Treasury breaks word on e-mail anonymity

Interesting (and not good) story from News.Com bq. The U.S. Treasury Department plans to publish nearly 10,000 e-mail addresses on the Web, violating its privacy promise to Americans who used e-mail to comment on a government proceeding. bq. In March 2003, the Treasury Department's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) asked for e-mail comments about a proposal that could raise the price of malt beverages like Bacardi Breezer and Smirnoff Ice. At the time, the department said that the text of comments would be made public--but assured people that e-mail addresses, home addresses and other personal information of individuals would be removed first. bq. "For the convenience of the public, we will...post comments received in response to this notice on the TTB Web site," the initial notice said. "All comments posted on our Web site will show the name of the commenter, but will not show street addresses, telephone numbers, or e-mail addresses." The TTB is the successor to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, portions of which are now part of the Department of Homeland Security. bq. As news of the proposed regulations circulated around malt beverage aficionados online, word-of-mouth took over and comments started flooding in to nprm@ttb.gov. By October, the Treasury Department had received about 9,900 e-mail messages, plus 4,800 comments sent through the U.S. mail or fax--and decided it could no longer keep its promise. bq. "The unusually large number of comments received...has made it difficult to remove all street addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses from the comments for posting on our Internet Web site in a timely manner," the Treasury Department said in a follow-up notice, published last month in the Federal Register. "Therefore, to ensure that the public has Internet access to the thousands of comments received...at the earliest practicable time, we will post comments received on that notice on our Web site in full, including any street addresses, telephone numbers, or e-mail addresses contained in the comments." Email harvesters are gonna have a field day - expect more spam from your friends in Government - we are here to help you! Bleagh...