White House hiring contractor to collect e-mail, comments from social networks

The White House is hiring a contractor to harvest information about Americans from its pages on social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. The National Legal and Policy Center, or NLPC, revealed the White House New Media team is seeking to hire a technology vendor to collect data such as comments, tag lines, e-mail, audio and video from any place where the White House "maintains a presence" – for a period of up to eight years. "The contractor shall provide the necessary services to capture, store, extract to approved formats, and transfer content published by EOP (Executive Office of the President) on publicly-accessible web sites, along with information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP offices under PRA (Presidential Records Act) maintains a presence," the posting states. According to the 51-page solicitation of bids posted Aug. 21, the purpose of the mining and archiving project is to "comply with the Presidential Records Act," though the listing does not specify how the information will be used. It states that the government is currently collecting data from social networks both programmatically and by use of daily screenshots. Contractors must agree to keep information disclosed by the EOP in the "strictest confidence" and restrict access "to those employees who must have the information to perform the work provided herein on a 'need-to-know' basis."...WND