[quote=air_ogi]partypup, you are misinformed. I know the article is a bit confusing, but it is your responsibility to do a bit of research on something that sounds completely improbable and comes from a biased source.

The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

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Air, I hear you, and thanks for including that link. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allay my concern because this information is still being gathered “without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama’s promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet. ”

When my friends post comments to my Facebook page, I don’t archive their posts. Do you? Do you even have that capability? Why does the White House have the capability to archive posts on Facebook that other users do not? And if you DID have this capability, wouldn’t you let your friends know, “Hey, by the way, I plan to collect all the information you send my way.” I would immediately wonder, “Why do you need to do that?”

No matter how you slice it, there is no transparency here. If he were Dubya, I would just chalk it up to another totalitarian erosion of my civil liberties. What more would I expect from that goon?

Maybe this kind of double-speak doesn’t bother you because it’s coming from Obama. So be it. But I’m not partisan. And to masquerade as a promoter of transparency and then take this kind of action without the consent of posters is disingenuous, at best. Is that the kind of *change* you were expecting?