Rats in the ceiling: Gmail in the Cabinet, Microsoft products and digital sovereignty in the FSM (Part 1)

By Richard Clark

I recently read, with great interest, commentary by Minoru Stephen, who said that the FSM Digital Office had “migrated the national government’s digital infrastructure to Microsoft 365, effectively surrendering government and citizen data to U.S. authorities.”

A long-time but now former employee of the FSM Cyber Security & Intelligence Bureau, Stephen holds the view that by using Microsoft 365 across the FSM government, and given that the 2018 U.S. Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, or CLOUD Act, compels U.S.-based providers to grant U.S. agencies access to data stored on their platforms, the FSM is contravening Article IV Section 5 of the FSM Constitution.

Said more clearly: if the Americans can read FSM government emails and other documentation, this harms FSM citizens’ rights to privacy and protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Of course, it’s easy to agree with Stephen. The Trump administration—a fascist dictatorship in practice, if not in name—has wholly abandoned the rule of law and any semblance of a moral high ground.

The U.S. has a history of ill-intended influence in the FSM, which I am unfortunately personally familiar with. In August 2022, a Central Intelligence Agency officer reached out to me, in my capacity as head of the FSM Information & Intelligence Service, and offered U.S. support to ensure a positive result for the March 2023 FSM election. I declined the offer.

To Washington's credit, we know they didn’t interfere in that

election because David Panuelo received by far the fewest votes

among the four candidates running in Pohnpei. (The Chinese, in

contrast, merely continued their historical support of funding

election campaigns).

Big shout-out, by the way, to Peter Christian for spreading a rumor that I was CIA myself, despite protecting the FSM from the U.S., not only in 2022 but also in 2016 when the U.S. embassy explicitly requested embedded Peace Corps Response Volunteers to conduct debriefs on state governor financial fraud and Compact fund audits, among other things. You’re welcome, Peter.

So, what should we do about this? As we consider this, let us recognize that

alternative superpowers, such as China, are not superior in this respect, i.e., if the U.S. CLOUD Act requires U.S. companies to provide U.S. information, which

it does, then let’s appreciate that China’s National Intelligence Law does the

same thing, but with even greater opacity. What the MSS wants, the MSS gets.

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The East Micronesia Cable uses Western-aligned companies and funding for the pragmatic purpose of maintaining the security relationship with the United States (instead of China), especially during the Compact negotiations. It's better for the CIA to read your email rather than the MSS, even if the ideal scenario is no foreigner reads your email at all.

Let’s consider our historical documentation governance baseline. When I inherited the FSM Public Information Office, it existed essentially in name only. The late Yosiwo George described to me at length how Peter Christian and his team had set historical FSM documents on fire, with Marilyn Jack, Dohsis Halbert, and others saying much of the same. To be clear: I became the public information officer because George wanted me to rebuild the office, which Christian abolished. That was the assignment.

FSM officials conducted work using personal Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail accounts, while government files were stored in cabinets and hard drives. As a result, when a person retired, resigned or was fired, the data they were responsible for became inaccessible to other parties.

The country’s public information apparatus existed in 2018 but lacked historical continuity. Were it not for the College of Micronesia-FSM and a kind fellow at the FSM Mission to the United Nations, we would have ended up with an information vacuum.

The transition to Gov.FM was done as much for national sovereignty as for operational continuity, and to that end I tip my hat to Edward Albert, the late Davidson Syne and others for their service to the FSM.

Opposition to continuity and accountability has been historically commonplace. Robson Romolow, now vice speaker of Congress, had an interesting encounter with the Department of Justice some years back. The department was interested in his emails related to an allegedly illegal purchase of a ship. The senator claimed he had forgotten his passwords or how to access various accounts, stalling the investigation. As a result, Panelo and then Attorney General Joses Gallen never pressed charges.

Had Romolow used an official instead of a personal email account to allegedly conduct official business—albeit official business that was allegedly unconstitutional for him to do—I am confident there would have been a case in court.

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But what would the FSM have looked like if allegations were easy to verify because documents weren’t lost, destroyed or otherwise inaccessible? What would have happened if former Transportation Secretary Lukner Weilbacher’s actions that eventually led to his criminal conviction were safely archived? I mean all of them. 

Or, in an ongoing civil case in the Supreme Court, the fact that Justice Secretary Leonito Bacalando authored and edited, along with Panuelo, a press release that plaintiffs argued was defamatory, placed the secretary in an unenviable position of having to defend the government from his own behavior.

What are the odds the department still has Bacalando’s chatlogs and original documentation when, prior to the Gov.FM push but even within it, the secretary has himself used multiple Gmail accounts in the style of $Name$Year for official government business and maintaining personal records of government business? Does it matter, or isn't it interesting, that officials also have a habit of deleting official government correspondence?

Deliberate opacity on behalf of government officials is common, whether to commit crimes, to act legally but unethically, to avoid public or media scrutiny or even simply to ensure their inbox is manageable. It is common to the point that the government has a vested interest in protecting itself from accountability, whether those scrutinizers are Micronesian citizens or, as Stephen suggested, Americans from the Department of the Interior or, say, the U.S. surveillance apparatus, be it of the “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible” variety vis-à-vis Peter Thiel and Palantir, or of the “We sold drugs to gangs in Los Angeles to fund Latin American guerillas” variety vis-à-vis the U.S. government proper.

To clarify: our original point is an abject lack of continuity in documentation retention and in good governance. I mean, remember on Feb. 11, 2008, when Resio Moses claimed in Congress that he and a presidential delegation to China received bribes? I got a call circa 2020 from a cleaner at an FSM warehouse in or around Dekehtik, who claimed to have old copies of video addresses from the FSM Congress. They asserted that they either wanted a bribe or would destroy the files. I referred the matter to the Congress PIO and never heard about this ever again.

I’ll see you again in Part 2. Well, metaphorically. I won’t actually see you at all. I need new glasses.

Richard Clark is allegedly a human person whose politics fall somewhere between libertarian socialism and authoritarian anarchism. Call him peristeronic (adj: suggestive of pigeons) atrichardandrewclark@gmail.com

Opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the editorial views of the Pacific Island Times.

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