--- From: "Thomas Leavitt" <thomasleavittat_private> To: "Declan McCullagh" <declanat_private> Subject: Our reps. in Washington turning off email. Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 09:51:37 -0800 Organization: B40 Declan, It appears to me that the response of our elected representatives to the flood of public input generated via email, is to simply eliminate email as a means of contacting them. The typical tactic is to require folks to visit the website of the politician in question, and fill out a form there to "email" them. If you buy the figures cited by this guy (http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/), 391 out of the 530 representatives with "email" require you do this (I want to know what dinosaur representatives don't do "email" in any form whatsoever). After receiving the email below, I called the Washington office of Senator Boxer (CA), and confirmed my impression that my email had just gone to the bit-bucket. "We don't have an email any more, it has been turned off, it is not that we don't read it, we don't get it." ... not quite true, given that they have an auto-responder attached, but probably true in effect. Note that her contact page also doesn't explicitly include an address to send letters via USPS... http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/ ... I wonder how many of the representatives and senators who told their constituents that due to the Anthrax scare, postal mail would not be read, or would be delayed for long periods, haven't bothered to tell them they are now welcoming postal mail again. Note that not one single email address is posted anywhere on her site, for staff, or anyone else. I'm certain that "insiders" have the email addresses of staff, and can probably even (how high tech) send emails with attachments. It seems to me that this only furthers the imbalance between the general public and those "in the know" with regards to our ability to exercise our constitutional petition our representatives for redress of grievances, etc. Have you seen any media coverage of this phenomenon, have any of our orgs like EFF, etc. taken any position on this fundamental abrogation of responsibility by our representatives - why is it that the only people who have the option of dealing with the "spam" problem by turning off their email are our elected representatives?!? Everyone else, you and I and businesses across the world, have come up with solutions to make the situation tolerable. Why can't our government and elected representatives trouble themselves to actually deal with public input? Regards, Thomas Leavitt Email: Thank you so much for contacting me. Because of technical difficulties, I am unable to respond to mail sent to this address. To send a message to me, please go to: http://boxer.senate.gov/contact Thank you for taking the time to contact me. I look forward to hearing from you in the future. Barbara Boxer United States Senator ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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