From National Review Online today, as reported by Quin Hillyer, a lot of conservatives are upset with Republican Senators who have caved in to Democrats demanding the head of staffers associated with the memo "scandal" - (Memogate?)
Matt Bivens, in The Nation, argues that Republicans are at fault, saying that in effect, the action was equivalent of taking something off someone's desktop computer.
Matt Bivens is wrong. The files were on a network server, in a shared folder. Miranda, the staffer who resigned over this kerfuffle, claims to have notified Democrats of the permission situation, and only disclosed the memos when it was apparent that they were going to do nothing about it.
I work with computer networks and security. There is absolutely no legal basis for prosecuting Republican staffers for seeing these files. Once they were put on a server which belonged to the Senate and shared on a network folder, there is no basis for considering them privileged.
It's the Democrats who should be losing jobs here, not Republicans.
Posted by joelfuhrmann at February 17, 2004 08:32 PM