Data Mining

Update (9/3):

I've done some digging, and I THINK I've found the origin of this story, and as seems to happen a lot with "Ooooh, look at what big bad Obama" stories, the actual facts are pretty harmless.

As far as I can tell, this archival project comes out of the White House trying to follow existing laws in untested waters.

Recall that one of the many complaints about the Bush White House is that large numbers of official e-mails were not archived properly, and there was some evidence early on of staffers using private e-mail accounts on Yahoo, GMail, etc for official business, to avoid the archiving.

So anyway, the Obama White House has taken web presence to unprecedented levels, with accounts on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. And since this is all electronic communication, they're archiving it. And because these sites all allow people to post comments and send e-mails TO the accounts, they're archiving that as well.

And they MAY be being a tad overzealous in the amount they archive, but the intent is to make sure they fully comply with the intent of the laws, even though they've not yet been tested in these arenas.

I'm guessing that many of the same people who are to today yelling about invasions of privacy and big brother and the like would be the same people who, if they WEREN'T doing this, in a few years would be asking "What are they covering up, that they won't show us the archives of their Facebook communications?"

And if you think I'm being overly simplistic, just remember that these same people have been telling us that Obama wants us to turn in our friends and neighbors for opposing health care, when in fact he asked people to tell him about UNTRUTHS about health care. Not who told them, just the untruths themselves, so that they (the White House) could effectively correct the record.

I'm going to consider this matter closed, unless someone comes to me with conclusive evidence that there's more to it than this. I doubt that will happen.

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This is the response I wrote to the posting at this link.

To me, this smells a lot like a propaganda effort. We know people are a bit testy about the illegal spying program that Bush put into place, so lets take something the Obama administration is doing that sounds, superficially, to be similar, and see if we can transfer that anger from Republicans to Democrats.

Keep in mind that the difference between the two is that the earlier program was sifting through (reportedly) all of our phone calls and e-mails, things which are supposed to be relatively private and are supposed to require a court order to access. The second is a program to compile a database of the public information people put on Facebook. It may be creepy to compile it all into a database, but then again, I have friends on there under pseudonyms like "Mare Astra" and "Terma Gant". All they're going to have is a list of your public statements associated with as much of your identifying information as you chose to leave public.

Anyway, here's what I wrote in my comment on the site:


So, let me get this straight... we didn't make a big deal with the previous administration went through our (ostensibly private) e-mails and phone records, but we're going to have a tizzy when this administration goes through the PUBLIC information we put on file with Facebook?

I'm not entirely happy about this, but to me there's a huge difference between compiling publicly available data vs. snooping through things that are supposed to be private and are supposed to require a court order in order to see.

To me, this whole uproar smacks of people trying to tap into the outrage over the illegal spying to use it to tarnish the current administration.

It's Facebook, people. They can only access the stuff you put out and available for everyone to see!