What's up? I can't quite discern your beef. The article was kindergarten-level pablum in the technical sense, but I didn't spot any errors or falsehoods.

I got a little chuckle from this news item because when I poked around at whitehouse.gov a long while back, they were using a much more intrusive monitoring system, judging by the grandiose claims of omniscience of its vendor's Web site. What they're using now is a popular package called WebTrends, that's not as ambitious but does indeed use tracking cookies. I was poking through its JavaScript file, and it does read cookies as well as record the referrer (the previous page that took you to the monitored page), as well as some technical details about your computer that the browser makes available. It even inventories whether you have the Flash plugin installed and if so what version. It packages all that stuff up into a long URL for the invisible WebBug graphic, to be recorded by their server.

As I noted, WebTrends is a popular commercial package, and to put it into perspective whitehouse.gov doesn't seem to be using it any more aggressively than a commercial site. They're not setting a cookie themselves to tag the visitor, but note that if the next site you go to has tagged you, they'll look at the referrer and then be able to identify that it was you personally that visited whitehouse.gov. Every site using WebTrends is a node in a tracking network, some active, some passive, and they don't have to actively ping you to identify you.

OTOH, almost all the links out of whitehouse.gov take you to other government agencies, mostly the executive branch, all prohibited by law from tagging you with tracking cookies, because that would be warrantless surveillance, and you know how diligently this executive branch complies with those laws, right? I feel secure, don't you?