So it’s true, the White House really does have a plan to collect your personal intenent info. Tipping my hat, yet again to Ms. Geller and the Yid at Lid, here’s the scoop. What does the Presidential Records Act plus the “fishy” turn-in-your-friends incident equal? A discovery by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) that the WH is datamining social networking sites for comments that might be antagonistic to the Obama administration policies.
The White House office of New Media has sent out a request for proposals from technology vendors to develop and run the project. According to the proposal request, 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.” The Proposal requests a bid covers allowing this project to last eight years. MMMM what else does the Obama administration want to last eight years.
{I thought Gibbs said BO would be happy with a one-term presidency…}
[Here are] the frightening parts especially for this administration which promises to be the most transparent in history. The disturbing parts of the proposal 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 comment by both Obama critics and supporters, with no restriction as to how the White House would use the information.
Maybe its just paranoia but this revelation comes right after the “spy on your neighbor” email program, and the David Axelrod spam from the White House problem. It just seems that when a President whose campaign was so good at understanding new media, keeps trying to break every internet “privacy rights social protocol,” it can’t be that they don’t understand what they are doing. And when they direct the vendor to keep it secret from the electorate, the objective must be more nefarious than the Presidential Records Act.
Now the same people at the White House are at it again with an ambitious plan to harvest huge amounts of information from the web and specifically social networking sites. This presidency is willing to violate our civil liberties for political purposes.
And the NLPC is a bit suspicious as well:
[This] interpretation of the Presidential Records Act is so expansive that virtually any communication mentioning the president or the Administration could become subject to collection and archiving under the Act. This is not out of an “abundance of caution,” but out of an over-abundance of power. President Obama should make sure that this plan goes no further.
Yeah, like he’s gonna do that right away. Well, at least the BO is off and running in the same direction, and that is hell-bent toward a complete socialist takeover of the country. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride…
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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 [1] at FedBizzOps.com. Click here to download a 51-page pdf of the solicitation [2].
See also CNN ‘Expert’ Lamely Claims to ‘Debunk’ NLPC on White House Data Harvesting From Social Networks [3].
Links:
[1] https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=eec856940efb75b2b1c11e2b1d5660a4&tab=core&_cview=0&cck=1&au=&ck=
[2] http://www.nlpc.org/sites/default/files/RFQ_WHOS090003.pdf
[3] http://www.nlpc.org/stories/2009/09/02/cnn-expert-should-do-homework-claiming-debunk-nlpc-white-house-data-harvesting
[4] http://nlpc.org/../../stories/2009/09/02/cnn-expert-should-do-homework-claiming-debunk-nlpc-white-house-data-harvesting
