A plan by the White House to harvest personal information from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter about dissenters who speak out against the Obama administration has been uncovered by The National Legal and Policy Center.
The administration, which previously encouraged supporters to forward personal information they received from Obama detractors to a specified email address and also spammed people with unwanted emailed disinformation about health care reform, is advertising for a technology specialist to capture personal information posted by citizen on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace where the administration has a presence.
The chilling effect that such data collection would have is clear, and is likely the reason the Obama administration is undergoing the project. You just can’t have those pesky dissenters networking with each other while Obama’s job approval ratings go right where he’s taking our economy: The 30s.
The goals of the program, as listed in the administration’s Request for Quote (a solicitation for contractors to submit bids for contract work), are clear.
• Capture of comments by detractors and supporters of Obama: the RFQ specifies that the White House will capture “comments by both Obama critics and supporters, with no restriction as to how the White House would use the information.”
• Transparency: there is none. The RFQ includes “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”)”;
• Collection of data on citizens: the RFQ prescribes a massive data collection effort including capturing of comments on any website or social networking service;
• Collection of any and all types of content: text, markup, graphics, video, audio, etc.
I thought this was hyperbole until I actually read the RFQ http://www.nlpc.org/sites/default/files/RFQ_WHOS090003.pdf . It’s all there in black and white.
The contractor shall provide the necessary services to capture, store, extract to approved formats, and transfer content published by EOP 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…. The contractor shall include in the information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence both comments posted on pages created by EOP and messages sent to EOP accounts on those web sites. Publicly-accessible sites may include, but are not limited to social networking sites. The contractor shall provide a user-friendly way of organizing and searching captured information…
…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.
He’s making a list, checking it twice
So much for your Constitutional Rights
Member #: 61931
Registered: 9/16/2008
Posted:
963
Occupation:
Tower Contractor
Location:
PA
Personal:
mid 50s
Experience:
~37 years
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