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Liberal Watchdog Questions White House Gmail Use
MexiCali59 writes "Liberal watchdog CREW has joined Republican Congressman Darrell Issa in calling for an investigation into whether White House staffers regularly use private email accounts to communicate with lobbyists. The allegations, first reported last week by the New York Times, would likely constitute a violation of federal law as well as an ethics pledge created by Obama upon taking office last year."
I've learned to ignore the bulk of what the President pledges when it comes to administration transparency. That was a campaign promise that I don't feel he lived up to at all.
Hey liberal elite, suffer with Websense like the rest of us.
Reason:
The Websense category "General Email" is filtered.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
While not as obviously of public interest as a Presidnet's secret communications, I hope Andew Breitbart suceeds in publishing the JournoList archives.
I thought this was how every politician operated? Palin, The previous white house, etc, all used non-government assigned email addresses to avoid archiving and disclosure laws.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
Amazing how opinions about e-mail oversight have changed over a few years. Have those two+ years of e-mail ever turned up?
what if the staffers email friends or relatives or children of the lobbyists? are we to assume that anyone a lobbyist regularly comes in contact with is tainted, and unfit for a personal relationship with a politician's staff?
Things like this don't even surprise me anymore, because I've come to expect them from our government.
Living With a Nerd
The allegations, first reported last week by the New York Times, would likely constitute a violation of federal law as well as an ethics pledge created by Obama upon taking office last year.
....aaaaaand the Obama administration has ZERO excuse for this, given that the Bush Administration and WH staffers were caught doing exactly the same thing (well, not exactly- in the Bush case, they were discussing firing US DA's for political advantage, and discussing CIA leaks...the list of illegal activity goes on and on.)
Aside from ignorance not being defense, Obama-ites were obviously not ignorant about it after the last administration were caught doing it!
Oh, and if you think this only happens in the White House, guess again. Mayor Thomas Menino in Boston had a lackey named Michael J. Kineavy who had his fingers in everything and was deleting emails before the City Hall backup server would get to them. And the City didn't have an email archiving system. And the city tried to claim that it'd cost a bazillion dollars to try and recover from the tapes they did have! More: http://www.google.com/search?q=menino+email
Please help metamoderate.
With all these lobbyists in Washington, I have always wondered who takes care of the ordinary citizen's interests in that city.
I guess the better question would be:
Who is lobbying on behalf of Joe Six Pack and family in Washington? Is there any?
fdfdfdfdf Support for Technology
Support for Technology
THIS!
And, to add, Obama ran into this PRECISE issue when he wanted to use his personal Blackberry after he was elected.
He damn well knows better, and we can prove it.
I think the penalties should be double for willful disobedience, especially from the POTUS.
Even if it is true that all politicians do this, that does not make this right. Archiving and disclosure laws are there for a reason.
I can't think of a single pledge the current administration has seen through.
I don't know much about the health care debate, but I suspect that what you got what quite a bit different than was advertised.
Pigs still can't fly, and hell is roasting away.
I thought this was how every politician operated? Palin, The previous white house, etc, all used non-government assigned email addresses to avoid archiving and disclosure laws.
Running a light because the guy in front of you did it too, doesn't make it legal.
Also, for the President and his staff (and the ex-president and his staff), the issue is more that they violated this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act
Please help metamoderate.
Subpoena time.
...the Sun was seen rising in the East.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
This administration has been terrible. All this promise, and then failure. And now there is news that the voter intimidation case got dropped for political reasons? I mean, there the guy is, holding a baton.....seriously, WTF.
Using Gmail should not be allowed. Government officials need to have ALL their activities OPENED to us, the people, unless it is personal stuff. This stuff is NOT personal, it is skirting the law. I don't care if PREVIOUS administrations did it or not. I don't care. Obama promised to do things DIFFERENTLY and I see nothing but business as usual if not more of an orgy type atmosphere there since they have a hold on both houses as well right now.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
To me this is just another example of how much people will try to cling to old ways of doing things and subvert rules that prevent it.
According to the NYTimes article referenced in TFA that kicked off this whole discussion, indicates that the administration has a policy of posting all White House visits and pressures staff to minimize contact with lobbyists. In response, rather than obey the spirit of those directives, the staff instead meets with lobbyists off the record.
This is a story older than government, going back to whenever a parent first told their kids not to do something or earlier: someone makes a rule, people impacted by that rule try to find a loophole, the rule is revised, repeat. Government is an inherently iterative process.
That being said, if doing an investigation speeds up this iteration of the feedback loop, I'm all for it.
And, to add, Obama ran into this PRECISE issue when he wanted to use his personal Blackberry after he was elected.
To be fair, I *think* one of the issues was that the device wasn't secure enough. I believe he got a secure PDA for guvmin't stuff, and still uses his personal blackberry for personal stuff?
It's not illegal for him to use personal email to tell his daughters to do their homework. And it's not illegal for him to email the Attorney General some smack talk about a soccer team in the world cup using personal email. It's illegal for him to use personal email to conduct any business that is government related.
Please help metamoderate.
No wharrgarbl like political wharrgarbl, amirite? Read this. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
Wow, Obama yet again doing the same thing as the guy who came before him. The only difference is that for some reason people might care about it this time.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So does anyone have any actual proof of wrong doing or is this a fishing expedition ? Do we have leaked emails ? do we have recordings of these secret coffee shop conversations ?
It's a good thing for Obama that Republicans would look like complete and utter hypocrites if they criticised him over this. Ah, who am I kidding. That's not going to stop them.
"As part of a settlement with CREW over missing Bush administration e-mails, the White House assured the watchdog that its system prevents employees from accessing personal e-mail accounts." So what the White House actually promised was to try and put up a firewall, and people are jumping the firewall. It also promised that, if anyone made a FOIA-style request about goings-on that should have been on the record, that it would respond quickly and without being a douche about it. So, if there was a breach that they tried to prevent, it's now up to them to respond appropriately, and we're still inside a reasonable time to service this request, right? Sounds like normal business for any company, so long as the people responsible for oversight weren't among the offenders.
Well, I can't say for sure what "Obama-ites" are ignorant of, but apparently liberals are aware of the possible ethics issues. In fact I think that was kind of the point to the article in the first place.
As mentioned before, two email account are pretty much mandated by law. The only question is if there is circumvention of disclosure laws.
That said, wouldn't it be fair to judge on.
1. The results of the investigation - i.e. did anything even happen!
2. What was the extent? Was it purposeful?
3. How well the administration cooperates, according to neutral investigators.
4. Who was doing it- i.e. was it pervasive and/or at the top?
5. And finally, how the administration handles what is found out?
This is a request for an investigation, not a guilty verdict. Someone, somewhere in the Whitehouse may be doing something wrong (frankly, someone somewhere probably always is). Scale and top level involvement matter.
There is absolutely no meat in TFA, just vague speculations about White House personell maybe using their personal email accounts to communicate with lobbyists. There need to be specific allegations about person X doing Y otherwise the article is just a baseless smokescreen. But yeah, *if* personal email accounts has been improperly used, then that is just astonishingly shameful for Obama.
Football Odds
I for one am looking forward to true A.I.
So many posts talk about the problems with all elected officials and promises and broken promises. If we develop AI with a mandatory integrity (truth and honesty), perhaps we can have a government run with AI? At least we will get what we vote for. We could avoid spin at every comment. Only downside might be giving over our children to fuel electricity consumption for the matrix.
In all of government, realize this: hope is what drives us to vote. In order to keep hope alive, an elected official does NOT have to deliver on all promises, just enough of them to keep hope alive. Obama is on the edge and perhaps falling behind in keeping enough promises to keep hope alive. He should have promised FAR less. Perhaps people wouldn't have been as disappointed.
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Wow, I guess politics truely does make strange bed fellows.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
George Bush promised to restore "integrity to the Oval Office". Maybe someone could ask Scooter Libby how that went?
The allegations , first reported last week by the New York Times,
Fixed that for you.
If one actually bothers to read the original NYT article, one would know it still only talking about allegations. And a limited number of incidents reported by unnamed lobbyists at that. Because there are allegations, CREW called for an official investigation to determine if there is truth to the allegations.
The bigger issue discussed was that coffee-shops being used as meeting places, which again is neither illegal nor necessarily a sign of corruption. It's not a strange and terrible thing for people to meet outside the office. I'd personally be more worried if they were meeting in a private hotel room rather than a busy coffee shop where they can be overheard by reporters.
You're right, there's no excuse for this administration to be caught regularly violating official records laws and ethics rules. But it's kind of important to realize they haven't yet. It's sad that so many in the Slashdot crowd aren't capable of seeing the distinction between sensational headlines and reality.
as well as an ethics pledge created by Obama upon taking office last year."
ROTFLMAO!!!!
If staffers are reqiured to have a second or separate cell phone to do personal and political business, then they will get iPhones or some other smartphone. Email access is built-in.
Can't stop that with hardware. Even policy will fail. And today, you can't tell them with a straight face that they can't have email so their wife can ask them to pick up takeout on the way home. Or their best bud wants to invite them over for another showing of Gladiator, whichever social stereotype you prefer.
Don't even bother to tell me about the firewall. It is meaningless. Make it a condition of employment that, due to the sensitive nature of their position, any emails sent during working hours, personal or not, are subject to disclosure.
Rotsa ruck with that. These people ultimately don't tolerate oversight very well. If they did, they would have taken a job somewhere else.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Bernie Sanders is mostly Republican? I can see the dig against Leiberman after speaking at the Republican convention in '08, but Socialist Sanders?
The WH staffers shouldn't be using Gmail for official business, period. Bush and his cronies did it, and I would expect Obama to not follow in that misguided direction. Real, real tired of voting for a guy who is making the same moves and mistakes the last guy did.
Now as a Californian, words cannot explain what a self-centered, idiotic, unpatriotic asshole Darrell Issa is. He hijacked our political system and twisted it for his own ambitions, and left everything in permanent disarray. The only consolation is that he ultimately did not become Governor, because Arnie was just too popular.
Is Issa right about this one thing? Yes, and we should support his efforts.
Is Issa a colossal asshole and the biggest douchebag to ever enter politics in California? Yes, that is undoubtedly true. You can thank Issa for making those terrible loud car alarms too, because that is what financed his move into politics.
Reid doesn't bring anything to the floor unless he has the votes ahead of time. Plenty of legislative items (like the dozens of bills that have passed the House) have stalled in the Senate if you had bothered to check. But of course, you didn't because you don't care.
And Republican obstructionism doesn't stop there - if a hold is made it takes three days to plow through the procedural hurdles to get to a vote... which frequently ends up being rediculously lopsided (99-1). That's all fine and good for the odd nominee and here but when Republicans have put holds on over a hundred routine political appointments, otherwise utterly uncontroversial appointments whither on the vine because the Senate would have to spend an entire year doing nothing but wading through Republican obstructionism.
Your unwillingness to acknowledge basic facts and reality is why we can't have nice things so take your talking points and shove up your ass you lying piece of shit.
If they did this, they should go to jail.
Bush did it too. Also should have gone to jail.
(also: White House email backup system has been non-functional since the Clinton era. Bullshit they can't afford to get that working. So fucking illegal. Their communications in doing business on MY behalf, while I'm paying them - is MY lawful property. Do the job right, or go the fuck home.)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Aw, come on, nobody old enough to cross the street by themselves believes that either party, or 99% of the politicians and officials palmed off on us by either party, are really going to try to abide by the Constitution much less the laws passed by Congress that don't have loopholes to avoid actually covering politicians and officials effectively. Awhile back, I had occasion to talk by phone to the top staff legal advisors to one top Republican Senate leader and one top Democratic House leader who were leaders in drafting, negotiating, and seeking and securing passage of a law in which I have a great deal of personal and legal professional interest and expertise, that was intended to restore the original intent of another law passed with wide bipartisan support, which the Supreme Court was then persuaded to read and apply in a manner contrary to the clear intent of the draftsmen and leading sponsors. Both of these people, deeply involved in negotiating the final language and passage of the new bill, told me flat out that they were altogether unfamiliar with what the Supreme Court had said about one whole critical title of the existing law, or that attorneys general and others had raised questions about its Constitutional validity and what should be done about that. The subject was completely overlooked in the Act amending the original law. Not one of my three Members of Congress knew anything about this Constitutional and Congressional issue when I contacted them, nor does it appear that these two leaders of each party in the House and Senate directly involved in negotiating and securing passage of the amending act. Never mind what of the whole sausage-making process that did result in passage of a bill doing part of what needed to be done anyone could learn through Open Records or other processes. I’m a retired lawyer, read faster and with higher comprehension than most, and am familiar with the very useful www.thomas.loc.gov, etc., looked through what was available there concerning the house and senate versions of the healthcare bill, etc., and I defy anyone to tell me that most Members of Congress ever actually read and understood the final draft of the TARP bank bailout bill, or the healthcare bill, before they voted on and passed them. It would be a physical impossibility. The healthcare bills are a maze of cross-references to other laws and other provisions of the same bill that would take a long time to read, too. Half the language is notably arcane and obtuse. Also, Sen. Dodd, in charge of the TARP bill, said that he didn’t know one controversial provision had been inserted into the bill, and that it had been done late the night before the vote. It turns out that he knew or should have known about that language long before that rushed process. And I read conflicting versions of the language of just one noteworthy section of the House healthcare bill as debated and passed in major liberal newspapers backing the bill, contrary to the language on www.thomas.loc.gov. It did not appear that any of the groups particularly interested found, noticed, and began to understand what that language actually said and what it would have done until after passage in the House. It was supposed to have been changed, but the language was still in flux right down toward the final votes, and even, after the celebration of passage in both houses, additional action was required to correct errors in the bill. Most of the healthcare bill essentially creates and empowers a bunch of beaurocrats to write the all-important regulations that will really determine how the program will operate, and the lobbying on that process is only beginning since the bill passed.
Gmail is so much more user friendly, you really can't blame anyone for using it as much as possible. ;)
I swear reading this article thread is no better than reading a thread on 4chan.org /new/s.
Here's an article calling for an investigation (which ethics violations may not exist) and most of the comments are nothing but hatred for the administration and lack of transparency. Then you get upset that backroom deals are made yet you still hear the deals made on the news and see them in the bills proposed ONLINE.
Does the definition of transparency mean you want to have influence in the conversation?
How can you claim that Obama took over healthcare when the other side is claiming the Healthcare bill does very little?
How can you claim that Obama took over the auto-industry when the other side is upset that government doesn't have total control of production and management?
How can you claim that Obama does nothing when in fact he's covered a great percentage of his campaign promises which very few politicians can?
This is just the pain before the love, this is what transparency feels like. Everyone was quiet several years ago about the government because of the lack of visibility.
Take a step back and think about it for once ... please?
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Let's all pile on saying ignorant racist, Faux News inspired shit that isn't remotely true! Because it's the internet and we can! Plus we're retarded fuckwits!
Most cut out the middle man. the insurance company and have the money go straight into the health care. From there it gets stolen, abused, and so on, but direct health care eliminates an extra layer of that. Do the math: how many policies does it take in one year with zero reimbursements to pay for just one insurance executive's 500,000 per year salary?
Now throw in buildings, company cars, executive salaries, executive bonuses, executive perks, administrative staff, investigators, health insurance for *their own* employees, and so on.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
That's fucked up to equate health insurance with health care. They are two very separate concepts.
The assumption is that the nation can't afford to let people go without health care. How that is achieved is what is controversial, mostly due to the big bucks spent by the health insurance lobby. Health insurance can be dropped like a hot rock because it provides no value added and because it wastes billions of dollars achieving that lack of value added.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.