I think this is a very important point. While I'm not in any way condoning efforts to deceive or hide things from the FAA/EASA, I shudder at the thought of
every work email I ever wrote being made public.
We all use email for private communications, and we consider private to be exactly that. We say things in private that we'd never dream of saying in public - it's human nature. Most of the FAA people I dealt with during my nearly 30 years as a cert delegate (DER/AR) were very good - and some I considered to be good friends. I had no problem openly discussing cert issues with them - if fact one of my major complaints when Boeing became an ODA is that it sharply reduced that open communication with my FAA counterparts.
BUT, as is the case in nearly any large organization, a few FAA people were a waste of space. And in
private emails (usually between myself and other cert delegates) we were not afraid to say as much. There was one FAA person that the knowledge that he'd retired resulted in a small celebration, another was so irrational that their last name became a sort of swear word - as in if you found out he was responsible for your project, it was said you'd been 'Smithed' (his name wasn't Smith, but you get the idea).
I once got into trouble due to an email. A certain operator, which had two hull loss accidents and a few major incidents in the preceding few years - had just picked up a couple new 747-400s, and had some questions which were forwarded to me by a customer engineer. Well, in my response to the Boeing customer engineer, I made a rather disparaging joke about that operator before answering the questions. Unfortunately the customer engineer didn't bother to edit out my bad joke before forwarding the answers to the operator
. The operator wasn't amused - and I had to profusely apologize.