Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has long used electronic chat rooms that destroy messages in 24 hours to communicate with state employees, records show, allowing his inner circle to keep communications beyond the reach of the public, state archivists and history.
The app the governor and his staffers have been using, called Wickr, markets itself to government agencies and others seeking security from foreign and domestic cyberthreats. The platform in practice has provided Hogan — a moderate Republican with national ambitions — a forum to complain about media reports, direct pandemic response and coordinate with top staffers.
Many states, including Maryland, have yet to reckon with technology that transparency advocates say allows officials to violate at least the spirit of open-records laws. That’s in part because of the difficulty of proving that officials are using the apps and the greater difficulty of seeing what’s being communicated.
Hogan, who has projected himself as a leader who prizes transparency, is not unique in his use of technology to erase communications about public matters. Government officials elsewhere have occasionally acknowledged their use of disappearing-messages apps, or had it exposed. After Missouri’s previous governor, Eric Greitens (R), was shown to be using the disappearing-message app Confide, that state’s...
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