Strike three for White House on Internet information

Washington Examiner Article
09/02/09
David Freddoso

President Obama's White House does not exactly have a stellar record when it comes to personal information and the Internet. In less than one month, the president's new media team has come under fire for asking citizens to report "fishy e-mails" about Obama's health care reform plan and for e-mail messages from David Axelrod that somehow went to people who did not sign up for them.

So when the Executive Office of the President seeks a contractor to archive the usernames and possibly other data from social network users, it is certainly worth asking them why. We did. We have not heard back from the White House yet.

The National Legal and Policy Center's Ken Boehm has written today on EOP's 51-page contract solicitation for a web archiving service. Among other things, the solicitation notes that the White House is already archiving the content of seven social networking sites where it "maintains a presence." The contractor's purpose is to comply with the Presidential Records Act by saving White House postings to Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, slideshare, Vimeo and YouTube.
But the solicitation also specifically includes archiving all messages sent to the White House accounts, and comments posted by users on those social networking pages. "Out of an abundance of caution," the document states, "we are treating comments made by non-PRA personnel on sites on which a PRA component has a presence as presidential records, requiring them to be captured or sampled."

The release of some of the data gathered -- to a future presidential library, or for any other purpose -- could run afoul of the Privacy Act. And the White House seems to leave itself a lot of room with respect to possible uses of the social networking data it stores. For example, will critical comments on EOP's wall secretly land Facebook users on a blacklist? Will other users begin receiving unsolicited messages, or even requests to sign up for Facebook applications?

If not for the events of August, it probably wouldn't even be an issue.

COMMENT: What kind of a blacklist is this Administration running? Where is the MSM on this invasion of privacy? Where is Congress? Crickets chirping once again. When Republicans speak out, you usually find it in local papers. Like a blackout on Republican members of Congress by the inside the beltway crowd except for a few. Wonder if this Administration has ever heard of the Privacy Act the way they act or Democrat leaders of Congress?