Archiving is more important than disclosure
No administration and, in fact, no organization and virtually no person can withstand an exhaustive examination of every email message ever sent. I certainly couldn't. Email is a form of casual communication and when people communicate casually, they often say things you would say when you're communicating casually.

Any large body of email messages is going to have some incriminating material in it. In a climate where there's such partisanship at such high levels in America's government, the safest path for most administrations must simply seem to be "losing" all that email -- or at least create conditions where losing the bulk of the messages is easy and wrongdoing plausibly deniable.

And yet, we need to keep track of this stuff. There can be no excuse for losing large amounts of email messages. Even if the message archives are never used for any oversight purpose, they're an important part of the historical record and there may come a day when a particular message or message trail is needed.

Disclosure is important for an informed populace
In a world where Paris Hilton's jail sentence and Britney's shaved head is more important (and more tangible) to most Americans than than items of policy, the value of an informed populace may seem to come into question.

After all, more people watch NASCAR than read the New York Times. Courtesy of partisan politics and an excellent disinformation distribution channel, a surprisingly large group of people now side with Anne Coulter's contention that her "only regret was that Timothy McVeigh didn't hit the New York Times building."

The question is obvious: can our populace be informed and can they tell truth from crap? More people today get their information from late night comedy like the left-leaning Daily Show with John Stewart, right-wing commentators like Coulter, and conservatively-biased news channels like Fox News. After all, to many citizens, why get your news from an impartial source when you can listen to people you generally agree with?

And yet, disclosure is important. While nearly half Americans will always vote Democrat and nearly half of all Americans will always vote Republican, there remain a core group of citizens who want to know what's really going on. These people deserve to be informed.

Further, in a world where it's possible to replace a voting machine's internal programming circuitry in less than a minute (there's a video circulating on YouTube demonstrating this), our citizenry may be our last, best hope for the preservation of a truly democratic republic.

An informed populace can sometimes be counter to national security
And yet...sometimes information shouldn't be set free. Let's look at an example from the tech world. Bugs and exploits are regularly discovered in computer operating systems like Microsoft Windows. Sometimes, they're discovered by evildoers and those exploits eventually wind up hurting us all. But sometimes those bugs and exploits are discovered by computer security professionals.