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Joe Biden apparently has been using at least three pseudonyms in email communications that mixed family & government business. A legal nonprofit group filed a FOIA request more than a year ago and the National Archives said it found potentially 5,400 emails but has yet to release them.
The closest scenario I can think of was Mitt Romney using the name "Pierre Delecto" in order to maintain a lurker Twitter account, which seems whatever. Trump is also quite fond of pseudonyms. Is there any possible innocent explanation for why Biden would use a pseudonym when discussing government business? I can't think of one. Obama defended the practice when members of his administration got caught doing it but it seems very unconvincing with the existence of email filtering:
Filtering is very lackluster, especially if you're trying to provide it to high-publicity people who aren't very tech-aware and especially where you're not just filtering between "useful" and "spam" but between several different tiers of importance and some junk that an intern still needs to go through. I wish plus-addressing was the right solution, but 95%+ of users will eventually just strip it out and e-mail to the top level instead.
That said, there's a difference between firstname.lastname.projectname and sooners7. The first does anything conventional filtering can not reliably do; the only real benefit to the latter is to avoid grepping. Political appointees are free (and required!) to keep private e-mails off of their public accounts and are free to go full Publicus for their private discussions, but the opportunity for problems are severe.
It's not the worst FOIA-evasion I've seen recently, but it's definitely going to add more reason to suspect fuckery going around.
On the flip side, it's not like anything's going to happen because of it. Even if this action 'violated the law' for NARA or whatever, it's not exactly something that gets enforced; the SLF may get some cash back for the clear violation of FOIA's statutory required response timeline, but even if they do it could well be after the 2024 election at this rate. It probably won't get anyone working in the government in actual trouble rather than just bilking some tax money.
Filtering is no less lackluster than a secret email address. A "promote anything from a source on this allowlist" rule hardly requires AI, but is already strictly superior to "tell the secret address to everyone on this allowlist and hope nobody leaks it".
"Promote anything from a source on this allowlist" requires the person to have and maintain a list of accepted sources. That works for some small projects, but a very typical use case is just "I want to pass this e-mail around to anyone who needs it, even if I don't know them, and not have it get mixed into the 1k+ emails I get already".
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