Archive: Year: 2013

Sabotage Todd Park, the White House CTO, is in today's New York Times repeating his explanation about why HealthCare.gov crashed last week on launch day: the feature enabling people create user accounts at the start of the sign-up process: "At lower volumes, it would work fine. At higher volumes, it has problems." Chiming in, in defense of the project, Aneesh Chopra, Park's predecessor: “This is par for the course for large-scale I.T. projects. We wish we could launch bug free, but in reality that’s not that easy to do. The reality is that if you have a product that people want, people will tolerate glitches because they expect them.” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius in USA Today: "On the first day alone, HealthCare.gov...

Reverberations James Ball, Bruce Schneier and Glenn Greenwald unraveled another layer of the NSA surveillance story on Friday with a detailed examination of leaked documents from Edward Snowden exposing the agency's efforts to crack Tor, the online anonymity tool. As they note, the agency hates Tor and has developed a number of only partially successful ways to trace its users. This despite the fact that the Tor Project receives about 60% of its funding from the State Department and the Pentagon. In a sidebar commentary, Schneier explains why the Guardian's Tor story is so important. Public disclosure of online security vulnerabilities, he writes, is critical to making the entire system safer. But: The NSA's actions turn that process on its head, which is...

Losers "We Win, They Lose" is the name of a non-governmental private list-serv organized by Senator Ted Cruz's staff, where Tea Party leaders, advocacy groups, conservative media and "like-minded" senior congressional staff are discussing and coordinating their responses to the government shutdown, reports the Washington Examiner. The list-serv's name comes from Ronald Reagan's line about how the cold war would end, notes Slate's David Wiegel. Policy wonks know that "Obamacare" has lots of Republican DNA in it (remember that Governor from Massachusetts who ran for president?). But now some data scientists have run a text analysis and found all the policy ideas from previous bills, by party and chamber, and visualized where the language matches up. Turns out Obamacare's parentage is at least...

Traffic Journalists who rely on the government's many data resources are complaining that the feds are going out of their way to shut down access to sites that essentially run automatically, Anna Li of Poynter reports. One reporter, Matt Kaufman of the Hartford Courant, says, "This is the equivalent of not merely locking the Smithsonian museums, but going the extra step to paper the windows so no one can peer inside while they're closed." With Data.gov going offline as a result of the government shutdown, Philadelphia CIO Mark Headd argues that this shows the advantage of "community managed open data portals" like those in his city, Cincinnati and Colorado. "A government shutdown can't impact sites that the government does not unilaterally control,"...

Glitches With millions of people flocking to the new online health exchanges yesterday, many of the sites collapsed under the load. The New York Times frontpages with a complete rundown. The big unanswered question: Will the flood of interest turn into a success as people discover the benefits of the system (and share that news with others), or will individual complaints about difficulties signing up congeal into an aggregate sense of failure? The White House had some smart talking points ready in response. President Obama compared the problems to Apple's recent launch of iOS7: "Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I...

DearCongress IsTheGovernmentShutdown.com? It's registered to one Zach Seward, senior editor of Quartz. Which is conveniently the source of the two articles displayed on the bottom of its home page. Damn you, Seward! Trending: The #DearCongress hashtag. It's more than 3 years old (a comedia going by the handle @lilduval appears to have started using it in response to a State of the Union address, but it's suddenly back with a vengeance, being promoted by NBC's Today show. It's an unscientific, pungent look at how the government shutdown is starting to play out across the country. The Tampa Bay Times has also curated a bunch. Assignment for a data-analytics reporter: map these #DearCongress tweets by Congressional district. Slate reports on the government shutdown as...

Now's the time to register for the Drones & Aerial Robotics Conference, taking place October 11-13 at NYU and co-curated by PDF co-curator Christopher Wong (who is also the executive director of the Engleberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU School of Law). Imagine a near future in which autonomous robots roam the skies, performing everything from law enforcement, to communications, to crop dusting, shipping and logistics. Sound implausible? Perhaps—but that is the future that the aerospace industry and a new class of entrepreneurs are busy preparing. In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, tasking the FAA with the development of a plan for safely integrating unmanned aerial vehicles into domestic airspace by 2015. As that...

The Clash Dueling splash pages: "Defend Obamacare" on the DNC home page. "Dismantle Obamacare" on the National Republican Senatorial Committee homepage. Metadata strikes again! That's how The Nation's Lee Fang discovered that a 2012 letter signed by 75 House Republicans demanding a vote to repeal a medical device tax was in fact written by one Ryan Strandlund, a lobbyist for an industry group. The repeal is one of the demands embedded in the House bill passed over the weekend. You say you want a revolution? Zack Exley, the veteran web strategist, co-founder of the New Organizing Institute and "venture anachronist," has left the Wikimedia Foundation to go to work for Thoughtworks on building new tools for political organizing. And judging by this post...

Hearing Yesterday, the Senate Intelligence Committee heard testimony from top NSA officials, and took steps toward moving a bill proposed by its co-chairs, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Saxy Chambliss, that would "change but preserve" the agency's collection of phone metadata. Feinstein says "a majority of the committee" supports the call log program. That's all you would learn if you read the New York Times account. Over at Firedoglake, Kevin Gosztola reports on an interchange between dissenting Sen. Mark Udall and NSA Director Keith Alexander. Udall asked if there were any "upper limits" on the number of phone records the NSA could collect and whether the agency's goal was to "collect the phone records of all Americans." Alexander said there was "no...

Bad Boys Digesting the repercussions of Tea Party Senator Ted Cruz's marathon stand against Obamacare on the Senate floor yesterday, The New York Times' Jeremy Peters makes a point that we've made here before: the rise of social media has widened the cracks in the once-solid Republican coalition (See "How Social Media is Keeping the Republican Primary Going." Noting how Cruz's staff fired up the Tea Party online base prior to his taking the Senate floor, saying "something big" was afoot, Peters writes: "As the party looks to take the Senate majority next year and recapture the White House in 2016, the split pits an emerging, younger class of social-media-savvy leaders like Mr. Cruz of Texas, who claim the mantle of...