Slashdot Mirror
Bush Won't Be "The Online President"
satch89450 writes: "The Electronic Telegraph says here that President Bush has retired his electronic mail habit, citing FOIA access. As a point in fact, The New York Times reportedly obtained a copy of the farewell e-letter to 42 of Bush's friends. Just how bad can it get? Here is an old news report from The Associated Press via amarillonet of an auction of the 1992 e-mail to John Glenn. Privacy advocates should be scared ..."
And an Anonymous Coward who points to the same article asks: "Whatever happened to the right of the people to be secure in their ... papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures?" Good question -- what did happen to that?
Probable cause? That is still usually intact, in that the court says there is probable cause. Unfortunately, the definition of "probable cause" has been expanded to being black in a rich neighborhood or peaceably assembling to protest.
Supported by oath or affirmation? Or anonymous tip, or evidence gathered (voluntarily, w/o a warrant) from some outside source.
Particularly describing? That one is pretty much gone now. If you're suspected of a computer crime, they'll take anything with a circuit board in it and any literature (journals, textbooks, etc.) vaguely related to computers.
My faith in the American judicial system as a counterbalance to overenthusiastic, vote-scrounging lawmakers has just dropped another notch.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
If only that was the real reason (dubya not complaining because he has a sense of humor).
He seems to steer clear of anything to do with Clinton, funny or not. I think it is because his handlers tell him to. There is no political gain at this point in doing otherwise.
---
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Did Reagan/Bush do a stupid thing? Yeah, just like Clinton. Did Reagan/Bush use their office to delay the investigation? Yeah, just like Clinton did. Did Reagan/Bush lie about their actions? Yeah, just like Clinton did. Notice a pattern?
How and why did these supposed ethical standards of conduct get magically repealed when Reagan and Bush were in office, but suddenly come back into effect when Clinton screwed up? How do you justify impeaching Bill but not Ronnie and George? You can't, you won't, you never did. Because "ethical conduct" is a weapon, not a standard, that we only apply to the people we don't like.
I wish people would be honest for a change and just admit that the real reason they hate Clinton/Bush/Reagan/Bush is because of their politics, and ethical conduct is just rationalizing after the fact.
Its not a bad move by Bush to protect his personal information from being subjected to ridicule via way of the FOIA. Its the same people who passed this law that has used it against many people often abusing it and hiding under the curtain of the FOIA.
Lets be realistic here if possible about the situation, and shoot from the hip should you think its conspiracy based. We all theoretically have the right to Freedom of Speech and privacy, and many go about daily having these rights violated without even knowing. Cookies, spam resellers, telemarketers, etc., etc..
Sure we have crypto here, but let us not forget these same people who believe in a persons right to privacy tried to secretly shaft us with HR46 late last quarter.
But wait before someone rebutts with a "That was a bill for criminals who use crypto", lets take a hi tech case to a courtroom trial shall we. Jury based, in theory a jury of ones own peers. Does anyone honestly believe they will get a jury of their own peers, or rather a jury of retired computer-phobic e-misfits who sit home watching Oprah and Judge Judy? This is the sad reality is that privacy is very limited in the United States although many would love to dispute this.
Anyways I don't feel like rambling on more than I already do.
The Big Breach
360 degrees of Karma
ooooooo....the Clintons were putting press releases on the internet in '92. Is that so? How did you find it? Archie? Gopher? back in them days putting it "on the internet" was a good as hiding it....
I would expect that he could. Nancy Reagan did that, well as close to that as she could. She got her own external phone-line installed in the whitehouse specifically so she could call her astrologer and not have to worry about her conversations being subject to any kind of public exposure due to using government owned equipment.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
All hat, no cattle.
Maybe instead of admiting that Americans have increasingly less privacy, he should be fighting for our rights.
That kind of sort of is his job.
Oh, wait, I must be wrong. Since I just KNOW that the president has a purpose.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
that you don't mind your mother erading in the newpaper.
Best advice I ever got from a lawyer
(And any past or present bashers of Ken Starr might want to look into exactly who the Democrats in Congress decided had the integrity and non-partisan judgement to delve into Bob Packwood's diaries, back when one's "private life" was worth exploring in every detail as long as the target was a Republican.)
We reap what we sow...and we have not yet begun to experience the full effects of the support this nation gave Bill Clinton and Democrats in Congress as they trampled common sense, decency, the rule of law, over the past 10 years or so.
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
It's not just government, either. If you spend any amount of time in a corporate environment you learn what to say, and what not to say, in email or voice mail. This isn't just a matter of external legal action, but internal personnel actions. I'll admit to being both being called on the carpet about unprofessional voice mail, and complaining about unprofessional email. In the former case, I accepted the blame, and in the latter I share part of the responsibility for the tone of the conversation, but the fact in both cases is that once your words are recorded, it becomes difficult to explain the context they were made in when they are being held against you.
dns hacks? you aren't really a quick one yourself are you?
moron
There is a practical difficulty in searching through paper as the tobacco litigants are discovering. They now have a warehouse full of documents on court discovery but no index to find stuff.
The President's fear is that someone would download the docs and use grep to find the incriminating stuff.
Don't expect this president to be giving written orders to sell arms to terrorists in Iran to buy arms for terrorists in Central america.
Problem with plausible deniability is that if there is a similar screw up under Bush it may not matter that people cannot prove it was his fault. The most damaging criticism of Bush amongst voters is the accusation that he is not in control.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
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Yes, trot out all the totally unsubstantiated slurs on Clinton, and then claim the moral highground. You're not very convincing, buddy.
Republicans spent $50 million dollars investigating Clinton, and with the full help of the Federalist society, who are the richest and best connected conservative lawyers in the country (Olson, Starr, Scalia, Thomas, etc.) And with all of this unprecedented firepower the only thing they could actually find was that Clinton received some blowjobs. That's a fact, buddy, and it's one you're going to have to deal with.
Or are you so foolish to believe that the enemies of Clinton had evidence of murder, rape, extortion, and treason and decided not to use it?
As for Thomas, his name should be dragged through the mud. Everything he's done since then has proved that he's nowhere near the calibre required of a supreme court justice. The man never asks a question and never writes an opinion. He always votes with Scalia. Basically, his job is to be a proxy vote for Scalia. He's a lightweight. And he's also one of Bush's often-stated models of what a supreme court justice should be.
We'd better hope Strom Thurmond kicks off soon, so the Senate can block any and all Supreme Court nominations by this illegitimate president. Otherwise we're going to pay the price for the next forty years or so.
Then how can they still be trying to supress it?
Reality has a liberal bias
All letters written by the President get entered into the Public Domain. Bush can't even write an email to his daughters asking them about their day without it being open to the public. I think email started being part of the Public Domain with President Reagan. I'm pretty sure all of his emails were kept for posperity.
[ ]
How would encrypting his messages protect him from having to turn over the documents under the Freedom of information act?
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
In answer to the /. editor's question, check out Jeff Rosen's book "The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America". Apparently, there was a time when common practice was _not_ to allow personal papers, diaries, etc as evidence. Rosen traces the errosion of this standard and extrapolates the current, invasive environment to the way email is handled in the courts.
Started reading this book recently, from what I've gotten through so far I'd recommend it...
Actually, I'm referring to the state-wide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. You know, the one that the Supreme Court of the US stopped for a couple of days, and then declared had to be cancelled because there wasn't enough time left to finish it.
Seems to me that before November 7th, manual recounts were the norm for any disputed election across the country. Hell, the Repubs were asking for a manual recount in New Mexico at the same time they were spouting crap about manual recounts being inherently faulty and "inviting mischief" in Florida, such is their sleazery and chutzpah.
You mean that warhead technology that the Chinese government tested during the Bush I administration?
"And FYI, the modern era of dragging public officials through the mud can be traced back to the Democrats doing it to Nixon. "
Dragging your opponents through the mud is an ancient political strategy predating the U.S. by a few millenia. Both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of perpetuating it but neither can realistically be blamed for originating it.
"Don't blame me. I'm a Libertarian "
Keep voting Libertarian. Third parties are good for democracy. I reserve most of my contempt for moral, cultural, and religious conservatives, libertarians and the occasional bout of fiscal conservativism I can live with.
Current presidents never slam former presidents because the current president will be a former someday and the other party will have a president in office in the future.
Linux O Muerte!
Am I the only one thinking that SOMEBODY -- be it the PGP people, the Free Software Foundation, or Microsoft for that matter -- should figure out a TRULY easy, TRULY fast, TRULY seamless means for the common email user to encrypt a message?
Yup, it's been done. The standard is SMIME v3 amd it uses digital certificates for encryption and authentication. Microsoft's IE (4 and up) has support for certs, so does Netscape 4.x (not sure about NS v6 tho'; the "final preview" I looked at last year had all the crypto removed). To encrypt an email is a click of the menu bar button. Ditto to sign an email. When you receive a signed/encrypted email, Outlook (or Outlook Express, or Netscape Messenger) displays an icon to denote the fact. Couldn't be simpler. Why isn't it more widely used? Well, you need to have a certificate. You can pay for one from Verisign (probly not a popular choice for /.ers). You can get a free one for email only (certs can be used for other types of authenticaton, eg web site access) from Thawte, but they require all sorts of personal info from you, including SSN, IIRC (probly even less popular choice for /.ers). However, if you're willing to add a new root certificate to your browser (which is easy) you can make and use your own certificates. I use certs for email security and also for securing acces to certain web-based admin pages. Secure and convenient. Luvvly.
If you're interested in using certs, you can do most everything you need with OpenSSL.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Personally I used the Web. However the press releases were distributed through NNTP which had close to half a million users at the time.
I got Gore's support for the Web early on when we had very few sites and fewer users, in large measure because he wanted to publish government information to make it generally available.
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Never mind DeCSS, how 'bout OT III?
(Oh, wait, someone did that in Sweden, which is what led to the lawsuit against Zenon, which is what led to the DMCA threat against Slashdot, and wow, we've come full circle ;-)
see:
g /c o1294.html
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/docs/Conlon_on_Computin
an exerpt:
"Your email must be treated just as you treat your paper mail. You discard messages of a transient nature and retain the official documents (if any) that are connected with the business of the University. Some of us receive (and therefore file) more business related documents than others. Committee chairs, department chairs, deans and administrators will, naturally, receive and file more paper and email official documents."
The same rules (more stringent) apply to government officials. Simply put, public records, whether they are official court documents or an email from the pres, are public records, and citizens have the legal right to request to see them (within reason). Because som e email from Bush might be public record, annoying lawyers could request all email "pertaining to Colin Powell" as public record, and the email between Prez Bush and his brother Jeb about how Colin Powell is a lousy golfer would have to be turned over and aired publicly.
At least, that's how I understand it all.
I am the king... of No Pants! www.penny-arcade.com
That's great. Where did you learn to be a comedian, Franks comedy school for the mentally challenged?
BTW I think you got the accent mixed up with some other state.
Let me guess. You learned everything you know from watching TV?
-----------------------
Jeremy 'PeelBoy' Amberg
That would be "both he and Gore."
So I'm guessing he also scored higher than you.
Think of it from the other side for a minute. Allow me to make the crime hypothetically worse to make it seem more enticing to throw principle away: you believe Sen. Packwood tried to rape your daughter based on some credible testimony, but there's not yet enough evidence that's come to light. He's been referring to his diary in order to refresh his memory as to what happened at various times, but he's using the information only to help himself. His home has been legally searched for evidence to no avail. You want to see what he wrote down on the night in question... why should his diary be exempt from the search warrant?
Yes, we could have a legal system that respected diaries, but why? What's so precious about a diary?
Our constitutional safeguards against self-incrimination are primarily to remove torture or like punishments being used in advance to coerce testimony. If we as a species had infallible pinocchio-noses, we would not have such a right. It would be perfectly reasonable to ask a defendant questions to find out the truth behind allegations of victimization, as it is perfectly reasonable to find out what they told other people and what they wrote down.
Doesn't matter. You encrypt using the public key of the person you're sending to, and their private key is needed to decrypt. So W doesn't have the key that decrypts. (Just as long as he doesn't keep a plaintext copy of the message!)
Agreed e-searching is a big worry. But when
e-mail records are FOIA requested, do they have to be delivered in machine-readable form? I would think they'd be printed on stacks of 8.5x11 paper floppies! No-one could then claim the info wasn't provided.
Please wait until your brain fully develops before speaking out loud.
-----------------------
Jeremy 'PeelBoy' Amberg
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
bribery and corruption in Bush's white hose
/."
The Clinton White House, Part Deux!
(I don't ususally troll but this was too good to let pass. Check your spelling, guys, hehe.)
"I'm not a bitch, I just play one on
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Let's face it, Washington D.C. isn't very full of technically-oriented people. I wouldn't be surprised if no one even recommended to Bush that he try encryption. This simply shows the incredible need we have to educate our government about cyberspace.
Earlier today an article showed how e-mails to Congress didn't have nearly the impact of snail-mail. How stupid. Instead of finding ways to better communicate through cyberspace, our government simply takes steps back.
Granted, Bush not e-mailing a few dozen friends isn't a threat to national security, but it's the principle of the thing.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
frrrrrrrrreaky!
(sorry, but "frrrrrrreaky" really isn't lame as the filter suggested)
blog
Seriously, Nancy's relationship with her astrologer during her lifetime and during her years in the Whitehouse is pretty well documented.
---
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
For those AOL "pass this on to every person in your address book, so some non existant sob story lukemia/AIDS/emasculated little child can get money SOMEHOW for you sending such an annoying message to people who will soon hate you" messages. That, or his bulk e-mail spam.
blah
So who did fire Cox? The Solicitor-General, your hero, Robert Bork.
At the order of his boss. While I feel that Bork made the wrong decision, his knowledge of the constitution is first rate.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I don't see a President having time to do email and internet anyway. That is stuff to be delegated. And he will
they could have made millions on ebay selling all of that email that Gore deleted.
You'll have to forgive me my ignorance, but I lost interest in tracking all the ins and outs of our nations capital when it was decided that lying to a grand jury was not an impeachable defense.
I'd just like to know where does this elitist outlook about the President came from? Everyone seems to think it's funny to act like the man is one step above retarded. My question is, what has he done to deserve this? I do know that he was only a C student (whether high school or college, I'm not sure). While that doesn't make him a nobel laureate, it doesn't make him an idiot either. And from the Katz' Columbine pieces, I would expect that most Slashdotter's would agree that high school grades shouldn't be considered a measure of intelligence (besides, I know several PhD who are dumb as dirt).
So, riddle me this: In what instance has the REAL President of the United States (not the one in the Saturday Night Live script) demonstrated a sever lack of intelligence?
Please don't cite policy decisions that you don't like as lack of intelligence. Scratching the back of his corporate buddies made be bad public policy, but not necessarily bad private policy. So, please just the facts.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Here in Indiana, the legislature tried to sneak through a law protecting the privacy of their emails - but the newspapers picked up the story and are having a field day. If you're on the job, the boss (in this case, We The People) have a right to that information. At home, that's another story - but of course in the President's case, we're talking about the ultimate Home Office.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I don't think that the government can crack my PGP encryption in a few sentances. That's because the only way to crack PGP and the like is by brute force. Now if I was using a really low encryption (see: rot-13) the government could hack it in a nanosecond. BUT, even if they did, could they use it in court? After all they did break into private property to do that.
after all, it can be done from a (hospital bed) without greater difficulties.
-
Having the President's electronic correspondence from the White House be part of the public record is a bad thing? Please. This has exactly squat to do with my privacy. Or your privacy. We're not the President, what we say is not part of the Public Record and the FOIA does not apply to things we write. It does apply to Bushy-boy, though, and--dammit if you don't like it but I strongly believe it--this is a Very Good Thing(tm). There's a line, probably, somewhere. But it doesn't impact me where they draw it so long as no President can be using e-mail to circumvent having things be a part of the public record were it snail-mail correspondence. He gives up a lot of rights to be one of the most recognizable people in the world. I wouldn't be expecting a lot of privacy if I were one of the most famous men in the world, using computers that belong to the American People to conduct personal correspondence.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
WOW after years and years of investigation and a buttload of money spent and hundreds of lawyers the combined might of the congress, keneth starr, conservative legal foundations, newsweek, time, new york times, washing post, fox TV and fox news, CNBC, MSNBC etc could not make any of the charges stick except for one thing.
Did you stick you dick in monica lewinsky? No I did not.
That's it one lie under oath in a deposition. Not only that but the it was a deposition in a sexual harrasment case about a consentual relationship. That suit was settled eventually BTW.
Listen just because Rush or Bill Oreilly says it, that does not mean it's true. If a hundred of the highest paid lawyers in the world could not make any of the accusations you just so carelessly made stick why should we believe you? I millions of dollars spent and the awsome powers of the senate and the house and the independent council could not gather enough evidence to make a case then all you have left are baseless accusations.
Nixon was a traitor, reagan betrayed his country, Bush sr. killed a hundred thousand arabs for cheaper oil, clinton lied under oath, bush jr. will ruin the environment (he has already started).
War is necrophilia.
DeCSS never was copyrighted by the MPAA/DVD consortium etc. It's not a matter of illegally distributing a copyrighted work, but the fact that it's a tool to circumvent an access protection scheme, which is illegal under the DMCA. Doesn't matter who wrote it or who owns copyright, because by it's very function, it's illegal under the DMCA.
Oh, that's right.  I guess I fell victim to the propaganda of that "vast right wing conspiracy".  How foolish of me.  Come on, we have testimony from many women that Bill Clinton sexually harassed them.  What do you do?  Work on a lame justification and give him a "one grope pass".  We have documented evidence of illegal campaign contributions.  What do you do?  Work on yet anther lame justifcation and push 1st amendment limiting crap like "Campaign Finance Reform".  We have documented evidence of the Clinton's guilt in Whitewater yet those who could and should testify instead plead the 5th and amazingly get a pardon (Susan McDougal.)  What do you do?  Put out another lame justification and state that the pardon was granted on the merits.  We have documented evidence that Clinton called a Democratic fundraiser regarding a Presidential pardon of a fugitive.  What do you do?  You bitch about how the Bush tax cut will "cost us too much" after Clinton just pardoned the largest tax evader in US history.  And it goes on and on.  Damn, man, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck you'd call it a house while redefining all of the passive verbs in the English language.
As for claiming the moral highground, you bet I do.  I respect the rights of others (even you whom I suspect I have very little in common with philosophically) and do my best to help my fellow man by donating time and monies to charities.  I follow the law to the best of my ability and do not work to actively circumvent it.  So yeah, morally and ethically, I've got it all over Clinton and am not afraid to say it.
Or are you so foolish to believe that the enemies of Clinton had evidence of murder
Who said anything about murder?  As for the rest of the evidence, he was being tried in a political arena and if it wasn't for the apathy of the American public, he'd be gone.  Just goes to show how effective denying and deflecting can be.
The man never asks a question and never writes an opinion
That simply is not true.  While he didn't write many opionions in his early terms, he now writes quite a few and asks many questions as well.  But that's right, I suppose all you know about the Supreme Court is what you learned during the Florida debacle.
And he's also one of Bush's often-stated models of what a supreme court justice should be.
You mean a strict constitutionalist?  A judge that doesn't believe in legislation from the bench?  What's wrong with that?
The constitution does not need to be "interpreted".  If there is something about it you don't like, ammend it.  Otherwise, read it and follow it and don't try and derive a hidden meaning.
We'd better hope Strom Thurmond kicks off soon, so the Senate can block any and all Supreme Court nominations by this illegitimate president.
Yeah, that's good.  Hope for ill will upon others for your short-term political gain.  You seem like a real peach.  As for the legitimacy of President Bush...  How many votes did Gore gain in the most liberal recounting of all the undervotes in Miami-Dade?  That's right, 49.  And with the Palm Beach methodology, Bush ended up gaining more.  And what did NBC report?  That idiot Democrat voters cannot tell the difference between Lieberman and Libertarian.  Sorry, I don't feel sorry for the voters that cannot be concerned to read the intructions and double check their vote.
Otherwise we're going to pay the price for the next forty years or so.
If it stops the stripping of constitutionally protected rights, I'll pay that price twice.
IANAL, but I act like one sometimes. Just a serious study of Congress & Constitution:
What would happen if a Senator (or CongressCritter) read DeCSS out loud on the floor of the Senate or House?
A congressman or senator cannot be held legally accountable for anything said on the floor (an old rule to encourage open debate without fear of legal action), so could not be busted for distributing a circumvention tool.
Would it then be a matter of Public Record?
That's where it gets interesting. It would then be a part of the Congressional Record and available to the public. I don't know if there is any method for striking passages before release, but there probably is.
You'd think the president, of all people, would at least encrypt anything he'd like to keep private.
He just couldn't stand all the CIA flak he got from all his emails with,"Gonna kill the United States President." for the subject header.
God spoke to me
When Newt Gingrich attempted to do the same thing as Gore in the house he was only partly successful. He did manage to get the web site up and did manage to force most of the house data onto it. However that was not a trivial fight for him and he spent a significant amount of political capital in the process. I don't think it is unreasonable to ascribe the same motives to Bush that Gingrich himself complained were the cause of the congressional web server being limited in scope.
The senate story was that almost nothing has been done. The senate committee chairs resisted anything that might inform the US people about the legislation in progress. There was bipartisan support for making the workings of the senate as obscure as possible to the US people.
Bush has already ordered a civil servant fired for putting unauthorized information onto government web servers. A naturalist studying bird migration put up a number of maps showing wildlife movements. The one showing the places the cariboo raise their young in the Artic Wildlife Refuge showed cariboo in the places earmarked for drilling so they fired him.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20010315/t00002 2700.html
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Ain't there Enkrip-shun in Texas?
I don't know the exact number, but it's pretty damn big. Trillions and trillions of dollars.
What are you talking about? Press releases and press briefings are still available at the White House site; see this link.
It's hard to type "www.(whatever).com" when there aren't any W's on your keyboard.
What's wrong with that is that there is no such thing as a "strict constitutionalist" nor a judge who doesn't believe in "legislating from the bench."
Those are spin terms that you apply to people when you personally or politically disagree with their interpretation or application of law. It is an attempt to associate one's own particular ideology or political preference with "objectivity" and rationalism rather than actually admitting that your rulings are motivated by your personal social agenda, just like everyone else.
It's called "appropriating the middle ground" and it is an old debate ploy. Modern conservativism and Ayn Randianism both play it to the hilt.
"We are objective. Anyone who doesn't agree with us is prejudiced or irrational. We're not motivated by our personal prejudices. No really, we aren't. We swear. "
What's your reference for this?  According to the Cox report, the Chinese espionage efforts extended as far back as Carter.  The big difference is that it reports that Carter, Reagan and Bush knew nothing of this.
Unfortunately it's documented that the Clinton administration did.  Despite the Clinton's claims the contrary, his own Secretary of Energy admitted he was repeatedly briefed.  So rather than do something about it he chose to put his head in the sand.
Nastier than McCarthyism? I think not.
Good point.  I was thinking only about the Presidential realm, but yeah, you're right!
The worst thing Clinton did in office was perjure himself to the American people and to Congress about an extramarital affair.
No, the worst thing that President Clinton did was violate the law that he swore to uphold.  Was Iran-Contra wrong?  You bet.  You'll get no apologies from me about it.  That doesn't change the fact that Clinton and his administration were corrupt and no ammount of blame deflection will change that.
A limited redistribution of wealth, based on income, is pragmatic, realistic, and rationally-justified.
We have a fundamental disagreement here I would suspect.  I don't agree with a tax on income.  I would much more vigorously support a sales tax based on the following reasons:
1) It's ultimately fair to everybody since all income is eventually consumed.
2) It's anonymous.
3) It does not require a behemoth organization like the IRS to oversee collections.
4) Everybody pays
I would certainly hope so. The FOIA requires certain government information to be made available; letting them release the ciphertext while hiding the keys would basically make the FOIA meaningless. Personally, I *like* the FOIA.
If he thinks that personal correspondense should be excempt (as it apparently is for telephone calls) then he should take it up with congress. The use of technology to skirt the law has created such lovely things as encrypted DVDs and using IR images of a house as evidence to get a warrant to search the house.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
The email message and its addressees were obtained by the New York Times. Under government regulations, White House emails form part of the federal presidential record and could be subject to subpoena.
Mr Bush's email address list included Don Evans, the Commerce Secretary, Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, chief strategist, and Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser.
I've seen quite a few people who were talking about this issue like it was Dubby's personal email that he stopped using. The quotes above from the referenced article seem to indicate otherwise. I could understand it if he didn't want personal messages to become a matter of public record, but we're talking about communications with other government officials which SHOULD be part of the public record. What is he trying to hide?
I was amused, especially when I wondered how they were going to spell illiam J Clinton after remving the keys . . .
hawk, who once found a keycap in the hallway outside an office. It was, of course, the "Esc" key, which was apparently taking itself a bit too seriously . . .
Are you really so stupid that you cannot discern the difference between sexual harassment in the workplace and consensual sex between two adults? The former indicates a lack of respect for women while the latter does not. And the latter is all that they could dig up on Clinton.
> If he does this, would the "open record requests" require him to relinquish the key?
Yes. He's the President and not a private citizen. All of Clinton/Gore's email was subject to subpoena. Remember all the hubub about the accidentally missing backups tapes with Gore emails. Do you really think Congress, while investigating the President for impeachment, would say "Oh, it's encrypted... well, it must be a private message between the POTUS and the VP, so we'll let that one go."
The whole purpose of "Open Records" laws are to keep the records "open". Letting a loophole like "unless encrypted" through would guarantee that every piece of email was encrypted and, therefore, not "open". Imagine a world where every FOIA request was denied because the documents were encrypted. They wouldn't even have to bother with "National Security" exemptions anymore.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
This isn't *JUST* his personal email. There were quite a few senior US Government officials on this list. Dubby's new email policy doesn't just apply to his personal mail, it applies to the whole shebang.
There you go again making what Clinton did only about sex.  It doesn't matter which President it happens to be.  Perjury is still perjury.  Obstruction of justice is still obstruction of justice.  Failing in their constitutional to uphold the law is just that.  Both Nixon and Clinton were guilty of that.  I'm not totally convinced that G.H.W. Bush is guilty of it but evidence does seem to indicate that he may well have been.  Thanks for the details of Watergate.  I never intended to dispute that Nixon was a bad seed.  I just happen to believe that Clinton and he are equals with respect to corruption.
As for diminishing the value of your vote, you did that when you voted for that mental midget that now occupies the White House.
Yeah.  George Bush, the idiot.  Good one.  Don't you know that the tactics have changed?  Now Bush's words are responsible for our current economic situation.  Get with the program so we can all stay on the same liberal page.  Isn't it amazing that the Democrats attribute so much power to the words of a man they consider to be so stupid?
And then Nixon claimed to own the tapes ...
That's just what I want in a Supreme Court Justice: Someone who makes bad decisions.
He did and was lambasted by the Republicans for doing so.
His correspondence is public record unless classified, and it cannot be classified unless it is a matter of national security.
So his recent email to the CEO of Alcoa:
Hi buddy, California is yours, if the regulators annoy you, all you have to do is whistle.
will one day be in the national archive.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
If it were his personal emails that we were talking about, he could just as easily get an AOL account under some pseudonym. If it's not part of the government system, it's not really our property is it? So long as it's not paid for with government money.
I recall that all conversation that are electronic ( telephone / fax / email ) ... are recorded if they involve the president. Some records might be kept secret if they involve national security otherwise it's all avalible. All mail is kept and filed away ( where and how I don't know ).
The president gives up the right to his personal communications in exchange for the power of the presidency. So this way he can not make a private deal without public knowledge.
I do not know if the first family is subject to these terms.
ONEPOINT
spambait e-mail
my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop news
please help me make it better
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
> What about what goes on in the residential portion of the white house?
He's President. Just about everything he does is subject to scrutiny. If there were *any* loophole like "except in this room," you can bet that Nixon would have not had conversations about Watergate in the Oval Office.
Public officials have to make all sorts of information public that ordinary citizens don't. Howard Stern, for example, ended his gubernatorial candidacy because he didn't want to release his financial records (or at least that was his stated reason).
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
This is simple personal email---to his mother and stuff. It isn't military secrets or anything. Maybe some minor political stuff (so and so is an a@@hole, etc) :) But just B.S. emails.
The problem is that even *IF* Bush did a 1024 bit PGP encription and *IF* the courts said he could keep it secret, politically it would not fly. He is trying to not be Bill Clinton, not emulate him!!
Basically this is all Clinton's fault. Clintons strategy when he pulled something unethical was to drag his heals as long as possible refusing to cooperate in any way. Then he complains bitterly about how long the investigation is taking and how much money it is taking. Then he finally reveals something 2 years later after everyone is tired of the whole thing. Because of stuff like this, Congress tried to clamp down---this email policy is one result...
Brian Ellenberger
Now imagine if that president was instead selling weapons to the sworn enemy of the state? Wouldn't that issue receive more scrutiny now that the few remaining privacies of official power are gone? Just imagine the trials that Bush will be put through as his close ties to the energy industry are revealed in quid pro quo deals with his buddies ...
In their zeal to take down Clinton, the Republicans have left Bush wide open to assault from numerous fronts. (Of course, they are stuffing the Judiciary with their Chosen Ones and they control Congress and the Supreme Court so this isn't as easy as it was, say, last year.) I can't wait.
The two most common things in the Universe are dark matter and stupidity.
because GPG is un-American.
Now... obviously he didn't write that. If it had said
---
Privacy? More like he learned from other mistakes (like his dad) and doesnt want an email biting him in the ass in a few years.
this space for rent
The best part about his former use of email...
g94b@aol.com.
He won't be the Internet President but he sure as hell will be the AOL President.
F.O. Dobbs
And with all of this unprecedented firepower the only thing they could actually find was that Clinton received some blowjobs. That's a fact, buddy, and it's one you're going to have to deal with.
What he did was commit a felony. Perjury is a felony. The pro-aborts remained faithful to Bill Clinton. That's why he finished his term.
Or are you so foolish to believe that the enemies of Clinton had evidence of murder, rape, extortion, and treason and decided not to use it?
Evidence and proof are not the same. Juanita Broaderick's word alone is evidence of rape, but since it was over 20 years ago, there is no physical evidence as proof.
We'd better hope Strom Thurmond kicks off soon, so the Senate can block any and all Supreme Court nominations by this illegitimate president. Otherwise we're going to pay the price for the next forty years or so.
Gee, no more abortion on demand. A lot more work to do before you can ban guns, what a horrible thing it would be if someone like Bork were on the court. BTW, Thomas, the justice that you hate was confirmed by a majority DEMOCRAT senate.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I agree with you that Sen. Packwood's situation was attrocious. You can't be forced to testify against yourself, but we can claim your diary (your words to yourself) and use it against you?
We've essentially decided to give up any sense of privacy and protections against self-incrimination if it is written down. This is wrong.
Alex
This county is quickly heading "the Roman way"... ...
In part thanks to people like you
And an Anonymous Coward who points to the same article asks: "Whatever happened to the right of the people to be secure in their ... papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures?" Good question -- what did happen to that?
... oh, wait, we're Americans, we don't have a right to privacy in the workplace like the Europeans. Never mind ...
Well, seizures, that's Cheney's job.
But seriously, even if he somehow got the job by bribing the executive review committee (Supreme Court), Baby Bush is our employee. So long as he's on our premises, which means at the very least the territorial boundaries of the USA and all government facilities (use of Secret Service), we own his email, notepaper, toilet paper, etc.
For that matter, his entire family loses their rights by living in the White House. But the media's too chicken to follow up on that and put the First Lady on the Spice Channel's "Red Shoe Dairies" show.
If he doesn't like it he can
Will in Seattle
Just because he knows about the constitution doesn't mean he wants it upheld.
He's pro second amendment and the NOW doesn't want him. That's good enough for me.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Encryption is good if your trying to get around technology. If the system said "only the text that you actually send is open to out scrutiny" then you're right pgp is great. But what the system says is ALL electronic correspondances are open to our scrutiny. Unless his message could encrypted in such way that the cyphertext looks like plain text encryption is useless. Or he could try to convince everyone that he enjoys sending his friends droves of random characters.
You delusions are apparent when you say, "A lie is a lie and if you don't value truth under oath you've just destroyed our legal system". What utter BS. Since when has a justice system relied on the truth? If fact all justice systems are based on the complete opposite. People have lied under oath since the beginning of time. Why the hell should Clinton be any different...just because he's the president? Everybody lies! Even you. People lie to protect themselves, people lie to protect others, people lie for all sorts of reasons, many of them valid (some not so valid...but that's not for you to determine or your business).
I believe that your presidents/politicians will become dumber and dumber as time goes by because only really shallow/simple/stupid people are able to conform to the 'moral standards' set by people like you. There is a reason all geniuses are evil
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
Hillary was even brighter, talking directly to the ghost of Elanor Roosevelt, no phone lines involved.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Dear friendilees
It is most saddifying to enstop electrical males toward personas and others to who I have been sending to. Many regretabilities,
Predisent Bush
-----------
-----------
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, forget 'em, because man, they're gone. -- Jack
Wouldn't you think he'd try to pass some more defined amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, or some new legislation, to permit members of government to keep personal e-mail not-subject to such laws?
Rather than just giving up on technology altogether? Guess this is what we get for voting in a conservative candidate(oh wait-we didn't! how ironic) - he'd rather leave legislation alone with stupid and inane results (the nation's president can't use e-mail) than try to make some changes to shitty legislation.
You can sit and stifle in your own body fat. Us PHB's rule most of the readership of this website, and don't forget it.
I am an MBA and quite proud of the hell that I put programmers and system admins through on a daily basis. I am quite fond of yelling at the top of my lungs "if we capture the data, we must be able to report on it!!!"
In all seriousness, I do have an MBA, and have been a PHB at the time. But business people are what make our economy run. Sure, we require the services of lots of worker bees like yourselves, and we truly appreciate it. Especially at bonus and stock option time.
p.s. Best combination is an undergraduate comp.sci related degree and an MBA. Name your price in pre-dotcom world. Nowadays you might have to work for an insurance company, but we pay pretty well too.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
If Bush wants to send secret e-mail love letters to the big-wigs at the NRA, the tobacco lobby, and the Christian Coalition, he can do it from a privately-owned computer in the home that he pays for.
The point is that the written correspondence of the President is a matter of public record if it's not classified. While we want to use encryption in our private lives, we have decided that the actions of our public officials should be public. As such, we don't let them use encryption unless public trusts like national security would be threatened.
Do you want your public officials using encryption to encrypt up their records of kickbacks and graft? Their secret deals with other officials?
Now all this really means is that people learn to do the stuff they want secret, including the illegal stuff, in ephemeral forms rather than writing. Though Nixon learned that you had better not have tape recorders on.
All these present interesting public issues. How much privacy do public officials get when in their offices? Should we grant special privacy to certain records to avoid people refusing to document them at all?
I'm presuming that if Bush has a computer in his private residence, and uses it to E-mail his friends strictly about non-governmental matters, he can encrypt them. And if they are not about government, people can't FOIA them. They can still subponea them, and even demand he hand over encryption keys, if they are relevant to a case.
This is one of the big issues of E-mail. E-mail ends up being halfway between written records, which are subject to subponea, and spoken ones which are normally not recorded and in many states can't legally be recorded. We haven't figured out a good way to treat it in the law.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Out of curiosity, would it be hard to break the encryption if you had access to the private key? E-mail addressed to him and his private key could be retrieved under the FOIA.
:)
I ask this of everyone besides the NSA.
I'd like to see your MBA please. This is techno elitism at it's worst. Just because he does not share your political views does not mean that he is a neophyte when it comes to technology. How many of your representitives even use a computer?
Thank you for your two cents. Unfortunately, you have to realize that both the senate and the whitehouse can handle only so much legislation in one year. The very high demand for the President's services makes it utterly impossible for the President to push through every cause presented to him by supporters like yourself. The President deeply believes that markets should regulate the choice of legislation he champions through judicious use of price signals thats reflect supply and demand.
The President is thefore forced to refuse your contribution, unless you up it to $2000, which is the current minimum for an executive order. If you want a pricelist for lobbying Congress, please send $25 and a self-stamped enveloppe.
John S. Leaze
secretary of corporate payback
-- look, cheese ahoy!
Into the sub-basement?
The US Constitution must be a really, really good idea if so many people are united against it. Not only the judiciary in general but practically every person with political or religious authority seems to have something against it - and Dublya is both - which is probably the single best reason around for protesting its erosion and demanding legal reform.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Maybe instead of admiting that Americans have increasingly less privacy, he should be fighting for our rights.
FOIA does not affect Americans in general. It mainly affects elected officials.
And what makes you think that nobody does this with ``sealed'' beer? (-:
Did you know that your sealed package of chocolate can legally contain up to 4% cockroach parts?
BTW, exactly who is it pisses in my kernel between ftp.kernel.org and here? With Microsoft you know what the product is full of... at least I have a chance of getting something edible. And it comes with the full recipe. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...so Bush ain't using it!
No... just as an employee at work doesn't have the right to "privacy" at their desk, through their company email or on their company phone, the president doesn't have a right to privacy while he's serving US. Remember, he's under our employment right now, 24 hours a day, for the next 4 years (give or take). He doesn't work for a corporation, he works for us, and we can request information from him. He can't refuse, unless it's on the grounds of national security, and him making fun of a reporter isn't national security, so that's the stuff he doesn't want coming out (any more than it already has).
Besides which, where's your PGP key? Not in slash's little field set up to hold it. And why should the president feel obligated to encrypt his emails to his friends discussing their last round of golf, or the dirty jokes they heard? As long as he's under our employ, it doesn't matter if they're encrypted or not, so long as he or anyone else is capable of providing the plaintext version...
"Whatever happened to the right of the people to be secure in their ... papers..., against unreasonable searches and seizures?"
IP messages are not transmitted on paper unless you use RFC1149.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Posted by Bridog:
It's rather interesting that the President of the United States is legally allowed to sign an online commerce agreement with a digital signature, and Clinton digitally signed a bill into law last year (though apparently a bill must still be signed by hand); but, at the same time, the president does not know, and was not informed, by his advisors or close friends, that the same technology can be used to encrypt his personal email.
It will be interesting to see if mass public usage of encryption ever comes to pass, and whether the `important people' (like business transactions, etc.) set the example or the end-users set the example.
I wonder how many people have emailed President Bush informing him about the uses of public-key cryptography?
They want you to know they are there. They wallow in the semi secret shadow they live in. Its strange how much you see that number reappearing - especially whenever Bush is mentioned. Fnord.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
They're pushing privacy issues at the moment aren't they? ;-)
AOL Lawyer: "..We are here representing one of our valued customers, whom at this time will remain anonymous and will herein be referred to as Pres... ahh... Mr. X"
'sapientia potestas est'
This is just another symptom of the lack of tolerance that has developed in our society. In this case, it is merely a man coming into the hell hole that is Washington DC, and seeing what garbage goes on, decided to handle it appropriately. Now you may not like it, but it makes sence, given a town full of lawyers.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
So doesn't this beg the question:
/.
if Bush sends an MP3 of a Metallica song, as an attachment through the email, does it then become public domain, subject to the FOIA? Or does it remain under copyright protection, since Bush had no right to reproduce it anyway?
If it is protected, can Bush simply copyright his emails? If not protected, do we have a backdoor method of receiving copyrighted material into the PD?
And if the encryption of MP3 bothers you, let's use a plain-text hypothetical, such as a poem or a short story, as the example. The idea occurred to me while watching West Wing last week--one of the characters read Dickens during a filibuster. Well, UIMM (unless I'm much mistaken) every word uttered on the Senate floor is archived, and becomes part of the public record. So what copyrighted works have been read during a previous filibuster, and are now quotable in the context of the public record of the Senate?
IANAL but I play one on
--
$tar -xvf
If he got your blood boiling, he must have hit a nerve. Can't blame him, that Dubya is nothing more than a bully and extortionist in a schoolyard the size of the world.
Have fun trying to enumerate all his illegal NAFTA and international trade-circumventing policies in the next 4 years, pricklord.
Go Kathryn Thurber!
Well honestly as a proud American I can say society's gone to hell. Lawyers and other people Rule Washington DC to the point where the President, be it Clinton, Bush, Gore, whomever, is nothing but a puppet of those with the real power. If they don't want the president of the United States reading email, he won't be reading it.
Sure it's better to keep it safe by using encryption, but when it's the government itself you're encrypting the data from, how long will it take them to crack it? A few seconds?
This also is the most well known guy on the planet. In addition to the Lawyers and the Government, general hackers will decrypt it just for fun. Okay so he could use really secret encryption we'd love to be able to run on our own systems, but even that is unlikley. End result his emails are public, 4th Ammendment or not. Sure I may not like Bush, and never saw him as someone who could spell e-mail anyway, but even if he was a super-geek, he probably would have made the same decision.
Not exactly, most companies which use encryption products like PGP, will enforce the use of an Additional Decryption Key (ADK) which will encrypt all messages to this key also, so when the lawyers ask for the messages, they will have to be decrypted. No 'ifs' or 'Buts' I'm afraid.
I'm going to describe shortfalls of PGP, but really, it applies to any infrastructure that's based on a web of trust.
Using encryption is easy.  I would argue that with 5 minutes of training, anybody familiar with their email client (assuming it supported hooks to PGP) could encrypt their messages.
So what?  That doesn't mean squat.  Yeah, I can get your PGP key from your user ID but again, that gains me little as I have no way of validating your identity.  Yeah, PGP has a web of trust, but that's not really realistic.  So you say, "OK, I guess you need to set up a central registry like the Post Office."  People are (rightfully) afraid of the abuses of their social in-security number.  You think they're going to trust their government public/private key pair?  I'd certainly be skeptical....
The point is, it's not the technology or the user's intelligence that are the problem.  It's the lack of a large scale supportable infrastructure that holds PKI back from widespread use.
Now, I do think that PGP works well with people whose physical identity you or another you trust has verified.  So realistically I can encrypt all my email to friends and family.  And that brings us smack dab into the middle of the hassle factor.  For a user to decrypt their mail they need to enter their passphrase.  If users need to type it a lot, they're going to make it short and sweet.  You just lost security.  But you can keep the passphrase in memory.  You just lost some more security since a black-hat can possibly look at the memory and get at your passphrase.
What's the answer?  I don't know if there is one given that there really isn't (yet) a compelling need to encrypt everything sent via email.
Hey, that's great:
Something like 14 responses asking "Gee whiz, doesn't the President use encryption?"
But not one pointing out the fact that, if someone of the dubious mental faculties of George W. Bush can't figure out how to use encryption, then half of America probably can't either.
Am I the only one thinking that SOMEBODY -- be it the PGP people, the Free Software Foundation, or Microsoft for that matter -- should figure out a TRULY easy, TRULY fast, TRULY seamless means for the common email user to encrypt a message?
Cuz I've got PGP installed on my Macintosh, and I'm telling you guys -- PGP ain't it.
--
Breakfast served all day!
> public key encryption is uncrackable, idiot
Is it ?
You are totally clueless. Public Key encription is "unbreakable" as long as no-one have a way to factorize the product of two unknown primes orders of magnitude faster than brute force.
This is beleived to be impossible, but have not been proved.
Who is an idiot ? You, of course.
Cheers,
--fred
What's he doing sending personal emails while he's at his job, anyway? It's the same thing as using a company phone to make personal calls. All he has to do is get a 'personal' internet connection, and the problem is solved.
1. Get your dad to buy you a laptop.
... and I don't even play one on TV.
2. Get your dad to buy a cell phone.
3. Get your dad to buy a PCMCIA modem.
4. Get your dad to sign you up for your own PRIVATE account with an ISP.
5. Use encryption as desired/necessary.
6. Continue enjoying life in the 21st century.
(Make sure ONLY private stuff goes through this computer.)
No problems as far as I can see; but IANAL
(Feel free to replace "Dad" with whatever person who can legally give the POTUS a gift without any legal/political implications.)
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
Sweet! Things are lookin' up.... ;-)
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
Which is what would happen if he used encryption. Don't you know that crypto turns law abiding citizens into pot-smoking, pipe-bomb-making terrorists? Sheesh. Bush is way smarter than YOU, apparently. =P
;-)
To be serious though, Colonel Klink (response just above mine) has it right on the nail. Though the guy deserves his right to privacy in his private life (a right which I think was stolen from Clinton by the Lewinsky circus), he IS the POTUS, and as such, his communications while acting as such are and should be openly available. The whole purpose of this law is to prevent things like Nixon's 18.5 minute gap from being used to deceive the public. If all our lawmakers started using crypto, we'd suddenly have no clue what they were up to until they did it.
Cnn reports: "And the Senate has, today, passed a bill striking down the Bill Of Rights. It was unkown to CNN that such a bill was being considered, as it was encrypted heavily and not made available to the public. The ACLU immediately registered a protest, and head ACLU officials are now being held in an undisclosed federal prison. And the Seargent who's holding a gun to my head has just handed me another amazing news break..."
Be glad our "leaders" are mostly too dumb to use crypto. Oh, and be glad our military isn't that dumb.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
a) Never recieved a response from Congressman Schnell when he complained about the 5 cent Email Tax.
b) He already knows how to Make Money Fast.
c) Hotmail's spam filters suck.
d) Whitehouse.com wouldn't sell
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
On the other hand, we have reached an age where we know way too much about our public officials and what they do. I find it somewhat ironic that Bush Sr. pardoned Caspar Weinberg who was indicted because he said that he knew nothing of the Iran-Contra scandal, but when he submitted his private journal to the library of congress it clearly stated he was in meetings with Bush Sr. discussing what was going on!!! We now have Jr. making a conscious effort to avoid any and all public discosure of what he does.
Public officials should be able to act without worry that things they do or say will be taken out of context. At the same time, I want to know what they are doing. There has to be a way to document the actions of public officials. I really don't like the idea that from Clinton on, our president will be making decisions and doing things with little or no documentation.
Ok, I hit the link and read about half of it. Many of the things seem to be nit-picking of someone with a slightly different accent. The old attitude that anyone with a southern accent is stupid and slow of wit.
A good percentage seem to be quotes from impromtu speakings/shooting from the hip type of responses to questions. Watch CSpan sometime. You'll find a lot of these type statements. They all sound ludicrous when taken out of context.
The President's method of using parenthetical phrases doesn't seem to sit well with the person making this collection, but I don't find anything silly about them.
Some of the statements appear quite ludicrous, but out of context I would tend to give him the benefit of the doubt. Were they prepared statements? Or was he distracted by something else while trying to answer several questions at once?
I'm sorry, but I'm from the southern United States, and I have often dealt with the "we talk better than you" snobbery. If this is the extent of your criteria for considering the man a buffoon, then I must discount your opinion as that of a political opponent who is upset that someone with opposing ideas was selected by the American people through the constitutionally mandated process as President.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Is it on a disk? What format? Did they print it out? Is it on acid free paper? etc. etc.
WRT the freedom of information act and the bill of rights protections against self incrimination or unreasonable searches and seizures, the impression I've gotten in the law class I'm taking (in theory business law but the prof is really cool so we end up debating all sorts of legal topics, you gotta love arguing the validity of things like the DMCA in a class situation[1]) is that as a _person_ you have those protections, as an _institution_ you do not. So Bush's love letter to his wife or birthday card to his daughter are not FOIA fair game, but his email _as the incarnation of the institution of the American presidency_ is. (Leaving aside my personal views regarding his _extreme_ lack of aptitude for the office, unfortunately we're stuck with that cromag for the next few years...)
[1]I'm a computational chem major, but I'm eclectic. eh, you have to have some way to squander your youth, I picked college...
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Just out of curiosity, can I see your masters degree from Yale?
Well, when it comes down to it, why shouldn't the US government act as a certificate authority and key registry for the people of the United States? Is it any worse than trusting Verisign?? People seem to think just because they're a corporation and you pay money for a key they're suddenly more trustworthy. Pffft. I'd rather have the Post Office or something oversee signing keys and validating "webs of trust" for PKI. Unlike many of the paranoid people here I trust the government more than I trust Verisign or Entrust or any of the other nameless faceless corporations out there that have detailed information about my personal life gathered throughout the decades.
yes, it means that Bush cannot be communicating with many of his friends, but as President, he has to give up some things. He wants to protect the privacy of his friends as well. I don't know why Timothy and Michael and everyone else below this are seeing this as something bad or whatever. Bush knows the laws, and wants to protect his own privacy. You do the same!
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
I suspect that anything sent from whitehouse.gov using government property should be officially related to government business or else would be waste, fraud and abuse of government property. Thus, all email originating therefrom would be subject to as much scrutiny as any hard copy document produced in the WhiteHouse. If he were to encrypt it, then he could be legally bound to produce the key. My place of business condones only the use of encryption products that provide them a backdoor.
Nevertheless, W. could still correspond with friends via his ISP:)
Due to advances in electronics, communications and storage, public officials will probably see another development in the near future: video and audio records of everything that transpires in the Whitehouse or other government installations is not far away. Then, no communications with another human being will be beyond recording. To date, verbal communications has been an effective means of communicating that could not be tied down much by the legal system, independent of whether said verbal communication was used to accomplish good things or bad. Verbal communications are used to do most of governement work at the highest levels. If hushed converstations in the halls of the whitehouse or the legislatures disappear entirely because of fear of monitoring, then it will have a big impact on what gets done.
I hope that before that point (by which time corporate databases will be rapidly filling up with similar information about the public in the interests of more effective marketing) that commonsense legislation will be passed to regulate the harvesting and sale of what previously was taken for granted to be private information.
P.S. A recent movie, The Contender, portrays some of the issues involved in how much privacy is due public officials. It's not an easy issue to resolve in a democracy that depends on a well informed public choosing their leaders.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
...obtained a copy of the farewell e-letter to 42 of Bush's friends. there's that number again!
The New York times probably got hold of the letter because Georgie misspelt (or as he would say it, nonspeldifyed) orinhatch@senate.gov as editor@nytimes.com. Hey, it could happen.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
Try;
http://www.spammimic.com/
________ semper ubi sub ubi
Congress wouldn't approve Bush's bill to outsource all government email to AOL.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
If he sent encrypted email, it would look like he had something to hide.
;-)
This is because we do not encrypt all email, and GWB should be concerned about this. This is why he should be using PPS.
Of course, until I and any volunteers write implementations of the spec, that'll be a little hard
im glad he wont be "the online prez".. but this could also be a bad thing.. if he doesnt understand the internet or is "afraid" of it then how can he make policy on it?
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese!
Exactly... someone moderate this up...
Those emails would be classified, as they are a matter of national security.
I'm skeptical- this can't be the sole issue... If it was just the government-owns-the-network problem, I'm sure for any politician at that level, it'd be worth their time to work around that.
For example, couldn't George pay for his own phone line and simply dialup AOL on his own personal laptop? That's not a government network by any stretch of the imagination.
Perhaps the issue is that any actions he conducts on governmental premises fall under some legal restrictions (perhaps the Hatch Act that Gore violated but claimed no-controlling-legal-authority under)? Anyone know what's really going on here, legally?
--LP
Posted by barmar:
If he could use a personal ISP account to get around the FOIA, what's to stop him from sending email to lobbyists, the CIA, etc. that way? The assumption is that any email the POTUS sends is potentially official business, and must be archived and made available. So it doesn't matter whether it comes from bushjr@whitehouse.gov or dubya@hotmail.com.
- That PGP is pretty easy to use.
- The fifth ammendment protects him from having to give out his key(Well IANAL but there are millions of lawayers out there who would love to defend the constitution on behalf of a Presidential defendant).
And this begs the question: What the fuck is our President doing sending unsecure unencrypted email in the first place?Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
If he really wanted to continue to converse, privately, with his friends why doesn't he just download GPG (or any other encryption program) and start using it? If he does this, would the "open record requests" require him to relinquish the key?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Maybe Thomas should have been dragged through the mud. But fair is fair - you can't pretend that a Supreme Court Justice's private character is a fundamental issue while a president's isn't, or visa-versa.
I don't even know where to begin punching holes in this, especially in the context of the rant that preceeded it. Noone is found guilty in a court of law until after they have been accused, publicly. (Right to face your accusers when you are tried and all that Constitutional mumbo-jumbo.) Our legal system is by its nature accusatory, as are the more drastic political remedies (like impeachment), and most of modern campaigning is in kind ("They'll take away your kid's lunches! They'll leave our borders undefended! They'll take away your granparents' medical care! They'll steal more of your money and pour it into failed social programs!" etc)And BTW, what was Thomas convicted of in court that makes him deserve to be "dragged through the mud"? Barring an answer to that, what personal (non-hearsay, etc) experience do you have with The Honorable Justice that validates your stated opinion that "[h]e is the stupidest Supreme Court justice to serve in our lifetimes"? My (extremely limited) personal experience with him has been that he's a very considered, thoughtful, and well-informed man.
I think this is the kind of thing we can come to expect from Mr. Bush.
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I thought it was hilarious (the W keys didn't make it out of the building as they were government property). Too bad certain Republicans don't have a sense of humor. Others do, though - you didn't see W himself complaining!
sulli
RTFJ.
Letters to Bill Clinton saying "why couldn't you keep your gals quiet? Doncha know a lady never tells?"
Just his spelling and syntax?
You know, now I'm more interested than ever in Dubya's personal correspondence...
Personally, if I became President, I wouldn't mind the American Public peeking in over my shoulder... they oughta stop being such prudes anyways... and before you ask, yes, I'm planning to go into politics myself, a double/triple major in Political Science, Law, and Computer Science, to fall back on in case of disillusionment...
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
This would make no sense. A letter is legally stronger than email. Not that the law needs to make sense. But Junior cutting himself off makes even less sense. There's more here than we've been told.
not to mention the fact that the client should automatically store the keys used for each email address or have some sort of drag-n-drop unlocking mechanism...
Bush certainly knows about digital signatures and encryption. His poppy was director of the CIA. His fear is that any record of what he does may become a political liability. As Ollie North and Bill Gates found out an email trail can look real bad in court
I did some security work on a project deployed at the Whitehouse during the days when they still counted the votes in elections. First thing that Clinton did was to put out every press release on the Internet - this was back in 1992. First thing the Bush crew did was to shut the server down. They want to control the flow of information.
The purpose of FOIA is to make elected officials accountable. Under FOIA every memo that reaches the president's desk is discoverable. PGP does nothing for Bush since if he used it to prevent FOIA discovery he would be facing a second criminal conviction. When the EOP screwed up the archiving process and lost a number of Gore emails the 'liberal press' had a field day. If Bush deliberately prevented his email being read Wolf Blitzer and co would, would, well explain it away to their viewers.
After having hounded the democrats for eight years it is entirely logical for the GOP to expect the same medicine in return.
The minute that the GOP loose control of either half of Congress they have a very real threat of trial by endless investigation. The more evidence they allow to be created the greater the liability. As one GOP lawyer told the incomming Clinton administration, never take any notes at meetings.
In summary it is certainly an understandable political move, if not an acceptable one. Bush is certainly not attempting to have the most accountable Presidency ever.
Bush may be doing the right thing to insulate himself from scandal. But he is also insulating himself from the administration he is meant to be in control of. I don't know many modern CEOs who insist on being kept out of the decision loop. But that is exactly what not using email means today.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
When he talks, he is mostly off-line, the rest of the time he isn't even on. I think Dick Cheney boots him every day before the press conference, but the ELISA implementantion is so buggy that after 10 questions from journalists all the memory is gone and the disk starts trashing. So they have to take him away and ALT-CTRL-DELETE him till the next day.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
Before leaving the white house, many childish aides in the last administration removed the "W" keys from the computer keyboards.