AMERICA
Obama’s White House:
Watching You Online?
If you’re on Facebook or MySpace, the president’s team
may soon be collecting data about you and your activities.
Is that a cause for concern? Probably.
By Kenneth R. Timmerman “The same White House new cally (via Application Programming
media team that is managing this Interfaces from social networks)
D
O YOU HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT THE contract got caught twice in just a and manually (through daily screen
Obama administration or a White matter of weeks for abusing White shots),” the quote request states. But
House policy? Have you sounded House resources,” says Ken Boehm it wants “a provider to ensure we
off recently about the president on of the National Legal and Policy automatically capture this content
a social networking site such as Center, who exposed the Web- in a scalable, effi cient and reliable
Facebook or MySpace? monitoring effort. manner.”
If so, chances are good that the In August, the media team The problem is not so much that
White House knows who you are sought quotes from Internet ven- the White House wants to archive its
and soon will be able to track you in dors with software that could “crawl own Web sites and the comments
cyberspace. That might sound para- and archive” Internet sites where the that people post there. Even privacy
noid, if it weren’t for the fact that the White House has a presence.
White House is reviewing propos- “Currently, the govern-
als of vendors with the capability of ment team is captur-
“crawling” the Internet and “captur- ing the data and
ing” content related to the president. content both
And that means more tracking of program-
information. mati-
More than 20 companies have
submitted detailed plans, which
the White House demanded to be
cloaked in secrecy.
The administration claims that
its vast data-mining operation is no
different from the Bush administra-
tion’s. Critics counter that it opens
the door to creating an “enemies list”
and could lead to the type of govern-
ment harassment that was heaped
on “Joe the plumber,” the Ohio man
whose question during last year’s
presidential campaign prompted
then-Sen. Barack Obama to reveal
his socialist goal of “spreading the
wealth around.”
20 NEWSMAX / NOVEMBER 2009
020_AM_whitehousesecrets.indd 20 10/1/09 11:58 AM
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