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White House Obfuscates Email
markgo2k writes "Do you want to email the president? This John Markoff, New York Times story (reprinted here in the non-subscription Seattle PI) details how the White House no longer promises to read anything you send to president@whitehouse.gov. Instead, you must navigate a multi-page website AND confirm your submission via email. Oh, and they only want to talk about subjects that are of interest to them." The web-form system appears to be a bit overloaded at the moment.
He said he particularly disliked being forced to specify whether he was offering a "supporting comment" or a "differing opinion" to Bush.
So when those emails come in, I guess they go in either one of two mailboxes. "With us" or "Against Us".
The "Against Us" email automatically get forwarded to Ashcroft.
Mike
I can't imagine why anyone would think the president of the United States would bother to read unsolicited email.
Head over to the real whitehouse alternative, much more fun.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
This is probably because emailing is 1000x easier than:
a) Mailing
b) Phoneing (being on hold for hours then talking to a nobody)
c) It gives you a warm happy feeling.
So why shouldn't they filter out their most popular form of communication given that most of it is crap anyway?
That, and my second point:
You shouldn't be emailing your most important concerns to the president - do your congressman, your senator, and your local government, they can probably help you more specifically.
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
It is really convenient to have the political opinions of your citizens stored in a database together with name, (e-mail-)address and the like!
It's a pain to use that thing, too... wife actually broke out the pen to mail the president about the redesignation of overtime for professional occupations. She heard back from our congressman within a week but hasn't heard squat back from G.W.
Considering G.W. runs a press conference once every six months, before an invasion, or after he beats up on some third world country, you expect better treatment?
Security through obfuscation, just like the ports.
Bah.
This space for rent.
I can appriciate the need for them to implement a "confirmation" action (Did you send this?), to stop spoofing, spamming, etc. However, the "pre-email questionaire" seems a little extreme. I suppose the goal is to ask "are you an insightful commentator or a raving lunatic?", but it takes a "are you a patriot or a terrorist?" tone about it.
Of course, it's now harder to complain to them about it, as well.
You want to talk to Bush? It's easy -- just raise $100,000 for his re-election campaign and you'll get 10 minutes of face time! No problem.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Bush declared early on that he would not be "doing" email as President, mostly to avoid ANY messages that would or could be construed as incriminating to himself or others.
Chances are, he won't be reading what you send anyway. Frankly, I suspect the concept of "mail your representative/elected official" is largely a thing of the past. Lobbyist's and big politcal money have largely ended any sort of grassroots effect.
Or have we forgotten the lesson we learned from being a colony of Britain?
Instead of firing off that e-mail, why not click "print" and mail it using the regular postal service?
In Canada at least, sending a letter via regular post to any Member of Parliament, including the Prime Minister, is free. Your letter is also far more likely to be read.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
The president never really read e-mail anyway. It was just a lot of paid interns who went through it. But because the e-mail address is made public on a very popular site, I'm sure they got a lot of spam and such. In these times of economic concerns, do we really need to be paying people to go through George Bush's e-mail?
... you can't expect him to read messages from everyone either. Instead, if you want to make a difference in government, start with your local representatives and senators. They are there to specifically represent the people in your district/state. You can get a message to the president much more easily through them than if you try directly via e-mail. This is how representative democracy works.
I agree with "representing the people" and such, but going through George Bush is just a bit too unfair. He has to look over 300 million people
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
"...government of the people, by the people, for the people..."
What with the general assaults on personal freedoms, Abraham Lincoln and the other Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves. Democracy isn't dead, but it isn't exactly at its zenith right now, least of all in the USA.
Can anyone think of a time when the freedoms of the average American were more at threat from their own government?
Like I've said before, the ideal of America is beautiful, it's just the reality that's becoming fubar.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Pretty amusing, when you consider that once, long, long ago, in an America far, far away, the President was an accessible private citizen.
Once, the President of the United States recieved visitors who just walked up to the White House. Once, the President used to walk out to Pennsylvania Avenue and hail a passing buggy for a ride.
My, how times change...
HenryJamesFeltus.com
Bear in mind when you say this that the modern "states rights" movement largely grew out of the federal government's efforts to end segregation. This isn't a general rule, but there certainly are some occasions where we need a strong federal government that won't listen to popular opinion.
Contacting the President should be a process simple enough that anyone in the USA, even those with limited technical, communication, and cognitive abilities could perform.
There's no excuse for a confusing system like this reaching the public, as the White House has someone "in-house", so to speak, who is a great benchmark for the lowest common denominator in those three areas. From the description, I believe there is no chance this procedure would have passed the "Dubya" test.
You think that this or the previous administration read all the email that it got? At best they had a bank of secretaries reading and responding to it. That's arguably the same as not reading it.
When a government doesn't have time to listen to the people it's supposed to govern, you know that it's grown too large.
While I agree that a government should listen to its people, that is largely done at the ballot box. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that in a country of nearly 300 million people where it takes just a few seconds fir anyone to rocket off an email to anyone--including the president--that the president or even the staff is going to be able to reply or even read every submission.
More power to local governments
I agree with you there.
Contacting the President should be a process simple enough that anyone in the USA, even those with limited technical, communication, and cognitive abilities could perform.
There's no excuse for a confusing system like this reaching the public, as the White House has someone "in-house", so to speak, who is a great benchmark for the lowest common denominator in those three areas. From the description, I believe there is no chance this procedure would have passed the "Dubya" test.
Why do you believe that? Do you really believe that Saturday Night Live parodies are reality?
I never thought much of Clinton's wisdom, morality, choices, etc. but I never deluded myself into thinking he lacked cognitive ability. Nobody gets to positions like that without it.
Why would you do this? Because given the overwhelming number of e-mails that come in, you can't process it and get it into a database with any "meta"-info attached. This way you let your users organize it for you, would be how the IT people sold the change. Then you really do have a better sense of the layout of all the mail you're getting, and you really do know more about what people think.
Not to say that this isn't incompetence on the part of the Bush folks. Anyone with a clue about PR would know the multi-page form that starts with stuff like "Do you Agree or Disagree with our beloved Kim Jong Il?" or "Are you a donor?" would be a mistake. Even if the Web guys told them they needed to use a revised front end to sort stuff, they should've realized how that form would read. In particular, they really needed to maintain the perception that every note got read -- to blow that off in any way just looks awful. The IT people had the same blindspot for that one -- ever decide to call an 800-line instead of using a tech support form you weren't sure would ever get responded to?
So this speaks to the blinders of both IT people and the Bush regime, sure -- but it probably was an honest try to address the volume of mail that comes in. I worked at the Ford Presidential Library for a while, and they've still got boxes and boxes, and shelves and shelves, of letters people sent abot pardoning Nixon -- categorized as pro and con, and that's about it.
(What they need is the text grinders to do the sorting automagically -- but wait, wouldn't that cost serious tax dollars?)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
If you want to know whether or not a politician is beholden to large contributors it doesn't matter how many people donated small amounts of money, but what percentage of the total money raised came from the political interest groups in question. What we need to know, from both parties, is the distribution of "income from supporters", the same way that the distribution of income is measured. What percent of the money was raised from the smallest 20 percent of contributions? What percent came from the top 1 percent?
And most definitely, all contributions need to considered, not just donations from individuals.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
Why should you be able to email the President? You can't call him, you can't pop round for a cup of tea and a chat, why should he have to read email from complete strangers on whatever pops into heir head. More importantly, why should I as a taxpayer have to fund the staff it takes to read all the email that he gets sent just so you get a cozy feeling about the democratic process?
You want to communicate with the President? Vote.
Clinton isn't the one that killed president@whitehouse.gov. Bush is.
Did you ever stop to think that nowdays, perhaps president@whitehouse.gov has a spam problem many orders of magnitude greater than your e-mail does?
Its easy to find conspiricy theories in all of this, but just imagine how much staff time was probably being allocated to filtering spam out of this mailbox.
Wow, that's some fancy logic!
Reasons why Israel should have WMD:
1. Maybe it's because Israel is the only democracy in the middle east.
2. Or because Israel has had WMD for more than 20 years now and never even thought about initiating an assault (unlike the US, mind you). In fact Israel doesn't even declare officially that it has these weapons, unlike many arab nations that declare how much they can't wait to use them on the Infindels (that's you!). The fact that these weapons are quasi-secret just goes to show that they're there for intimidation - in order to keep the arms balance between then Billion arabs surrounding Israel and it's 6 mil. population.
3. Maybe it's because Israel protects the interests of the US in the middle east, provides intelligence for example - the only worthwhile intelligence the US has about the middle east, IMO.
4. Maybe it's because Israel isn't run by "crazies" - at least not more than the US is run by a war mongering illiterate. Such claims are prejudice.
Get your facts straight. The fact of the matter is that Israel has the same right to bare nuclear arms as the US has. Israel hasn't started any of the wars it was engaged in. Israel hasn't sponsered any military coos in south america or east asia. Israel didn't give the Taliban billions of dollars and training to fight the soviets. Israel's foreign policy is much more peacefull than the US's. You might not agree with it's current internal security policy - with regards to the palestinians - but that's a very complicated issue and peace isn't going to come in two years just because Bush decided to draw a RoadMap-To-Peace. It's going to take seperation from the palestinians. It's going to take generations of healing and trust-building. It's going to take a sane palestinian government that would put an end to suicide-summer camps for 6 year olds and fanatic islamic religious text books in the schools. Palenstine needs to be built on a stonrg democratic foundation and not on Jihad. The area in Israel has no natural resources like Saudy Arabia or Kuwait and if a palenstinian state is to rise it has to have a free market, an educated working market that could support it financially. Otherwise, what's stopping it from becoming another Syria? Nothing.
The worst thing you can do is fulfill the stereotype of the ingnorant american cowboy by oversimplifying a painful and serious situation and thinking every problem can be solved by using power and money. Take the time to really study the issue and don't post your Israel-bashing opinions until you read at least a few books about 20 century middle easy history.
The power of Christ compiles you!
Or maybe they were organizations that NEEDED to be audited, but were never gotten around to during the Reagan/Bush I era