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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
"When it comes to a Web site, it's a bit like a movie," Mr. Orr said. "Some will say it's a tour de force; some will say it fell flat."
This website must be "Cabin Boy."
I don't find it very encouraging that the government doesn't promise to read anything we have to say anymore. Isn't it their job to listen to what the public has to say to make informed decisions for the good of the country? What are we paying them for?
KappaStone
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!
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.
This is not a big deal. In fact this was a good thing. Before, they had some poor secretary who had to sit there getting a vague idea of what the emails were about. Let's face it, they almost NEVER made it's way up to the top anyway.
Now with the new system they can have some DBA write script to pump out statistics on what kind of feedback/problems/etc most people are writing about. They can actually get a real number and say "we got 10,000 emails this week and 67% of them disagreed with such and such policy." Plus, they can weed out the junk mail. Can you imagine how much spam he must've gotten. Do you think the Pres was using SpamAssassin?
Cire
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.
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
Any Paypal customer with a problem typically has an impossible time calling and talking to a real live person, and personal attention to electronic mail is virtually non-existent. According to Vince Sollitto (PayPal spokesman), Paypal intentionally makes the phone number very difficult to find in order to save costs. This is fine, except their Email "customer service" also leaves a lot to be desired. Many times you will get a canned response that doesn't address your initial Email message, if you get a reply at all. It doesn't do any good to complain anyway. When asked about customer complaints, Sollitto said the company reads them, but takes them with a grain of salt...
Just reminded me of the White House. Congress hardly responds to what the people want (file sharing, etc) why should the President be any different?
On a side note, for what it's worth, the daily press briefings contain more 'hard' news than I see in the average evening news broadcast. (On a politically snider note, it's also much easier to understand how bad off things are when you can actually read the daily obfuscations with your own eyes, and in most cases, watch them in streaming video sans interepretation by talking heads.)
Also, say what you will about Clinton, but he was the first president to really make an effort at utilizing the internet to diseminate information regarding the executive branch, though granted he was the first president of the 'internet era.' There are several cool innovations he made and several excellent articles over at Slate regarding the White House web (Article #1 and Article #2) historically.
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
Many years ago, my mother wrote to a former President, protesting a policy. She got back an elegant card thanking her for her "support." The next day, that President addressed the nation from the Oval Office and said that 90% of the mail he was receiving was in support of the policy.
Maybe that button isn't such a bad idea.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
... in favor of Bush enlarging his penis. That's gotta count as a refferendum or somthing.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
We are not a democracy for chrissakes. When we people learn the difference?
A few links:
Link #1
Link #2
Link #3
Scary quote #4
Scary quote #5
Quote #6
And from our own government:
Link #7
We are not a democracy. Get it through your head. Democracy is a terrible for mof government where 51% of the people take rights away from the other 49%.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
- Put up a nicer message. This page is typically only going to be seen for a few seconds, if at all, but when the destination is down, would you want your visitors to be looking at that?
- A link would have been nice, to accomodate those who have turned off javascript. Yeah, I know this doesn't apply to many, but it's not difficult to do. In addition, instead of making users refresh (thereby burdening this server), users can just keep clicking the link if the destination page doesn't load.
- PERSdata??? What the hell is up with that? First, use all lowercase. Second, don't give your directories scary names like that. It scares the children.
- I think we're beyond the 8.3 filename conventions now. mv intro.htm index.html
If this is my first impression of a site, you can be sure I won't be trusting it to deal with my personal information.I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
I would suspect that current pols don't give a $*()@*#)( about their e-mail or messages anyway. Local officials are too powerless for most people to communicate with. State and National pols are too busy talking to lobbyists and paying attention to the polls and statistics to worry about what Joe Schmoe is ranting about today.
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.
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.
Im my experience, snail mail is far more effective in getting your point heard and something done about it. I ALWAYS write a letter if I have a problem, and 90% of the time, the situation is adequatly dealt with.
I have never had any luck with email complaints, and only marginal success with phone complaints.
Just last night in fact, I heard back from AT&T wireless because I sent the CEO a letter about how his company was attempting to defraud me on my bill. Fixed, no problem. And a free month to boot. I had previously called 5 times and had been told that is was "impossible" to fix.
So use email for normal communications, but when you need something done, write a letter and fork over 37 cents for a stamp. The results are well worth the cost. I imagine that a letter to the president has a much higher chance of actually being read by someone than an email does, especially now.
T
Indeed it is...as lots of conservative organizations discovered during the Clinton-Gore regime.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
The IRS is a great agency for exacting revenge on people idiotic enough to declare themselves your enemy.
That's no joke. Just ask the Christic Institute. The Christic Institute is a government watchdog agency that has been a thorne in the side of Uncle Sam for a great many years.
I first hear about Christic during the Iran Contra "guns for drugs" scandle in the mid 1980s. They were the ones who actually brought the suit against the government.
An apt description of the Christic Institute (as appearing in this article)"The institute has won several landmark civil lawsuits, including the "Greensboro massacre" case against members of the American Nazi Party and Ku Klux Klan who assassinated demonstrators in 1979, and the "Silkwood" case against the nuclear industry. The institute does not charge legal fees and depends entirely on contributions from churches, Jewish philanthropies, private foundations and individual supporters."
Another decent (and slightly more in-depth) history of the organization can be found here. The sad truth is that the IRS is likely to revoke their not for profit status making them liabel for back taxes for all of the years they have been in operation. Many feel that this is in direct retaliation to the Avrigan vs. Hull lawsuit. The government is alredy quite fond of issuing hefty fines to the institute for what it deems to be "frivolous lawsuits" (I'll let you judge that one for yourselves) as a means of intimidating them into not persuing their just causes. But if this IRS thing the IRS has in mind at the prompting of ultra conservative members of the house, it could mean the final curtain call for a heroic agency that has done much to keep america free.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.