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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.
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!
The problem with Hanlon's razor is no one ever seems to believe it when it goes up against their conspiracy theories. It's such a helpful rule for separating conspiracy theories from reasonable assertions. Maybe Hanlon was a member of the Illuminati, or something.
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.
And the IRS was not politically targeting conservative groups.
Funny how people are so quick to admit they are idiots when they are caught doing something they shouldn't be doing.
Nobody's buying it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I disagree.
The only reason I can think of to have a secret email address is to try to skirt any paper trail and FOIA requests.
If people are conducting their official business in secret email accounts, it's hard NOT to think the sole motivation is to fly under the radar. If at the end you provide the 'official' account (which has nothing interesting in it), you can claim nothing happened.
These people already *had* official accounts, why would they need a second, undocumented email address? This stinks of having the official account to do mundane things, and the secret account to do all of the other stuff.
In this case, I'm going to assume malice -- since it actually had the effect of people inadequately responding to FOIA requests, because all of the good stuff was buried in a second account nobody knew about.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ditto. It is malice to obfuscate the email system.
But, more important, these email addresses aren't really 'secret'. They were presumably used, so those who needed/wanted to use them knew them. This is just an undisclosed system. FOIA requires disclosure. The cost of uncovering a surreptitious system should not be borne by the requester.
And truly, if the agency is claiming they cannot determine the addresses of their email system(s), be they acknowledged or surreptitious, perhaps they need to hire in some contractors to fix that for them. Like the FBI. It is illegal, you know.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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
"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."
"investigative groups and agencies' is limited to the Government. By law. Which obviously should be repealed. And probably doesn't cover government servers, and should not cover my corporate servers.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"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."
So you're saying all of the subfolders for my email account is full of abandoned messages even though it's an actively used account? Are you sure you don't mean email account?
These people already *had* official accounts, why would they need a second, undocumented email address?
So they could could engage in private conversations, and feel free to express their true opinions. Eliminating all privacy for public employees might seem like a great idea at first, but it is likely to engender a culture where people toe the official line, and are afraid to report problems or concerns because their comments might later be misconstrued by a journalist or lawyer that is either ignorant or unconcerned about the context.
"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."
So you're saying all of the subfolders for my email account is full of abandoned messages even though it's an actively used account? Are you sure you don't mean email account?
The first one.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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
Except laws already say that all of this stuff needs to be recorded.
There is no private here. If you're doing Official Government Business, you have to comply with the law. The law says that any and all communications you do are covered under a FOIA request.
Setting up a second email account for the same person bypasses the whole process, and then you get a case like this where they have no idea if they've complied with the request or not, because nobody knew about the email account.
And if you hide half of the context, how would anybody ever take then in context??
Sorry, but I don't see any situation in which this is beneficial to anybody except for a bunch of political appointees trying to cover their asses, or possibly cover up questionable actions.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
> The only reason I can think of to have a secret email address is to try to skirt any paper trail and
> FOIA requests.
There was a nail, you just hit it on the head. I find it amazing that people get away with this at all, this would have never flown, not once, not for a day, at ANY job I EVER had. I keep my own email, seperate from any job, on purpose. In fact the ONLY work related emails I have ever sent from my personal account have fallen into a couple of very specific categories.
1. Testing the email system or a process that takes in external email.
2. An emergency "I am having a personal emergency and can't access normal communication" notification. (once or twice ever)
3. Messages to myself as quick notes
Using a work email for personal messages is more understandable, though, I still don't get people who use work email as their primary email address, having no personal one that goes with them. Its not as bad, better to waste an insignificant amount of company resources to store and send email than to trust a third party with the privacy of internal emails!
I shudder to think what sort of exposure an organization faces when such a high level person uses an outside email. That anyone would think this is the least bit ok is jaw dropping. There is no way in which using an outside email makes sense as a practice except to hide activities.... ....About the only excuse I would start to accept would be something along the lines of "They provided no access means but an account on a pop3 mailbox with a tiny quota"... or along the lines of "the only way to send official mail was to telnet to the VMS box and use vms mail".... at which point, using hotmail would start looking very acceptable :)
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Fascist.
Or perhaps they just wanted to get their emails on their smartphone and had to skirt the IT policies by forwarding everything from their business account to their personal account. The they hit "Reply", it comes from their personal account, and next thing you know, business is being conducted through the personal account.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
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...
I love this logical fallacy. Because someone is only one sided in this, right? Pathetic.
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.
Well, that's good to know. Time to back them up to a DVD and purge them from the mailserver.
So, in context of your 'explanation' for this, explain how a second government address was used and how it differed from the first one.
Because, if you can access the second government issued email address on your smart phone, you bloody well could have accessed the first one.
See, there is no 'personal account' here. There's a second, government issued (but not published) email address. One which conveniently is difficult to track down to comply with FOIA requests.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No. You're wrong. Actually, you're assumption is wrong.
They set up second e-mail addresses because as public figures, their well-known e-mail addresses are flooded with crap from everyone and their dog who thinks it is neat to directly e-mail a Presidential appointee. They work for the PEOPLE, don't you know. The second address is used to do actual work, not bypass any process.
Those second addresses are fully subject to FOIA and it was not suggested in the article that they were "secret" -- just "non-disclosed".
If you read the article the costs -- not allowable and quickly rescinded -- we do have people dig thru a couple of years of backup tapes to make sure everything from former employees was also captured.
Take a deep breath and calm down. There is plenty of questionable crap going on in government, so there is no need to make up more.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They wanted to pass on to the AP the cost of retrieving the tapes from their off-site storage facility, hire a couple dozen additional workers for a month to pour over the data on the tapes, and other crazy costs.
They are not allowed to pass on those costs, they are only allowed to pass on reasonable copier costs after the first 100 pages.
But hey, that's just the law - no need to sticklers about it!
Ken
Oh boy, it would help if I read tfs, eh?
I'll go hide over here....
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
No, it's because Slashdot leans far to the left in comparison with the country as a whole. Our system (what's left of it) of accountability, fairness, oversight, and rule of law is being systematically dismantled. The NYTimes is ignoring it, people on the left are justifying it, and frankly it scares the hell out of me. And if you had any ability to look objectively at the situation, you'd feel the same.
That doesn't quite explain how Lisa Jackson used the email of fictitious employee 'Richard Windsor' to conduct official EPA business off book.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
And here we are.
Its legal because I am a lib and I hate Sarah!
Good argument.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Wow, no.
This doesn't have anything to do with a personal account, nor keeping personal/work e-mail separate. It isn't outside e-mail. This is a "everyone and their dog has this e-mail address, so my mailbox is useless -- get me a second one to work internally on" issue.
The information, and mailbox itself is fully subject to FOIA.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Apple and Oranges. Sarah Palin and staff were using non-State issued e-mail addresses to avoid record retention laws.
The article here talks about STATE-issued e-mail addresses to avoid spam and frivolous e-mail filling up their inbox. No public e-mail addresses were issued, and FOIA requests for e-mail included messages from the multiple addresses.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Except laws already say that all of this stuff needs to be recorded.
My point was not about what is legal, but about what makes sense. The law says that all official business has to be done through official channels, which are open to public scrutiny. But the result is that we have less effective government because people avoid expressing themselves openly, and set up illegal side channels. Prior to Watergate, nearly everything that happened in the Oval Office was recorded. The tapes of the meetings and phone calls by JFK and LBJ have been a goldmine for historians. But after Watergate nothing was recorded, because the precedent had been set that the recordings could and would be subpoenaed. So the "victory" for transparent government, led to the opposite.
E-mail Scandal at the EPA - The Obama administration embraces secrecy and stonewalling.
Who is 'Richard Windsor'?
In The Liberal War on on Transparency, published by Threshold Editions last month, I revealed the existence of a series of black, or “alias” email accounts used by EPA administrators. These were actively instituted by none other than Carol Browner, who designed her own secret address, for an account that I also learned was set to “auto-delete”.
You remember Ms. Browner? She’s the lady who suddenly ordered her computer hard drive be reformatted and backup tapes be erased, just hours after a federal court issued a “preserve” order that her lawyers at the Clinton Justice Department insisted they hadn’t yet told her about? She’s the one who said it didn’t matter because she didn’t use her computer for email anyway? Yes, that one. . . more
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
If you're doing Official Government Business, you have to comply with the law.
Only if there are personal consequences for failing to do so.
Otherwise, compliance is optional.
Left? the US doesn't have a left. it has a right and far right.
The second address is used to do actual work, not bypass any process.
Your first quote applies:
No. You're wrong. Actually, you're assumption is wrong.
E-mail Scandal at the EPA - The Obama administration embraces secrecy and stonewalling.
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
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.
From the article, a government employee named "Lisa Jackson" set up a separate ID with the alias "Richard Windsor" who people assumed was a unique individual.
I think that dismantles your argument about having one public facing e-mail address for crap and a private one for work. You're not going to get much work done if everyone in the organization is using different names for different things.
My mistake. I thought this discussion was specifically about the DOJ stupidly requesting $1+ million from AP for FOIA requests and "private" e-mail addresses.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20130604/DA6MPFHG2.html
You've dug up an article from January. We're now in June. Yes, *that* instance was quite probably criminal. What is being reported NOW is something totally different.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Not really. The mention of "Lisa Jackson" (EPA Administrator) was from an incident in January -- 5 months ago.
This one addresses the DoJ's stupid request for $1+ million from AP to disclose all e-mail addresses and the use of second e-mail addresses by various agencies. None of those indicate anything similar to what Ms. Jackson did at all.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20130604/DA6MPFHG2.html
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The information, and mailbox itself is fully subject to FOIA.
Except we just found out it isnt actually subject to FOIA, unless you cough up a pile of $$$$'s (which is just the current excuse not to release the information.)
"His name was James Damore."
Thanks for reinforcing my point.
No you didn't. That was one agency, and they rescinded that almost immediately and already provided the information.
That was one whiny little bitch in the storage branch realizing he'd have to do a shitload of work and trying to get out of it without thinking or running it thru General Counsel's office.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think you have this wrong. There are already ways for government officials that actually need it to get confidential information and candid opinions. This is something different. The point of transparency is to provide information on current government operations so that the public can provide feedback to the government, and so that voters can hold the government accountable. The benefit to historians is ancillary. There is no way now to provide feedback to the JFK and LBJ administrations, they are long gone. There is no way to improve their effectiveness. All that is left is the history. Voters need to be able to act every 1-4 years, depending on the office. The actions at EPA and other agencies clearly undermines providing that information and subverts accountability. Part of the reason this is occurring is that many people currently in government aren't separating there personal views from their government job and are illegitimately using their government position to engage in activism. That at least partially explains why the IRS is now involved in so many scandals for suppressing conservative political groups, conservative religious groups, Jewish groups, pro-life groups, and even adoptive parents. That also explains why they want to hide their tracks.
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
The AP story says that there was only ONE e-mail from a secret account returned by FOIA. The Department is lying, and so are you.
Your point seems to be that you are the only 'objective' one here and your 'enemies' are biased. The very fact that you think that can be reinforced by others who have no facts, only biases, proves you are wrong. If all the people who disagree with you are offering only unsupported or biased opinions, you should not change your fact based opinion in the slightest. If hsmith ()or me for that matter) has no objective facts, then he has given you no new data to either reinforce or moderate your conclusion. So, was your position reinforced by a non-fact, or are you ignoring a fact that disproves it - which is it?
Who is John Cabal?
Only if the demarcation between 'left' and 'right' is 'prohibiting/allowing ownership of property'. Because 'state ownership of land' is about the only plank the European left cares about that the American left doesn't.
The left in America believes in abortion rights, gay marriage, social and racial justice, legalizing drugs, social safety nets, taxing the rich, limiting corporate power, restricting corporate executive pay, and many other of the planks in the international leftist movement.
Several members in our Congress are hard core leftists based on those criteria. Just because the US also has an actual right wing, doesn't mean its left wing is missing. This turkey may not fly, but it does have the equipment needed, if only it knew how to utilize it properly.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
As the posters all said...
"CHANGE"
-Styopa
Those second addresses are fully subject to FOIA and it was not suggested in the article that they were "secret" -- just "non-disclosed".
Can you explain the difference between secret and non-disclosed, when the definition of secret is essentially to not disclose something? Can you explain how, in this case, the supposed non-disclosed email address are subject to FOIA? The problem here is not the usage of said addresses, but instead their usage (whether intentional, or incidental) to evade FOIA requests.
An identity that later won internal awards for ethics "scholar of ethical behavior.”
Of course this is also the administration who also was caught having visiting with lobbyists at a local Caribou coffee shop (ie secretly) instead of bringing them into the White House where they would show up in the visitor logs.
Most transparent administration evah eh?
Between the IRS targeting conservatives, a few officials being held in contempt of congress (and court), Obama sleeping on the job when his ambassador in Libya was killed, running guns to Mexican drug gangs, HHS seeking protection money from companies they are to regulate (and much much more)... this administration is destined to go down in history as even more corrupt than history has tried to paint Nixon.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
My mistake. I thought this discussion was specifically about the DOJ stupidly requesting $1+ million from AP for FOIA requests and "private" e-mail addresses.
You are a slippery weasel with words. The DOJ demanded one million dollars to fulfill a single specific FOIA request for non-disclosed email addresses.
Do you really really think that it costs a million dollars to run a fucking LDAP query? Is there some job where we can be paid that much for something so mundane? Are you really so naive to ascribe this to simple stupidity; that they forgot the addresses, otherwise they would tell?
The left in America claims to believe in abortion rights, gay marriage, social and racial justice, legalizing drugs, social safety nets, taxing the rich, limiting corporate power, restricting corporate executive pay, and many other of the planks in the international leftist movement. In practice, there is no discernible difference, as evidenced by little to no progress in any of those areas, even during periods of "Left" supermajority.
FTFY.
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...
Left? the US doesn't have a left. it has a right and far right.
That is a mistaken idea commonly held by people without a strong understanding of the American political system and politics. The US does in fact have a full political spectrum from left to right, including real, honest to Lenin and Marx Communists , and Communist Party. (More than one, actually.) It even includes people who have been willing to go the Stalin or Pol Pot route (see below after reading the rest of this). The difference is that people in the United States generally won't vote for Communists if they understand that is who is running for office. That is why many on the hard left camouflage themselves by rhetorically moving to the center and refer to themselves as progressives, or some other label, to merge into the larger body of the moderate left. If they make it into government, they are forced to govern by incrementalism using ordinary political means since they gain office by votes, not by revolution.
William Ayers' forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire
We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years. . . .
...We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build a new society.
And more....
The Weather Underground openly discussed exterminating 25 million Americans who refused to be "re-educated" into communism...
... I bought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. We, we become responsible, then, for administrating, you know, 250 million people.
And there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics; how are you going to clothe and feed these people.
The only thing that I could get, was that they expected that the Cubans and the North Vietnamese and Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.
They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education centers in the southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking and teach them... how things were going to be.
I asked, well, what's going to happen to those people that we can't re-educate; that are die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill. 25 million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.
Who is BILL AYERS?
William Ayers says Weather Underground, Boston bombings not same
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
You make a valid point. I guess it's more that 'the left' isn't really in power in large numbers. Or not larger numbers than 'the right' who oppose those issues. And even left-leaning politicians want to get reelected. But I do dispute that there are no people in the US, or in our government, who believe in those issues.
Also, looking at the long game, more of that will eventually come to pass here in the US, if we don't collapse first.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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.
I lived through the Nixon era. Calling what is going on in Washington more corrupt than what was happening under Nixon is ridiculous.
The stuff going on now doesn't even rise to the level of the Iran-Contra affair.
No, my point was exactly what I said it was, not what you wish it to be. I said Slashdot leans far to the left. A Slashdot user reinforced my point. I would be the last to say that I or anyone else is unbiased.
The article here talks about STATE-issued e-mail addresses to avoid spam and frivolous e-mail filling up their inbox. No public e-mail addresses were issued, and FOIA requests for e-mail included messages from the multiple addresses.
Not in all cases. That is unless the government now owns gmail.
Congress demands EPA’s secret email accounts
Mr. Horner uncovered the existence of the secret emails . . . Mr. Horner said . . . two former EPA officials told him about the “Richard Windsor” email and said it was “one of the alternate email addresses she used.”
He said he has also discovered some EPA employees setting up private gmail accounts using their first and last names and the word EPA as a standard formula.
“They’ve been moving government over to private email,” Mr. Horner told The Washington Times. “In the book, I reveal private servers the White House had universities and pressure groups set up so they can conduct discussions.”
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
Not really. The mention of "Lisa Jackson" (EPA Administrator) was from an incident in January -- 5 months ago.
It wasn't an "incident," it was a pattern of behavior stretching over a period of years. It involved secret email address like those being used at other agencies. This has been going on at multiple agencies for quite some time.
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
This was my thought as well... why there isn't some database that has all these "internal" email addresses is kind of inexcusable though. For that matter, I'd be okay if they scrubbed the actual addresses in favor of real names for any FOIA requests, so long as the content and real name of the senders/recipients are maintained. People in high profile jobs can't have their email address open to the public and still get work done with said email address.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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
You are also looking back through history at the Nixon era and what else has come out.
We've got spying on journalists, enemies lists (only public ones in the case of Obama), using the IRS to target political opponents... the only thing we are missing is a break-in by his subordinates and a subsequent cover-up... granted we've got multiple cover-ups and perjury's ongoing today.
What we've seen over the last month alone is pretty damning... how much more do you think there will be?
The economy remains stagnant, increasing numbers going on disability (rather than working), the impending implosion of the American health care system... the list goes on. In fact while Nixon can be credited with the creation of the EPA, and Reagan (since you mentioned something from his time in office) for ending of the cold war... what major achievement do you think people will look back on the administration of President Obama and hold up?
Go broader... this President has often liked to compare himself to presidents of old... how many Presidents in 50 or 100 years will want to be compared to Obama?
How many Americans were killed due to the direct actions (Fast & Furious) or indirect actions (Benghazi) where the President either opted to go to sleep and/or ignored what his underlings were doing in Iran-Contra?
Oh no... it is hard to imagine a President who could do more to damage this country in the short and long term than what we have today.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Looks like more information is needed:
White House Adviser Van Jones Resigns Amid Controversy Over Past Activism
White House environmental adviser Van Jones resigned late Saturday after a simmering controversy over his past statements and activism erupted into calls for his ouster from Republican leaders on Friday....
Jones's position did not require Senate confirmation, so he avoided the kind of vetting Cabinet officials were subjected to. In addition, as an adviser to the Council on Environmental Quality, rather than to Obama directly, his past was not reviewed to the same degree as the more senior "assistants to the president" and other top advisers inside the West Wing.....
Jones, who joined the administration in March as special adviser for green jobs at the CEQ, had issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition in 2004 from the group 911Truth.org that questioned whether Bush administration officials "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war" and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.
His one-time involvement with the Bay Area radical group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), which had Marxist roots, had also become an issue. And on Saturday his advocacy on behalf of death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of shooting a Philadelphia police officer in 1981, threatened to develop into a fresh point of controversy.
The resignation (and coming MSM/left-wing martyrdom) of Van Jones; Obama “thanks him for his service”
Van Jones, 'Green Jobs Czar', a self-described 'communist' arrested during Rodney King riots
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
And the IRS was not politically targeting conservative groups.
Just to make sure everyone understands that is sarcasm:
Lawmakers say IRS targeted dozens more conservative groups than initially believed
A Frequent Visitor to the White House
Enemies List: IRS Wanted Names of Tea Party Members
What's going on between the IRS and True the Vote?
Criticism of IRS grows amid allegations of targeting beyond Tea Party
The IRS’s Tea-Party Targeting
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
Do you really really think that it costs a million dollars to run a fucking LDAP query?
Right, because thats all it takes. I dont' know about it costing a million dollars, but it does take effort to put forth actual results for this sort of request.
If they just go run an ldap query they are going to get back ... NOTHING YOU FUCKING WANT BECAUSE THESE ADDRESSES AREN'T IN THE GOD DAMN DATABASE YOU MORON. Thats the point.
They have to go HUNTING for signs of undisclosed addresses in many cases. That requires the efforts of a lot of different people due to all the existing checks and balances that have to be followed.
You've clearly never worked in a position as an admin where you had to go hunt down things we were never before asked for, years after they happened, when even just finding the backup media can be difficult.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Umm you forget that Watergate is tied to prolonging the Vietnam war. In 1968 Nixon's campaign intentionally sabotaged Johnson's efforts Vietnam peace talks, an act that President Johnson later referred to as treason.
As a result of the longer war thousands of Americans died. This was a far more direct action with horrific consequences by Nixon than what happened in Benghazi or in F&F. By a factor of a thousand at least.
And Iran Contra, well, let me know when 14 White House officials including the Secretary of Defense are indicted (11 convicted) for selling TOW anti-tank and surface to air missiles to Iranian muslim fanatics.
On the air conditioning thing, there are fairly good reasons for the existence of such a smart grid system. It's far worse to have a brownout than to ration power. Ideally, the smart grid would extend to houses and the actual appliances within them so that, in such a situation, the air conditioner turns itself down from high to medium based on an alert from the power grid that usage in the area is critically high (although obviously there would need to be some sort of interactive scheduler the devices communicate with, otherwise you start burning houses down). Whether or not such a system should have an override is an interesting question. In the interests of freedom, having the air conditioner obey such instructions over its owner isn't very appealing. On the other hand, every social experiment ever conducted on the Commons Dilemma in anything other than small, tightly knit social groups shows that, with a manual override, most people would turn on the manual override. Then again, just having a default setting to obey requests from the grid but with a manual override to reverse that if it happens, would probably be sufficient. Enough people would either want to act for the common good, be comfortable even with the A/C turned down a notch, be too lazy to do anything about it, not even be home at the time, or not know how to operate their A/C controls that an impending brownout could probably be averted.
The method of operation the quote seems to imply would seem to be a little unfair, essentially picking homes on some criteria to experience an individualized brownout. Still probably better than a widespread brownout, but really fair. The criteria would probably be based on some sort of average use case which would end up ignoring other factors, such as how many people are actually living in the house, how far it is from the junction, how well insulated, if the occupants are elderly or unhealthy, etc. Far better for the system to just be an emergency general alert to homes that, if they don't cut power usage, complete loss of power is imminent.
Obviously either way, if such a thing triggers frequently, there's a serious supply or grid problem that needs to be dealt with. When all the rolling blackouts were happening in California, it turned out to mostly be intentional manipulation by Enron, which they seem to have used both for financial gain and to help get the governor kicked out of office. A smart grid would probably help make such manipulations either difficult or extremely obvious as manipulations.
As for the government shutting off power to individual homes for other reasons, they can already pretty much do that it's just that they need some linesmen to do it by hand for the most part at the moment. They would still need to provide a reason.
I, for one, don't believe the US can create any sort of smart grid system or, at least, probably not in my lifetime. It could be done as an open standard... HAH!!! Just see that get adopted. It could be developed from the private sector, in a thousand competing flavors designed not to work together, or it could be created by the government, which would bog it down with a million designed-by-comittee requirements that would cripple it, then it would still be farmed out to a private sector crony "bidder" who would manage to retain all ip rights despite the development being funded by government money at several times the cost it should be. If the project were even ever completed before being abandoned, the private ownership of related patents, copyrights and trademarks would make adoption an expensive nightmare.
I'm going to go and have a lie down now I think.
If they just go run an ldap query they are going to get back ... NOTHING YOU FUCKING WANT BECAUSE THESE ADDRESSES AREN'T IN THE GOD DAMN DATABASE YOU MORON.
What are you trying to say? The DOJ MX magically accepts mail without account validation? No, that is stupid. If the email addresses are/were not in the authentication database, they could never have received mail, and thus the problem is solved. Also, I would suggest finding a more polite LDAP client if that is the sort of response that you are getting.
They have to go HUNTING for signs of undisclosed addresses in many cases. That requires the efforts of a lot of different people due to all the existing checks and balances that have to be followed.
Perhaps you forgot to RTFA, I know it is pretty long. The AP was asking specifically for undisclosed email addresses, which were provided by the DOJ, for the purpose of executing official business. This was not a hunt for clues that DOJ employees were using email addresses that they created personally. Are you trying to say that the DOJ made email addresses internally with no record whatever of who owned/used them? Does that seem right? In your position, where that you evidently know everything about all things, do you make totally anonymous emails for employees? Perhaps it makes more sense to say that they simply delete the account records instead of deactivating them, but even then we encounter a severe problem. There are record keeping requirements for federal agencies, so by deleting the records they are literally pre-committing perjury.
In other words, they are trying to charge the AP $1,000,000 to query a database. In business perhaps we might dismiss this as greed, but who even stands to profit in the DOJ? They are covering something up. Use your brain.
In some places it was done with off-peak hot water (and swimming pool pumps?) decades ago and the signalling system could be applied cheaply to other appliances. The incentive for letting somebody else control these appliances is a cheaper rate than if it was uncontrolled, which where I am led to 100% take up for off peak electric hot water, and those that wanted hot water on demand shifted to gas heating. Even the solar hot water has off-peak heating for backup. None of it is on a timer but instead turned on and off by control signals via the grid.
That one is a pretty big bar to jump. Selling weapons to a terrorist group that had killed over a hundred US Marines only a year before was only one part of the mess.
Can you explain how, in this case, the supposed non-disclosed email address are subject to FOIA?
By submitting the FOIA request for e-mail by a PERSON or a specific TOPIC/SUBJECT and not from a specific e-mail address.
i.e. -- "Send me all of Bob Smith's e-mail on the subject of soft lumber trade negotiations with Canada."
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
"Send me all of Bob Smith's e-mail on the subject of soft lumber trade negotiations with Canada."
"Here is the bill, that will be two million dollars, thank you. :)"
Interesting. In the US, on a wide scale, I still don't see it happening in my lifetime.
By american standards it leans far to the left. My point was that by the standards of people in many other countries both major US parties are pretty far right.
I was referring to the 2 parties which actually get into power.
Like most other countries the US has small groups supporting pretty much anything under the sun.