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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It can't deny that. It is engaged in mass surveillance of US citizens. Members of Congress use Google Mail just like everyone else. To deny that they may have collected information on a Congressperson just sets them up for yet another scandal.

Presented with that question, NSA gave the only answer it could possibly have given, short of (once again) lying directly to Congress. That's not all that interesting of a result.

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Out of curiosity; what is the official mail system of the USG?

I don't know; I won't work with USG IT. I know the DoD has their own system.

> I won't work with USG IT

This may be none of anyone's business, but I'm curious enough to try asking anyway: is this a moral objection of some sort, or something more mundane (i.e. inconvenient regulatory burden)?

Moral.

What specifically is your moral objection?

I wrote a longer response a couple days ago but the outage ate it. :)

IIRC (because I think "Moral" is likely to be misinterpreted by people reading into it what they want) your response came down to "the moral landscape when working with DOD and DHS in particular, is forbiddingly difficult to navigate, so I've chosen to avoid them both - EPA et al I'd be happy to work with".

Out of curiosity, what do you use for mail?

My friend in USGS reports that they switched last year, from an internally-hosted Lotus install to Google Apps for Business.

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