Archive: Year: 2013

Juggernautism NSA Long-reads (1): The Guardian has put together a multimedia presentation on the NSA Files that not only pulls together its groundbreaking reporting, but also includes short and evocative video statements from many key participants in the debate. If you are one of those people still asking, "Why should I care about this?" the Guardian's report will help you figure out why. Plus it's a great example of how HTML5 can be used to present stories in a new way. NSA Long-reads (2): The New York Times' Scott Shane's lengthy report in Sunday's paper on the NSA's voracious data-gathering activities demonstrates the complexity of the debate about its overseas activities. On the one hand, he shows that it is collecting far...

Peak Open? Reporting from the Open Government Summit in London, where sixty countries are represented along with 300 representatives from civil society organizations, Susannah Vila and Christopher Wilson cover how those non-governmental groups are trying to use the summit to pressure their governments to actually live up to the nice promises they keep mouthing. Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his Open Data Institute issue a new report ranking how countries around the world are progressing with their open data policies. Have we hit "peak" open government yet? Panthea Lee of Reboot asks, "Too much 'open government,' not enough openness?" Alex Howard reports on the Obama Administration's latest victory lap in the open government sweepstakes, noting that "yet again" it has committed itself to modernizing...

Profanity Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani break open a whole new layer of the NSA surveillance scandal, reporting in the Washington Post that the agency "has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials." The agency collects millions of records a day, ranging from metadata to the content of emails, audio and video. As Gellman and Soltani note, "The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process." Both companies responded with dismay. Shown an NSA presentation slide on "Google Cloud...

Contained Fury Reuters reports that President Obama has ordered the NSA to stop its electronic surveillance of the United Nations. NSA director Keith Alexander told the House Intelligence Committee yesterday that phone records from France and Spain were collected by their country's intelligence services and shared with the US, denying that his agency was collecting millions of phone records directly. Yesterday's hearing of the House Intelligence Committee was marked by the spectacle of committee chair Rep. Mike Rogers claiming that the NSA had kept the panel fully informed on its activities, and verbally sparring with other committee members who insisted they had been kept in the dark on things like spying on foreign leaders, Mike Masnick of TechDirt reports. The USA Freedom Act has...

Snoop Dog "Unless the United States is engaged in hostilities against a country or there is an emergency need for this type of surveillance, I do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers," declared Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and longtime defender of the NSA. "It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary," she added, upset that the committee was "not satisfactorily informed." It remains to be seen what kind of "total review" Feinstein might conduct given her continued stated support for the NSA's collection of Americans phone metadata. The New York Times reports that President Obama is on the...

Greenwald's Day Natasha Vargas-Cooper's profile of Glenn Greenwald in The Advocate is full of gems. Where did Greenwald get his politics? From his socialist grandparents in Florida. Why did Edward Snowden reach out to Greenwald rather a more mainstream reporter? Snowden told her, "“The bottom line is that sources risking serious harm to return public information to public hands must have absolute confidence that the journalists they go to will report on that information rather than bury it." Snowden added: “Glenn’s work is a foreshadowing of the death of ‘access journalism.’ What we’re seeing with the NSA reporting is that prioritizing the interests of officials over the public, the news audience, is not a winning strategy. Journalists and institutions that hold power to account will...

Agility "For the first time in history, a president has had to stand in the Rose Garden to apologize for broken Web site." That's Clay Johnson and Harper Reed in the New York Times op-ed page, explaining "Why the Government Never Gets Tech Right." Their proposed solution: start a "Government Digital Service" like in the United Kingdom, have the White House stop all large IT purchases, and shift to the "Agile" method of incremental software development. In case you were wondering, there is no comparison between what the Obama campaign did with technology and the construction and launch of HealthCare.gov. So sayeth former Obama 2012 techies Harper Reed, Catherine Bracy, and Carol Davidsen in Mother Jones. Liberal journalists like Joan Walsh of Salon...

[View the story "Says @tommattzie "I feel like I'm in the NSA. Except I'm in public."" on Storify] This Storify, by Matzzie's Ethical Electric colleague Matt Browner-Hamlin, is much more comprehensive. [View the story "Overheard: Michael Hayden bashing Obama admin" on Storify]...

Touchy German chancellor Angela Merkel called President Barack Obama Wednesday to demand a clarification of a report in Der Spiegel that the NSA was eavesdropping on her mobile phone. According to the Guardian, her spokesman said Merkel told Obama that "she unmistakably disapproves of and views as completely unacceptable such practices, if the indications are authenticated. This would be a serious breach of confidence. Such practices have to be halted immediately." The White House said her phone was not currently being tapped, but declined to deny that it had done so in the past. The New York Times notes that "after a similar furor with France, this was the second time in 48 hours that the president found himself on the phone...

The Hypocrisy Gap Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore have a hilariously subversive essay that they have somehow published with Foreign Affairs called "The End of Hypocrisy: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks." Here's their key point: The deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermineWashington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it. Their danger lies not in the new information that they reveal but in the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually doing and why. When these deeds turn out to clash with the government’s public rhetoric, as they so often do, it becomes harder for U.S. allies to...