By David Gewirtz
For the past few days, we've been struggling with where to take the White House email story. Even though email management in the Executive Office of the President is a relatively arcane topic, it's also a big topic with a lot to cover.
For example, there's a deep, rich, convoluted history about how email has been used in the White House going back all the way to 1982. From what we can tell, every president from Ronald Reagan onward has "lost" some key email messages. There are the issues of conversion from Lotus Notes to Outlook and the possibility of lost email messages in this White House due to that conversion. There are questions of backup strategy, and even technical discussions of how lost email messages might be found.
"In the 2,072 days since September 11, 2001, a minimum of 103.6 million messages have likely been sent by White House staffers, completely in the open, for anyone to read."
We'll do our best to cover all of these topics in coming weeks. However, since we've been following the path of the GWB43.COM domain name through SMARTech, a small Chattanooga ISP, and we know that Karl Rove and 21 other White House officials, abiding by the Hatch Act, run political email through GWB43.COM and SMARTech, we thought it best to look at the quite troubling national security implications of this practice.
Quick recap
Let's do a quick recap first. The Hatch Act says that government workers can't use government facilities to engage in political activities. As a key political advisor, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove is subject to the Hatch Act and when he wants to send email messages of a political nature, the law requires him to use non-government systems to do so.
The non-government systems he uses appears to be servers operated by SMARTech Corporation, a 12-person ISP located in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We know that that SMARTech operates a Postfix email server (a well-respected open source email server). Due to evidence showing SMARTech's Jeff Averbeck appearing in a Microsoft press release, it's also likely that SMARTech operates a Microsoft Exchange server, but that's really just educated speculation.
In the April 13, 2007 Press Gaggle, White House Acting Press Secretary Dana Perino confirmed that White House staffers use Outlook and BlackBerry handhelds.
