
The Presidential Records Act of 1978 meets web-based social media of 2009 - imgabe
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Reality-Check-The-Presidential-Records-Act/
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jsm386
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/>

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jrwoodruff
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.

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

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sachinag
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."

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jsm386
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.

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seiji
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/

