White House seeks to capture and archive citizens' comments on its social networking sites Interesting that they find this necessary. "Out of an abundance of caution" = We don't give a fuck about wasting money. edit: For those not reading the article, the government is supposedly only data mining comments on EOP (Executive Office of President) pages (www.twitter.com/whitehouse) or whatever..
yeah know, its probably only comments from public profiles (if your profile is public you are an idiot anyways). Mines private, and with all this new security talk about apps and making sure our info is protected (in Canada at least), i doubt they will do this(in Canada at least)!
America is just as socialized as Canada, we simply cater better to the special interests of multinational corporations.
This! plus we might be having a fucking 5th election in 4 years this fall... hopefully well get someone good. EDIT: Salvial, where in ontario are you?
All of ya'll need to chill out and put this shit in perspective. The title is already misleading. "Secretly harvesting facebook comments." Yeah big secret if it made it all the way to GC ^_^ And how is this impeding on your rights? If you leave a twitter/facebook/forum post on their facebook/twitter or whatever, why can't they index it? How is that unconstitutional? I mean everyone in here is crying that they're indexing facebook comments, when most of you shallow bastards are too ignorant to realize that Myspace is COMPLETELY OWNED by News Corp. What do you think they do with their terrabytes worth of indexed data from music likes, to movie likes, to tv show likes, to comments/messeges, friend networks, etc etc etc. That shit has been going on for a few years now, and that's totally cool for them to do that, but when the government wants to index hundreds of thousands of messeges that it receieves daily, if ONLY for the reason of having a record of them, thats going too far? Ya'll need to put the pipe down and take a walk outside. Conspiracy theories are corroding your brain.
if they dont mention in the rules when you sign up or send out a notice stating they will be 'harvesting' comments, it kind of is secret.. Go to yahoo, the story aint there. go to cnn, not there. bigger new stations, not there. If they arent reporting it..a majority of people dont hear about it. which techinically makes its secret. Its keeping a majority of the public in the dark. Its one thing to say " hey, due to these problems, we are going to have to keep comments on document", its an entirely other thing to wake up to an article that tells you you've been monitered for some time now without your knowledge. My comments should be MY business, and if its for some reason not, they gotta let it be known so people can choose to stay or not. also, its one thing to say " oh myspace is collecting comments!well, that means the government must be spying!!" where there is obviously no government connections.. But here, the whitehouse is flat out admittedly doing this. No one is bringing the government into out of no where. They ARE doing this. its NOT a theory, Jack. If they can "harvest" shit from those sites, whats stopping them from coming to grasscity and using comments as criminal evidence against people?
Man, Obama really did promise change, too bad he wasn't specific enough about his change to mean that he wasn't changing from the Bush-era, but the entire contextual history of our founding document. Damn politicians and their word-wizardry!
It's literally a secret though. The language in the RFQ specifically calls for secrecy. Don't even get me started on constitutionality, that god damn piece of paper was thrown out a long time ago. Regardless, this process is at the very least unnecessary. Sell them to corporations and their governments. I'm a praxeologist, I don't believe someone simply decided to start monitoring comments "out of an abundance of caution". This is coming from the same White House that asked supporters to send in the emails and comments of dissenters, the same White House that calls half of the country "Right wing terrorists". Even if you think this is just a random and unplanned move by the state, it appears to be excessive, certainly not an expense worthy of our scarce tax dollars.
Hey at least the ones who leech of the Executives and everyone else who may have to use a computer for their occupation wont be effected, right? WOOT MORE GOVERNMENT FOR TO HELP US FROM OURSELVES!!!
If you really want to bring the Constitution into this (something very rare in today's politics), this is DEFINITELY unconstitutional since to monitor public information is not a specifically enumerated power and thus shall be reserved to the states. You could say this could be included under the "Congress can do anything in all cases whatsoever as long as it's for the general welfare" clause if it was a bill passed by congress, but it isn't. It's an executive mandate instead. If you think the only reason they want these is to have a record for no purpose you are naive. There are usually two reasons the government does something - the stated reason and the real reason. This is a blatant invasion of privacy on the part of the federal government. The role of the government shouldn't be to become as large and intelligent about it's citizens as possible... only totalitarian governments have a tendency to seek such information. Valuing privacy has nothing to do with conspiracy theories... this doesn't even fit half the definition of a conspiracy theory. It's not a conspiracy, and it's not a theory.
Dude, its their facebook page. They signed up on twitter and facebook as an entity, that entity was the whitehouse, they choose to keep a record of their comments, they are well within all legal bounds to do so, because they exist as an entity on both twitter and facebook. You guys are really looking for excuses for ridiculous conspiracy theories and shit to complain about. Every person on facebook and twitter has the right to index their own comments, why shouldn't the white house be able to again?