Government paws on our every tweet

… If that’s not enough to get your antenna up, here’s another bit of news that most people missed. In April 2010 it was announced that every 140-character snippet you have ever posted on Twitter has been committed to the U.S. Library of Congress. The Library of Congress and our friends at Twitter have agreed to archive every single tweet since its inception on March 21, 2006, when the first tweet was launched. It is now estimated that together we send a billion tweets a week – and all of it is be preserved forever. … In September of this year it was reported that the Federal Reserve put out to bid an RFP (Request for Proposal) detailing its plans to monitor Facebook, Twitter and Google News. According to the document, the Fed is evaluating bids for a social media analysis system that will mine data from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and web forums – beginning in December 2011. In order to “handle crisis situations” and “track … what they call “key bloggers and influencers”… Without jumping to completely Orwellian conclusion I believe that it is fair to say that many parts of our government are now attempting to gauge positive and negative sentiment by tapping into the immediate empirical data that is delivered online everyday…. Privacy is core to all we stand for as a nation – the right to our own opinions and convictions, privacy to express those opinions while standing on the First Amendment and freedom from fear regarding that expression. Lets commit to keeping our antennas up as we move forward into a digital unknown. Regret after the fact does little to secure our future privacy. (Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com …