What began with the FoxNews-led blowback against the Obama White House’s new media team’s request for people to turn in “fishy” emails gained steam when the White House mistakenly blasted out a pro-health reform email to thousands of people who hadn’t signed up to receive it. And now, White House opponents now have the all-important Act III of the narrative that Obama is guilty of misusing and abusing the Internet. The latest strike against him, in the eyes of critics, is that the White House new media team has issued a request for proposals asking federal IT contractors to develop a Presidential Records Act-compliant system for auto-archiving the contents of White House pages on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The National Legal and Policy Center ratcheted up the fear with the “Obama White House Has Secret Plan To Harvest Personal Data From Social Networking Websites.”

Where NLPC is getting its "harvest" talk from is that the Statement of Objectives issued by the White House and posted on posted on FedBizOpps.com is asking for contractors to build a system that collects "content published by EOP on publicly-accessible web sites, along with information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP offices under PRA maintains a presence." [Emphasis added] In other words, the White House is interested in automating the collection and archiving of not only what they post to Facebook and the like, but what citizens post in response. If this scares you, you should be frightened already. The White House already does this, more or less by hand. To both save them the trouble and ensure compliance with the Presidential Records Act, contractors are asked to come up with an user-friendly system to handle the job. From the SOO issued by the White House:

The contractor shall provide the necessary services to capture, store, extract to approved formats, and transfer content published by EOP on publicly-accessible web sites, along with information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP offices under PRA maintains a presence, throughout the term of the contract. The contractor shall if possible, capture, store, extract to approved formats, and transfer content published by EOP on non-public websites. The contractor shall include in the information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence both comments posted on pages created by EOP and messages sent to EOP accounts on those web sites. Publicly-accessible sites may include, but are not limited to social networking sites. The contractor shall provide a user-friendly way of organizing and searching captured information. The contractor shall properly transfer the captured information, as identified by EOP, to NARA in an acceptable format for both preservation in NARA's Electronic Records Archive and presentation at the future Presidential Library. The Contractor shall provide a method to separate content posted by other EOP component offices as required.

Whether or not compliance with the Presidential Records Act really does require the archiving of every comment and post is, according to experts I’ve talked to, still something of an open question, and the National Archives has been working on a set of guidelines to clarify how the post-Watergate good-government law applies to modern technologies. There’s a good chance that, when it comes to the web, PRA is an archaic approach to transparency that needs to be rethought by Congress. But until Congress gets around to it, the White House -- and its lawyers, who are still a bit shell-shocked by dealing the various email scandals that have plagued White Houses of late -- are going the cautious route of collecting first and asking questions later.

That super-cautious approach is being taken in some circles as a nefarious plot. Drudge ran with the NLPC story. The American Spectator ran commentary titled “White House Has Secret Plan To Harvest Personal Data From Social Networking Websites.” (Which, you might notice, is more or less the exact language used by the NLPC in their alert.) From the column:

It never ends. Every day a new outrage about the Obama administration comes to light. Each new outrage sounds like fiction. Who could dream up this stuff?

The conservative CNS news service tread more lightly, but still managed to strike a sinister note:

Anyone who posts comments on the White House’s Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter pages will have their statements captured and permanently archived by the federal government, according to a plan that the White House is now seeking a contractor to carry out.

That said, Ed Morrissey on Michelle Malkin's Hot Air blog isn’t signing off on the idea that this is some sort of nefarious and covert plot:

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.   

Now, there's a strong argument to be made that the White House has erred by not going far enough to let people know that a comment posted in response to a White House tweet or Facebook post will, indeed, be enshrined in the eventual Obama Presidential Library for the rest of time. When it comes to social media, there's an expectation that tweets and Facebook comments are fleeting. The White House should probably do a better job letting people know that the rules are -- at least for the time being -- different when it comes to corresponding with the chief executive.

In terms of political maneuvering, going after the Obama White House on the grounds of the Internet has its own sort of wisdom. By calling into question an area that, by common consensus the Obama organization had been thought to be uniquely skilled, it turned strength into weakness. Where once Obama was seen as someone who figured out how to use the Internet to bring more people into politics, that has become a liability. What’s remarkable to see, with each of these stories, is the tremendous play they get on conservative news sites, where at the same time you barely hear a thing about them if you only read progressive blogs or your more traditional news site. But if you pay attention to conservative circles, but can witness the slow building of this line of offense against Barack Obama: he’s a bully who uses the Internet to push people around.

That this is turning into a political battle isn't the least bit surprising. The White House email system alone has been the subject of countless hours of commentary and paid the salaries of quite a few lawyers. But the danger is that, as these fights go on and this storyline hardens into conventional wisdom, it isn't just the Obama White House that suffers. The risk is that what gets caught in the crossfire is the progress that has been made to use technology to improve the interaction between citizens and their government.