Archive: Year: 2013

Smorgasbord The review panel selected by President Obama to scrutinize the NSA's surveillance programs and report on ways to restore public trust is, according to the AP, "effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence." "Its meetings in recent weeks with technology industry and privacy groups have been closed to the public even though no classified information was discussed, according to participants….'No one can look at this group and say it's completely independent,' said one attendee, Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute and vice president at the New America Foundation. Meinrath said the closed meetings 'leave the public out of the loop.'" Security expert Bruce Schneier tells MIT's Technology Review: "The Internet has become...

Step Right Up Coming soon: "AskThem," a version of "We The People" (the White House's e-petition portal), but for every elected official in America, as well as any verified Twitter account. It's from the veteran civic hackers at the Participatory Politics Foundation. (Full disclosure: Yours truly is on the AskThem advisory council, along with Zephyr Teachout, Nick Grossman, Tiffiniy Cheng, Nicco Mele and Tom Steinberg). Sign up here to be notified when it launches. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has just unveiled a gorgeous new portal into the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. It's a data-rich view into the US mortgage market, built on top of nearly 19 million mortgage records from more than 7000 financial institutions. And soon: easy-to-use tools for filtering...

Generation W? Philosopher Peter Ludlow has written a provocative essay called "The Banality of Systemic Evil," connecting the dots between Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden: they all believed that it was "sometimes necessary to break the rules that required obedience to the system in order to avoid systemic evil." And he thinks this may be a generational trend, noting that 70% of those 18-34 say that believe Snowden "did a good thing" in disclosing the NSA's vast surveillance programs. Ludlow writes: Persons of conscience who step outside their assigned organizational roles are not new. There are many famous earlier examples, including Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers), John Kiriakou (of the Central Intelligence Agency) and several former N.S.A....

Longform Steven Johnson pinpoints what I thought was missing from Henry Farrell's essay on the "Tech Intellectuals" in a comment on CrookedTimber, where Farrell blogs: my main disagreement has to do with the “drab uniformity” of the tech intellectuals. The one thing you don’t really mention is the emphasis on commons or peer-based production that runs through the work of many of the people you mention: certainly in my books, and Lessig’s, Shirky’s, Zittrain’s, not to mention Aaron Swartz and Yochai Benkler, and so on. I think you’d agree with me that, in mainstream US political discussion, collectively created property without traditional ownership relationships has almost no place whatsoever. It doesn’t even register as a recognizable category. And yet it is a...

Tom Slee has penned a tough critique of the Omidyar Network's philanthropy, titled "Six Degrees of Omidyar," arguing that its venture capital investments "time and time again" have damaged "commons-based sharing" projects, pointing to investees like microfinance fund Unitus, Global Giving, CouchSurfing, Code for America and Change.org. As with all of Slee's writing, the piece is worth reading. But I think he's painting with far too broad a brush and has cherry-picked his evidence. (Full disclosure: the Omidyar Network has been and continues to be a financial supporter of PDM, both as a sponsor of our annual PDF conference and as a funder of our WeGov section. As a senior advisor to the Sunlight Foundation, which ON has supported for six...

It's a crowded field running for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party nomination for mayor of Minneapolis, so this new YouTube video by candidate Jeffrey Alan Wagner is suddenly getting him plenty of attention, with plenty of news sites touting it as one of the best political ads of the year: He says he won't take money from developers, that he'll be ok only making $100,000 a year, that "I won't go to the strip clubs any more," and ends with "Wake the F--- Up!" Wagner isn't likely to become Minneapolis' next mayor, but I bet this video is going to help his acting career. Here he appears as "Uncle Wags," a video DJ (returning to the air after a period "on probation"): Wagner also appears...

Spirit Guide Forrester Research says that the recent NSA disclosures "may reduce US technology sales overseas by as much as $180 billion," due to rising mistrust that American companies may be selling compromised products, Bloomberg reports. Matthew Prince, the CEO of CloudFlare, tells the Washington Post that his company, a web security firm, "is getting 50 to 100 calls per day from customers demanding more answers about the firm's involvement" with the NSA, but his inability to say anything about that is "seriously hurting his business." The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, says "I think it's clear that some of the conversation this has generated, some of the debate, actually needed to happen," regarding Edward Snowden's leaks. But he decried journalists,...

Not Psyched Mark Zuckerberg told Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Disrupt that the US government was not doing a good job balancing its efforts to protect national security with civil liberties. ""Frankly, I think that the government blew it," he said. "They blew it on communicating the balance of what they were going for with this." He continued: "The government response was, 'Oh don't worry we are not spying on any Americans.' Oh wonderful that's really helpful to companies that are trying to serve people around the world and that's really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies." "I thought that was really bad," he said. Zuckerberg said Facebook and others were pushing successfully for more transparency. "We are not at the end...

Drip, Drip New documents released by the NSA show repeated violations of its own privacy rules for the handling of Americans' phone records, reports the Guardian. The violations occurred "on a daily basis," Judge Reggie Walton, who is now the FISA court's top judge, wrote. In related news, Rep. Darrell Issa has changed his mind and is now urging another vote on the Amash amendment that would have halted the NSA's collection of phone metadata. Issa voted against the Amash proposal in July, when it came within just a few votes of passage. President Obama's new "Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies" is seeking public comment on how the US use its technical sophistication at surveillance "while respecting our commitment to privacy...

Zombies Joining Google and Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook have each asked the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for permission to be more transparent about the number and types of government requests for user data that they get related to national security. ICYMI: In the course of an internal PowerPoint deck describing the NSA's ability to spy on smartphones, the agency refers to iPhone users as "zombies" and Steve Jobs as "big brother." For real. Michael Arrington said he was going to ask hard questions about the tech industry's failure to challenge the NSA's "terrorism against the American people and everyone else in the world" at TechCrunch Disrupt, and he started yesterday by pressing VC Ron Conway. Conway's answer to Arrington: ““The events of the...