Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum today said messages sent between Blackberry devices, known as PINs, are indeed public records and that the state is capable of retaining the documents.

For years, PIN messages — regularly used among lobbyists, lawmakers and governor’s office officials — have fallen into a loophole in state Sunshine Laws because state officials have maintained the messages could not be recorded by government e-mail servers. (Press release here.)

McCollum, who is running for governor in 2010, said today that’s not true. He said PINs and other instant messages can be capture by, essentially, flipping a switch on a server. He said his agency would start keeping those records starting today and urged Gov. Charlie Crist, his fellow Cabinet members, state agencies and the legislature to do the same.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Crist said later in an interview with The Palm Beach Post. “We’ll follow suit.”

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A criminal investigation of former Florida House Speaker Ray Sansom, recently indicted on charges of falsifying the state budget, has turned up e-mails related to the scandal that supposedly did not exist when The Palm Beach Post requested the documents from the legislature.¹

Sansom

The Post also sought messages between Sansom and then-college President James “Bob” Richburg about the scandal.

The House responded with documents that showed Sansom neither sent nor received a single e-mail for 11 days.

But that is not true, prosecutors’ files show. Documents found by Leon County State Attorney Willie Meggs reveal several e-mails from that time, including a conversation among Sansom, Sansom’s communication director and Richburg, who was fired for his involvement in the controversy.²

“We need to be concerned about this,” said Barbara Petersen, president of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, when told about the discovered e-mails. “I’m almost speechless when I see what the legislature is doing and how they’re doing it.”³

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1. The Palm Beach Post, 04/18/09: Ex-House speaker’s indictment blasts secret budget deals
2. Click here for the e-mails included in Meggs’ case file, but not in a public records request made to the House.
3. Petersen was chairwoman of Gov. Charlie Crist’s Commission on Open Records Reform. The panel issued a report in January that determined the legislature has rules for itself that may be inconsistent with state public records laws.