Government Contracting Out Email

Before we hear it from the Hillary Defense Fund, we should look closely at what is going on in the Federal government to contract out their e-mail services.  Every part of the Federal establishment is looking at using Google, Amazon, and Microsoft for official government business, from HHS to the Intelligence Community.  They are doing it now, in great numbers, but you don't hear much about it.  

None of these services involve putting email servers in the basement of anyone's house.  They have different rules than a private individual who might sign up for a private account to use on a home computer, and they are probably more secure, though that is a relative term when it comes to email.  Is it OK to contract out a service like this, when the Feds already fund their own services internally?  They can't have it both ways....

If anyone believes that the Big Three can do email services that are equivalent to what a government agency provides, they should be allowed to contract it out.  What doesn't happen after that cutting the IT services of that agency an amount equal to what they no longer require as result of contracting the service out.  This would be like operating food concessions in the Pentagon and still keeping government cooks employed there.  The reason for contracting the service out is to save money.  If we contract it out and still have the same levels of staff, we aren't saving anything. 

I don't think any vendor can run a service as well as some government agencies, for the obvious reason that the information being exchanged is sometimes very sensitive, even though it is not classified.  We are going to see the "it wasn't classified" argument from the Defense Fund.  What they will never say is that it should have been.  State Department negotiations with other countries and the underlying basis of those are classified, but they don't always classify them in email.  This is usually out of ignorance of classification guidance, not because unclassified e-mail is easier to use.  Every government email system has something euphamisticly called "spills".  Classified information gets out on the unclassified system, generally by accident, but always by someone making a mistake somewhere.  I'm not sure how Google, Amazon or Microsoft handles that kind of thing.   They have to have people with security clearances, sometimes pretty high clearances, to handle it.  They can't be in another country, and they can't be foreign nationals in the U.S. The circuits are leased by the private service and run by whatever country the service is in.  We have international treaties for this kind of thing in government, but I don't know what they do to provide people to operate those services.  We also don't know how well commercial services handle the encryption and/or service of personal devices that are used to transport the mail.  Did Hillary's Blackberry belong to her or to the government?  Where did her service of hardware and software come from?  Did she ever have a spill?

I don't really care what the Feds do, but they have to stop trying to have it both ways.  If they really think it is a good idea to contract it out, then get on with it, but take the IT cuts that go with it.  If they look more closely at it, they might change their minds about having an outside service do it.