New E-mail System Helps Congress Sort Messages
By Nikki Schwab, Washington Whispers
A congressional E-mail system slated for implementation next year has Capitol Hill aides drooling. The setup will help offices better sort messages to determine if they are part of grass-roots campaigns, a benefit to aides trying to figure out if a writer is part of a broader lobbying effort. "Their mouths start watering, and they say, 'Tell me when,'" says Tim Hysom of the Congressional Management Foundation, the organization leading the charge. With most communications to members of Congress arriving electronically, it's a big deal. "What we are really trying to do is develop a set of standards that would then allow staff to spend less of their time administering the mail and more of their time communicating," explains Hysom.
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Reader Comments
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You learn this early in journalism school or any feature writing class - never, ever, ever lead with a question the reader can answer No to. ,
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This was our time to rise up, our time to take the mantle of this nation. ,
This is data mining
For this to be possible, it implies that your personal affiliations and any mailing list or group activities have been tracked. I think this falls under the personal privacy act. If this is correct, I am very concerned.
At present email applications already have the ability to flag a message from a repeat sender and categorize it based on previous interactions.
So who is developing this database, who owns it and where is the information coming from?
Is it an enemies list? A donor list? a people who write blogs list?
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