This issue received so much press that the White House provided an official response and Fox news did an interview with Major (the reporter who surfaced the issue) this morning. I’ve updated my original blog post to contain links to these.

http://blog.bronto.com/2009/08/14/white-house-email-acquisition-controversy/

Of significant interest, the WH says:

““The White House e-mail list is made up of e-mail addresses obtained solely through the White House website. The White House doesn’t purchase, upload or merge from any other list. … [A]ll e-mails come from the White House website
as we have no interest in emailing anyone who does not want to receive an email.

“If an individual received the e-mail because someone else or a group signed them up or forwarded the email, we hope they were not too inconvenienced. Further, we suggest that they unsubscribe from the list by clicking the link at the bottom of the e-mail or tell whomever forwarded it to them not to forward such information anymore.”

The also say they’ll crack down on opt-in policies. Double opt-in perhaps? I wonder if this is just rhetoric or if the WH will actually do anything to beef up the process. If TAF is too risky, don’t add the feature – let friends forward their copy. And, with information being publicized about how they’ve previously acquired email addresses from online petitions, that seems to be in conflict with them getting email addresses by recipients directly opting in at whitehouse.gov.

(IANAL, but I swayed one in DC.)

If that’s the case, I could understand why some people receiving the email might not want to share their email address with those same people….