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Labor Dept. Wanted $1M For E-mail Addresses of Political Appointees
Virtucon writes with this snippet from an Associated Press story as carried by TwinCities.com: "'The AP asked for the addresses following last year's disclosures that the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency had used separate email accounts at work. The practice is separate from officials who use personal, non-government email accounts for work, which generally is discouraged—but often happens anyway—due to laws requiring that most federal records be preserved.
The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees' email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses.' The reason for the $1 million dollar request was to do research including going to backup tapes. Some of the information has been turned over to AP but it still seems that the government just can't get their hands on e-mail addresses for their own people."
We need to cap, or eliminatee, fees charged to citizens seeking information from the government. Hell, they already paid for the information's creation via taxes anyway.
It's not malice, it's incompetence. Having worked in several large organizations, I'm not surprised that it would be difficult to find a complete list of personal email addresses for people that probably don't even work there anymore.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
I'm shocked that top government officials are using secret government email addresses. We should insist that they turn over every email address so that they all have to waste hours each day deleting spam and irrelevant stuff like the rest of us!
Setting aside the ridiculous $1M issue, the accounts are called secret, but aren't they simply PRIVATE? That is, they aren't publicly distributed and shared widely, but they aren't "secret" since multiple parties obviously know that they exist. Even my low-budget church has a "Minister@.com" address for the public and a private @.com.
This 1m red tape gives them time to delete and purge "abandoned" emails from the private addresses used for government business. According to law, any email older than 6 months on a server (example yahoo or google mail) is considered abandoned and available to investigative groups and agencies without warrant.
Not having inventory of the contact information for federal employees and agents while using "private" addresses hosted on public services owned by private corporations is something that someone should be prosecuted for criminal neglegence. Heads should roll. Instead we get red tape and excuses.
Incompetence would be if they asked for $1 million but meant to write $100. Maliciousness is when you ask for a hugely inflated figure that you know will never be paid thus defeating a freedom of information ask request.
It doesn't take a million to extract unique email addresses from the mail logs they're required to keep. If they've been sending work email from separate accounts, they'll show up in the list.
If only they had a large database with all of this stuff in it.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
President Obama said he was committed to being the most transparent Administration in history. It seems to be coming true, but not in the way votes expected. But it is true, the administration is becoming increasing transparent.
The EPA’s Secret Email Accounts
Most Transparent Administration Evah is Riddled with Secret Email Addresses
More secret email accounts for Obama’s EPA chief?
So, this can be added to the growing list of administration scandals fighting for public attention: Benghazi, IRS suppression of conservative political groups, IRS suppression of orthodox religious groups, IRS suppression of adoption, IRS seizure of health records, exploding costs for healthcare reform, ....
I guess it must be morning wherever the press has been on vacation the last couple of years.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Fascist.
Half a decade of Government-R-Us filling the appointee posts with statists oblivious to the optics of the hate-filled world view trained into their souls... I think the right is going to have a good year in 2014, 17 months from now.
A question; the IRS persecution of "tea party" outfits was either Obama campaign/administration shenanigans or it emerged spontaneously among IRS staff. Which is worse?
Looking forward to the IRS bubble bath shots as investigators figure out how these celebrity bureaucrats pissed away $50e6 on "conferences."
Don't doubt for one second the voters won't punish. That's what they use midterms for.
Almost all admins have been in on some shady crap. Wikipedia is unfortunately democrat biased and edited to make sure nothing 'bad' shows up. I can think of at least 3 different items from Clinton that are not documented and at least 2 from Obama that are not. While most of the republican lists are very will vetted and filled out on things that went wrong. It is actually quite glaring in what is missing.
Pretty much if it is religious or political I skip wikipedia. As the bias is amazing with people closely guarding the edits to make sure they stay within their world view.
This is also one of the reasons many are leaving wikipedia. They get tired of edit wars with someone who has nothing better to do than push their 'team'.
Imagine if this was a private corporation that the labor department wanted information from. They would probably already be criminal charges filed and raids by DOJ or FBI
Couldn't they just ask Bradley Manning to get them for him? Oh wait...
One of the primary reasons this sort of shit continues is idiots like you who think there is any difference at all between republicans and democrats. You've been had my friend.
the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency had used separate email accounts at work. The practice is separate from officials who use personal, non-government email accounts for work, which generally is discouraged—but often happens anyway—due to laws requiring that most federal records be preserved.
First, I don't understand why a separate email account is needed. But let's say there is a good reason. The way I read this is that it was an official account that was set up within the organization. There is no good reason why this should be anymore difficult to find/access as any other account. Either someone is extremely incompetent, or is trying to hide something. Or both.
If communications legally must be logged then the system also should not allow users to access "personal" accounts. If someone uses a personal account to do business, then that account should immediately become property of the organization. Not just "frowned upon". I've known people who worked in security agencies. They typically had a secure computer and one that was not. If you accidentally plugged a USB device(yours or not) into the secure system it then became classified and property of that department and you just lost it. I don't see why this should be treated any differently. Anyone who is caught trying to circumvent this should have to forfeit the account and be disciplined, or fired as the very least, and possibly criminally charged. I find it baffling that behavior that could get you fired or criminally charged in the private sector is so commonplace and ignored in the government.
I know I'm getting old, but we've come a long way from Lincoln's government of the people, for the people, and by the people. It's becoming pretty obvious that we have a government above the people.
Pretty much what you'd expect from the steaming pile of partisan shit that is Wikipedia.
Aww, you're getting your panties all foamy.
What's that billboard say? "Miss me yet?" Bush never left.
It could be reasonably argued that government officials hava a legitimate need for both publicly-facing published email addresses and private, unpublished email addresses for inter-governmental communication. Presumably the former would be handled by their staffs for public communication and the latter used for professional communications between government officials.
If that were the issue, there would be no scandal here, merely a difference of opinion between what is good practice. What makes this a scandal is not that the email addresses themselves were secret, but that 1). The practice of maintaining secret email accounts was itself secret 2.) With one single exception the agencies exempted the contents of the secret email accounts from FOI searches. 3) In violation of its own policy agencies sought to charge the AP fee, and quite a hight one.
So this looks like a widespread attempt by government officials to avoid transparency and accountability, not a pragmatic attempt to manage their inboxes efficiently.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
As the posters all said...
"CHANGE"
-Styopa
The meme that Palin was abusing e-mail to avoid the law was a left-wing talking point that was both fake and illogical. They kept saying she was a stupid dolt who knew nothing and was illiterate... but then insisted she was cleverly using private e-mail to hide all her uber-clever devious activity and if they could just see what was in her private accounts they'd have the "dirt" to get her.
It was a great, albeit dishonest, campaign theme and it energized the hateful Democrat base... so much so that a Democrat broke into her private e-mail account exposing its contents to the world and Democrat-leaning media outlets actually encouraged their readers/viewers to help sift through Sarah's personal e-mails. Sadly for her critics, it turned-out there was no there there. It turns out that even when acting in private in her personal private email account which she never expected anybody to see, she had not done the things her critics accused her of
Let's see now... Has the NYT encouraged its readers to go through all the "private" email accounts of the Obama people? And IF we ever identify those accounts and IF we ever get to see what's in them... will team Obama come-out looking at least as clean an honest as Palin (using her as a minimum standard) did?????
Not holding my breath...
Manning was a military person, under oath, in uniform, on duty while giving aid to the enemy in time of war
He ought to have been put before a firing squad and shot within 30 minutes of being caught
It does not matter how much some on the internet wanted to see what he had access to. It does not matter whether what he exposed was right/wrong... there are federal whistle-blower laws and he could certainly have taken material to his civilian elected representatives if he thought he had something important that needed exposure outside his chain of command. It does not matter if he thought things he exposed were improperly classified... we do not entrust the determination of what military and/or state dept docs are classified and at what levels to army privates.
Government officials should have no private or public e-mails... they should do everything on a government-run, publicly available, and archived equivalent of Twitter. Everything they do, even negotiations on bills and political strategy meetings, should be done in the open in public... it would kill-off all the nastiness and all the corruption and all the back-room deals. These people are being paid with money taken at gun-point from the citizens (disagree? I dare you to quit paying your taxes and then resist all efforts to collect... eventually they will show-up with guns)
The government people are always calling themselves "public servants"... well we the public have a right to see exactly how they are serving us and they have no need of privacy in how they scheme to manipulate us.
Without private e-mail accounts and private (behind physically-locked doors) meetings of legislators regulators and lobbyists, we would not now be saddled with thousands of pages of Obama care that we are only now (long after it was passed and signed) finding out what's in it and we would not be about to be hit with the 20,000+ pages of related regulations that the bureaucrats have been writing after being empowered by that law. Have you read the combined 22,000 pages yet? Are you sure you are going to be in compliance with the law in January? How sure are you? We would have had a much better law had Obama kept his campaign promise to conduct ALL the negotiations in the open on C-SPAN... but that was never what this slimy corrupt Chicago pol had in mind.
...by secret email addresses is the notion that maybe the Labor Department was mostly being honest.
It's scary because it paints the reality of a large government bureaucracy essentially unaccountable even to the people internal to it theoretically with their hands on the levers of control, like a big bus being driven on a huge sheet of ice where you can brake, accelerate and steer but the actual responses to your inputs may have completely different outcomes than what you expect.
It seems unfathomable that the Federal Labor Department can't easily tell you who has what email addresses, yet it's not hard to imagine an agency like the Labor Department with 20,000 employees may have dozens of email servers spread over various bureaus and locations managed by different teams with different reporting structures.
One of the primary reasons this sort of shit continues is idiots like you who think there is any difference at all between republicans and democrats.
The only difference is that the democrats scream when the republicans do it, and the republicans scream when the democrats do it, but they both do it, without lube.
If only there were some sort of electronic system that could be used to record generic information, like in this case a list of people and their related email addresses internal and external... a base for relational data... a relational database if you will... And if only it were relatively inexpensive to setup and backup such a system... if only...
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info