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?

Comments

Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to type "www.(whatever).com" when there aren't any W's on your keyboard.

Bush already encrypts his e-mail!

[Seinfeld]

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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Encryption is not the issue

[btempleton]

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.