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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Then how can they still be trying to supress it?
Reality has a liberal bias
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...
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!
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
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!)
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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
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
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?
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.
It's hard to type "www.(whatever).com" when there aren't any W's on your keyboard.
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!
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!
> 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!
Now... obviously he didn't write that. If it had said
---
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
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
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
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
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?
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
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!
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"
Is there such a thing as "executive privalege" that could be used to keep these things private?
No. They could be prevented from available to public scrutiny due to national security measures, but they would certainly still be read by someone other than the sender and the intended recipient, be it a closed Senate hearing, Independet Counsel, etc.
Also, does anyone know the basis for the president's private e-mail (say, to his daughters about family matters) being public record? If he wrote them paper letters, would that be public record? Why is e-mail different?
It doesn't make any difference if the letters are paper or electronic. It doesn't even matter if he's President or John Doe or who its to, all correspondence is discoverable in legal action. It just so happens that the President's correspondence, especially email is an easy target for any investigation. Sounds like he's just being cautious, I don't think he wants his own version of the "Nixon Tapes".
Would it make a difference if he used a computer owned by him personally instead of by the government, and used and ISP he paid for himself instead of the government's connection?
In the event of some kind of investigation, they could get those too.
Also, how do we know he'd be forced to reveal the private key or plaintext, instead of just the ciphertext? Is there legal precedent for this in other cases?
I have no idea if there is precedent, but I would be pretty confident that failure to turn over the key would become immediate grounds for contempt. As for the long haul, I would also be pretty certain that the Prez would be nailed with obstruction.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
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!
Er..this isn't about encryption. That would just prevent any middleman from intercepting and reading his emails while they are being sent. It's the fact that the emails he sends thru Government networks become public record, and so people can request them thru the Freedom of Information Act. He'd be required by law to give up his encryption keys.
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
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
only criminals use encryption ;)
.
Actually, there is a means for review. Members of Congress routinely use it to edit the record of debate (Particularly in the Congressional Quarterly). In the Dailies (which come out each day
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
Actually, I feel this goes to show we have a long way to go in the battle to have easy to use, strong encryption for all users.
If the President doesn't use encryption in his e-mail to friends and family, then Joe User certainly doesn't.
I can't really offer and constructive suggestions or code, but I hope some of you good people out there will work to make encryption easy to use for everyone.
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
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!
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
I saw that episode (West Wing Rules) and I had this thought:
What would happen if a Senator (or CongressCritter) read DeCSS out loud on the floor of the Senate or House? Would it then be a matter of Public Record?
Please reply if you are a lawyer, and you know about this stuff.
If its true, we need to snail-mail all those CongressCritters... if even one of them reads DeCSS into the record, we've WON!
Reality has a liberal bias
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
- 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.
1) Dubya knows enough about security to know not to send needs-to-be-secure information over insecure networks. (His Dad taught him better than that at his previous gig ;-)
2) His personal emails, which don't need to be as secure, may or may not be encrypted. FOIA is what we're talking about, however, and it may require (I guess it did require, in the case of the emails mentioned) that - encrypted or not, the keys be turned over.
3) This isn't about Joe User - it's about Mr. President. Mr. President's emails, like any government employee's, may very well be public property and therefore subject to an FOIA request. This kinda sucks (if you're Mr. President), but it's not inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment.
As a public servant (leaving politics out of this for a moment), Dubya knew this when he took the job. If his snail-mails are subject to FOIA requests, then his e-mails ought to be similarly subject.
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.
It breaks down like this: Your private key is a thing (i.e. a set of magnetic particles on a platter somewhere, etc.) The government can seize any *thing* via a search warrant. This also includes any notes, papers, etc. They cannot seize your *thought*. So if you don't write it down (e.g. like a passphrase), they can't get it.
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.
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.
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/
Before leaving the white house, many childish aides in the last administration removed the "W" keys from the computer keyboards.
Encryption is a technical solution, the problem here is social/legal.