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Wednesday, September 16, 2009

EXCLUSIVE: W.H. Collects Web Users' Data Without Notice

Social-media messages go into archives

The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama's promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet.

Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the White House signaled that it would insist on open dealings with Internet users and, in fact, should feel obliged to disclose that it is collecting such information.

"The White House has not been adequately transparent, particularly on how it makes use of new social media techniques, such as this example," he said.

Defenders of the White House actions said the Presidential Records Act requires that the administration gather the information and that it was justified in taking the additional step of asking a private contractor to "crawl and archive" all such material. Nicholas Shapiro, a White House spokesman, declined to say when the practice began or how much the new contract would cost.

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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Welcome to The United Communist States Of America, We can march in DC and call our Representatives, write letters and they just keep on pushing their agenda on us.
WAKE UP and STAND UP
We must take our country back. B4 it is too late.

Anonymous said...

Typical Obama administration thug politics. There is no more right to
privacy. Because they are a bunch of communists. And when they take away our freedom of speech they will use any means necessary to find out anything we said on the internet that is against the Obama administration. Then they will probably change our name from the United States of America to the
Socialist States of America.

Anonymous said...

Presidential records act requires this info be archived "for posterity".
Don't want to be in the archive, don't go to any of the W.H. websites.

Anonymous said...

The Chicago style White House defines transparency as them having the ability to spy on the citizens, while they maintain a curtain of secrecy over what they are up to.
I think Rahm Emanual would call this, "NEVER GIVE A SUCKER A BREAK"

Tim Chaney said...

Smells of McCarthey-ism

Anonymous said...

1) This came out and was acknowledged when Bush was in office

2) Don't do anything illegal and you have nothing to worry about.

Anonymous said...

Ok, so I posted a comment last night as soon as your posted this Joe. No play for someone stating some commone sense huh?

People voluntarily post items on their site. The site isn't stealing some type of private information. Youtube, myspace, facebook all archive data posted to their website. This data stays on their servers for a certain amount of time even AFTER you have deleted them.

If you guys would focus on the real issues, you would find that more people might listen to your arguments.

Anonymous said...

Speech suppression is forthcoming at the big summit in Pittsburgh. It seems officials fear rioting, therefore will not permit any protests of any sort.