Archive: Year: 2013

Since the launch of the White House's "We the People" e-petition site, 232 petitions have met their signature thresholds, which are supposed to trigger an official response from the administration. So far, 202 of those have been responded to, in an average of 61 days. Of the 30 unanswered petitions, the average wait time is a whopping 240 days, or eight months. These delightful facts have been surfaced by Eli Dourado, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University. He built his new transparency site, WHPetitions.info, "because the list of successful petitions that are awaiting a reply seems like a glaring omission from the We The People site." As he notes, "We The People displays petitions that are accumulating signatures,...

Commandeered Peter Maass has a must-read cover story in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine on documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who with Glenn Greenwald and separately Barton Gellman, broke the Snowden story. (Oddly, Gellman isn't mentioned at all in the article.) Before she started working on her current project, a documentary about surveillance, she had made several award-winning films on the effects of the US invasion of Iraq, which apparently made American authorities place her on a terrorist watch list. Here's how she describes her many experiences with US border security since then: “It’s a total violation. That’s how it feels. They are interested in information that pertains to the work I am doing that’s clearly private and privileged. It’s an...

Making the Connections What the connection between Edward Snowden and Jeff Bezos? Jay Rosen finds it: "It's whether Bezos has the inner strength to go up against the most powerful and secretive forces on the planet." That is, as the new owner of the Washington Post, which helped break the Snowden story, and also took part in publishing the Pentagon Papers, Bezos will eventually face his "free press moment." Rosen pulls no punches, noting that when the Wikileaks "Cablegate" controversy arose, Amazon summarily kicked the leaks site off its servers. "The biggest threat to privacy was Moore's Law," says cryptographer Phil Zimmerman, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy. Om Malik has a long and fascinating interview with him covering the dangers of...

Complicity and Corrosion Lavabit, a ten-year-old email service provider reportedly used by Edward Snowden, has decided to shut down rather than cooperate with a demand for user information. Its owner, Ladar Levison, says, “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. … What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company. This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent,...

NSA + DEA + IRS = ?? Could the Internal Revenue Service be investigating Americans using NSA surveillance data laundered through a secretive US Drug Enforcement Agency program? That question is on a number of minds in the wake of yesterday's story from Reuters, which says that "Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans." Reuters notes that, "The DEA phone database is distinct from a NSA database disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden," but that hasn't stopped Republicans like Senator Rand Paul and Rep Mike Rogers, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee,...

The way they run now With Newark Mayor coasting to a likely victory in next Tuesday's special primary for the Democratic nomination to fill the late-Senator Frank Lautenberg's seat, the New York Times covers his close relationships to the tech industry. Zeroing in on his large stake in Waywire, a struggling start-up backed by the likes of Eric Schmidt and Oprah Winfrey, the report also notes that "Waywire has also provided jobs for associates of Mr. Booker: the son of a top campaign donor and his social media consultant" as well as an advisory board position and stock options to the son of NBC exec Jeff Zucker. We can't handle the truth? Jay Rosen zeros in on the essential contradiction at the heart...

Holy Shit? “There is one thing I’m certain about: there won’t be printed newspapers in twenty years. Maybe as luxury items in some hotels that want to offer them as an extravagant service. Printed papers won’t be normal in twenty years.” That's Jeff Bezos from an interview in Germany last year. (h/t Gregory Ferenstein in TechCrunch) Bezos' purchase of the Washington Post newspaper for $250 million in cash reverberated across the web. For once, the navel-gazing is justified--and revealing: "This Town" is upset and flummoxed. Former Post reporter Lois Romano, writing in Politico, calls the deal "a white flag of economic defeat." John Harris, Politico's co-founder: "Holy. Shit." Josh Marshall, on the other hand, offers "three cheers." He also notes that Sally Quinn, bemoaning...

NSA, the gift that keeps on giving: Weekend reading catch-up: Don't miss sci-fi author Bruce Sterling's darkly brilliant essay on Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Richard Stallman and the NSA. Among Sterling's provocative gems: "Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock." It's on Medium.com, which is quietly becoming a great place to find quirky and original writing on how we live today. Speaking of dark brilliance, British tech blogger Tom Scott's hilarious video "Welcome to Oversight" is an all too believable vision of what may happen when our national surveillance state starts using crowd-sourcing. "Click to apply for a search warrant--it will normally be granted within 15 to 30 seconds…" How close does the Bradley Manning verdict come to...

Today is Nick Judd's last day at techPresident, as he is taking off for a few weeks of well-earned R&R before heading off to graduate school at the University of Chicago to study sociology. In his nearly four years with us, he reported intensively on the tech-politics industry, oversaw our news-site redesign and upgrade, drove our coverage of the 2012 presidential cycle, and led our forays into e-book publishing. Among his outstanding work was early and solid reporting on the rise of civic technology (see his 2011 story on Boston's Office of New Urban Mechanics), his in-depth coverage of the role of tech in the rise of Occupy Wall Street, and his stewardship of our 2010 10Questions.com project. Nick brought...

Every six months or so, we add more items to our "Politics and the Internet" Timeline, a living document that now includes more than 160 items stretching back to 1968 and covering a range of domestic, international and online events. Keep in mind, this isn't an official list but just our best subjective judgment on the most important developments at the intersection of technology and politics. If you would like to suggest something that we've left out, or make a correction to the record, please use this form. Here's what we've added for the period from January 2013 to the end of July: January 13: AARON SWARTZ, OPEN INFORMATION AND DEMOCRACY ACTIVIST, COMMITS SUICIDE Two years after being arrested for downloading millions of articles...