You can just about picture White House new media director Macon Phillips banging his head against his office wall at the very same time he's banging out a blog post explaining why the White House, in its view, has no choice but to build out a system for archiving all the social media content being sent the White House's way. History recommends it, and the law demands it. But critics pounced on the plan's Orwellian implications when it first became known. Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times ran the headline "W.H. Collects Web Users' Data Without Notice."

The crux of the problem is that, in a breathtaking display of shortsightedness, the 1978 Presidential Records Act -- passed in that post Nixonian moment where American confidence in the presidency was, shall we say, a bit shaky -- utterly fails to dictate how the National Archives and Records Administration should treat Facebook wall posts and Twitter replies. In the face of such disappointing legislative oversight, the White House has two choices: (a) comply with NARA's guidance that it archive social media, (b) ignore NARA, or (c) get off the social web. The Obama White House is choosing (a) -- but not without causing itself considerable pain...

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...”

Surely this is one of the great mysteries wrapped inside an enigma of our day. Robert Gibbs sparked a a bit of a flurry in our niche the other day by saying on C-SPAN that Twitter is blocked in the White House. Gibbs used the Twitter blockade to explain why he, as White House press secretary, isn't in the practice of tweeting his own reflections on life inside the White House.

I noted at the time that Gibbs' interpretation couldn't be the full story. There were clearly holes in this blockade. For one thing, the White House's own account at @whitehouse is regularly updated with notes on the President's schedule, pointers to tweets coming from elsewhere in government, and even the occasional "FTW" celebration. Unless White House staffers were using non-White House computers to conduct official business, somewhere in the Executive Office of the President someone had been connecting up to Twitter. Those folks are in the White House's new media operation, which handles the White House's and Obama's social media profiles and outreach.

Over on Mediaite, Rachel Sklar has done some digging into the situation and concluded "Twitter Not Blocked In White House, As It Turns Out." Indeed, according to White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton, a pair of White House new media staffers -- new media director Macon Phillips and online programs director Jesse Lee -- are updating the White House Twitter feed. But the truth of the matter, says a White House contact, is that that pair of staffers are the exception to White House rule. They are two unrestricted aides out of the couple thousand employees in the Executive Office of the President...