Archive: Year: 2011

A few days ago, Dr. Rasha Abdulla, an expert on the role of the Internet in Egypt who teaches at the American University in Cairo (and who I'm pleased will be speaking at Personal Democracy Forum this June in New York), told me about a strange experience she had with her Facebook page during the height of the uprising against the Mubarak regime. A video of a defenseless Egyptian man being gunned down by police in Alexandria on January 28th, which she and others had tried to share on their Facebook pages, was mysteriously taken down without explanation during the heat of the protests. [Warning, this video is not for the faint of heart.] Then, a day later, it was back up...

The PdF Network is PdF's premium membership service, designed to give those working in government, politics, advocacy, and many more sectors, unparalleled access to industry experts and resources. As we work to upgrade the network, launching at the end of spring, we're offering the PdF Network's bi-monthly call series to the public at no cost. Patrick Meier. Since its launch in early 2008, Ushahidi ("Witness" in Swahili) has grown from a Google Maps mashup of user-generated reports about post-election problems in Kenya that was hacked together in two days by volunteers, into a robust world-class platform for crowdsourced reporting on all kinds of urgent (earthquake in Haiti! floods in Pakistan!) and not-so-urgent (snow in Washington, DC) situations in close to real...

I spent yesterday deep in the weeds of WikiLeaks post-mortemizing, first at an invitation-only session run by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, at the Harvard Kennedy School and then in the evening at a jam-packed public event hosted by the Columbia University Journalism School. You can read my live notes from Harvard here and Columbia here. This is what happens, I guess, when you write a quickie book on the topic (pre-order your copies here). I was struck by two things across both events, which featured top editors from the New York Times and the Guardian, and in the case of Harvard, a strong contingent of former top government officials. First, that too much of...

While I completely agree with Matthew Ingram, whose post "It's Not Twitter or Facebook, It's the Power of the Network" should be must-reading as an antidote to all the overheated media commentary about which tech tool is most responsible for the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, I have one wrinkle to add. The biggest factor in the unfolding events, to me, appears to be the emergent power of young people, compounded by how urbanized they are and how connected they are by mobile phones. If you look at the available data on degree of internet penetration, number of mobile cellular subscriptions per 100 people, percentage of population under the age of 15 and degree of urbanization, what jumps out is how...

When President Obama sought, during Tuesday's State of the Union Address, to dramatize the power and value of building out America's high-speed broadband infrastructure, he offered a compelling illustration: "It’s about a firefighter who can download the design of a burning building onto a handheld device...

WikiLeaks and Anonymous are harbingers of a future where networked individuals who know no particular allegiance to any country have the power to disrupt business as usual, thanks to the Internet, decentralization, and powerful encryption technologies. What you might call the "old" notions of "citizen activism" and "citizen journalism" have to be expanded or rethought, because now there are kinds of activism and journalism that don't appear to be subservient to the laws and customs of any state. Citizenship, wherever you may hold it, comes with boundaries. Right now, it appears that both WikiLeaks and Anonymous have found ways to stretch, if not completely break, those limits. That's what I'm hoping to discuss tonight at the second PdF Symposium on WikiLeaks...

Personal Democracy Forum, in partnership with New York University's Interactive Technology Program, is pleased to present our second symposium on WikiLeaks and Internet Freedom this coming Monday, January 24, from 6-8pm. Tickets are $15 and only available in advance; don't delay, they're selling quickly. We'll be joined by a terrific array of speakers: Birgitta Jonsdottir, a leading member of the Icelandic Parliament, who was an active volunteer with WikiLeaks for part of last year, and who is currently challenging the U.S. Justice Department's request for her personal records from Twitter; Clay Shirky, noted author, NYU lecturer, social theorist and long-time friend of PdF, who has written some of the most widely-discussed and nuanced analyses of the WikiLeaks controversy (see "WikiLeaks and the...

I'm trying to finish my Qwikileaks book, but events in Tunisia and the commentary around them spurs this quick comment: Image credit: Sam HusseiniDoes anyone remember the Meetup Revolution of 2003, where the Internet put Howard Dean at the front of the Democratic presidential primary? No, you don't. What you hopefully do remember are names like Joe Trippi, Zephyr Teachout, Mathew Gross, Zack Exley, Nicco Mele, Michael Silberman, Amanda Michel, Jerome Armstrong, and Karen Hicks; and organizations like MoveOn.org and the Service Employees International Union, as well as Meetup. Does anyone remember the #TCOT Revolution of 2010, where the Twitter hashtag for "Top Conservative on Twitter" put the Tea Party movement on the map and drove conservative candidates like Scott Brown...

I'm excited to announce that in mid-February OR Books, a small independent press based in New York City, will be publishing my seventh sixth book, WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. You can pre-order copies or e-books here. The book is not meant to be a treatise on WikiLeaks, nor an exhaustive discussion of the future of secrecy or privacy. But it is very much inspired by WikiLeaks and the fierce debates it has set off. The book aims to be a report from the trenches where a wide array of small-d democracy and transparency activists are hard at work in the United States and other countries using new tools and methods to open up previously closed and powerful institutions and...