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White House Obfuscates Email
Posted by
michael
on Fri Jul 18, 2003 08:56 AM
from the tired-of-nigerian-lottery-spam dept.
from the tired-of-nigerian-lottery-spam dept.
markgo2k writes "Do you want to email the president? This John Markoff, New York Times story (reprinted here in the non-subscription Seattle PI) details how the White House no longer promises to read anything you send to president@whitehouse.gov. Instead, you must navigate a multi-page website AND confirm your submission via email. Oh, and they only want to talk about subjects that are of interest to them." The web-form system appears to be a bit overloaded at the moment.
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I'd rather not have to deal with the DOJ... (Score:4, Insightful)
So when those emails come in, I guess they go in either one of two mailboxes. "With us" or "Against Us".
The "Against Us" email automatically get forwarded to Ashcroft.
Mike
Re:I'd rather not have to deal with the DOJ... (Score:5, Funny)
Gueass again where that's going.. (and you along with it).. ever been to Cuba? I heard it's got this lovely bay with lots of friendly people in orange suits. Gua
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The Christic Institute (Score:5, Informative)
That's no joke. Just ask the Christic Institute. The Christic Institute is a government watchdog agency that has been a thorne in the side of Uncle Sam for a great many years.
I first hear about Christic during the Iran Contra "guns for drugs" scandle in the mid 1980s. They were the ones who actually brought the suit against the government.
An apt description of the Christic Institute (as appearing in this article [greenleft.org.au])"The institute has won several landmark civil lawsuits, including the "Greensboro massacre" case against members of the American Nazi Party and Ku Klux Klan who assassinated demonstrators in 1979, and the "Silkwood" case against the nuclear industry. The institute does not charge legal fees and depends entirely on contributions from churches, Jewish philanthropies, private foundations and individual supporters."
Another decent (and slightly more in-depth) history of the organization can be found here. [geocities.com] The sad truth is that the IRS is likely to revoke their not for profit status making them liabel for back taxes for all of the years they have been in operation. Many feel that this is in direct retaliation to the Avrigan vs. Hull lawsuit. The government is alredy quite fond of issuing hefty fines to the institute for what it deems to be "frivolous lawsuits" (I'll let you judge that one for yourselves) as a means of intimidating them into not persuing their just causes. But if this IRS thing the IRS has in mind at the prompting of ultra conservative members of the house, it could mean the final curtain call for a heroic agency that has done much to keep america free.
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Re:I'd rather not have to deal with the DOJ... (Score:5, Interesting)
It would make perfect sense for the Republicans to send out emails for contributions to those on the "for" list.
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Re:I'd rather not have to deal with the DOJ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I'd rather not have to deal with the DOJ... (Score:5, Funny)
It would also be an enormous ethics violation, and thanks to those geeks among us who use a different email username for each site we submit data too it would be simple to prove what was happening.
The "liberal media" (if any) would have a field day with it.
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Re:I'd rather not have to deal with the DOJ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Bush administration doesn't talk much about policies in the Middle East except those related to Iraq or to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Try asking about Israel's nuclear weapons.
Or Saudi Arabia - definitely intimately involved with Al-Quaeda, unlike Iraq.
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We've come a long way baby (Score:5, Insightful)
Once, the President of the United States recieved visitors who just walked up to the White House. Once, the President used to walk out to Pennsylvania Avenue and hail a passing buggy for a ride.
My, how times change...
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Re:We've come a long way baby (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:We've come a long way baby (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:We've come a long way baby (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:We've come a long way baby (Score:5, Informative)
Looks like someone slept through history class. The first attempt on a President was Jackson in 1835. Lincoln was killed in 1865 by Booth, an actor. The next President to be shot was Garfield in 1881 by Charles J. Guiteau, a disappoined unemployed guy. The next assassination happened in 1901 when McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. Between 1901 and when Kennedy was shot in 1963 by Lee Oswald, there were two attempts on Presidents. One happened in 1912 against former President Theodore Roosevelt on a campaign stop. The second happened against Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. The shots missed Roosevelt but killed Anton Cermak, the Mayor of Chicago. After Kennedy's death, there were three attempts on a Presidents life. The first two happened in September 1975 against Gerald Ford while in California. The third happened against Reagan in 1981.
BTW, I am an history geek!
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Re:We've come a long way baby (Score:5, Insightful)
The average Slashdot reader is too young to remember this, but Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn walked hand-in-hand from Capitol Hill to the White House on inauguration day. Right down the middle of the street.
I also remember all of the Republicans who called Clinton a coward and paranoid for blocking off Pennsylvania Avenue. You may notice that the only change since Bush has taken office is more armed guards and greater restrictions. Funny thing: I haven't heard any of those critics of Clinton's apolgizing...
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Re: we've come a long way baby (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly ive always felt that unless the cause for war is good enough for the commander in chief to pick up a gun and lead the troops off to battle in the name of truth and honor and whatever else he might be fighting for, then its not a good enough reason to send a single lowly infantryman.
But maybe I hold warmongers to too high of a standard? Ya know, thinking the onus should be on them to justify their actions, inisting they be truthfull in their assertions and even to back them up. You know, silly things like that.
I don't think leading the troops is too much to ask. Afterall, How can you give an order that would cause people to die if your not willing and ready to be counted among the dead?
Guess you could say I just think hes a yellow bellied coward more than anything. War is easy. Diplomacy I guess is pretty hard.
-Steve
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Re: we've come a long way baby (Score:5, Interesting)
The big problem is that the president currently declares when the war ended. Maybe we could have the excecution when the president leaves office, whether the war's ended yet or not. Keep the two term rule, of course.
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Re:We've come a long way baby (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:We've come a long way baby (Score:5, Insightful)
Snopes has a long article [snopes.com] on this very subject.
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Re:We've come a long way baby (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Eisenhower directed the near gutting and restoration of the building, installing bullet-proof glass and other modern security features. Before WW I/II, the US was a fairly isolated country with a small federal government. If you had a gripe with the goverment, it was probably at the state level.
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Re:I'd rather not have to deal with the DOJ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Contributors to the campaign, friends and relatives have other means of reaching these people, the public points of access are just garbage chutes for straw-polling and allowing the Secret Service to gather and track death-threats and such.
This is not ALWAYS true, but from talking to people who have worked on The Hill, I'm certain that it is the case far, far more often than not.
One time, I sent mail about Echelon to my Senetor. I was frankly stunned and awed to the point of voting for him in the next election because I got back a letter than addressed what I had said, and outlined what he had done as a result, and what the results of his actions were.
It wasn't a lot, just one page and not a lot of action as a result, but the fact that this Senetor cared about the concerns of a constituent got MY vote! I urge you to discuss the things that matter to you with your representitive government, and when they work on your behalf (not just send you a form "Yes, this is a pressing issue which all Americans should vote for me over") you should reward them by voting for them.
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Re:I'd rather not have to deal with the DOJ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that U.S. senators and representatives are so far removed from the public that responses are, by default, not expected is a very strong argument, in my opinion, why most issues should be handled by state and local governments and not the federal one.
Local officials are much more accessible by their constituants (constituant to politician ratio is an order of magnatude less), and local officials are more accountable in thier communities. For example, the local state representative is very likely a local businessperson who is a member of the local chamber of commerce and lives in a known neighborhood on one end of town. He may even be active in a local church or civic group and may even know local people by name (imagine that!). Simply, the "pro" and "con" piles are just much smaller for local representation and are more likely to be given attention.
Compare the local people to national people like Hillary Clinton or Dick Cheny, for example, and there is no comparison. Besides the Letterman show or the Weekly World News, do the constituants of New York really understand or have the resources to care about what Ms. Clinton does for their state?
I just think that human society scales poorly (suburban spawl, for example), and that smaller groups are more likely to make real progress towards a genuinely happy community than very large ones. Smaller groups are also more accountable, and, if a person can't cope, moving to another group is not a big problem. If a person can't cope with a federal government, or the approaching global government, then what?
And, to be clear, "small" doesn't mean, necessarily, on the scale of nomadic tribes, but more like regular towns of several tens of thousands of people each. It seems that once an area gets into the hundreds of thousands of people, people start clashing in their everyday lives--traffic, for example--and don't find effective ways to deal with that scale.
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Re:I'd rather not have to deal with the DOJ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you were really serious about getting a message through to the "president" I would check "supporting comment," then say something nice about him (if you can think of anything) and then offer some "supportive criticism." This method actually works for me on a regular basis. (Although I haven't tried it in the scenario) It saves me lots of stress and the other person is more likely to listen.
However, if you just want to send flaming messages, that's a different story.
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Re:I'd rather not have to deal with the DOJ... (Score:5, Funny)
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which movie? (Score:5, Funny)
This website must be "Cabin Boy."
Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Or have we forgotten the lesson we learned from being a colony of Britain?
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Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you ever stop to think that nowdays, perhaps president@whitehouse.gov has a spam problem many orders of magnitude greater than your e-mail does?
Its easy to find conspiricy theories in all of this, but just imagine how much staff time was probably being allocated to filtering spam out of this mailbox.
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Waste of the President's time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Waste of the President's time. (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, so I assume you disregard as "unsolicited" any email that comes from your bosses, too...
Parent
Since many people use... (Score:5, Insightful)
Head over to the real whitehouse alternative [whitehouse.com], much more fun.
Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
a) Mailing
b) Phoneing (being on hold for hours then talking to a nobody)
c) It gives you a warm happy feeling.
So why shouldn't they filter out their most popular form of communication given that most of it is crap anyway?
That, and my second point:
You shouldn't be emailing your most important concerns to the president - do your congressman, your senator, and your local government, they can probably help you more specifically.
convenient (Score:5, Insightful)
Snail Mail... (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering G.W. runs a press conference once every six months, before an invasion, or after he beats up on some third world country, you expect better treatment?
Security through obfuscation, just like the ports.
Bah.
Deluges of mail (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, it's now harder to complain to them about it, as well.
re: deluges of mail (Score:5, Funny)
+1 campaign donor
-1 civil liberties kook
+1 convenient ally
-1 democrat
-1 libertarian
+1 republican
+1 useful tool
ed
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This is a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Now with the new system they can have some DBA write script to pump out statistics on what kind of feedback/problems/etc most people are writing about. They can actually get a real number and say "we got 10,000 emails this week and 67% of them disagreed with such and such policy." Plus, they can weed out the junk mail. Can you imagine how much spam he must've gotten. Do you think the Pres was using SpamAssassin?
Cire
Apparently they've gotten over 1000 e-mails.... (Score:5, Funny)
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It's irrelevant anyway... (Score:5, Insightful)
Chances are, he won't be reading what you send anyway. Frankly, I suspect the concept of "mail your representative/elected official" is largely a thing of the past. Lobbyist's and big politcal money have largely ended any sort of grassroots effect.
Use snail mail (Score:4, Insightful)
In Canada at least, sending a letter via regular post to any Member of Parliament [parl.gc.ca], including the Prime Minister [pm.gc.ca], is free. Your letter is also far more likely to be read.
This isn't news, it's "DUH" (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with "representing the people" and such, but going through George Bush is just a bit too unfair. He has to look over 300 million people
Just like a bunch of other corporations (Score:5, Interesting)
Any Paypal customer with a problem typically has an impossible time calling and talking to a real live person, and personal attention to electronic mail is virtually non-existent. According to Vince Sollitto (PayPal spokesman), Paypal intentionally makes the phone number very difficult to find in order to save costs. This is fine, except their Email "customer service" also leaves a lot to be desired. Many times you will get a canned response that doesn't address your initial Email message, if you get a reply at all. It doesn't do any good to complain anyway. When asked about customer complaints, Sollitto said the company reads them, but takes them with a grain of salt...
Just reminded me of the White House. Congress hardly responds to what the people want (file sharing, etc) why should the President be any different?
Barriers to entry (Score:5, Informative)
On a side note, for what it's worth, the daily press briefings contain more 'hard' news than I see in the average evening news broadcast. (On a politically snider note, it's also much easier to understand how bad off things are when you can actually read the daily obfuscations with your own eyes, and in most cases, watch them in streaming video sans interepretation by talking heads.)
Also, say what you will about Clinton, but he was the first president to really make an effort at utilizing the internet to diseminate information regarding the executive branch, though granted he was the first president of the 'internet era.' There are several cool innovations he made and several excellent articles over at Slate regarding the White House web (Article #1 [msn.com] and Article #2 [msn.com]) historically.
"Supporting comment" / "differing opinion" (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe that button isn't such a bad idea.
Classic IT and bad PR, but it's a real attempt (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you do this? Because given the overwhelming number of e-mails that come in, you can't process it and get it into a database with any "meta"-info attached. This way you let your users organize it for you, would be how the IT people sold the change. Then you really do have a better sense of the layout of all the mail you're getting, and you really do know more about what people think.
Not to say that this isn't incompetence on the part of the Bush folks. Anyone with a clue about PR would know the multi-page form that starts with stuff like "Do you Agree or Disagree with our beloved Kim Jong Il?" or "Are you a donor?" would be a mistake. Even if the Web guys told them they needed to use a revised front end to sort stuff, they should've realized how that form would read. In particular, they really needed to maintain the perception that every note got read -- to blow that off in any way just looks awful. The IT people had the same blindspot for that one -- ever decide to call an 800-line instead of using a tech support form you weren't sure would ever get responded to?
So this speaks to the blinders of both IT people and the Bush regime, sure -- but it probably was an honest try to address the volume of mail that comes in. I worked at the Ford Presidential Library for a while, and they've still got boxes and boxes, and shelves and shelves, of letters people sent abot pardoning Nixon -- categorized as pro and con, and that's about it.
(What they need is the text grinders to do the sorting automagically -- but wait, wouldn't that cost serious tax dollars?)
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to communicate with the President? Vote.
Send regular mail anyway... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have never had any luck with email complaints, and only marginal success with phone complaints.
Just last night in fact, I heard back from AT&T wireless because I sent the CEO a letter about how his company was attempting to defraud me on my bill. Fixed, no problem. And a free month to boot. I had previously called 5 times and had been told that is was "impossible" to fix.
So use email for normal communications, but when you need something done, write a letter and fork over 37 cents for a stamp. The results are well worth the cost. I imagine that a letter to the president has a much higher chance of actually being read by someone than an email does, especially now.
T
Re:Remember... (Score:5, Informative)
A few links:
Link #1 [chrononhotonthologos.com]
Link #2 [brainyquote.com]
Link #3 [brainyquote.com]
Scary quote #4 [brainyquote.com]
Scary quote #5 [brainyquote.com]
Quote #6 [brainyquote.com]
And from our own government:
Link #7 [cia.gov]
We are not a democracy. Get it through your head. Democracy is a terrible for mof government where 51% of the people take rights away from the other 49%.
Parent
Re:Innovative use of the tag (Score:5, Informative)
- Put up a nicer message. This page is typically only going to be seen for a few seconds, if at all, but when the destination is down, would you want your visitors to be looking at that?
- A link would have been nice, to accomodate those who have turned off javascript. Yeah, I know this doesn't apply to many, but it's not difficult to do. In addition, instead of making users refresh (thereby burdening this server), users can just keep clicking the link if the destination page doesn't load.
- PERSdata??? What the hell is up with that? First, use all lowercase. Second, don't give your directories scary names like that. It scares the children.
- I think we're beyond the 8.3 filename conventions now. mv intro.htm index.html
If this is my first impression of a site, you can be sure I won't be trusting it to deal with my personal information.Parent
why do you believe that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Contacting the President should be a process simple enough that anyone in the USA, even those with limited technical, communication, and cognitive abilities could perform.
There's no excuse for a confusing system like this reaching the public, as the White House has someone "in-house", so to speak, who is a great benchmark for the lowest common denominator in those three areas. From the description, I believe there is no chance this procedure would have passed the "Dubya" test.
Why do you believe that? Do you really believe that Saturday Night Live parodies are reality?
I never thought much of Clinton's wisdom, morality, choices, etc. but I never deluded myself into thinking he lacked cognitive ability. Nobody gets to positions like that without it.
Parent