Could the federal government be getting in the way of transparent communication between officials and the public? According to The National Journal, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy is caught between a rock and a hard place, battling with its desire to interact more with the public via online social networks and the federal regulations that require everything posted online to also be archived internally.

That’s a lot of records that need to be stored. And it’s quite difficult to store such records when you’re talking about activity across networks like MySpace and Facebook. Private messages sent between users, wall postings, status and mood updates…these are all things that change frequently on social networks, and they are things that quickly and easily convey attitudes amongst users. But they can’t be readily archived. Just think of your Facebook newsfeed, which can be completely renewed in less than a day’s time.
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