Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Fascist.
Under Sorbanes-Oxley, if a private corporation gets sued, they need to provide *all* relevant emails as part of discovery. That would include any restricted email addresses.
The same kind of things apply to government and the FOIA.
Um, really? Government accountability is a partisan issue?
I don't care what side of the political spectrum you're on -- you have to follow the rules and laws, and this has the smell of being intended to skirt around those. Republican, Democrat, Communist -- just follow the damned rules.
In this case, FOIA requests failed to return the emails in these other addresses, and they didn't know how to find them all.
So, if it isn't just shady behavior, it has the net effect of hiding information because people don't know to go looking there.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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?
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
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?