Friday, November 07, 2008

Dept of Change?

Ed Morrissey has some comments to make about Obama's new website-

However, this site has a .gov top-level domain (change.gov). That is reserved for “qualified government organizations and programs”. The incoming administration technically has no status as a government organization or program until January 20, 2009. The “Office of the President-Elect” doesn’t exist within the government. Furthermore, the use seen at the site is clearly promotional for Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and should have been kept at their own campaign domain rather than set up as an official US government site.

Another instance of Obama's ego- just like his faux Presidential Seal?

He also notes this odd fact-

Why does the government need to collect e-mails and addresses from citizens in order to share their stories with the President-Elect? What purpose does the OPE have for this information? Are they hoping to build a list to sell to political allies, or perhaps just to telemarketers to help pay off the deficit? Since this is hosted as a government site, I think they need to explain what official use they will make of this information.

Which of course made me think of this comment from Zombie-

But most disturbingly of all: The Obama campaign knows the name, phone number and address (as the assistant told me) of each person called; and we volunteers do in fact mark down the voting preferences of each individual. So, through phone banks like these, should Obama in fact become president (and even if he doesn’t), he and his team will have a pretty extensive list of everyone who voted against him.

Creepy, no?

No comments: