Archive: Year: 2013

Kinks The Affordable Care Act is "more than just a website," says the email from the White House. "Here's What's Being Done to Make HealthCare.gov Better," says the post on the White House blog. “Nobody is madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should, which means it’s going to get fixed,” President Obama said Monday in the Rose Garden. Well, at least we know the White House communications operation still works. The problem, according to Obama: "kinks in the system." Which are being "ironed out." White House CTO Todd Park, who formerly was CTO of HHS, and co-founded two medical technology companies before he entered the public sector, is part of the "A-team" working to...

Surging Yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) put up an unusual Sunday blog post titled "Doing Better: Making Improvements to HealthCare.gov." After two weeks of near silence, it was the agency's first on-the-record admission that "the initial consumer experience of HealthCare.gov has not lived up to the expectations of the American people." The post promised a "tech surge" of additional help--"some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and improve HealthCare.gov." Responses to the "tech surge" were mixed. Longtime open data activist Carl Malamud tweeted "Out here in the country, we recognize the smell of bs." Technologist Clay Johnson responded, "It'd be great if they had 10 $150K...

The Bloggers Edward Snowden tells James Risen of The New York Times that he didn't take any secret documents with him to Russia, giving them to the journalists who met him while he was in Hong Kong. He also made an eloquent defense of his decision to blow the whistle by going public: “The secret continuance of these programs represents a far greater danger than their disclosure…So long as there’s broad support amongst a people, it can be argued there’s a level of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally wrong program, as it was an informed and willing decision,” he said. “However, programs that are implemented in secret, out of public oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that’s a problem....

Kludgeocracy* With the government shutdown over (for a few months at least), will attention shift to the broken HealthCare.gov portal? Two weeks after its launch, the site is "still broken," reports Politico. CGI Federal, the prime government contractor at the center of the HealthCare.gov meltdown, is a big government porker, and a big internal mess, reports WonkBlog. Before the shutdown fades from memory (i.e. before next week), stop and read this breathtaking statement from Chamath Palihapitaya, a Facebookillionaire (he joined the company in its first year) who now invests in disruptive start-ups. Is it possible that some in Silicon Valley think the Washington shutdown crisis was irrelevant? That's the takeaway from this tidbit spotted by Kevin Roose at New York Magazine. Palihapitaya...

Boom BuzzFeed's Ben Smith reports that Glenn Greenwald is leaving The Guardian to start a "brand new, large-scale, broadly-focused media outlet." The details, Greenwald told Smith, will be "unveiled very shortly." The venture will be based in New York City, Washington, DC and San Francisco, Greenwald said, and will be "a general media outlet and news site — it’s going to have sports and entertainment and features. I’m working on the whole thing but the political journalism unit is my focus.” Reuters reports that Greenwald's financial backer is Pierre Omidyar, the founder of e-Bay. Back in 2011, Omidyar's Civil Beat news-site in Hawaii editorialized strongly against the decision of Amazon, Visa and Mastercard to cut off service to WikiLeaks, and in recent...

Harvesting Washington Post contributor Barton Gellman and privacy analyst Ashkan Soltani break new ground in the NSA files story, reporting that the agency "is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans." The data, which is collected daily, "enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships." The data is collected overseas but sweeps up the accounts of millions of Americans. Primed with federal anti-terrorism dollars, police forces across America are expanding their routine data collection on their residents, reports The New York Times. "The New York Police Department, aided by federal financing, has a big data system that links 3,000 surveillance cameras with...

Malala, Malia The AP's Martha Mendoza reports on a "growing backlash to government surveillance" in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations. "Activists are fighting back with high-tech civil disobedience, entrepreneurs want to cash in on privacy concerns, Internet users want to keep snoops out of their computers and lawmakers want to establish stricter parameters." Another Snowden repercussion: the core institutions managing the Internet are moving away from their longstanding relationship with the US and towards "accelerating the globalization" of Internet governance. Snowden received an award from the "Sam Adams Associates," a group of retired CIA officers, for "Integrity in Intelligence" last week in Moscow. Here he is talking about the need for greater government transparency in the US, one of several short videos...

Greased Politifact, home of the "Truth-o-Meter" and one of the US's main fact-checking sites, is soon launching a sister site called PunditFact, which will check claims made by pundits, columnists, bloggers and the hosts and guest of talk shows. Seed money came from Craig Newmark's craigconnects, and additional funding ($625,000) is coming over two years from the Ford Foundation and the Omidyar Network's Democracy Fund. IMHO, this couldn't be more needed. Revolution Messaging, the mobile politicking shop that grew out of part of the 2008 Obama campaign's online team, just launched DrunkDialCongress.org, a site that helps you blow off some steam at a random Congress-critter, preferably after you've had a few. Type in your phone number and it will call you...

Root Causes Leonard Downie and Sara Rafsky's big report for the Committee to Protect Journalists on "The Obama Administration and the Press" is just out this morning, and it's a doozy. Downie, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, "Despite President Barack Obama’s repeated promise that his administration would be the most open and transparent in American history, reporters and government transparency advocates said they are disappointed by its performance in improving access to the information they need….with some exceptions, such as putting the White House visitors’ logs on the whitehouse.gov website and selected declassified documents on the new U.S. Intelligence Community website, it discloses too little of the information most needed by the press and public to hold the...

Counting On the front page of the Washington Post: the Obama administration was "repeatedly warned" by "major insurers, state health-care officials and Democratic allies" that HealthCare.gov "had significant problems," but the White House chose to proceed with its October 1 launch. David Brailer, who was HHS's national coordinator for health information technology in 2006, when the Medicare drug benefit was rolled out, said that HealthCare.gov was initially built to handle half as many visitors as the Medicare enrollment site. Building a web site for just 60,000 people at a time, he told the Post, “is weird. The math just doesn’t add up,” he said. The Verge's Adrianne Jeffries blames the HealthCare.gov launch mess on the government contractors that divvied up the $93.7...