Electronic Details

During Watergate there were Nixon's secret White House recordings, documenting meetings and phone conversations for historical record. The tapes, of course, later became the key pieces of evidence indicating high level conspiracies surrounding the Watergate break-in and its subsequent investigation. Were it not for those tapes, there would have been no smoking gun.

Today, we see case after case of email being used as documentary evidence for investigations. The eyes of the Beltway have frequently fixed upon Jack Abramoff's email chains. And now, with special investigators looking into claims that elements within the White House leaked the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, email trails have again taken center stage (in the form of documented conversations).

Email technology has created paper and electronic trails where none may have existed before. These records construct time frames, document conversations, and provide a history of interaction, even when that interaction took place behind the veil of double secret background.
Forget for a second the case of Karl Rove (or any other WH staff) and the Plame Affair. Plenty of blogs are already dissecting the legality and appropriateness of the White House's role, even if Joe Wilson managed to ably discredit himself without help from anyone else. There is enough righteous indignation to go around.

What is important to take note of is the way in which seemingly private email has the potential to become very public, and can fill evidentiary gaps more readily than any media in history save phone taps. Separate from the legal implications, loose emails can also cause great embarrassment.

I've always written emails as if I were cc'ing both my mother and the district attorney. As General Counsels across the government and industry come to grips with the best way to cope with this new reality, political managers should take note of policies that protect the candidate from legal or politically embarrassing troubles generated through email traffic.

Changes on the Horizon?

I wanted to correct the record on a matter that was discussed in class last Tuesday.

After anthrax was discovered in the Congressional mailstream in October 2001, deliveries of mail to Congress were suspended for several months. Picture the impact. More than 30,000 pieces of mail per day were held in limbo until corrective security measures could be taken. Constituents were encouraged to contact their representatives in Washington by fax and email. Wary politicians sweated the inability to respond to their constituents.

After instituting the necessary security measures to sanitize mail and ensure its safety, mail delivderies resumed. There were ongoing jokes about Christmas cards delivered in August. In an effort to deal with a problem never before encountered, Congress initiated two pilot programs designed to change the way Congressional offices interact with their constituents.

The first program was an initiative to digitize incoming fax messages and integrate the delivery of those digital images with the public e-mail stream that arrives in each Congressional office. This pilot program has since expanded and is now a service offered to each House office that chooses to utilize it.

The state of the Digital Mail program in the House of Representatives was mischaracterized in class. The progam has not been discontinued and in fact is poised to expand from 20 House offices to 75 House offices. This program is a particularly interesting insight into the 21st century Congressional office operation.

The Digital Mail program scans incoming letters from a remote location and delivers them electronically, populating the images automatically (with metadata identifying address information) into the variety of correspondence management software used by idividual offices.

Both the inbound fax and digital mail programs will continue to grow in popularity with Congressional offices, particularly as the culture adapts to technology. Both programs cut drastically the staff time needed for handling correspondence and provide for greater efficiency and accountability for the interaction with constituents. Both programs also provide for continuity of operations, allowing offices the ability to communicate with constituents no matter their location or circumstance.

Circle the Wagons

There's an interesting cover story in this week's National Journal magazine on the Internet Left. Focusing on the DailyKos and MoveOn, the piece objectively lays out the strategies and context for the progressive movement that has been so successful on the internet, and how it is shaping Democratic politics.

Core to the Internet Left's argument is that the Democrats in Washington simply have not yet come to terms with a minority party status that is reality. It is this context that has given rise to a pugnacious progressive movement trying to reshape and steer the party through internet-centered activity. This activist movement has embraced minority party status and seeks to shape it into an effective opposition.

Right now it is all show and no go. While pioneering effective tools to galvanize grassroots support independent of the Party structure, the Internet Left has reshaped the political battleground in the new media and quickly erased the progressive deficit identified by Frank Watson. But confluent with the movement's rise have been a series of stinging defeats to Democratic candidates at the polls. The root cause of those defeats is the battlefield for debate, and by taking on the establishment of the Democratic party, the Internet Left has engaged in a very high stakes battle of ideas that will ultimately require a reckoning.

There is a limited grace period for electoral defeat before the luster of the Internet Left's movement wears off and other factions of the Party employ similar tactics in the battle for ideological supremacy. Before they are further into the political wilderness in Washington, Democrats must make a sober assessment of who they really are or need to be. It took Republicans decades to truly find themselves and launch the effective and principled opposition that helped them to retake Congress in 1994.

The Internet Left seeks to coalesce the Democratic party around them, yet they have not achieved anything close to the critical mass of support that would enable that, and risk fracturing the party they are trying to direct. There can be no doubting that the movement is strong enough to truly influence debate. Will that influence be affected from inside the party structure or in a more combative struggle against that structure?