Labor Dept. Wanted $1M For E-mail Addresses of Political Appointees 154
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."
Re:Secret or PRIVATE? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The unexpectedly transparent (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, the mistake Obama made was not just ignoring FOIA requests like the previous administration did.
Not to mention doing things like outing the wives of reporters writing critical articles.
Re:Incompetence (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Incompetence (Score:2, Informative)
E-mail Scandal at the EPA - The Obama administration embraces secrecy and stonewalling [nationalreview.com].
Who is 'Richard Windsor'? [nationalreview.com]
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 [nationalreview.com]
Re:Incompetence (Score:4, Informative)
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 [nationalreview.com] 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.
Re:Incompetence (Score:3, Informative)
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 [pjmedia.com], and Communist Party [cpusa.org]. (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 [zombietime.com]
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 [discoverthenetworks.org]?
William Ayers says Weather Underground, Boston bombings not same [foxnews.com]