FC: Congresscritters turning off their email inboxes

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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From: "Thomas Leavitt" <thomasleavitt () hotmail com>
To: "Declan McCullagh" <declan () well com>
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




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