The Presidential Records Act of 1978 meets web-based social media of 2009 | Hacker News Reader

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 meets web-based social media of 2009

whitehouse.gov

19 pointsimgabe7 comments

Not getting political, but it always struck me as absurd when: Perino says she "could not rule out" that as many as 5 million emails are missing but stressed the White House does not know the extent of what maybe lost. Twenty-two current White House staffers hold RNC email accounts -- 50 during the course of the two terms. About 1,000 people work for the Executive Office of the President. All White House official records are to be preserved indefinitely under the Presidential Records Act

Regarding Karl Rove -- who is in Portland, OR today doing fundraising -- the White House says that in 2004, his email accounts at the RNC were exempted from the RNC's practice of an automatic 30-day purge that applies to other users. In January 2006, Rove's ability to use a "double delete function" was removed so he could no longer manually delete and then empty his delete file. Officials say this applied only to Rove as far as they know now.

edit: source: http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2007/04/13/e_mails/

Very interesting. I remember reading about this when Obama first took office, I believe. The article was discussing the painful process of updating the whitehouse home page. Apparently, any change to the page requires that the current page is saved in its entirety, archived, then a the updated page can be posted.

I've been wondering how this requirement effects Obama's web 2.0 push.

Probably very little--any version control system should meet that requirement.

It makes me physically sick that they have to rebut the accusation that archiving blog comments and other UGC is "a secret, sinister plan to catalog the activity of individuals on all social networks and capture personal or private information about individuals without their consent."

I agree the secret, sinister stuff is nonsense, BUT I think there are legitimate privacy concerns for citizens. The Presidential Records Act is being, appropriately I believe, extended to social media. The average citizen probably had no idea the act existed; probably more so for anyone who is buying into the wildest exaggerations.

As the post explains, 'The PRA also extends to communications from people outside the White House. So if a lobbyist or CEO emails the White House, that communication is a presidential record and will eventually be made public. The same holds true for correspondence received by the White House from the public. Because of the PRA, Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush all treated letters, faxes, and other communications from the public as presidential records.'

'Instead of sending an email, people often now post on someone’s profile or comment on a video or photo that's been uploaded. When people want to tell the White House what they think, they’ll often do the same thing on our social media pages. A lot of times, we solicit this feedback because we want to hear from you.

These new types of communications from individuals to the White House, even though they take a different form, are governed by the PRA.'

So yes, in the past if you sent a letter to the White House it was archived, but it is an entirely different mindset for someone posting a comment, or sending an @whitehouse on Twitter. We're talking about archiving, for public record, something you probably quickly typed, not a letter you sat down, wrote, and sent via the mail.

Is there anything sinister? No. But I think it makes perfect sense that this is something that needs to be explained to the general public who are a) woefully ignorant of how their government works, and b) rightfully suspicious of how laws written decades ago, which weren't designed for social media, let alone the Internet, are being interpreted and applied on the fly.

Considering what's been tried before (and fairly recently at that), it's a valid concern.

E.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office

A few years ago, I wouldn't have believed this URL would exist one day: www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Reality-Check-The-Presidential-Records-Act/

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