A Republican congressman is calling on President Obama to ensure that all business-related e-mails from White House staff are appropriately preserved, including e-mails the staff sent from temporary Gmail accounts.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter to White House Counsel Gregory Craig on Thursday, raising the concern that e-mails sent through personal accounts may not be retained.
"It is incumbent that the new White House implement policies and processes to minimize the risk of losing e-mail subject to the Presidential Records Act," Issa said in his letter.
The Presidential Records Act mandates that all presidential records be preserved as public record. As the letter notes, "The challenges posed by retaining e-mail as required under the PRA have proved vexing for the last two White Houses."
The Bush White House came under fire for apparently losing millions of e-mails from 2003 through 2005. Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee pressed the White House last year to recover the e-mails, including some that were sent through Republican National Committee e-mail accounts. At the time, Issa was skeptical of the Democrats' attempt to recover the e-mails.
"Are we simply going on a fishing expedition at $40,000 to $50,000 a month?" he asked National Archives and White House officials at a hearing. "Do any of you know of a single document, because this committee doesn't, that should've been in the archives but in fact was done at the RNC?"
In his letter to the Obama White House, Issa specifically called into question e-mails sent from Gmail accounts the Obama team used before receiving their official White House e-mail addresses. The Gmail accounts were established so the communications staff could continue to send e-mails after the Obama transition office shut down its press office on Inauguration Day.
"Gmail users on the President's staff run the risk of incorrectly classifying their e-mails as non-records under the Act," Issa's letter said.
The letter asks the White House to answer seven questions by March 4, including what procedure exists for ensuring that messages sent or received on private, non-governmental e-mail accounts are properly categorized as presidential records or non-presidential records, who would make that decision, and what review process has been instituted for the process. It also asks about the status of the White House's new electronic archiving technology, which was still being installed in late 2008.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the letter.
Updated at 3 p.m. PST with quotes from White House spokesman Bill Burton.
The Obama administration may be considered tech-savvy, but that didn't do much good Monday when the White House was hit with a daylong "server outage."
Most White House aides, the first lady's office, and other executive offices were without e-mail for the day, The Washington Post reported, after the outage blocked all incoming and outgoing messages beginning around 10 a.m. EST.
As of Tuesday morning, the White House was once again sending its regular slew of e-mails.
Press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged the outage during a briefing to reporters Monday afternoon. White House aides at the briefing had to pass out photocopies of the executive orders signed by the president that day, rather than e-mailing them to reporters. The outage, however, did not appear to cause any major disruptions at the White House.
White House spokesman Bill Burton said the outage was the result of a piece of old hardware in the data center breaking Monday morning.
"This caused a chain reaction with other systems, specifically the e-mail servers," he said. "We began the process of modernizing all of our technology infrastructure last week, and the faulty piece of hardware that broke has been replaced."
"In spite of it all, we enjoyed the opportunity to get out from behind our computers and meet with colleagues and visitors face to face," he added.
With less than a week left before the Obama administration moves in, the Bush White House was ordered Wednesday to turn over any devices that may contain e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005, a period from which millions of the executive office's e-mails appear to be missing.
In an emergency court order, Judge Henry Kennedy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia directed the Executive Office of the President to search staff workstations and personal storage table files, and to preserve any e-mails from the period in question.
The court order also directed the office's employees to surrender any media devices in their possession, such as CDs, DVDs, memory sticks, or external hard drives, that may contain e-mails from that period, so they can be searched.
The emergency court order came at the behest of the National Security Archive, a George Washington University research institute that filed a lawsuit in September 2007 to compel the White House to retrieve and preserve its e-mails. A similar suit filed by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington was consolidated with the Archive's suit.
"There is nothing like a deadline to clarify the issues," National Security Archive Director Tom Blanton said in a statement. "In six days, the Bush Executive Office of the President will be gone, and without this order, their records may disappear with them."
At a separate hearing Wednesday, the Justice Department told a federal judge that the White House has already located at least 14 million missing e-mails, The Washington Post reported.
This post was updated at 11:55 a.m. PDT with a graphic and more details.
The Web site for the House of Representatives has been overwhelmed this week by a deluge of visitors trying to e-mail their congressmen and download the financial bailout bill the House rejected Monday.
News.com Poll
The site on Monday saw three to four times its normal traffic, according to Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the House chief administrative officer. The traffic has slowed down the site and made it inaccessible to some, a problem that continued into Tuesday morning.
"It's extraordinary--the highest level of Web traffic we've seen," Ventura said Tuesday. "This doesn't even compare to the release of the 9-11 Commission Report."
After the financial bailout bill was defeated in the House Monday, the number of people trying to download the bill diminished, he said, but the number of people using the House's standard e-mail form to contact congressmen continues to rise.
"We received millions of e-mails last night," Ventura said. "It was pretty staggering."
Keynote Systems, which measures Internet performance, has been tracking the availability and performance of the House site. It has found that for the past week, the problems have persisted from early in the morning on the East Coast through the business day on the West Coast. The graph below shows the site's performance was temporarily back to normal over the weekend.
The House has implemented measures to limit the amount of e-mails flowing through to congressmen during high-traffic periods. If a person is tries to e-mail his representative during one of those periods, he may receive a mechanized response indicating the system is overwhelmed and to try later. Ventura said the problem could last through the week.
"We had people working on it all night, and we still do," he said.
The House site is not the only government site that has been affected. The Library of Congress' legislation database, Thomas, has posted a notice on its front page: "Due to a high volume of traffic, some Thomas users have reported problems running searches. We are working on this issue." It also provides a direct link to the bailout bill.
This graph from Keynote Systems measures the average download performance of the House Web site in 10 cities, four times an hour over four-hour periods since September 20. Though performance was back to normal over the weekend, the site clearly was slower in the past week, coinciding with news of the bailout bill.
(Credit: Keynote Systems)The Federal Communications Commission is being asked to do a remarkably silly thing: create mandatory "e-mail address portability."
The idea is that because the U.S. Post Office offers to forward physical mail, and because FCC rules require telephone service providers to offer number portability, the same principle should be extended to e-mail accounts.
Here are some excerpts from the petition to the FCC asking for an immediate rulemaking:
In today's world, many individuals and businesses depend just as heavily on their e-mail addresses as on their phone numbers as public points of contact with the larger world. One's e-mail address is a key component of the small matrix of characteristics which forms our public identity: one's name, one's address, one's phone number, and one's e-mail address. This is how the world knows who we are and how to contact us. E-mail addresses are now customarily included on letterheads, resumes and Web sites. The loss of an e-mail address is therefore a crushing blow to any business since not only does all the collateral material have to be discarded, but all the good will that has been generated over the years with that address can be lost in a second if the address is terminated.
The solution to this problem is clear: require ISPs to port e-mail traffic to new e-mail addresses designated by customers. There is no technical reason at all why an e-mail sent to "customer@aol.com" could not be automatically forwarded by AOL to "customer'snewaddress@yahoo.com." This would require none of the technical re-tooling which LNP entailed and could be implemented almost immediately. This simple measure would provide the American public--both consumers and the business community--with the basic confidence that their personal or business identity cannot be destroyed at the whim of their ISP.
The petition was filed by Gail Mortenson, a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., who had a run-in with AOL customer service when she tried to stop paying monthly service charges (some AOL services like e-mail are now free). Mortenson says her AOL account was unceremoniously closed after she disclosed to AOL customer service that her son had been a minor when he opened it.
Now, I admit that AOL was being unreasonable, but that doesn't mean the FCC needs to get involved. So just why is Mortenson's proposal silly? Let me count the ways:
1. If you're running any kind of business, even a freelance writing business, it's naive to use an AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail address. This will be your online identity for the foreseeable future, and you don't know if those companies will be around (or if you'll like their e-mail clients or annual fees) a decade from now. Buy your own domain name for around $10 a year instead.
2. E-mail is not the telephone system. The way e-mail forwarding works is for the message to be received by address1@aol.com, which AOL's mail transport agent forwards to address2@yahoo.com. If the customer switches accounts a second time, the message would be forwarded from AOL to Yahoo and on again to address3@gmail.com. Any message to address1 would bounce through three different e-mail providers--a horrifically inefficient delivery route. It also introduces more ways for delivery to fail; if even one e-mail provider in the chain is having network difficulties, email to address1 won't get through.
3. E-mail is free. Let's keep it that way. By that I mean companies like Yahoo and Microsoft offer us no-cost e-mail services in exchange for sending us ads. If they're forced by FCC edict to be a free e-mail forwarding service and they can't make any money at it, they may be less likely to offer free e-mail (or generous mailbox sizes) in the first place.
4. Domain names are portable but e-mail addresses are not. Internet engineers refer to the "protocol stack," and a similar concept applies to policy matters too. If you own a domain name and don't like your registrar or hosting provider, you can take your business elsewhere in a highly competitive market. E-mail addresses are the wrong level of the policy stack to target.
5. The FCC probably does not have the authority to do this. If the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit wouldn't let the FCC get away with mandating the broadcast flag, why would it let the FCC get away with mandating the even more dubious requirement of e-mail portability?
6. E-mail portability already exists in some forms. Gmail offers e-mail forwarding. So does Pobox.com, for $20 a year. There's nothing stopping other services from using e-mail forwarding (perhaps for a year after a customer closes his account) to differentiate themselves from their rivals. Or from coming up with Internetwide standards if there's sufficient customer demand.
7. There's no market failure. Not only is pre-emptive regulation rarely wise, but it's extra double-plus unwise when there's no market failure, a term some economists use to describe when the free market is inefficient because of, say, imperfect competition. Buying your own domain name is a counterpoint to any alleged market failure. Besides, getting the FCC involved is much more likely to lead to what's known as a government failure.
I have no inside knowledge about whether the FCC will take Mortenson seriously enough to start a formal proceeding. But stranger things have happened in Washington, and sometimes shining a bright light on silly proposals is the best way to ensure they quietly expire in the dark.
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