or this:
and this:
I believe this means they will archive the messages posted to White House accounts on social networking sites. This is approximately the same as saving a letter mailed to the White House, unless they plan to use data gathering to form remote access to your personal computer. So let's not panic.
When the Bush Administration wanted to analyze the pattern of call frequency to numbers in terrorist-sympathizing nations, the left went crazy thinking the WH would be "listening in" on private phone calls to people's doctors or phone sex line. That was not the case -- they wanted to look for spikes of activity to known terrorists outside the country, but once the hysteria took hold, there were ridiculous accusations of denied civil rights and trampling the Constitution, etc., based on ignorance.
So let's find out more about this. Reporters need to study this proposal and ask Gibbs a lot of detailed technical questions.
And some patriots need to submit proposals and try to get into the information loop.
I agree. I haven’t read the entire RFQ, but from what I have read thusfar, it appears that they want to automate the process of saving all the data where they have a presence as required by law. Presence as in their own facebook account, twitter account, etc...
or this:
and this:
The key phrase is “shall include.” The RFP does not expressly limit the data collection to messages sent only to EOP maintained pages.
Even if this really smelly program doesn’t have a much broader application planned—and I am not at all convinced they don’t—this is a hugely dangerous precedent. All government programs exploit to the max the tiniest loophole, and interpret even the tightest-range authority in its very broadest possible way. And that goes for all administrations. With this one, we’ve got a real problem on our hands.
I know your call for caution is not meant as a blanket defense, and your reasoned approach would make sense if we were dealing with an administration with a track record of restraint. But this administration has already given us ample reason to reject a default assumption of restraint and respect for individual liberties and personal privacy.
I simply do not trust these people. At all.
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.