I find myself amused. When I first saw this, I was sure it was from the Onion.
The Congress-focused research organization LegiStorm set off a firestorm on Capitol Hill this week as some staffers learned that their personal Twitter accounts would appear on the site.
LegiStorm on Wednesday publicized the tool StormFeed, a “real-time, full-text searchable access to every official press release and official tweet from Capitol Hill plus the tweets of thousands of congressional staffers,” according to a release. It’s a page available for members of the subscription service LegiStorm Pro.
As staffers learned about StormFeed, some discovered other detailed, personal information listed on the site.
“Many are finding inaccurate information in their profiles, despite [Legistorm’s] promise that info provided is ‘confirmed,’” one House Republican staffer told POLITICO in an email on Friday. “I was pretty surprised to show that they even listed who I married, when I married him and where. Why in the world does that need to be in there?”
Welcome to the fucking club, guys. We, the citizens, are subject to our government collecting all kinds of information about us. We, the citizens, are told that government can monitor our cell phones, roll drug-sniffing dogs up and see our e-mail patterns without a warrant. We, the citizens, will be subject to the new SOPA bills you guys are quietly crafting. We, the citizens, are subject to an ever-expanding list of federal crimes we can commit with knowing it. But someone wants to publish your public records and suddenly it’s a violation?
You may think that Congressional staffers are innocent bystandards in the war on our privacy. You would think wrong. Staffers are usually very involved in the legislative process. They often read the bills that Congressmen don’t. They are a party to ever civil liberties violations that has come down the pipe in the last ten years. And now they’re miffed because someone is looking at their God damned Twitter feed?
Give me a break.