Transcript: Government e-mail wars

Description: In the past, most constituents contacted members of the U.S. House of Representatives by snail mail and received a written response. But today, an e-mail war has erupted. As Bob Artner explains, advocacy groups are spamming the House, which in turn uses equally impersonal methods to respond.

I'm Bob Artner from TechRepublic. Technology affects government in many ways that we're not aware of. And there's an interesting battle going on right now between House members in Washington and organizations that are trying to organize on behalf of constituents. And it's all around sending and receiving email. So let's look at how constituents used to contact their members of Congress and what's happening now.

In the old days, you'd write a letter and you'd send it off to the House, and your Congressperson would have a legislative assistant who would turn around and write a letter back. Pretty straightforward. Members of Congress have what's called the franking privilege, which means they can send letters to their constituents at no cost. It's a powerful way that they continue to get reelected time after time.

And this worked for decades and decades, and over time as more and more mail would go into the House, legislative assistants would start to use word processing software to automatically generate replies. They would have pen technology that would create signatures that look like they were actually from the member of the House when in fact they were generated by a machine. But it was a physical piece of mail that was sent and a physical piece of mail that was received.

What happened when email started in? Well, on the one hand, it became easier for a person to send an email to their Congressperson, right? Because those email addresses were freely published. And then what would happen is the legislative assistant, just like with regular mail, would send an email response back on behalf of the Congressman.

And then what would happen is you'd get more and more email that started to come in, and the legislative assistants would respond by using automated templates in their email, email application, using word processing to store all these and just customize a send on that. And so you'd see this greater volume going back. You can already see here that you're starting to lose some of that human interaction.

What's happening now is even bigger. You've got advocacy organizations-nonprofits and other business lobbying-that are sending huge amounts of mail to House members using automated websites, special software that's designed for this purpose. And members of House, their legislative assistants are responding to this huge barrage of email by using CRM software or other kinds of automated programs.

So what you had in the beginning was a constituent sending a letter, a personal letter to their member of Congress. Now what you have are large organizations, basically more or less kind of spamming the members of the House and then the House people responding with something that's equally impersonal.

How much mail are we talking about? Well, the Washington Post recently estimated that between 2002 and 2004, the volume of emails received by just members of the House increased from about 50 million to just under 100 million. They also estimate for the same time period, 2004, that the Senate received an additional 83 million pieces of email.

So here's the paradox. Technology's increased. It's much easier for us to contact our individual member of Congress. But has this technology really helped us have a more meaningful conversation? Or is it really just an inauthentic, superficial conversation? Have we really lost something with this new technology?

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