Exhibit #43,859 re: the American right is fucking insane

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yes, you heard me: fucking insane. Here's some paranoid raving from the National Legal and Policy Center:

NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites.

The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House maintains a presence."

Right. The Obama White House is an Orwellian menace, a threat to American freedom. Seriously, what utter nonsense.

Where were these idiots when Bush and Cheney were wiretapping American citizens and otherwise shitting all over the Constitution?

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Please note: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr are public websites. Comments, tag lines, e-mails, audio, and video are not "personal information." When I tweet, that's it, it goes public. The same goes for the other sites. Yes, there are privacy settings on Facebook, but there's a difference between status updates and personal information.

The Obama White House is free to monitor public websites, it is not? After all, these are new media sites. It isn't enough anymore just to monitor traditional media outlets. And it isn't just the White House. I'm sure every government office in Washington, and in every state capital, conducts broad media scans. I'm sure every elected official has staff monitoring what's being said in the media. I'm sure media outlets, businesses, and other private organizations conduct their own scans, too.

It's not Orwellianism, and it's not some nefarious plot to create a totalitarian society. In a free society, people are free to monitor the public sphere. It's called democracy.

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UPDATE: For an intelligent conservative take on this story, see my friend Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air:

I'm not sure that highlighting a public contract offer amounts to "uncovering" a conspiracy, especially since their analysis turns out to be faulty. Contrary to NLPC's take, the contractor would be collecting data required to be kept by the White House -- by law.

Ed is absolutely right -- and his analysis is fantastic. It's much ado about nothing, not a totalitarian plot.

Would all of you who jumped on the anti-Obama bandwagon care to apologize, or at least to take back your attacks?