RED ALERT: White House Has Secret Plan To Harvest Personal Data From Social Networking Websites

National Legal and Policy Center ^ | August 31, 2009 | Ken Boehm

[PowerPro]

NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites.

The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”

In the course of investigating procurement by the White House New Media office, NLPC discovered a 51-page solicitation of bids that was filed on Friday, August 21, 2009. Filed as Solicitation # WHO-S-09-0003, it is posted at FedBizzOps.com. Click here to download a 51-page pdf of the solicitation.

While the solicitation specifies a 12-month contract, it allows for seven one-year extensions. It specifies no dollar cap. Other troubling issues include:

extremely broad secrecy terms preventing the vendor from disclosing to the public or the media what information is being captured and archived (page 7, “Restriction Against Disclosure”)

wholesale capturing of comments by non-White House staff on publicly accessible sites

capturing of content of any type (text, graphics, audio, or video)

capturing of comments by both Obama critics and supporters, with no restriction as to how the White House would use the information.

This is the third controversy involving the White House internet operations in less than a month. First, Obama’s New Media operation asked supporters to send information about critics of the White House health care effort to a White House email. This provoked a storm of criticism and the White House retreated. Then large number of people complained of getting email spam from the White House supporting the President’s health care position. Again the White House was forced to back down.

[amutr22]

That was my understanding and why I questioned it. Yes, it is a slippery slope but they can still say that the WH has always maintained these records under the Presidential Act.

[Pipe Dog]

I am not nervous at all. I’m already on all of their lists!

There! His Majesty can now read my name without glasses. And he can double the reward on my head! ----- John Hancock, upon signing the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

[paulycy]

Got any money left after taxes?

Uh, not really. A little. But we get by.

[NotSoModerate]

Before I get too chicken little here, where am I missing it where they'll be capturing and storing more than what is directed directly to the EOP?

ON the FedBizOpps site there is a pre-solicitation for this contract. In the pre-solicitation it clearly says, "Information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites controlled by EOP includes comments posted on pages created by EOP and messages sent to EOP accounts on those web sites."

That's very specific, but that language was dropped for the final solicitation. And replaced with vague language referring to a "presence of a PRA component."

Clearly they laid out specific guidelines in the "pre-solicitation" but then dropped specific guidelines and went for vague guidelines in the final product. I wonder why?

[Blood of Tyrants]

You can make your page viewable to only your friends and network. If the WH wanted to view my page, they would have to hack into the account. However, your comments may be viewed on a friend’s page who chose not to secure the info.

[mainestategop]

Where's the ACLU and the far left to whine about this?! Had Bush done this crap there would have been a #%it storm!

[Blood of Tyrants]

I could see Major Garrett asking a question about this. Fox News hasn’t been banned from the WH briefing room yet, have they?

[Beloved Levinite]

States sovereignty & a defecting US Military is all that can save us now.

[OB1kNOb]

Thanks for the clarification.

[stevie_d_64]

You don’t believe he hasn’t seen this already???

His radio show is on right about now...He may be talking about it already...

I’m going to go pop a bag of popcorn right now and listen in...

Woo Hoo!!!

This whole thing just keeps getting better and better...

We don’t even need to be making stuff up anymore...

Doesn’t he (Obama) have a Czar in charge of Fascist things???

Gosh, I hope so...Then we can all just sit back and enjoy it...

(the proceding message was brought to you by “/sarcasm”)

[Kakaze]

If the WH wanted to view my page, they would have to hack into the account.

I'm sure they are or they will do just that......however it will not be called hacking, it will be presented as national security.

[azkathy]

Nothing this administration does surprises me anymore.

I once asked a man about my safety concerns when reporting on the environMentalists, (he had infiltrated Earth First.) His response was, the more outspoken you are, the safer you are. If you disappear everyone would question it and know who was behind the disappearance. I decided he was right.

Besides, they already know who the “dissenters” are. Speak loudly and often...ramp it up because the more of us who say this is an outrage, LOUDLY and CLEARLY the harder it will be for them to say it is only “right wing wacko’s” who oppose their tactics.

[amutr22]

If you read toward the end of this, it appears this may only be for the specific White House pages on Facebook and Twitter, NOT the entire site because it speaks of being done on sites created by the EOP....obviously only their specific Facebook page was created by them etc.

Still bad, but not as bad as earlier appeared if this is the case. Looks like they may be doing it for records request archive purposes, but it could still be used for bad purposes, which is scary.

---

Did any other POTUS’ do anything similar?

[444Flyer]

There can be no doubt that this administration seeks to silent dissent.

Freedom of speech means nothing to these thugs.

Mark Lloyd approves of this message

[the_Watchman]

However, Doug Ross is simply reporting what he read on the NLPC site. So what we have is Doug Ross “vouching” for NLPC instead of an independent source of information.

[Danae]

This is something I have wondered about for some time. Why can’t the COURT initiate proceedings? I don’t know the answer to this question. It seems to me that there are some things that the court SHOULD initiate proceedings on.

[Eagle Eye]

Something that every resident anti-American critic should have seen were the fortifications along the East German border. Gurad towers, walls, fences, barbed wire, trenches, dog runs, etc. And all of it pointed inward to keep people in, not to keep NATO out.

If anyone ever saw that then had to think about how determined a government had to be to keep their own people in...and how bad a government had to be for people to risk their lives to escape!

[Gritty]

Why does this remind me of the Communists in Hue, South Vietnam, and the TET Offensive in 1968?

Before TET, they patiently gathered extensive information to identify their enemies and potential enemies. When they captured Hue, they quickly went house to house with their lists, gathered those they had previously identified as "trouble" and took them out and immediately executed them by the thousands.

Are we possibly seeing a similar information gathering and identification of potential enemies scenario being set up now?

Why is the White House so interested in identifying their enemies that they would take this unprecedented action? There can be no good come from this.

[Sprite518]

No kidding and look how quiet the media, newspapers and the far left. See they really never had a problem with it. They just did not want a Republican with that power. It’s ok to them if a Democrat is doing this. We all know they are fakes and hypocrites.

[ponygirl]

I was a starry-eyed liberal college student who had the opportunity to study in Prague for a semester after the wall came down. I flew into Berlin, had to catch a train out of East Berlin to Prague. My eyes were opened then. The differences between East and West Berlin were startling. It was like stepping into a black and white movie from the 1940s - like time had stood still. They still had the same signage in the train station that you see in those old movies - nothing had been painted or updated since the war. Buildings were abandoned, windows broken. People whispered, watched us suspiciously. Tons of crap and garbage just thrown by the side of the train tracks; the fact that the toilets on the train were simply holes that opened onto the tracks. It was a slummy ghetto.

Prague was much nicer, but they never stopped their fight and accepted the Communists. I was very lucky in that I got to study with and talk to the artists and writers largely responsible for creating the propaganda against the Commie regime. They had some stories to tell.

Living that way affects people on a psychological level. It's like they're scarred or something. That whole experience really changed my life and my thinking about how lucky we have it here. I wish I could say the same for some of the students who were there with me. A lot of them voted for Obama. I guess what we experienced over there didn't have the same effect on them as it did on me.