Archive: Year: 2013

The Web We Want? Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani's latest scoop in the Washington Post reveals that the NSA collects "nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world" in order to track individuals and map their relationships. A vast database with information on hundreds of millions of devices is the result, including substantial records of Americans' locations. Gellman and Soltani note that "Cellphones broadcast their locations even when they are not being used to place a call or send a text message." Rolling Stone's Janet Reitman has a long and well-reported feature story on Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden. Most of the ground it covers is familiar, but near the end, there is this small revelation:...

For two years now, Ruck.us, the political social network start-up founded by political scions Nathan Dasche (aka Abu Tom, former Senate majority leader), and Raymond Glendening (aka Abu Parris, former Maryland governor) has gotten an unearned and adoring press from the usual places. On Mashable, a reliably lousy source of critical thinking about tech and politics, Alex Fitzpatrick's piece was headlined "Ruck.us Breaks Up Party Politics on the Social Web," and claimed that "why it's working" is because Ruck.us gives independents "an outlet for political expression outside the binary, two-party system." On TechCrunch, Rip Empson said, "I think this is a political startup that might just get your vote." On PandoDaily, Hamish McKenzie questioned Ruck.us's model, but said "what Ruck.us has working in...

Civicus The Knight Foundation has issued a huge new report mapping the civic tech ecosystem and its growth since the beginning of 2011, and we have the scoop for you here. Pierre Omidyar turns to the Huffington Post to give his take on "WikiLeaks, Press Freedom and Free Expression in the Digital Age." In it, he argues for leniency for the "PayPal 14" protestors who participated in DDOS attacks against the company in retaliation for its cutting off payments to WikiLeaks in 2010. Read the whole thing. Conor Friedersdorf interviews Jay Rosen on "NewCo," and reports that "the start-up won't insist that its reporters observe the conventions of what is variously called objectivity, impartiality, or viewlessness." Rosen also says that it's not clear yet...

The Knight Foundation has released a fascinating and valuable, if incomplete, report on "The Emergence of Civic Tech: Investments in a Growing Field." It's the first major effort I've seen to define and map this growing space, and covers 209 companies that have received funding since 2011 in its purview, including the ones that Knight itself has poured more than $25 million into in that period. Knight's researchers--Mayur Patel and Jon Sotsky--working with Sean Gourley and Daniel Houghton of Quid, a firm that does data analytics and network analysis--looked for organizations from six overlapping fields: government data, collaborative consumption, crowd funding, social networks, and community organizing. They seeded their list with organizations that are generally viewed as core to civic tech...

Last week, Fight for the Future, the Internet freedom group that played a big role in kicking off the movement that stopped the SOPA and PIPA bills, announced that it was taking on a new cause: Bitcoin. Together with Bitcoin evangelist Jon Holmquist, they put together ">BitcoinBlackFriday.com" as a hub for more than 250 online vendors who are accepting the digital currency, some of them offering special deals through the site. The vendors include OK Cupid, Reddit, CheapAir.com, and the Internet Archive. In rolling this out, FFTF's co-founders, Tiffiniy Cheng and Holmes Wilson, made some strong statements about Bitcoin's value to people interested in social change, arguing that a) the digital currency was a good way to avoid hidden transaction fees...

Hanging by 834 Threads The White House is pivoting back to selling the country on the benefits of Obamacare, confident that the problems with HealthCare.gov are behind it, Politico reports. Meanwhile, Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic, who has tracked health care reform intensively, says it's still too soon to say for sure. Anecdotal reports of people having success signing up are appearing more often, and the administration's own usage statistics sound good. But finding out whether insurers are getting accurate sign-up information--known as "834" forms--is still difficult and if that piece isn't working well, there are going to be a lot of unhappy people. On that final point, Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin report for the Washington Post that errors plague "roughly...

Privatization The New York Times and Politico both have stories sharing some details of the Maryland war room where HealthCare.gov is being nursed off life-support. The Times gets more of the backstory on who was in the room when the President finally faced the bad news head on; Politico emphasizes the work of troubleshooter Jeffrey Zients and the crash effort to fix things. As of Sunday, the White House says that HealthCare.gov can support more than 800,000 consumer visits per day. But insurers say ongoing problems remain with the site's back end, which is supposed to process consumer sign-ups and deliver accurate information to insurers. In other words, the White House's passing grade for the site's repair may need to get revised. Mark Ames...

Changing the Odds The Huffington Post reports that the NSA "has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches." The story, by Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher and Ryan Grim, is based on a top-secret document provided by Edward Snowden, dated October 2, 2012. "Without discussing specific individuals, it should not be surprising that the US Government uses all of the lawful tools at our disposal to impede the efforts of valid terrorist targets who seek to harm the nation and radicalize others to violence," Shawn Turner, director of public affairs for National Intelligence,...

Taking Over Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Udall (D-CO) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) say "End the NSA Dragnet, Now" in a New York Times op-ed, and criticize their colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee for ratifying a surveillance reform bill that "would explicitly permit the government to engage in dragnet collection" and "to conduct warrantless searches for Americans' phone calls and emails." The Times has a nifty feature, the "op-doc," a forum for short, opinionated documentaries. This one, by Brian Knappenberger, explains why ordinary people should care about the NSA's online surveillance, starring Sen. Ron Wyden, Daniel Ellsberg, David Sirota, Gabriella Coleman, and Kurt Opsahl. How the NSA probably hacked Google and Yahoo by targeting the weak spot in their infrastructure: the fiber-optic...

Jackpots This blog post about the realities of being a member of the working poor, called "Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts," has taken off, receiving more than 200,000 visits. As of late Sunday, its author, Linda Walther Tirado, has received more than $55,000 in donations from more than 1,900 people (up from $34,000 on Saturday midday) on GoFundMe, which she says is "more money to wok with than I have ever had at a time in my adult life." She has now started a blog "about the things that affect those of us living on the margins," and is working on a book proposal. The President of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, retweeted Secretary of State John Kerry's tweet announcing...