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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?
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.
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
It's hard to type "www.(whatever).com" when there aren't any W's on your keyboard.
> 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!
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!
Now... obviously he didn't write that. If it had said
---
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
-----------
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If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, forget 'em, because man, they're gone. -- Jack
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'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.
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.
- 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.