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."
Time for an amendment for FOIA (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Make them eat Spam! (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:Incompetence (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Secret or PRIVATE? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Time for an amendment for FOIA (Score:5, Insightful)
They were violating their own regulation by charging a news organization.
Why should a "news organization" be treated any differently than anyone else? Last time I read the Constitution, it appeared to apply to everyone equally, not just a select list of government approved organizations.
Re:Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is a whole heap of awesome... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Make them eat Spam! (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is this shady? I bet every senior executive in industry has a public facing email that their staff handles, and then a restricted email address that is disclosed only to people who he works closely with.
It seems to me this smells like the usual partisan bullshit.
Re:Make them eat Spam! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And then they destroyed the backup tapes (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Time for an amendment for FOIA (Score:5, Insightful)
How exactly would a fine help.
I am "Government Agency"
I do bad things.
Someone wants info on bad things I do.
I delay. Then I charge. Then I delay more.
Peons sue me to pay a fine to them.
I delay.
I delay more.
I pay fine from my budget that comes from the peons.
Many peons give money through me to 1 peon.
Next year I include these costs in my budget.
I now control more money.
Re:Incompetence (Score:2, Insightful)
Left? the US doesn't have a left. it has a right and far right.
Re:Time for an amendment for FOIA (Score:4, Insightful)
Big Surprise from the Obama Administration.
That's right, those loopholes are for Whites Only.
No, they apply for all Chicago scofflaws and thugs.
Re:Time for an amendment for FOIA (Score:5, Insightful)
... but the county courthouse wanted thousands of dollars to copy the transcripts and would not allow me to simply come down and copy them myself.
I should hope not. I don't want official transcripts to be handled by any random member of the community - they could be damaged or destroyed that way, maliciously or otherwise. Yes, the person doing that might be charged after the fact, but the documentation is still gone. So I'm glad they didn't hand you official government documents to dick around with however you wanted to. And, in fact, I'm not sorry that they wanted to charge you for the extra work they had to go to for you - your fellow citizens don't need to pay for your particular hobby horse.
Besides, if the newspaper were seriously interested in your story, they would have submitted the FOIA request themselves (and paid for it). The sad truth is that reporters get "leads" from people with axes to grind all the time and the best way to deal with them is to say "Docs or it didn't happen". Unless you can present a more compelling story, you're just another nut with an agenda.
Finally, as for the DOT "killing your business model", it's not the government's job to provide extra services to make your business succeed. You should have known about the data processing methods and their associated costs involved before you started the business. If the only people who wanted the data available were folks (like you) hoping to profit by free-riding on special work (i.e., computer system development) that they wanted done by the government, I see no reason that your fellow taxpayers should pay for your hand out.
Re:Incompetence (Score:3, Insightful)
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.