It is essential in a democracy that readers are free to read without fear that the government will monitor what they are reading. When government information is available only from government-controlled web sites, it will be easy for the government to track who is reading what and even track web surfing. Although a 2003 Office of Management and Budget memo prohibits federal agencies from using persistent cookies, news this week is that the National Security Agency site created cookies files that do not expire until 2035, “likely beyond the life of any computer in use today.”
An NSA spokesman, said that the cookie use resulted from a recent software upgrade and that the agency immediately disabled the cookies when they were notified of their existence.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.