What you describe affects government officials, too. From the President on down. (George W. Bush saiid in 2001 as he took office that he would not use email because what he wrote would be sought and used “by those out to embarrass.”) Historians have not yet seen the impact of the partial collapse of record keeping in some areas of the Federal government–federal agencies and departments–in the last two decades. Archival records usually are not transferred into the National Archives, where I once was employed to do disclosure review of the Nixon tapes, until they are at least 20 years old. But as an Air Force historian observed over a decade ago, a common topic when federal historians gather is, “whatever will our successors do?”

The reasons for future knowledge gaps are many.

These days, the technological challenges receive considerable attention from information professionals on whom we historians rely–government, corporate, and academic organizations’ records managers (a different profession than archivist). The psychological impact less so. Yet what you describe about the dehumanization of executives and critics’ refusal or inability to place themselves in their positions is a part of this. It goes against human nature to throw your deliberations open for cherry picking or place recorded thoughts at risk of demagoguery while you hold a position in government, in the academy, anywhere. Unfortunately, many of those whose actions we as historians seek to understand react to dehumanization by shielding their humanity in records they create. They learn to write in what lawyers call “discoverable language.” (As Michael Beschloss has said, they hide.) The result is greater opacity, more distance, more risk of dehumanization.

In an essay this past March, Washington lawyer Suzanne Garment quoted a friend who once worked in the federal government . He noted the richness of Eisenhower-era records.

“’It was amazing,’ he said, ‘the unvarnished things these people said because they were confident their remarks would never be in the newspapers.’

By the time my friend told me this story, bureaucratic communications had changed. ‘You get a memo,’ he explained, ‘and you want to comment. You don’t write the comment on the memo, because the comment becomes part of the public record. So, you put the comment on a Post-It Note and send it to the next guy, who reads it and throws the Post-It Note away.’

So much for the historical record — and for the idea that you can force people to make their private thoughts public. Leave aside the question of whether it is a good idea to do so. If you try, you may be sure that those people will find ways around your high-mindedness.

They will use Post-It Notes. They will establish private email domains. They will do business verbally instead of in writing. The public record they create will be sanitized into something incomprehensible that requires a machine designed by Alan Turing to decode.”