Government paws on our every tweet

In April 2010 it was announced that every 140-character snippet you have ever posted on Twitter has been committed to the U.S. Library of Congress. The Library of Congress and our friends at Twitter have agreed to archive every single tweet since its inception on March 21, 2006, when the first tweet was launched. It is now estimated that together we send a billion tweets a week – and all of it is be preserved forever. It does not seem to me that there is such a big jump from the retention of this information to the dissection and analyzing of such data and then ultimately the utilization of what is learned. The purpose (according to a blog post by Library of Congress communications director Matt Raymond) is to document "important tweets" as well as gather information about the way we live through the sheer masses of tweets on the site. Some find great comfort in the fact that only tweets from public Twitter feeds will be included, not those that have been set as private. Think quickly for me – are your tweets set to be private? Do you really understand that every tweet you post is intrinsically designed to be searchable? We must understand that Twitter was always designed to be searchable. In fact, it's essential that we recognize the possibility that at some point in the future our government, either overtly or covertly, could attempt to match this information with other user information archived in federal databases...more