Since much of what goes on in any White House is political by nature, the Hatch Act forces our leadership, in many, many cases, to completely bypass the best the American security establishment can offer, and instead forces our leaders to rely on the efforts of a 12-person ISP in Chattanooga -- and the open, unsecured, globally accessible Internet as a message transport vehicle.

It took the Allies 10,000 people working 24/7 at Bletchley Park to crack Enigma. The encyption and security technology we have today is vastly superior. The United States National Security Agency has most of the top encryption and code-cracking scientists in the world working for it. But the problem isn't our vastly superior security and encryption technology. The problem is that all of that technology is simply not being used.

Remember, the Hatch Act explicitly says that government resources can't be used for political discussions. So all the wildly powerful technology at the disposal of the United States government, must, by law, remain unused by our nation's leaders for any communication that, in any way, may have a political component.

Our vastly superior technology isn't being used and, instead, ad hoc commercial systems run by "I know a guy in Chattanooga" are being used instead. Because of this, anyone with $500 laptop and an Internet connection could easily intercept Mr. Rove's GWB43.COM email messages to Dana Perino. Any other email messages from the 1,000 politically-appointed White House staffers to any other political operatives could just as easly be intercepted.

Figuring a wildly conservative figure of 50 emails a day per staffer, we're talking 18 million messages or more, each year, completely open and available for our enemies to read. In the 2,072 days since September 11, 2001, a minimum of 103.6 million messages have likely been sent by White House staffers, completely in the open, for anyone to read.

And that's a nightmare scenario.