White House Admits Mistakes Were Made (By Someone Else, Natch) on Spam Email List

As I guessed, they're blaming this on their overly-enthusiastic cultists, claiming they did nothing wrong, except trust too much.

Advocacy groups and partisans, they claim, were signing up emails not their own.

We only have their word for that. There is a chance they had an email vaccuum fishing addresses out of their fishy-reporting snitch headquarters -- grabbing the emails of everyone there, including emails forwarded as "fishy" -- but of course they're not going to admit that or allow us to inspect their story.

Now, this makes me very suspicious: the flag@whitehouse.gov address is now non-funcitonal. Emails bounce from there, and you get this message:

The email address you just sent a message to is no longer in service.We are now accepting your feedback about health insurance reform via:http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck

Now, supposedly, the White House is tightening up the lax sign-up procedures that allegedly lead to citizens being spammed by its government.

But when I go to that new address, there is a simple sign-in with no warning about signing up other people. Furthermore, I signed up a new email I made myself to test what would happen -- would they send me a confirmatory email asking me if I had intended to sign-up? To make sure this is not a bogus sign-up?

It's now been a half-hour and thusfar no such confirmatory email. I wasn't warned not to sign up someone else; I only had to enter a zip code (which was false, buy the way); and so far the only message I've gotten from them is "Thank you for signing up."

It seems odd to me that if phony sign-ups were indeed the problem, they have so far added nothing to prevent this, and furthermore, whatever new protections they plan on adding could have been added to flag@whitehouse.gov.

But they were not.

Which makes me suspicious that the problem here was flag@whitehouse.gov, all along, and that they are not busy diabling and deleting its functions.

posted by Ace at 12:00 PM

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