An Obama Plan to Harvest Personal Data from Social Media
Borrowed from All American Blogger (with all due respect...see Interesting Sites List)
Posted by Duane Lester on Sep 1st, 2009 (with minor editing).
As if there wasn’t enough controversy over the solicitation of snitches via the Flag@whitehouse.gov email address, it seems the Obama Administration has another scheme in the works. This one will harvest personal information from social media sites like Facebook. Oh, and you can’t know what they find:
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 targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”
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 content of any type (text, graphics, audio, or video);capturing of comments by both Obama critics and supporters, with no restriction as to how the White House would use the information.
This is a serious “whiskey tango foxtrot (WTF)” issue. ... very 1930s Germany. And isn’t this supposed to be the most transparent administration in the history of transparency?
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