Free Republic

Who knew that the Obama administration had a penchant for black humor? Earlier this year, in February, President Obama told Bill O’Reilly during an interview on Fox News that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS scandal involving the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. In July 2103, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew foreshadowed his boss’s nonchalance by insisting that there was “no evidence” that any political appointee had been involved in the scandal. Now we may know why. After months of delay in responding to congressional inquiries, the IRS now claims that, for the period of January...

The cover-up is always worse than the crime, the conclusion drawn from Watergate, does not seem to have been learned by the IRS or whoever directed it to make the claim late Friday that emails from Lois Lerner to outside agencies (including most notably the White House) were lost in a computer “crash.” That claim is risible according to various experts. Jason Howerton of The Blaze interviewed veteran IT expert Norman Cillo, “an Army veteran who worked in intelligence and a former program manager at Microsoft,” who laid out six reasons, complete with charts, why he believes Congress is being...

Writing yesterday about the IRS’s amazing loss of more than two years of Lois Lerner’s emails (“Where’d they go? They were here just a minute ago!”), I wondered in passing how the Extended White House Public Relations Office, e.g., the New York Times, MSNBC, et al. would handle the news. The Nixon White House, you’ll recall, found quite a lot of the morning’s scrambled on its collective countenance when 18 and 1/2 minutes of audio tape somehow—somehow!—went missing as the Watergate scandal unfolded around the president. What a godsend to the guardians of our “Right to Know” Watergate was! Day...

Welcome to the FossaMail homepage! FossaMail is an Open Source, Mozilla Thunderbird-based mail, news and chat client for Windows, brought to you by the Pale Moon developer (and therefore not affiliated with the Mozilla Corporation). It is an optimized and reconfigured re-build of Mozilla Thunderbird ESR.

Still using email? You might already be behind the curve. Despite the fact that the Defense Department is well into a broad transition to defense enterprise email – with the Army fully migrated, the Air Force partially moved and several Pentagon executive offices on board – at least one top defense official believes email is on its way out. However, that does not mean it’s already known what comes after email. “I’m not sure what the medium is going to be, that’s what we’ve got to build now,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins, director of the Defense Information...

A newly-released government email indicates that within hours of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya; the State Department had already concluded with certainty that the Islamic militia terrorist group Ansar al Sharia was to blame. The private, internal communication directly contradicts the message that President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and White House press secretary Jay Carney repeated publicly over the course of the next several weeks. They often maintained that an anti-Islamic YouTube video inspired a spontaneous demonstration that escalated into violence. The email is entitled “Libya...

Baehr and Will Davis, were summoned to Washington for a meeting with the Postmaster General. Evan and Will wondered what it could be, “They must have seen the recent coverage in CNBC, maybe they’ll help our company expand?” Or, “maybe they wanted the traditional photo opportunity and positive media buzz that political actors care so much about. Surely their company made the Post Office look good, right?” But when the Postmaster General came out to meet them, the stark reality became clear, they weren’t interested in a photo-op. As Evan and Will describe it: “This 30-minute meeting was the end...

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spends roughly $123.2 million per year to provide “email services” for its 70,000 employees, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Buried in a footnote of a recently released GAO report on the agency’s coordination with the nonprofit group Enroll America, the congressional watchdog detailed the high operating costs associated with running the department’s email. “HHS told us that HHS pays $146.64 per month per user for email; that this charge covers connectivity, storage, and other e-mail services; and that this charge is independent of the number of emails that are sent...

Good day, My family and I are currently searching for another email provider. We are seeking a service which uses SMTP-TLS in order to protect their clients privacy. Any suggestions/recommendations? Does anyone use FastMail? Thanks, TJI

Organizing For Action is, of course, the group founded by Team Obama in 2009 after he was sworn in to push his agenda while in office. It’s the successor to Obama For America, his 2008 campaign outfit. The first OFA got him elected, the second OFA is supposed to help get his policies through Congress. Here’s who was running the scrupulously impartial IRS Exempt Organizations Division that targeted dozens of tea-party nonprofits for extra scrutiny. Was she joking or wasn’t she? That’s the juiciest bit released today by the House Ways and Means Committee, which voted — along party lines,

Fundraising emails frequently offer an amusing glimpse into the thinking and strategy of a political party. Remember earlier this month when Democrat senators took to the floor for an overnight session about “climate change”? The very concerned senators warned of grave consequences of human activity, painted pictures of global catastrophe, and chided critics and “deniers” of “settled science.” And then proposed exactly zero words of legislation in a chamber they control. **SNIP** Now comes a fundraising email from Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA): We must rise to the challenge, but too many people are standing in our way.

The Congressional investigation into whether the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups for persecution ended today on a controversial note after former official Lois Lerner refused to answer questions. The rough day for the investigation followed the release of emails corroborating political targeting of groups. The emails, obtained by the House's investigative committee, indicated that Lerner, in her official capacity, aimed to target political groups out of concern that the Citizens United ruling would lead to more suspicious or inappropriate tax filings. The ruling repealed much of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act and allowed individuals and political groups to...

<p>Yahoo reported on Thursday that some of its users' e-mail accounts may have been targeted in a security breach of a third-party database.</p> <p>"Recently, we identified a coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts," the company said in a blog post on its Tumblr site. "Upon discovery, we took immediate action to protect our users, prompting them to reset passwords on impacted accounts."</p>

The NSA orchestrated Internet vulnerabilities against the directive of Congress Every child learns not to touch a neighbor’s mailbox. “That’s a federal crime,” he’s told, and for good reason. However, the transactions and love-hate letters that used to go through physical mailboxes now go through electronic ones. The U.S. government cannot protect their privacy. What the laws and customs that surround the U.S. mail once did is now done by encryption. Government’s own role is problematic, because many of its various agencies want to look into our mailboxes by defeating encryption. We can understand how serious a matter this is...

**SNIP** The brouhaha started when Kennedy, who’s president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center, blasted out a holiday card with an image of her family, a biblical quote and “Merry Christmas.” Even though the recipients were bcc’d, thanks to a tech glitch, anyone who responded by hitting “Reply All” sent their message plus e-mail address to Kennedy’s full distribution list. **SNIP** But as an unending stream of trite responses clogged inboxes, a war of words broke out. “Please remove me from mass e-mails to Kerry in reply to her christmas card,” snapped activist Valerie Sklarevsky. “Please REMOVE ME FROM YOUR...

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION FBI. WASHINGTON DC. ANTI-TERRORIST AND MONETARY CRIMES DIVISION FBI HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON, D.C. FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION J. EDGAR HOOVER BUILDING 935 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, NW WASHINGTON, D.C. 20535-0001 Attention: Beneficiary, Series of meetings have been held over the past 7 months with the secretary general of the United Nations Organization. This ended 3 days ago. It is obvious that you have not received your fund which is to the tune of $3.5,000,000,00 Million us dollars due to past corrupt Governmental Officials who almost held the fund to themselves for their selfish reason and some individuals who...

A public university sent an email to alumni highlighting the esteemed research of one of its professors — research that notes many similarities between the old Ku Klux Klan and its modern-day equivalent, the tea party. The University of Washington’s email to alumni asked the question four separate times: “Is The Tea Party like the Ku Klux Klan?” Christopher Parker, a UW political science professor, argues in a new book that there are major similarities. The book is titled “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in Contemporary America.” “In this commentary from Professor Christopher Parker...

New computer with Windows 7 and latest IE version . When I click on a email contact hyperlink on websites I am not able to access automatically via Windows Live Mail which my old HP with the same 7 and IE has no problem with . A message pops up in Japanese , something about the mail client ( I ) hasn't correctly installed something or other etcetc...Anyway , I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of correcting some settings in either Live Mail or IE . Anybody have any idea what's up ?

Email might be on the verge of a radical makeover. And the NSA is not going to like it. On Wednesday, two American companies with a track record of offering encrypted private communications are set to join forces in an unprecedented bid to counter dragnet Internet spying. Some of the world’s top cryptographers are behind the secure communications provider Silent Circle,

Update: Yahoo! Email Recycling October 7, 2013 Allison here. We’ve recently discussed the June 2013 Yahoo! announcement indicating that the company would be recycling old email addresses, allowing users to pick them up if they wanted something simpler i.e. janedoe instead of janedoe34732. This program launched within the past several weeks, and a few users have received emails intended for the previous owner, and these emails emails contain personally identifiable information that put these previous owners at risk for identity theft. However, when Yahoo! first announced this program, they reassured users that it would not compromise their personal information or lead to...