicly, but the files could still be reached online via cached versions of the webpages. 
   
   ____ 
   
   Associated Press writer Gary Fineout in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report.
target: – It hasn't been a good week for the man who calls himself the "eGovernor." First former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush accepted the resignation of PAC CTO Ethan Czahor after a series of offensive tweets by Czahor were uncovered. Now he's under fire for revealing personal info—names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers—of at least 12,000 Floridians, the AP reports. On Tuesday, Bush posted online between 275,000 (the number Bush's spokeswoman provided) and 330,000 (the number an independent audit found) emails he received during the eight years he was governor in what he says was "the spirit of transparency." "Some are funny; some are serious; some I wrote in frustration," he writes on the site. "But they're all here so you can read them and make up your own mind." But a portion of those emails contained the unredacted personal info—as well as intensely personal anecdotes and even requests not to publish the correspondence. Gizmodo notes an email (which contained the sender's full name and email) that said, "Please do not make this email public to anybody. I do not want my privacy violated, especially by the media"; another citizen whose email was posted tells the Daily Dot she was "embarrassed" about an email she had sent about "illegal immigrants." Here's where Florida freedom-of-information laws get tricky: According to the Verge, Bush noted in his emails that "Florida has a very broad public records law" and "your email communications may therefore be subject to public disclosure." But a Florida attorney tells the Verge that SS numbers are "both confidential and exempt" from public disclosure. A spokeswoman for Bush, meanwhile, said in a statement that "this set of emails on our website is an exact replica of the public records on file with the Florida Department of State and are available at anyone's request under Chapter 119 sunshine laws," as per the Washington Post; she also tells BuzzFeed that they're filtering through the emails and redacting personal info.