Now we have elenasinbox.com, a project of the Sunlight Foundation to expose government records to the public. It is a copy of Elana Kagan’s emails when she worked in the Clinton White House more than 10 years ago.

The emails are searchable, as if she was running Gmail (well, it has been in beta a long time, but not that long). It isn’t a perfect copy, since the records were probably transferred several times between digital and paper copies before they came to be in their present form. But it is an interesting exercise nonetheless.

My question for all of you: who among us has ten-year old emails that are willing to let them be shown in public? Even those of us in public office might not be so inclined.

For some great commentary and discussion about the topic, see David Gerwirtz’ column on ZDnet here.