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

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 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.

"I believe this means they will archive the messages posted to White House accounts on social networking sites"

The solicitation says "The contractor shall provide the necessary services to capture, store, extract to approved formats, and transfer content published by EOP (aka the white house) on publicly-accessible web sites, along with information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP offices under PRA maintains a presence, throughout the term of the contract.

Read it for yourself https://www.fbo.gov/spg/EOP/OP/WashingtonDC/WHO-S-09-0003/listing.html Which by the way is a RFQ, Request for Quote. Typically those are ones slated for a specific company. Maybe I'll bid on this so I can remove data from 'friends' on FR. Payup guys this is the new world order.

5. Performance Objectives

(A) The scope is to capture, store, extract to approved formats, and transfer to NARA all content posted by EOP components subject to the PRA on publicly-accessible websites during each calendar year.

(B) Capture and store content of any kind, including text, graphic, audio, and video, in any existing file format.

(C) Demonstrate an ability to adapt to and archive new file formats that are created after the initiation of this contract.

(D) Capture and store content regardless of whether it is uploaded from the EOP network to the site or created directly on the site.

(E) Capture all created content at regular intervals daily, ensuring the retention of any deltas introduced between captures per day(it is preferable, but not necessary, for vendor to capture content that was added to a site and subsequently removed in the interval between captures). Vendor must capture content at least twice a day, and preferably would have a process to initiate a re-crawling of the content on demand.

(F) Capture (and later display) content in context, as it appeared on a given web page.

(G) Capture of comments and publicly-visible tags posted by users on publicly-accessible websites on which an EOP component subject to the PRA maintains a presence. Vendor must be able to either:

(i) Capture all comments posted to a list of websites provided to vendor; or

(ii) Capture a sample of comments posted to a list of websites provided to vendor, according to a sampling methodology that will be provided to vendor and approved by EOP.

(H) Provide the ability to search and/or organize collections by website, keyword, date and/or filter by file type.

(I) Store and transfer data in a manner that preserves both the record content, associated with comments, and related objects, as they were created and with the relationships they exhibited on the web page at the time of capture creation.

(J) Ability for government employees to tag captures from publicly-accessible websites by arbitrary fields or tags such as office or issue (i.e. OVP or health care).

(K) Provide a web-based tool for government employees to administer and manage this record-keeping. (i.e. add new publicly-accessible websites to the crawl or adjust the crawl frequency). Provide a minimum of 10 simultaneous login accounts.

(L) Extract the data at capture and store in formats approved by NARA prior to the transfer of data to NARA, preferably at the time of capture. Formats must allow NARA to ingest the records into their Electronic Record Achieve, with preference given to open-source or common industry formats independent of proprietary software or hardware to maintain and access.

(M) Develop process to transfer extracted data in NARA approved formats at set intervals (at least quarterly) and at the end of the contract.

(N) Provide sufficient disaster recovery backup.

(O) Provide process verification which confirms all required data was collected, stored, extracted to NARA format, and transferred to NARA successfully.

(P) Provide either web-based or on-site training for government employees who access and/or administer the proposed solution.

(Q) Provide sufficient user guides and online help documentation.

(R) Provide a maximum of 24 hour turnaround for questions and/or support by either email or telephone during business working hours.

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