Archive: Year: 2014

Watching the Detectives Last night, this livestream from Ferguson, Missouri, where protesters and police have been in a tense confrontation since the shooting of teenager Michael Brown got more than one million views. The police fire on the crowd starting about seven minutes in. On LocalWiki, here's a page on the Ferguson Police Department started by Atlantic writer Alexis Madrigal. Palestinians are tweeting tips about how to deal with tear gas to protestors in Ferguson, Missouri. You might think that going to a McDonald's to charge your phone and use the free WiFi was constitutionally protected behavior, especially if you're a reporter. Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly had a different experience last night. A State Department official, John Napier...

Public Enemies In a long cover profile for Wired magazine, Edward Snowden tells James Bamford, the author of several seminal books on the NSA, that "he actually intended the government to have a good idea about what exactly he stole." Before he made off with the documents, he tried to leave a trail of digital bread crumbs so investigators could determine which documents he copied and took and which he just “touched.” That way, he hoped, the agency would see that his motive was whistle-blowing and not spying for a foreign government. It would also give the government time to prepare for leaks in the future, allowing it to change code words, revise operational plans, and take other steps to mitigate...

Jumping Catching up to our British cousins, the White House announced Monday that it is launching a new U.S. Digital Service, to be led by Mikey Dickerson, a former Google engineer who was critical to overhauling HealthCare.gov, Nancy Scola reports for the Washington Post. We'll have more background on this later today. One thing that hashtag activism often does right, says James Poniewozik in Time magazine, is media criticism. Case in point: #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. It's SharkWeek, and our friends at Upwell, the "big listening/networked campaigning" Team Ocean, tweet (with chart): "Every year, #SharkWeek conversation has nearly doubled…until now. Has #SharkWeek jumped the shark?" On Vice, Lee Fang anatomizes the telecom lobby money behind Politic365, a news site that calls itself the "the premier digital destination...

Reshaping BuzzFeed just closed a $50 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at $850 million, reports Mike Isaac for the New Yotk Times. The money will go to create "an in-house incubator for new technology and potential acquisitions, and putting far more resources toward BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, its Los Angeles-based video arm." Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon, who is joining BuzzFeed's board, explains the investment: We see BuzzFeed as a prime example of what we call a “full stack startup”. BuzzFeed is a media company in the same sense that Tesla is a car company, Uber is a taxi company, or Netflix is a streaming movie company. We believe we’re in the “deployment” phase of the internet. The foundation has been laid....

Leaking Security analyst Bruce Schneier blogs that there are actually three significant national security leakers feeding stories to the press: Edward Snowden; the source for a series of major stories published in Germany; and now the new leaker feeding the Intercept's recent stories on the terrorist watch list. It's not just the NSA: The Intercept's Cora Currier and Morgan Marquis-Boire explain how recently leaked files show how German surveillance company FinFisher helped Bahrain put down Arab Spring protesters. Yahoo is planning to support end-to-end PGP encryption in Yahoo Mail, another sign that major Internet service providers are starting to compete for users by providing strong privacy protections. The Sunday New York Times magazine has a long feature by Robert Draper that captures well the...

Dueling The Republican National Committee has launched a petition in support of Uber and opposing "taxi unions and liberal government roadblocks," a new effort to reach young urban voters, report Byron Tau and Kevin Robillard for Politico. Republican Trey Grayson, the outgoing director of Harvard's Institute of Politics, comments, "It's a way for the party to reinforce the message that here's a private company serving a need--and the need is created because government regulation created poor services." Meanwhile, House Democrats have turned Obama impeachment threats into a small-donor email fundraising cash machine, reports Darren Samuelsohn for Politico. Politico's Tony Romm takes a close look at Amazon's rising presence in Washington's lobbying ecosystem. Google has decided to make a site's use of HTTPS a "ranking...

Differentiation Building on their prior story about the US government's known or suspected terrorist watch list, The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux report that 280,000 of the 680,000 on that list are "described by the government as having 'no recognized terrorist group affiliation.'" They also note that the no-fly list has grown ten-fold, to 47,000, under President Obama. There were 16 people on that list in 2001. Interestingly enough, one of Scahill and Devereauz's sources, "a US counter-terrorism official familiar with watchlisting data" says that a report by the AP last month that put the full list at 1.5 million names was inaccurate. Based on the documents in the Intercept story, which includes material from the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013,...

Polarization danah boyd shares her frustration with the Israel-Gaza war, and notes how social media seems to be making it worse: "Far from engendering enlightenment or enabling civil conversation, I’m watching personalization allow people to revel in their intolerant ghettos, oblivious to how one-sided their perspective has become." Her partner, Gilad Lotan, who happens to be Israeli in addition to being a brilliant data scientist for SocialFlow, literally maps the social media data illustrating that point in this post on Medium, and explains how online platforms' algorithmic recommendation engines reinforce personalization into polarization. The co-founders of Brigade, Sean Parker's latest attempt to hack politics, tell the Washington Post's Nancy Scola that their still-in-stealth-mode effort to use the Internet to uplift Americans' civic engagement...

Hacks CIA employees hacked into Senate Intelligence Committee computers, a report by its Inspector General's Office has concluded, according to Jonathan Landay and Ali Watkins of McClatchyDC. Noting that back in the spring, after Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) had publicly charged the CIA with improperly interfering with the committee's investigation into the CIA's involvement in torture, the agency's chief John Brennan had publicly denied the charge--saying, "Nothing could be further from the truth"--Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn says Obama should fire Brennan, or explain why he is retaining "an intelligence chief who misled the public about CIA misconduct." Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) told The New York Times's Mark Mazzetti and Carl Hulse that “This is a serious situation and there...

Astonishing The Twittersphere erupted with attacks on Twitter CEO Dick Costolo after he prompted users Tuesday afternoon to #askcostolo to ask him questions. The issue for many, as Ethan Chiel reported for On the Media: how Twitter handles (or fails to handle) abuse and harassment by some users, which often targets women and minorities. One response, from mobile interaction designer Danilo Campos, suggested that Twitter give users a bunch of tools that they could use to block abusive users. But veteran digital freedom activist Danny O'Brien remarked, "handing someone else a tool to silence others for you is handing them a tool that will be used to silence the weakest, it *seems* obvious." Abuse reporting tools are being misused right now in...