How Bureaucrats Respond When You Get Too Close to a Third Rail Issue

When you correspond with Bureaucrats and get too close to third rail issues in such a way that they would incriminate themselves or their employer, here are the tactics you will see:

1. They will forward the hot potato to a colleague and expand the distribution list.
2. They will then make it unclear who exactly is required to respond.
3. If you ask them why they haven’t responded yet, they can say:
   “I thought ____ was supposed to respond.”
4. They will deny they have any responsibility at all to answer.
5. They will try to make it appear that they don’t understand the meaning of the words you are using or equivocate words so they don’t have to answer the question precisely. This makes their answer ambiguous enough to not create a liability on their part.

Below are examples of the last item above in action:

More on what a Third Rail issue is:

Wikipedia: Third Rail