Chapter nine 
Government by Inter-Newt
In my quest to unearth some deeper truth about our electronic culture, my adventure in detaching fact from fancy, perhaps the only claim I heard more often than the one about how our interpersonal relationships will be forever transformed was the one about how our democratic form of government will be radically altered. Barely a day would pass without my reading a magazine article or Usenet posting announcing in no uncertain terms that the Net was absolutely, decisively, and positively going to turn Washington upside down and inside out. Thanks to electronic mail and many other inventive ways and means of swapping information through phone lines, the nation’s democratic process was soon to become an open book, accessible, convenient to all, and as wonderfully efficient as a Pizza Hut! (I’ll take welfare reform with extra cheese, thank you.)
The Government Transformation Forecast goes like this: our representatives in Washington have to this point been a distant, privileged, inaccessible elite who listen only to the pleasing rip rip rip sounds emanating from the fatcat lobbyists’ checkbooks. But soon—once you, and I, and every loyal citizen with a modem and a keyboard begin forcefully and instantaneously telling our congresspeople, our senators, and even president© whitehouse.gov what we think, what we want, and when we want it—the direction of our nation will be firmly in our hands—safe, secure, just the way Thomas Jefferson originally intended.
Sounds good, but is it true?
I’ll give you three guesses.
The federal government is using E-mail big time; in fact almost every office in our nation’s capital is linked to almost every other office, and increasingly these offices are being linked to the outside, to the public, to us. We can, indeed, send E-mail to the White House on any issue, from term limits to our neighbor’s annoying habit of dumping lawn clippings in the street.
And many, both within and without the government, seem convinced that this greater access will lead to greater involvement on the part of We the People, more accountability on the part of our elected officials, and a more Jeffersonian, more responsive, more productive, more perfect union. In a progress report entitled “Technology for Economic Growth,” President Clinton himself promised that this new information technology will dramatically improve the way the federal government serves the people.
Well, I have my doubts, as I’ve indicated, especially when it comes to elected representatives and the entrenched bureaucracy that helps them accomplish so little. Wanting to know more about these improvements in service, I used my own considerable influence and sweet-talked myself into a visit with the techno-bureaucrats who operate the House E-mail network. We rendezvoused one Thursday on an upstairs floor of the dismal but charmingly bulky Gerald R. Ford House Office Building. The people I met were exceedingly nice, well informed, and wore more powerful power ties than I personally have ever worn. Before they even spoke, however, it was made clear that I could not, under any circumstances short of torture, reveal to you their names.
I can tell you the name of their boss at the time, Charlie Rose, Democrat-NC, chairman of the Committee on House Administration before the New Republicans took over; but I can’t tell you who they are. A Rose by any other name, you see, would get these bureaucrats in trouble.
I was told that this is a standard rule in Washington, though it is nowhere written down. When reporters refer to “House sources,” this is what they mean. They mean the men and women who do all the work but aren’t up for reelection every few years and don’t really need the publicity.
“It’s the way the Hill works,” the senior bureaucrat told me. “All the credit goes to the representatives.”
Wowza, I thought. I’m in the Halls of Power now.
The House sources I met, my House sources, are responsible for every congressperson’s electronic mail link and, for that matter, for the E-mail going in and out, down and through all the offices that serve our splendidly recompensed elected officials. As part of this responsibility, they oversee the United States House of Representatives Constituent Electronic Mail System.
All House offices have access to internal electronic mail, and last year they were sending messages back and forth at a dizzying rate of 6,066 a day, but by early 1995 only about forty House members also had “public mailboxes,” open to the voters. For instance, georgia6@hr.house.gov is Newt Gingrich, and if you send Newt Gingrich a message, the Constituent Electronic Mail System is what responds.
Neat, huh? You can E-mail Newt Gingrich.
Except we are talking about Washington, right? And nothing is simple in Washington. If you send electronic mail to Newt or anyone else, what you will get back is a rapid electronic form letter from an auto-responder. An auto-responder is a bit of software sorcery that receives your message, takes note of your return address, and responds, all with no human intervention. Think of it as a robotic federal clerk that, thankfully, has no need for healthcare or dental benefits.
The auto-response begins like this:
Thank you for contacting me through the House of Representatives Constituent Electronic Mail System (CEMS). I am pleased to be a part of this effort to offer citizens a quick and efficient way to communicate with the representatives in Congress.
Quick and efficient is really a matter of opinion, however. The auto-response is certainly quick, taking as few as five seconds on a slow mail day, but that’s it, electronically speaking.
If you come from the representative’s home district, then maybe three or four months down the line someone might read your message and the massive federal Information SuperLogJam will send you, through the U.S. Mail, another letter, saying, “Though the representative doesn’t necessarily agree with your views on sending convicted criminals to live 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, he has voted many times to stiffen criminal penalties and he greatly values your opinions.”
This bears repeating: the electronic mail we send our representatives gets answered through the U.S. Postal Service, that behemoth of a bureaucracy that E-mail is supposed to gloriously sidestep. On the very day I met with my House sources, in fact, The Washington Post reported that the D.C. area had “the worst mail service in the nation.” Postal inspectors had found undelivered mail in one post office that was over five months late.
“Of course to the Internet gurus,” my House source explains, “this is blasphemy?
And did you notice the second catch? Representatives will only respond if you come from their home district.
My highly placed House source explains that as well. “The internal rules are such that representatives cannot be responding to a constituent not in their district, because if they did that it would be considered electioneering.”
Electioneering means canvassing for votes, and representatives can only canvas for votes at home; otherwise they are stepping on some other representative’s toes, or running for president. We wouldn’t want that either, would we?
Well, maybe not in Newt’s case.
Over at the Senate, on the other hand, I found a source who was willing to be named. Chris Casey, Technology Policy Advisor to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, is a bit of an internet guru in the federal system. Among other things, he has a really neat picture of the U.S. Capitol attached to the bottom of all his outgoing Email messages.
Casey estimates that maybe twelve Senators have public mailboxes. Unlike the House, however, which maintains a list of addresses that can be obtained via E-mail, Casey explained that no public list existed of E-mail addresses for Senators.
I don’t mean to sound rude, or maybe I do, but really, if the addresses aren’t publicly available, they are hardly public, are they? I love Washington. People in Washington make Groucho Marx seem logical.
Senator Kennedy does have a public public mailbox though, (senator@kennedy.senate.gov), and his office is clearly at the forefront of computer networking. And yes, I know that a lot of people would like to hear Senator Kennedy jokes here, but I happen to like the senator, and you have all heard the jokes anyway, so just insert them here yourself.
So, what is Kennedy doing with the Net?
“In May of 1993,” Casey explained, “Senator Kennedy’s office began posting the senator’s press releases and statements to a small network of computer bulletin boards in Massachusetts and providing users the means to comment electronically. Thanks to assistance from the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, these same materials were also posted to two Usenet newsgroups (ne.politics, talk.politics.misc) and were kept at an ftp archive at MIT. When the senate Internet sites became available, we began to also post the same materials to them.”
He had more to say, but I found myself distracted by a simple question: if the Internet only gives us greater access to our elected officials’ press releases and public statements, and not to our elected officials, how the hell is it going to change the world?
And then there is the White House. Despite repeated attempts, I could get no one at the White House to talk with me about their use of the Internet and electronic mail, even when I mentioned that I thought Bob Dole looked remarkably like Doctor Strange-love. But, then, who could blame them. It seems these days that whenever the White House talks to anyone about anything, a special prosecutor is appointed.
Here, though, is what I do know about the White House:
1. They do have public electronic mail addresses:
—president@whitehouse.gov
—vice-president@whitehouse.gov
—socks-the-cat@whitehouse.gov
2. It is unclear who reads the E-mail. Maybe the cat.
But it is neat to send messages to the White House, and fun to tell your friends. I sent the following, for instance:
Date: 15 August 1994, 11:11:54 EDT
From: D. W. Moore
Subject: Lawn Clippings
To: president@whitehouse.gov
Dear Sir,
My neighbor, Ed, repeatedly, throughout the summer, has been dumping his lawn clippings off the curb and onto the street in front of his home. When it rains, these clippings wash down to my curb, where they create an unsightly and dangerous green goo-like substance. My local township officials have no interest in solving this problem, so I am appealing to you. Could legislation be sponsored that would make this a federal crime? Or could you call Ed? He voted for you, and respects your opinion.
Thank you,
D. W. Moore
And, yes, they actually answered.
The auto-responder, concerned and responsive as always, considered my query for three-quarters of an hour, then sent back this reassuring note:
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 94 11:57:35
From: autoresponder@whitehouse.gov
Subject: Re: Lawn Clippings
To: D. W. Moore
Thank you for writing to President Clinton via electronic mail. Since June 1993, white-house.gov has received over 250,000 messages from people all over the world.
Although the volume of mail prevents the President from personally reviewing each message, the mail is read by White House staff. Your concerns, ideas, and suggestions are carefully recorded and communicated to the President weekly with a representative sampling of the mail.
Of course, if you include your street address in your message to the White House, you may eventually receive a personalized response by U.S. Mail. A crack team of epistolary scribes has drafted a dizzying array of form letters that vaguely address any issue we can raise, and one of these form letters will be picked out of a computer file, printed on White House stationery, and sent your way within mere weeks.
Do you see how E-mail is changing everything?
Even though our elected officials are eager to use the Internet to send public policy pronouncements and thrilling notices of their day-to-day accomplishments to various Usenet groups and electronic mailing lists, it is beginning to seem clear that they have this problem with the messages we send them. To be blunt, they treat electronic mail from you and me, the loyal and blameless voters, as if it were the badly soiled diaper of a radioactive child.
Why?
Actually, there are some good reasons.
The folks in Washington are very concerned about what is called “spoof” mail. By this they don’t mean imbecilic morons who send dumb but essentially harmless messages about lawn clippings, they mean people who send harmful messages. There are a few scenarios, and they are very real and very possible.
“Security is a big problem,” my House source explained, “in and out. Every which way. Who is sending? Who is responding? Where does the mail really come from?”
If I knew more about computers, basic stuff that undergraduate computer science majors learn by their third semester, I could forge my address, sending E-mail to the White House or to Newt Gingrich that appeared to be coming from somewhere else.
For instance, I could E-mail a death threat to the president. (Don’t do it! This is not a joke.) It has been done. Some people are in a lot of trouble.
A college student in Illinois, for instance, is alleged to have sent a message to President Clinton from a purely fictitious address (Almighty@Never.Gonna.Catch.Me), and the message said, “I am curious, Bill, how would you feel about being the first president to be killed on the same day as his wife?”
Unpleasant stuff, and a federal offense. Despite the attempt at anonymity, the Secret Service tracked the young man down; the kid was caught, charged, and is reported to have confessed.
In Lufkin, Texas, another student is alleged to have pulled a similar prank, trying in this case, however, to make it seem as if the death threat came from his former roommate at Stephen F. Austin State University. He was arrested, too. Presumably, he has a new roommate now. At least for the next five to ten years.
These guys were apprehended, but each and every day people get more and more clever at forging false return addresses, and there is seemingly no end to the resourcefulness of computer hackers, especially the really slimy ones.
Then there is electronic mail going the other way. A clever hacker could potentially, and probably without breaking a very big sweat, send messages to certain people that would appear to be from Bill Clinton. “Please come back to Washington right away, Senator Helms. The president would like to give you a free midnight tour of the Secret Service shooting range,” or, “Yes, Mr. Citizen, I happen to agree wholeheartedly with your views on twenty-four-hour term limits, and hereby pledge to devote my full resources to making that goal an immediate reality.”
The opportunities for abuse are staggering. Yes, you can pull these pranks by phone or conventional mail, too, but the Internet is new and fancy, so people are presently more prone to play with it. The government hasn’t yet figured out convenient routines for dealing with it, either.
Chris Casey at Senator Kennedy’s office worries about another potential problem—electronic mailbox stuffing.
“It is very common for interest groups and organizations to use mass mailing campaigns of postcards, letters, telegrams, and so on in order to try to send a message to a member of Congress by inundating them with mail,” Casey noted. “Using E-mail, that won’t take any organized campaigns, just an individual who feels it is somehow better to send a duplicate electronic message over and over and over again. Unlike postcards stacking up in our mailroom, these messages are bytes, becoming kilobytes and megabytes on that member’s computer network!”
In other words, the gun lobby would no longer need volunteers with writer’s cramp in order to stuff a mailbox, they could just program a computer, as was done in the case of Crosspost & Spam. The machine could send thousands of messages an hour, all of them perhaps randomized to seem as if they are coming from thousands of different electronic addresses. All it takes is some cleverness and a plug.
Casey explained how, in this instance, the auto-responder offers a hidden benefit. “The unexpected (but effective) side effect of the auto-responder approach is that it discourages such mass mailings by giving back as good as we get.”
Send five thousand messages to Senator Kennedy, you see, and you will get five thousand in return. See whose computer blows up first.
If the true wonder of Internet access to government is not the people you can reach, perhaps it is the information that can be uncovered. Most access providers permit you to use a feature called the Internet Gopher, a research tool that burrows rodentlike through countless worldwide computer files in search of the document you need.
The tireless Gopher can even tunnel under the earth, to our nation’s capital, below the Office of Management and Budget, under Alice Rivlin’s desk, through the thick nap of her royal blue carpet, and retrieve for you the actual Budget of the United States.
You can get it, sure, but the problem is, you then have to read it. Good luck.
And Newt Gingrich himself, shortly after his ascension to Speaker of the House, announced the opening of a new on-line site called THOMAS (as in Jefferson) where the full text of every House bill since 1992 would be available for public scrutiny. He threatened to also put the Congressional Record on-line, so we could pour over transcripts of each and every speech made on the House floor.
Further on, if you know where to look, you can even uncover the following government offerings:
• Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance: information about more than one thousand U.S. government assistance programs. (The main reason the Budget is so big.)
• Congressional Office of Technology Assessment Reports: full text of reports produced by the Office of Technology Assessment, which conducts detailed studies for Congress on a wide range of subjects, from climate change to health care reform. (The other reason the Budget is so big.)
• Agricultural Genome Gopher: genome information from the National Agricultural Library system about agriculturally important plants and animals. (No comment.)
• Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature: database of planetary place names that have been approved by the International Astronomical Union; courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey system. (Fascinating.)
• Ribosomal Database Project: access to a database of ribosomal RNA sequences, software useful in manipulating the data, and more. (This, I gotta have!)
Only a tiny sample of course, but frankly, I couldn’t even bear to look at the rest. Perhaps I’m simply not enough of a concerned citizen, but access to information like this makes me want to go back into Usenet and search for pictures of swimsuit supermodels. Cindy Crawford has a certain je ne sais quoi that I do not find in, for instance, the Speaker of the House.
Back to Thoreau a moment.
Way back when men were men, ponds supported aquatic life, and the federal government had barely enough employees to field a decent softball team, he wrote this:
But to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.
Okay, then—here is the kind of government that would command my respect:
• A government where the House sources all have names, and they are allowed to use them.
• A government that either doesn’t accept my E-mail or, if it does, has the good sense to answer in kind.
• A government where no men are named for salamanders.
• And, finally, a government where the civil servants keep fully informed, pouring over the Gazetteer of PlanetaryNomenclature, memorizing and cataloging the genomes of every single agriculturally important plant and animal, and keeping fully abreast of the entire Ribosomal Database Project, so that you and I never, ever, ever have to give these important documents a moment’s thought.
Isn’t that why we pay our civil servants so much money?