Twitter Banned from White House

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_banned_from_white_house.php

12 7 17 years ago

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).

icey• 17 years ago

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.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

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.

JimmyL• 17 years ago

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.

jgilliam• 17 years ago

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

pavs• 17 years ago

Someone who is not in the White House.

jbarciauskas• 17 years ago

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..."

Twitter Banned from White House

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