June 19, 2006
When Auto-Delete Just Isn’t Enough
BY: Andy Sharpless
In this day and age, there’s little you can’t do online. Book a flight? Click. File your taxes? Click. Chat with Aunt Sally on the other side of the world? Click. Contact your representative? Not so fast.
Congress wants to add “logic puzzles” to its already difficult web forms in an effort to reduce the amount of e-mails it gets from those troublesome folks that elected them to office. Apparently, sending an e-mail like this one through an advocacy group, doesn’t qualify you as a constituent with a legitimate concern. You need to answer questions like “what’s 5 minus 1?” to get your Congressman (most likely, your Congressman’s staffer) to read your e-mail.
Advocacy groups are not letting this slide. Oceana has joined with at least 30 other groups in a letter to Congress today stating among other things that this technology “raise[s] dangerous questions about the infringement of constituents’ First Amendment rights.” It’s not yet clear whether we’ll be sending this letter via snail mail.
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