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September 3, 2009

Ed Morrissey: 'Does Obama plan to spy on social-networking sites?'

Topics: Political News and commentaries

Ed Morrissey addresses yesterday's rumor of presidential overreach involving a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, "secret" effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites and suggests that Big Brother is not upon us. The rumor stemmed from an RFP from FedBizOpps, the site that publishes all opportunities to do business with the federal government, that offers a contract for a company to collate data from the Internet.

As Ed explains:

A more careful reading of this RFP shows that to be the project. The contract directs the contractor to archive the "information posted on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence", including social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter, and so on. It doesn't call for everything on those networks to be archived, but only "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." In other words, the archiving will include interaction on EOP websites and pages, but not anything else.

The very real threats to our liberties, rights, freedoms and way of life that the Obama administration's radical agenda to transform America poses are significant, numerous, and very real. However, it's important to delineate the real threats from those that are simply perceived or imagined, and for Americans to focus their energies on stopping the real ones. It appears that the perception that the Obama administration intended to spy on social-networking sites is incorrect, so Americans can breathe a sigh of relief on this one, for now.

Posted by Richard at September 3, 2009 9:39 AM

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• Ed Morrissey: 'Does Obama plan to spy on social-networking sites?' - Sep 03, 2009