It appears that there’s some kind of sophisticated hidden ‘bug’ on the page that actually tracks the number of people that go to the site, whether you were referred from another site, and other dangerous information.
That’s right - the White House web site uses a (gasp!) hit counter. The bastards. And, it turns out that the use of the counter actually meets federal regulations!
Then there’s the shocking title of the article: “White House Says Web Site Counts Visitors”. My god, what will they stoop to next?
Man, those investigative reporters at the AP are good! Wait 'till they find out about Javascript. It’ll blow their minds.
It’s verboten to use cookies and bugs together to gather information about visitors to government websites in the US, without disclosure and adherence to careful guidelines.
One of the White House’s contractors, unaware of this rule, used a web-bug alone – but on servers that had user cookies associated with them, from other pages. This created an appearance of impropriety. It’s good that it was looked into – it’s even better that cookies weren’t being used improperly. These rules are in place because of concerns a few years back that a federal agency might make improper use of data collected about people who were interested in drug control policy.
The NSA got slapped recently for violating these rules – (apparently by accident.)
They’re good rules, with good reasons.
There’s no call to jump up and down about it – it’s not like the article was suggesting that anything sinister was going on.
Apparently friend Sam Stone was in such a rush to share his sarcastic indignation with us that he overlook the fact that this was more than a mere hit counter:
Or, in non-geekspeak, if you
visit a web site and get tagged with a WebTrends cookie, then
visit an NSA site that looks for those cookies, then
the feds can track what other web sites you visit.
But I’m sure friend Sam Stone will be back any minute now to tell us how perfectly innocent this is, and how he looks forward to volunteering to have all of his cyber-visits supervisied by the Bush Administration…
The article was about the White House’s web site, and it turns out they did nothing wrong and were violating no rules. They aren’t exploiting the webtrends cookie.
This was a total non-story, and why it was published is completely beyond me. That was the whole point.
This story boggled my mind when I saw it on a U.S. network news program. Your president authorizes illegal spying on your own country, it gets discovered, they decide to hold an investigation… into who told people they were spying, and the big news story is persistant cookies on web sites nobody goes to?
On yahoo news, it was right up there with stories about a pack of wild chihuahuas attacking an officer, the tiger cubs heading to Denver, and the racy blogger at the U.S. attorney’s office. More real important news items.
But thanks for yet more proof of the right’s persecution complex. It’s very becoming.
It’s also strange that every time someone posts about something that sucks about U.S. governmental affairs, someone will post right away that it’s only the left/right getting uptight over nothing, and then everyone breaks down in to the two separate party lines and bicker over that. :dubious:
