Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Huh?
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_08_02-2009_08_08.shtml#1249412628
A reader passed along the "all your computers belong to us" story that
first broke on the Glenn Beck show; here's [1]PolitiFact's summary,
with the government response:
[On his show, Beck quoted the following statement from cars.gov]:
"This application provides access to the DOT CARS system. When
logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a federal
computer system and it is property of the United States Government.
Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be
intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and
disclosed to authorized CARS, DOT, and law enforcement personnel,
as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic
and foreign." ...
The Department of Transportation confirmed the language was on the
cars.gov Web site, but on Aug. 3 it was removed. The DOT released
this statement to PolitiFact: "A security warning on the CARS.gov
dealer support page that stated computers logged into the system
were considered property of the Federal Government has been
removed. We are working to revise the language. The language was
posted on the portion of the website accessible by car dealers and
not the general public."
"It would be factually inaccurate to say that any computer that
went to cars.gov would become the property of the U.S. government,"
said Sasha Johnson, a DOT spokeswoman said....
What a screw-up. I have no reason at this point to think that this was
part of some malevolent government conspiracy, or even of a
well-intentioned but ill-thought-through design. It might well have
been an error by one low-level Web designer, which wasn't reviewed by
any higher-up. Still, what a mistake to make, especially when people
are understandably concerned that the federal government in general
likes to poke around on your computer systems. (I approve of some
degree of such poking around, in some cases, but the existence of
federal computer surveillance and the growth of such surveillance
makes erroneous claims of such surveillance especially plausible and
frightening to people.)
PolitiFact goes on to point out that the Glenn Beck item was mistaken
in suggesting that the warning purported to apply to consumers -- it
only applies to dealers that access that part of the site. I think in
the course of this, PolitiFact underestimates the propriety of the
criticism (referring to "the small amount of truth in their comments
[on the Beck program]") and exaggerates the error. But that's
tangential to the point I'm making here, which is about the Department
of Transportation error and not about the Beck program's errors.
References
1.
http://www.politifact.org/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/03/kimbery-guilfoyle/glenn-beck-claims-governments-cash-clunkers-web-si/
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
