Twitter Banned from White House | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Banned from White House

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They also block Facebook, Myspace, and likely most other forms of external communication sites such as Gmail and Hotmail. This isn't news or a new development.

Seriously though, do we want our taxpayer-paid public employees wasting as much time at work on Facebook as we do? I doubt it. People forget that the White House is an office too, just like others - just with lots of special properties.

Many large corporations block those as well. Partially it's to prevent goofing off, but I suspect (especially in the White House) the main reason is documentation.

Pretty much all communications coming in and out of the WH have to be monitored and recorded - either at the summary level (sender/recipient/subject/date) or at the full-text level, owing to laws about public access and documentation in the National Archives. Interested parties can FOIA pretty much anything produced by an employee of the government; electronic communications are no exception. So until NARA can created a Twitter/Gmail/Facebook proxy - for which I wouldn't stay up waiting - I suspect they'll just keep blocking them.

so who's updating this? http://twitter.com/whitehouse

Someone who is not in the White House.

Or someone who has a filter exception.

"If you require access to this site for business reasons, please fill out this form in triplicate and sign in blood..."

My wife's employer has that sort of high-handed approach to control of employee behavior. I'm rather astonished that a progressive, 2.0, "open government" administration chooses that sort of avenue to security/leak-control/discipline (or whatever their actual motivation).

I assumed the motivation had to do with the legal requirements that the White House is supposed to follow regarding tracking communications coming from the White House.

If they don't have a way to keep tabs on any messages that get twittered, sent via facebook or even worse, webmail; then it's far easier to just block it.

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