Posted on 09/02/2009 1:00:47 PM PDT by Ooh-Ah
President Obama's White House does not exactly have a stellar record when it comes to personal information and the Internet. In less than one month, the president's new media team has come under fire for asking citizens to report "fishy e-mails" about Obama's health care reform plan and for e-mail messages from David Axelrod that somehow went to people who did not sign up for them.
So when the Executive Office of the President seeks a contractor to archive the usernames and possibly other data from social network users, it is certainly worth asking them why. We did. We have not heard back from the White House yet.
The National Legal and Policy Center's Ken Boehm has written today on EOP's 51-page contract solicitation for a web archiving service. Among other things, the solicitation notes that the White House is already archiving the content of seven social networking sites where it "maintains a presence." The contractor's purpose is to comply with the Presidential Records Act by saving White House postings to Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, slideshare, Vimeo and YouTube.
But the solicitation also specifically includes archiving all messages sent to the White House accounts, and comments posted by users on those social networking pages. "Out of an abundance of caution," the document states, "we are treating comments made by non-PRA personnel on sites on which a PRA component has a presence as presidential records, requiring them to be captured or sampled."
The release of some of the data gathered -- to a future presidential library, or for any other purpose -- could run afoul of the Privacy Act. And the White House seems to leave itself a lot of room with respect to possible uses of the social networking data it stores. For example, will critical comments on EOP's wall secretly land Facebook users on a blacklist? Will other users begin receiving unsolicited messages, or even requests to sign up for Facebook applications?
If not for the events of August, it probably wouldn't even be an issue.
Your FReepername is amazing!
Civil rights? I’ll show you civil rights!
Obama laughs at the law. He breaks it every day.
I don't think he laughs.
I think he just doesn't care, or even notices it.
It doesn't come into his realm of perception.
How about now?
Hey, guy! How’re you doin’?
CA....
How am I doing? Rocking in what’s left of the Free World. And preparing for the conflict that’s almost overtaken us. Be vigilant. Things will change literally overnight.
Hell, if Bush had tried this, I wouldn't have much liked it either.
“e-mail messages from David Axelrod that somehow went to people who did not sign up for them.”
also known as spamming.
“...we encourage you to join us online, share your thoughts and build....”
And because visiting a government website allows us to data-mine via your computer.
I’m with you, bro, I’m with you!!!
CA....
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