

Twitter Banned from White House - kajecounterhack
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_banned_from_white_house.php

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brown9-2
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.

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JimmyL
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.

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

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jbarciauskas
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..."

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ExJournalist
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).

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icey
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.

