Digital age challenges archive law

WASHINGTON, May 4 (UPI) -- A U.S. law covering official communication fails to address sufficiently correspondence sent through private digital channels, a top GOP lawmaker said.

Rep. Darrell Issa, who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he remains concerned that the personal e-mails, text messages, Facebook posts and tweets of White House officials are not being archived in the spirit of the federal law, Politico reported.

The California congressman questioned the White House Office of Administration's chief information officer at a hearing Tuesday on the Presidential Records Act that requires storage of all official administration communications.

Issa grilled Brook Colangelo about staffers using private e-mail accounts on the AT&T and Verizon networks that would not automatically be logged by the administration.

Colangelo and others at the hearing stressed federal employees can only use private accounts in the event of an emergency.

Among the hurdles in updating the Presidential Records Act is dealing with the dated nature of the federal government's IT systems.

Old e-mail servers experience periodic outages, two officials testified.