The Obama Administration is trying to get back on the offensive after a slew of reports characterized its efforts to collect e-mail addresses as an attempt at compiling information on the political beliefs of individuals, and possibly invading American’s rights to privacy.
Fox News has been one of the leading media outlets in taking the Administration to task, reporting Monday night that it the White House was telling it that third-party groups were likely to blame for a rash of unsolicited e-mail that was sent out over the weekend.
Reviewing, the e-mail in question was from Senior Advisor David Axelrod, which was aimed at combating detractors of Obama’s heath care overhaul.
According to the network’s reporting, it has found individuals that were part of no group nor were they advocating for any issue. Several reported they had given their e-mail address through another government website before the unsolicited e-mails began.
In a post to the official White House blog, New Media Director Macon Phillips said that it was aware of the reports, but categorically denied the Obama Administration was doing anything nefarious.
“We’re certainly not interested in anyone receiving emails from the White House who don’t want them. That’s one reason why we have never — and will never — add names from a commercial or political list to the White House list,” Phillips wrote. He added changes were being made to prevent future incidents of unwanted e-mail.
One of these measures is the use of CAPTCHA, which would necessitate that each email address be entered invidually. The White House did not say if it had any concrete evidence that these “third party groups” had somehow found a way to batch add e-mail addresses they had compiled.
Certainly, the White House sending unsolicited e-mail is somewhat troubling. At the same time, should we really jump to conclusions right away that what is happening here is nefarious?
Do we distrust government that much? After all, this technology-enhanced participatory government thing is new for all of us. In my opinion, I think we all need to step back, take a breath, and not be so paranoid.
But I guess that’s just me…
#1 by BK on August 19, 2009 - 12:22 pm
I work as a programmer/DBA for a political group on Capitol Hill – I can tell you that just because you “got an email from David Axelrod” does not mean that the Whitehouse used “nefarious means” to get your email address. The political groups that send these emails out have lists with literally millions and millions of email adresses gleaned from web campaigns where people sign petitions/vote/give feedback/donate or pretty much anything else. It’s unlikely that they could have used Axelrod’s name without some kind of consent on the part of himself or his senior staff – so he probably had some say over the “vetting” of the email’s actual contents – But that process is pretty far divorced from the selection of the universe to which that message is to be sent.
The people seeing the bogeyman in the mysterious appearance of an email in their inbox most likely signed up for a petition, casted a vote in an online poll, or something of that nature where an email address was required and simply forgot about it.
#2 by Ed Oswald on August 20, 2009 - 12:36 am
I agree BK. Like I said in the post, I think a lot of this was manufactured by the folks at Fox :D