Posted on 09/02/2009 8:57:23 PM PDT by hope
The White House is hiring a contractor to harvest information about Americans from its pages on social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
The National Legal and Policy Center, or NLPC, revealed the White House New Media team is seeking to hire a technology vendor to collect data such as comments, tag lines, e-mail, audio and video from any place where the White House "maintains a presence" – for a period of up to eight years.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
Bump
Ummm...does this not violate some...law or ethics code or something or other? Am I taking crazy pills? Imagine the outcry if this was W?
Stalin would be very proud of his protege.
That’s a clear violation of each site’s Terms of Service. Time to enforce Terms, disable WH accounts, and execute an injunction.
It must violate something.
Does the White House have a presence on Free Republic?
o.O
I recommend that if you must use these sites, have a number of e-mail addresses (hotmail, yahoo, lycos, gmail, etc.) all with bogus information associated with them.
For more protection access only through a proxy.
This country has a long tradition of anonymity on political interactyion and communcation, from the secret ballot to “Publius” in the Federalist Papers.
guess i should delete pretty much all of my facebook comments ... NOT!! If they saying there are looking for some contractor to take this on, my guess is that means were already doing it and someone soon is going to find out.
Now and then, some conservative organizations should put a commercial criticizing ACLU and other ‘privacy rights organizations’ for being totally mute on this issue today while very vocal under W.
It is beyond doubt that The Failed Obama Administration © is monitoring Free Republic. Why do you think so many of us post insults here constantly??? We want the Fraudulent Leader to hear us and hear us well.
Identify your local ACLU lawyers and keep track of them...
** hiding in the digital age **
change all your bills to your new ‘home’ address... the UPS store PO box (call it an apartment in your new address)
only give out cell phone or voip numbers, both connected to your new ‘home’ address
you can disconnect your verizon main line at your home if you’d like... it’ll always do 911, even if you have no service.
at that point, the only people that would have your actual name attached to a physical address would be your home services (ie: electric, cable, water, trash, etc). you could put your home in the name of a trust, then move all services to that name.
just some food for thought.
Where exactly is the ACLU with all of this?
Hey, obama! If you or your goons are reading this, you should quit beacause your thin skin is failing you. You lack the ability to inspire, lead, and unite. Give it up now. You’re not good enough. You don’t have what it takes to achieve your goals. Spare yourself the shame of your impdending failure. Quit now, not for us because we know you aren’t in it for us. Instead, quit now to save yourself from yourself.
Update on story
I wanted to update my readers on the story regarding the obama administrations plan to “Harvest your personal information” that I posted early this morning in case you saw the lame report claiming to debunk it on your nightly Communist News Network (CNN) in this case. Watch out Twitter,Facebook, My Space, You Tube and others on social networking sites. From the National Legal and Policy Center again...
David Gewirtz, who contributes to Anderson Cooper’s blog at CNN, claims to “debunk” our story about White House New Media office plans to collect data from social networking websites.
Our story was based on a document called a “Request for Quote.” Of the document, Gewirtz states, “It’s a publicly available government procurement document, and just for you, I’ve read all 51 excruciatingly boring pages of the thing.”
Maybe too boring for Gewirtz, as he must have skimmed over this section that appears on page three under “Performance Objectives:”
(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.
In other words, the administration wants the ability to have at least 10 government workers simultaneously adding new web sites to a crawl program, or adjusting the crawl frequency on web sites being crawled. This would allow a massive data mining operation. Our characterizations of this operation are not exaggerated.
This capability is overkill for what Gewirtz is claiming the administration is trying to do with this contract:
The White House isn’t trying to get at your secrets. Instead, the White House is proactively attempting to comply with the Presidential Records Act (PRA) by interpreting postings to social networking sites — if posted by members of the Executive Office of the President — as possible Presidential records.
This is a good thing.
Instead of NLPC, Gewirtz attributes the story to:
…a completely unruly and often full-goose-bozo body of bloggers, just looking for any excuse to increase their ‘hits’ and drive up the pennies they’re given for their thoughts from Google’s ad revenue service.
Although our website is based on blog software, Gewirtz is advised that NLPC is not a blog. We are a public policy group in existence since 1991. We have a track record of credibility and success. We even occasionally appear on CNN.
Before we posted out story, it was reviewed by both experts on the internet and federal contracting. We stand by it.
Too bad Gewirtz did not take the same care with his posting. According to the CNN website, he has an array of credentials. Here’s his bio:
David Gewirtz is Chairman and CEO of ZATZ Publishing, Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines and, according to the Independent Computer Consultants Association, is “one of America’s foremost email experts”. He has been described by CNN as “a leading Presidential scholar specializing in White House email.”
He is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism & Security Professionals and a columnist for The Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security. He is a member of the FBI’s InfraGard program, the security partnership between the FBI and industry. David is also a member of the U.S. Naval Institute and the National Defense Industrial Association, the leading defense industry association promoting national security.
Credentials don’t mean a thing if you don’t do your homework. Fair play would dictate that Gewirtz contact us before attacking us. He made no such attempt.
http://bluelori.blogspot.com/2009/09/obamas-secret-plan-part-two-yes-it-is.html
The White House is hiring a contractor to harvest information about Americans from its pages on social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
Just to be clear, I think the story is saying that the information will be harvested from people who browse on the White House's Facebook, MySpace, etc., pages, not on just any Facebook, MySpace, etc., pages. The WND headline is misleading.
Well, yes, on FB and MySpace, the obama white house will be able to record only interactions between it and other users. That’s just how the privacy models work on those sites.
However, Twitter is different in two ways: Most Twitter users have public profiles, and Twitter offers real-time search. Given these two aspects, the WH can record any tweets that include targetted words, such as ‘obama’ or ‘president’. So even if these tweets were directed to someone other than the WH, the admin can still record them.
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