• Use official authority or influence to interfere with an election
• Solicit or discourage political activity of anyone with business before their agency
• Solicit or receive political contributions (may be done in certain limited situations by federal labor or other employee organizations)
• Be candidates for public office in partisan elections
• Engage in political activity while on duty, in a government office, wearing an official uniform, using a government vehicle, and
• Wear partisan political buttons on duty

It's quite obvious that the Hatch Act is bent just a little bit for the President of the United States. For example, clearly political activity (even if just a discussion among staffers) occurs on Air Force One, which is very much a government vehicle. What we find interesting and curious is that the neither the Hatch Act itself nor the government's posted guidelines explicitly discuss the use of email and whether or not it can be run through government servers.

Last week, we asked the question, "Has the Hatch Act been used as an excuse to bypass government servers, thereby giving a reasonable-sounding excuse to circumvent the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act?" It's an interesting question, and while it does pertain to the disclosure concerns we've identified, it does not pertain to the national security concerns.

Put simply, the Hatch Act must not be used as an excuse or as a guideline for running political email outside the government's security apparatus.

It'd be as if the president had to fly commercial if he was going to give a speech supporting someone's campaign. The idea is ludicrous. Whether we like it or not, the president makes a juicy target for our enemies, we've learned that, and we put a series of very well-trained teams in charge of the president's protection and all aspects of the president's transportation.

Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, email routed outside of secured channels also makes a juicy target for our enemies. Every email sent by a White House staffer via the open Internet, via SMARTech, or even via AOL is a target. Even if the staffer is a 30-year-old deputy-level White House employee confirming a date via AOL, the message is a target -- and so is the staffer and so is his date.

I wish I could say I'm just being paranoid, but the world is full of troubling people and there are countries, organizations, and entities that wish to see us compromised.

Whether it's an al-Qa'idah fatwa, anti-Americanism from Turkey's Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, troubles with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, rhetoric from Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who virtually foams at the mouth when speaking of President Bush (as a "devil", a pendejo, and "Mister Danger"), or the more serious threat that seems to be wafting out of an ever more militant Russian Federation, there are governments and enemy entities that could derive some advantage from the primo intelligence that could be gathered from intercepting White House email messages.