Archive: Year: 2013

Busted The death of the filibuster is a big deal. In case you were wondering. Remember back in 2009 when then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"? Now Schmidt thinks strong encryption of Internet traffic will prevent governments from censoring and spying on their citizens communications within a decade. "The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything," he said in a speech in Washington yesterday. Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the original author of the Patriot Act, says "the overreach by the National Security Agency does more than infringe on American civil liberties. It poses a serious threat to our economic vitality." Bob Woodward...

System of a Down Clay Shirky unpacks the management and cultural problems that produced the HealthCare.gov debacle, arguing that procurement processes alone do not explain what went wrong. To wit: Every time there was a chance to create some sort of public experimentation, or even just some clarity about its methods and goals, the imperative was to deny the opposition anything to criticize. At the time, this probably seemed like a way of avoiding early failures. But the project’s managers weren’t avoiding those failures. They were saving them up. The actual site is worse—far worse—for not having early and aggressive testing. Shirky also points out that HealthCare.gov is having a phased rollout now, "just one conducted in the worse possible way," adding...

Crisitunity? If there's one thing you read today to understand the roiling politics of Obamacare, sit with Thomas Edsall's challenging column on "The Obamacare Crisis" in today's New York Times. He points out that the underlying economics of the President's centerpiece domestic policy involves a substantial " a transfer of benefits from Medicare, which serves an overwhelmingly white population of the elderly – 77 percent of recipients are white — to Obamacare, which will serve a population that is 54.7 percent minority." Then he reminds us that "Those who think that a critical mass of white voters has moved past its resistance to programs shifting tax dollars and other resources from the middle class to poorer minorities merely need to look...

Since 2004, Personal Democracy Media has helped nurture a world-wide conversation about technology’s impact on government and politics, and society - providing a place to meet the people who are making that change happen, discover the tools powering the new civic conversation, spot the early trends, and to share in understanding and potentially shaping this dynamic new force. Many of those who are challenging the status quo, learned what they know, or found people to collaborate with, did so by being a part of the Personal Democracy Forum, our yearly convening. We are currently conducting research into new ways of extending that conversation year-round, looking at related efforts that convene, educate and incubate civic and political innovation. Job description: We are looking...

NewCo News NYU's Jay Rosen, longtime press critic and democracy advocate, is, as he puts it, stepping "out of the press box and onto the field" to work on "NewCo," the as-yet unnamed new venture in digital journalism being led by Pierre Omidyar and Glenn Greenwald. Other NewCo new staff, CNet reports: Eric Bates of Rolling Stone, independent journalism Ryan Devereaux, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff technologist Micah Lee, freelance foreign policy writer Murtaza Hussain, and sports writer Andrew Jerell Jones. Three 20-something coders were having trouble figuring out their own health care options, so they created HealthSherpa using data from HealthCare.gov to tell consumers what plans are available to them, the New York Times reports. MomsRising, the liberal parents advocacy group started by MoveOn...

Seeking Refuge URGENT: The United Nations is seeking volunteers to help tag crisis-related tweets coming from the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Yolanda, which is a Category 5 storm and one of the strongest to ever occur, with winds topping 200mph. More details on the storm here. A majority of Germans see Edward Snowden as a hero, but they are evenly divided on whether to offer him political asylum. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has written a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder stating that his office is seeking to meet with journalist Glenn Greenwald, and asking if the Justice Department intends to "detain, question, arrest or prosecute" him if he enters the United States. The letter was sent October 10; no word...

Transitions How the McAuliffe campaign in Virginia used voter modeling to guide its field efforts and find persuadable voters all over the state. Blue Labs, an analytics shop born from the 2012 Obama campaign, did a lot of the heavy data lifting. Youth turnout was up in Virginia and flat in New Jersey, according to CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. This suggests that the McAuliffe field effort, which went after young women in particular, may have had an effect. Our Miranda Neubauer surveys how political technology firms did not only in Virginia, but also New York, New Jersey and the Boston mayoral race. Tech entrepreneur Jack Hidary, who ran for NYC Mayor as an independent and tried...

Half Orcs and Whips Two Google engineers have gone public with their fury at the NSA's hacking into their secure network. Says Mike Hearn, who worked on a anti-hacking system featured in some NSA slides published yesterday by the Washington Post in its follow up story on Google's vulnerability: We designed this system to keep criminals out . There's no ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a balance as we've got between the need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason . Unfortunately we...

The 16-Year-Old Vote Here's a great way to increase voter turnout: lower the voting age to 16. Today, Takoma Park, Maryland becomes the first city in America where that is possible. Rob Richie of FairVote, who got the idea from Denmark, says there's evidence younger teens are more likely to vote than 18-year-olds because they're still connected to their community, while their older peers are moving away. The White House is inviting developers who want an early look at the Write API for its "We the People" e-petition site. When the API is done, it will allow people to sign petitions via other platforms and be counted toward the signature threshold needed to earn an official White House response. Speaking of which,...

One of out six (16%) American adults use Twitter, and half of those people (8%) say they get news that way. The Twitter news consumer, says the Pew Research Center, is typically younger, more mobile and better educated than Facebook news consumers, who number about 30% of the adult population. That's the information Pew highlighted in their report today, but what I wanted to know was this: Who are the people who are using Twitter but say they don't get news from it? In its survey, Pew defined a news consumer as someone who has "ever" gotten "information about events and issues that involve more than just your friends and family." The survey authors Amy Mitchell and Emily Guskin ran the...