But don't think this administration intends to rest on its online petitioning laurels. In a blog post today, Peter Welsch, deputy director of online platform in the White House Office of Digital Strategy, revealed that We the People as we know and love it is only a version 1.0.

In the months to come, Mr. Welsch plans to roll out Petitions 2.0, an update that will make it easier for outside parties to mine the petitions for data:

The first set of methods, Read API, will be released in March, 2013 and will allow anyone to retrieve data on petitions, signatures, and responses. Later, we'll release a second set of methods, Write API, that will allow other websites and apps to collect and submit signatures without directly sending users to WhiteHouse.gov.

What's more, the White House is holding a hackathon later this month to give a select few a sneak-peak at the API. Well, we suppose it's nice to see the federal government reading the word "hacker" in a friendlier context. As for the new API, we're waiting with baited breath to learn what the data underlying petitions like this one will tell us.

(Photo: WhiteHouse.gov)

After a slew of stupid petitions cluttered the White House's official petition platform We the People, the administration has decided to raise the bar for the amount of signatures required to elicit a White House response. Now, instead of 25,000 signatures (a number easily attainable by Redditors and 4chan enthusiasts), a petition will require 100,000 signatures in order to garner a response.

The White House is too polite to admit that this is largely because they had to take time to write a response to a petition about building a Death Star, and instead argues that We the People has seen explosive growth recently, and it makes sense to raise the signature bar accordingly:

"In the last two months of 2012, use of We the People more than doubled. In just that time roughly 2.4 million new users joined the system, 73,000 petitions were created and 4.9 million signatures were registered....Most petitions that crossed the threshold collected 25,000 signatures within five days of their creation. More than 60 percent of the petitions to cross threshold in all of 2012 did so in the last two months of the year."

This isn't the first time the White House has upped the ante: previously they raised the signature requirement from 5,000 to 25,000.

Our sincerest condolences to Pokemon enthusiasts.