DHS can’t even get email right

March 3, 2006

I don’t mean to sound picky, but after nearly four years, I kind of hoped the Department of Homeland Security would be further along than this.

Among other woes at Homeland Security, the inspector general’s office says it can’t widely distribute electronic announcements of new watchdog reports. A spokeswoman explains the department lacks capacity to create a mass email list, and “We don’t have a fix at this point.”

Former Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin calls circulating such information crucial.

Feel safer?

Incompetance needs to be the new and constantly repeated frame for this government and its failures. Nothing could be more true.

  • Yes, actually. I feel a little safer. Because the government has shown itself to prefer turning on its own people rather than giving due diligence to real security issues, the dumber they are, the safer we are from them.

  • Wouldn’t you think the DHS would simply choose some spammer, arrest’em as a terr’ist and put them to work (from their detention facility) cranking out mass mailings? How hard is that?

  • They are much better at reading our e-mails than sending their own.
    I’ll bet technology isn’t a problem at NSA.

  • I think knobboy echoed what I was thinking. From my experience with IT people it’s all about solving problems. Give an IT person a problem and plenty of pizza and the problem will be solved. For my money Homeland Security’s IT department is probably staffed with know-nothing kids of Bush Pioneers and Rangers.

  • Meanwhile, I can just imagine the people at NSA sitting around going through our emails and responding to all the Nigerian money scams thinking it would be a clever solution to our massive national debt.

  • I’m sure that someone at NSA reads the progressive blogs on a regular basis.
    Our chance to infiltrate the hearts and minds of an overburdened civil servant.
    Hey you in there, wake up and smell the freedom.

  • I have at least a dozen tenth graders in my English Lit class that could solve the DHS e-mail problem. It strains the imagination to try to imagine what is going on there.

  • I’m grateful the Bush Crime Family knows so little about computers. It gives me great faith that when they “erase” their emails, they’ve only removed their addressing points, so that Congressional investigations will yield immeasurable treasures once they get going after the November elections.

    The only ones we won’t snag that way are

    (1) those with sufficient technical skills to fully erase what they’ve written (but they’re not listened to by the Bush Crime Family anyway, and anyway they’ve mostly been fired for being smart)

    (2) those who, like Bush, are too stupid to learn “email technology” (i.e., how to type a sequence of letters and click ‘send’) in the first place.

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