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White House Mapping Internet Users' Data For Mass Archives
Status update: Barack Obama is archiving your opinions
and personal information
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If you're a user of twitter, facebook, myspace, youtube or flickr,
and you visit the White House page at any of the sites, you
are at risk of having your personal data archived without your
consent or knowledge.
The Obama White House has sought a private contractor
to "crawl and archive" 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.
Defenders of the White House actions said the
1978 Presidential
Records Act requires that the administration gather
the information and that it was justified in taking the additional
step, The
Washington Times reports.
However, this claim is being disputed by The National
Legal and Policy Center, who first exposed the
White House plan last month by drawing attention to a 51-page
solicitation of bids (PDF).
The solicitation states:
"The contractor shall provide the necessary
services to capture, store, extract to approved formats, and
transfer content published by EOP (Executive Office of the
President) on publicly-accessible web sites, along with information
posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites
where the EOP offices under PRA (Presidential Records Act)
maintains a presence,"
Excerpt from the White House solicitation
of bids
The solicitation also states that the White House
is already collecting data from social networks via programs
and daily screenshots.
The NLPC argues that Presidential Records Act
does not apply because any comments are pasted onto a third-party
Web page and do not constitute official correspondence with
the president.
The watchdog group also points out that the program
is suspicious because it is shrouded in secrecy and the public
cost is being withheld.
"[V]irtually any communication mentioning
the president or the administration could become subject to
collection and archiving under the act. This is not out of an
'abundance of caution,' but out of an over-abundance of power.
President Obama should make sure that this plan goes no further."
a statement on the NLPC website reads.
The move represents another broken promise of
"change" on behalf of the president who consistently
pledged
to protect privacy on the Internet during his campaign.
It also comes on the back of recent news that
the Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing
ban on tracking
how people use government Internet sites with "cookies"
and other technologies.
Recent disclosures under the Freedom Of Information
Act also reveal that the federal
government has several contracts with social media outlets
such as Youtube (Google), Facebook, Myspace and Flickr (Yahoo)
that waive rules on monitoring users and permit companies to
track visitors to government web sites for advertising purposes.
With further news today that Obama
is seeking to reauthorize warrantless wiretapping
under the PATRIOT Act, and that the
DHS plans to supply local "fusion centers" with
military surveillance intelligence, it is clear that the privacy
of American citizens continues to be systematically eroded under
a regime that was voted in on a promise to scale back such activity.
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