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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 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.