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Obama Staffers Followed Palin's Email Lead On Inauguration Day
theodp writes "Using Yahoo's free e-mail service to conduct government business was good enough for Sarah Palin. And now the Washington Times reports that Obama staffers turned to Gmail on Inauguration Day to conduct their business. Those wishing to contact members of the incoming Obama administration were instructed to contact staffers at wh.LASTNAME@gmail.com until official White House e-mail addresses became available."
Are they kicking & screaming about it being a private account or something? I mean it doesn't sound like they are hiding anything by publicly asking people to use it to contact them temporarily.
There is a war going on for your mind.
This is clearly a transitional measure, and not a concerted effort to hide communications from mandated records keeping procedures as Bush and Palin are accused of.
It doesn't matter if you are accused of something if the accusation is not credible. Otherwise: I hereby accuse the Obama team of trying to hide information from public record.
In the case of Palin, a single email was found sent from someone on her staff to her account. It was not even shown that she had replied to it using that address. To simply describe this as "she has been accused of using her private email to hide records" is misleading to the extent of trolling. I would argue it should be even less controversial than the incident described here.
Will Obama be punished if a single one of his staff sends a public business to his private blackberry? Palin has been, in the media. I look forward to Obama getting the same punishment - "has been accused of criminal intent" might even make it to his Wikipedia page.
The problem is that every administration brings in their own IT staff which, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't get their hands into anything until day 1.
It's a pretty poor system, IMHO. Imagine a complete refresh of IT staff in an office. There would be chaos for weeks.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Because whitehouse.gov mail is more secure? It's e-mail, people. You know. SMTP. It's sent in plaintext over the wire through SMTP servers.
That's why stuff like PGP, GPG, etc. exist.
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Now, for a little puzzle, ask yourself how long it would normally take to create hundreds of email accounts in a secured system?
About as long as it would take to create them in a regular system? Unless the person entering the account data has to do on-the-fly RSA encryption in their head.
Seriously, that security for @whitehouse.gov is (hopefully) tighter than for, say, GMail does not mean that accounts are not likely managed by a few folks via a sleek administrative GUI, just like it's done at any well-managed IT department at medium-sized to large organisations.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
We can find political news anyplace else. This stuff really is not news for nerds and does not matter here.
It's a technology story, not just an Obama story (as was the last one involving cookies). E-mail is Internet tech, last I checked. Gmail is a state-of-the-art free Web-based e-mail service. Obama is the most technologically fluent President ever. What's not to like?
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Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
IANAL, but:
Even a few hours before inauguration, using a whitehouse.org email address could be considered impersonating or forgery. I suspect most of these people had email address ending with @democrats.org (or even @rnc.org) which could be considered bad taste to use in an official use out of a campaign. Yeah, the best solution would have been a @change.org. Gmail comes second.
Anyway, it is disturbing that Google could potentially spy this.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The delay is not in clicking 'create account' on the administrative interface, or running a list of names through a Perl script; it's in processing the paperwork that ensures that the people getting accounts are who they say they are, and that their account access is appropriately restricted.
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GWB's IT Staff managed to "lose" massive amounts of email. These aren't the career professionals that serve one administration after the next.
It looks like we may see a more technologically enlightened administration this time around. The changeover, while painful, at least should function as an effective purge of the incompetent and/or corrupt predecessors.
Palin staff: already had government e-mail accounts, but used Yahoo accounts to conduct business that they did not want to reveal to the public.
Obama staff: losing one e-mail account before they gained their next one, so for a few hours they needed transitional addresses, and Gmail was free and easy to use.
If Obama staff continue to use Gmail for government business, THEN we can equate these two situations. But not until then.
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Only criminals require privacy. The Obama team has as much clearance as Bush did and should have access to everything.
You do understand the basic concept that email is insecure in transit, and so the security at the sender and recipients' ends is utterly irrelevant, right? My 5 year old son understands this. Shall I get him to explain it to you?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The whitehouse was a functioning government office with thousands of employees up until 12:00 on Tuesday, and at 12:01 all ~3000 employees were replaced. If it all worked smoothly it would have been nothing short of a miracle.
What's amazing is that a should-have-been-expected bump in the road has turned into a partisan political battle, where Democrats say the Republicans lived in the technological dark ages for 8 years, and Republicans say the Democrats botched the transition.
This is the kind of story that the main-stream media should have filtered out and pushed to the back pages. You know... If responsible journalism still existed.
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