Andre sez, "You mentioned the Government Printing Office (GPO) in an entry about applying DRM to government documents. Well, my associate Domingo and I have been on to the GPO for a while now – they have a listerv that has some suspicious stuff, such as the OGE-ETHICSINFO-L list which gives ethical advice to the executive branch, and requires you have a .gov or .mil e-mail address to join and remain a member of the list. I joined the list and dumped the contents using wget in August, and turned up some interesting stuff, such as 20040419.txt, which advises the executive branch to turn down gifts from Microsoft. We filed a FOIA request with the GPO for info on their mailing list and are awaiting a response."
It has come to OGE's attention that Microsoft Corp. is offering free
promotional software valued at over $500 to IT personnel at various
agencies. OGE has written Microsoft asking it to refrain from doing
this, citing the implications associated with the Standards of Ethical
Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch. We understand that the
Department of the Army also has sent a letter to Microsoft asking that
these gifts cease. Please advise your IT personnel that they are
prohibited from personally accepting these gifts. However, OGE does
recognize that an agency may have gift acceptance authority that allows
acceptance of this software by the agency for its use.
(Thanks, Andre!)
Update: Daniel sez, "Using a quick google search using the term: "inurl:listserv.*.gov" i found a hell of a lot more (54k hits). some intresting stuff on there, weird what you can find on goverment sites. Some mailman ones as well.
