Government to receive archive of every tweet ever sent...

[n2doc]

Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive - Tweets, emails and other electronic communications can be considered "government documents" and must be preserved. The National Archives handles official government materials, while the Library of Congress' mandate is to deal with anything that may have long-term historical interest.

"We're basically in the same situation as the National Archives, only on a much larger scale," said Bill Lefurgy, digital initiatives program manager at the Library of Congress national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. "We tend to have a much larger perspective in terms of what we collect." He joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Amy Morris Tuesday morning to talk about the library's digital mission.

But how much digital information are we talking about? How about all of the tweets from Twitter's archives?

"We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public," Lefurgy said. The archives don't contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else — billions and billions of tweets — are there."

more
http://www.themistsofavalon.net/t3573-government-to-receive-archive-of-every-tweet-ever-sent

[DCKit]

1. What a waste of.... everything. nt

[Scuba]

2. Hmmm, might want to invest in data storage. n/t

[RC]

3. How can private sector communications be considered government documents?

What happened to "Secure in our personal papers... etc."

[HereSince1628]

4. Well, our personal papers are securely held by the government.

that's sort of how it works in our increasingly policed state.

[xchrom]

5. Fuck. Nt

[rurallib]

6. Big Brother gets a christmas present.