Archive: Year: 2013

We're off the web and back on Planet Earth, going where the winds will take us. To all our readers and friends, a happy and health new year!...

Nerdfighters The Washington Post's Cecilia Kang and Ellen Nakashima report on what went on yesterday in President Obama's meeting with 15 Silicon Valley tech executives. Not surprisingly, much of the conversation focused on company concerns about NSA overreach. We'd like to know which participant "suggested the president pardon Snowden," which Obama said he could not do. President Obama also joked that he wished Washington was as "ruthlessly efficient" as portrayed in the Netflix series House of Cards. The relatives of the 17 people killed earlier this month when a U.S. drone mistakenly hit a wedding convoy in Yemen were not available to comment. Edward Snowden has not made a new request for asylum in Brazil, Glenn Greenwald told BuzzFeed; his original request is...

Can You Hear Me Now? Not living in the past: The collection and retention of the phone call "metadata" of all Americans likely violates the Constitution, Federal District Court Judge Richard Leon said yesterday in a preliminary ruling in a case challenging the NSA brought by conservative Larry Klayman. Leon rejected a 1979 precedent, saying, "“Put simply, people in 2013 have an entirely different relationship with phones than they did 34 years ago,” he wrote. “Records that once would have revealed a few scattered tiles of information about a person now reveal an entire mosaic — a vibrant and constantly updating picture of the person’s life.” Edward Snowden issued a statement through Glenn Greenwald praising Leon's ruling: “I acted on my belief that...

To hear Jon Carson tell it, Organizing for America, the continuation of President Obama's massive 2012 political machine, was nothing but a one-man shop on January 20, 2013, just him sitting "in a Potbellies restaurant" near the White House charting out its future. Except for one thing. "We were a start-up that inherited the assets of Google." That is, as Carson, OFA's executive director, made clear at an open session last Friday morning at RootsCamp 2013, OFA isn't really a start-up at all, just a new bottle for all the campaign's old wine. And a much smaller bottle at that. For while OFA did inherit digital assets like the @barackobama Twitter account and its massive email list, it had to start...

Self-censorship The NSA doesn't "spy" on Americans. It just collects and keeps the phone records of everyone, going back five years. But General Keith Alexander insisted to 60 Minutes that that was not spying. Also, in a new claim for the NSA, Alexander told 60 Minutes that it had foiled a plot to take over computers in America, which could have "impact[ed] and destroy[ed] major portions of our financial system." A top NSA official alsohas told 60 Minutes that he would consider recommending amnesty for Edward Snowden in exchange for documents that have not yet been given to journalists. Though Snowden has said he gave all the documents he downloaded to journalists, the NSA apparently believes he has access to more. 60 Minutes...

Intellectuals Josh Levy and Renata Avila of Free Press have penned an eloquent call for "The Decentralized Web," tying together the rise of the handful of web giants that each want to be our all-purpose data holders (and use various forms of walled gardens to pen us in) and the newly exposed national surveillance state. Most interestingly, they offer several moves individuals can take to fight back, including: "Ditch Google and turn to alternative search engines and email providers…Get off Facebook…Learn about encryption and off-the-record chat." Read the whole thing. Don't miss Jillian York's response to Henry Farrell in the new issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. She tackles his recent essay on "The Tech Intellectuals" and presses on a weakness...

Yum, Cookies! Cookies placed by Google on the web browsers of users of its services are also being used by the NSA to track the web behavior of its targets, reports The Washington Post's Ashkan Soltani, Andrea Peterson and Barton Gellman. Their story presents a new dilemma for the big tech platforms, which just two days ago issued a new call to limit government surveillance. They could make their browsers less cookie-friendly, and stop sending unique IDs from them, but that could make their own advertising business models suffer. Soltani and Gellman also reported yesterday on how the NSA using mobile location data to develop detailed information about people it may target. While the program is focused on overseas, it does "incidentally"...

Incentives HealthCare.gov is "vastly improved," reports the New York Times' Lizette Alvarez and Jennifer Preston. "In the first week of December, about 112,000 people selected plans — compared with about 100,000 in all of November and only 27,000 in October. Last week, more than half a million people created accounts on the federal website, according to people familiar with the health care project." Members of the congressional committees that oversee the U.S. intelligence community have received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from industry contractors who receive billions from the intelligence budget, Maplight reports. The competition for online attention is driving some news sites to post stuff that is too good to be true, reports Ravia Somaiya and Leslie Kaufman in the Times....

Open Letters Eight tech giants, led by Google and Microsoft, have issued a call to limit online spying. On ReformGovernmentSurveillance.com, the companies lay out five key principles, including limits on governmental authority, opposition to bulk data collection, an adversarial court process to insure stronger oversight, and greater transparency about government demands for private data. At the Guardian, commentator Jeff Jarvis applauds the new initiative, but points out: Please note who is missing from the list – the signators are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Aol, Apple, LinkedIn. I see no telecom company there — Verizon, AT&T, Level 3, the companies allegedly in a position to hand over our communications data and enable governments to tap straight into internet traffic. Where is Amazon, another leader...

Snark vs Smarm Don't miss Tom Scocca's long and brilliant essay "On Smarm" that was published yesterday on Gawker. It's not primarily about tech or politics, but it gets at both in a really interesting way. Some of windiest windbags of our time--Ari Fleischer, Joe Lieberman, Dave Eggers, Jedediah Purdy, Barack Obama, Mike Bloomberg, Niall Ferguson, Malcolm Gladwell, Upworthy--get skewered. And it's also a brilliant defense of snark, swarm's antithesis. Here are two of his gems: "The old systems of prestige—the literary inner circles, the top-ranking daily newspapers, the party leadership—are rickety and insecure. Everyone has a publishing platform and no one has a career. Smarm offers a quick schema of superiority. The authority that smarm invokes is an ersatz one, but...