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An Activist’s Life, by Thomas Leavitt » Blog Archive » White House Web Mail response: insecure, unauthenticated, uses PDF attachment, bad all around.

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August 11th, 2003
Activism

White House Web Mail response: insecure, unauthenticated, uses PDF attachment, bad all around.

[Sent this to Declan McCullagh and Dave Farber tonight. -Thomas]

A form letter response from the White House in PDF format?!?

I did a few searches on this… very little coverage other than a flurry of articles on the 18th… most of them negative… none of them mention the technological aspect of requiring those of us who write to the White House to install a proprietary piece of software from a private sector corporation in order to read a basic communication from an elected official.

I don’t have any beef with Adobe, I have Acrobat Reader installed and use it daily, but the implication that if I don’t, my government won’t talk to me is absurd and undemocratic. Yes, it is theoretically possible to read PDF files without Acrobat, but all indications are that this is a less than competitive alternative… indeed, if you look at the Webopedia web page, it doesn’t even bother mentioning any alternatives. The Wikipedia web page mentions other alternatives, but I have a hard time believing that the average consumer will find them accessible; see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

What if your PC doesn’t have Adobe Acrobat available for it? My parents use an Amiga… here’s an article describing what one person had to go through to be able to read PDF format files on his Amiga… I doubt things have changed dramatically since he prepared it in 1998: http://www.mikety.net/Articles/PDF.story/PDF.story.html

Aren’t they entitled to be able to read what their government has to say without going through all this hassle? What about all those folks whose email clients/computing systems (such as a Cidco MailStation or a purely text based environment) can’t read PDF attachments or are set up to reject all attachments (such as many of our elected representatives have chosen to do)?

The use of PDF over plain ASCII text (or even HTML, shudder) is purely cosmetic (and perhaps laziness, since I suspect the original was prepared in MS Word). Futhermore, if you open the “Document Security” menu option, you’ll see that no security precautions have been made whatsoever. “Security Method: None” “Changing the Document: Allowed” “Encryption Level: None”. The email the PDF is attached to contains no digital signature (how difficult would that be?!?) and thus the entire process invites “spoofing” and impersonation - especially given the massive delays between submission and response (I have no idea what I wrote, or when, to generate this response).

Who built this turkey? It needs to be taken out and shot.

Regards,
Thomas Leavitt

—– Original Message —–
From:
To:
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 6:14 AM
Subject: Re: Web Mail to President George W. Bush to Write a Supporting Comment on Foreign Policy (Human Rights)

Thank you for your interest in White House Web Mail.
A PDF formatted reply is attached. You must
have Adobe Acrobat reader installed to view the attachment.
A free Acrobat reader is available at: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

automated email response from White House in PDF format

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2003 at 11:16 pm, 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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