The White House will soon be capturing and archiving any and all comments from visitors to its sites on the Internet, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube. It says it is doing this to comply with the Presidential Records Act (PRA). It is requesting proposals from private contractors to handle the work. The request for proposal (RFP) can be found here (PDF). Although the original article mentioned social networking sites specifically, "Publicly-accessible sites may include, but are not limited to social networking sites," says the RFQ.
The document says that White House — which it refers to as the Executive Office of the President (EOP) — "currently maintains" seven sites. These are:
www.facebook.com/whitehouse
www.twitter.com/whitehouse
www.myspace.com/whitehouse
www.flickr.com/whitehouse
www.youtube.com/whitehouse
www.vimeo.com/whitehouse
www.slideshare.com/whitehouse
The RFQ specifically asks at the end why the information is being collected. In the question and answer section on the last page of the RFQ, it says: "The Presidential Records Act does not require the storage or archiving of non-EOP content, as such is there a specific reason as to why the content provided on EOP related websites in the form of comments is included in these archiving procedures?"
The answer: "PRA includes in its definition of presidential records content ‘received’ by PRA components and personnel. Out of an abundance of caution, we are treating comments made by non-PRA personnel on sites on which a PRA component has a presence as presidential records, requiring them to be captured or sampled."
The original article says 10 companies have put answered so far. The link to the government's site listing the companies wasn't working when I tried it.
The original article is found here.
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