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An Activist’s Life, by Thomas Leavitt » Blog Archive » Washington Abandons email (letter to Declan McCullagh)

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December 2nd, 2002
Activism

Washington Abandons email (letter to Declan McCullagh)

[Declan runs Politech, www.politechbot.com, a politics and technology list with a very wide and influential readership. He gets a ton of email daily, so who knows if he’ll publish this. -Thomas]

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

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 2nd, 2002 at 9:53 am, and is filed under Activism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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