More information about the White House's attempt to use the Internet to keep up on what people are thinking. This time they are trying to track people on social network sites.
I came across this news article on World Net Daily. "The
White House is hiring a contractor to harvest information about Americans from its pages on social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. The
National Legal and Policy Center, or NLPC, revealed the White House New Media team is seeking to hire technology vendor to collect 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. '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," the posting states.'"
"This is the third controversy involving the White House Internet operations in less than a month.[...] "Now the same people at the White House are at it again with an ambitious plan to harvest huge amounts of information from the web and specifically social networking sites." Some of this information includes, "capturing of comments by both Obama critics and supporters, with no restriction as to how the White House would use the information.
President's Obama green job advisor Van Jones made and interesting statement concerning information technology, social networking websites(?). Here is what he said about this: "'It's my great hope that if we combine this breakthrough in clean energy technology with the real breakthrough in the information networking domain, we can get to a breakthrough in American politics,' said Jones at a speech screened by WND.[...] 'If we can combine these two revolutions in green technology and information technology, we can have a political realignment to get us the country we always wanted,' he said."I don't know if this is related to the White House's attempts to gather information on social network sites. Using social network sites in and of it self to bring about political action or to achieve a political goal is not a nefarious thing, but gathering information from these sites in this manner is a little "fishy". Of note is the fact that there is an attempt to bring about a political realignment, not a bad thing in and of itself; but when one looks at this guys past statements, one can see the type of political realignment he is talking about.
I wonder if there would be outcry if this was done under Bush? In my opinion, this is not some huge thing to get worked up over. This encroachment on our privacy will only get more pronounced in the future. This is a possible tool of a tyrannical government that could be used to implement its control. When one looks at this in connection with the goals of the current people in positions of power in our government, one should wonder what this information will be used for. When I go on the Internet, I expect that my actions are being tracked. This is worth noting to give an indication what our system of government is evolving into.
