I have two quotes for you: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who will watch the watchers?), from Juvenal, a Roman poet (late first century B.C. to early second century B.C.), and “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” from Lord Acton, a British historian (1834 to 1902).
I have two quotes for you: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who will watch the watchers?), from Juvenal, a Roman poet, late first century B.C. to early second century B.C., and “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” from Lord Acton, a British historian (1834 to 1902).
What got me thinking about these quotes was the recent “loss” by the Republican National Committee (RNC) of reportedly 50 million e-mail messages. Assuming an average message size of 20KB, that’s around 1 terabyte of data.
You don’t just “lose” a terabyte. You are either negligent and allow the data to be deleted or you knowingly purge it. Sure, you can have a system crash, but that’s what backups are for! When you have a legal responsibility to maintain data in the public interest it should be jail time if you fail.
The White House’s lost data snafu happened a couple of weeks ago when congressional investigators looking into the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys asked for copies of the messages sent through the RNC’s private e-mail system. The RNC responded with what amounted to “Oops, we’ve lost them, we’ll see if we can find them.”
The reason for White House staff to use the RNC system rather than the White House e-mail system is that the Hatch Act makes it illegal to use government equipment and services for partisan political purposes. The problem for the RNC is that the e-mail messages are covered by the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which was passed because Richard Nixon tried to get rid of the records of his Watergate misdeeds.
Thus it was that when the congressional committee tried to follow the virtual-paper trail they ran straight into a real wall. Given that Karl Rove and at least 50 other top dogs in the RNC use the system, it is hard to be surprised that it would be, to be euphemistic, “undesirable” for anyone to be able to follow the trail.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is reported to not use e-mail at all (no surprise there) and in a CNBC interview in October last year President Bush said ““I tend not to e-mail or — not only tend not to e-mail, I don’t e-mail, because of the different record requests that can happen to a president. I don’t want to receive e-mails because, you know, there’s no telling what somebody’s e-mail may — it would show up as, you know, a part of some kind of a story, and I wouldn’t be able to say, `Well, I didn’t read the e-mail.’ `But I sent it to your address, how can you say you didn’t?’ So, in other words, I’m very cautious about e-mailing.”
Again, why are we not surprised?
So, here we have the incumbent government of the greatest power on earth that avoids modern communications tools and that resorts to the old “the dog ate my homework” excuse to cover up when it actually does use them! Wow.
Here’s my proposal: We get rid of the Hatch Act at least as it applies to communications and enact a law that requires the Library of Congress or a similar body to maintain a distributed, redundant government mail archive. Without exception, all governmental and political e-mail, voice mail, and perhaps even telephone calls will be securely archived and encrypted so that they can be made available to congressional committees, for other legal enquiries, and under the Freedom of Information Act.
The ideal places for these messaging warehouses are in areas with little seismic activity such as the Nevada desert or in north Texas. We dig a big hole and stick a nuclear reactor in it (cooling it by using the surrounding rock mass as a heat sink) and then sit the data warehouse on top. We then run fiber between the centers and to all metropolitan areas and voilá! Redundant, high-performance, power-efficient data warehouses run for the people by the people so when want to see what the heck the pols have been up to we can.
Of course the pols will always be corrupt, but at least there will be a better chance that we can watch what they do. And it will be nice for us to spy on them for a change.
