Archive: Year: 2014

Costs Former NSA director Keith Alexander explains to Shane Harris of Foreign Policy why he is charging companies as much as $1million a month to defend them from hackers--technology he has patented that he says he developed in his spare time while running NSA. The Open Technology Institute's Danielle Kehl, Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene and Robert Morgus have issued a major report estimating the "NSA's Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity," and their conclusions are quite tough: billions in direct economic costs, the fragmentation of the Internet, the "loss of credibility for the U.S. Internet Freedom agenda" and "serious damage to Internet security." Net neutrality update: Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), the Democratic majority leader, has written Demand Progress promising to "ensure...

Experiments Lawrence Lessig's MayDayPAC is starting to roll out its "SuperPAC to defeat all the SuperPACs" strategy by spending as much as $4 million in New Hampshire and Iowa, respectively backing Republican Jim Rubens in his primary against Scott Brown and Democrat Staci Appel in an open seat race,reports Nicholas Confessore for The New York Times. Pierre Omidyar posts an update on the development of his First Look Media. Most notably, he writes: We have definitely rethought some of our original ideas and plans. For example, rather than building one big flagship website, we’ve concluded that we will have greater positive impact if we test more ideas and grow them based on what we learn. We are unwavering in our desire to reach...

Unlocking Politico's Darren Samuelsohn reports on "The GOP's digital dilemma" as the 2014 elections approach, and the judgment from Republican and Democratic techies alike is that the party's efforts to upgrade its tech and data practices since 2012 isn't quite up to snuff yet. The passage of the cellphone unlocking bill is, to Gregory Ferenstein, an example of the Internet shaping public policy in a significant way, since it started with a highly popular petition on the White House's "We the People" portal. Alex Howard points out that "there’s a much deeper backstory to why activism worked. He writes, "the people behind the e-petition didn’t stop with an official response from the White House. After making a lot of noise online, activists...

Software for Good Noting the general lack of "real, viral enthusiasm" for Hillary Clinton among Internet users, BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief Ben Smith writes in a short but smart piece that "Clinton still hasn’t unlocked the only thing that could really turn a campaign into a movement, and make her a figure of the future and not just the past: authentic excitement among American women at her historic candidacy." Anti-dystopias: Just in time for weekend pondering, futurist Kevin Kelly offers 23 100-word scenarios "of a plausible technological future in 100 years that I would like to live in" that he crowdsourced via Twitter. New on GitHub, the ironically-named Streisand codebase built by Joshua Lund enables a user to successfully defeat efforts by "ISPs, telecoms,...

"Our problems are connected, but we are not." --Ami Dar, Idealist.org One of the enduring values of the Personal Democracy community is the belief that people using Internet and other connection technologies can help make civic participation easier and more effective. Despite the prevailing trend towards using data and analytics to enable small groups of people to more intensively target, manage and manipulate large atomized lists of other people, we believe today's technologies can enable something more than the digital equivalent of direct mail. Not only that, we think that activism and community action enabled by tech can involve much more than the "thin" kinds of engagement--signing up on lists, clicking on petitions, and sharing social media--that are so prevalent today in...

To see how people using the Internet can thicken civic engagement in deep and positive ways, there is no better example than SeeClickFix.com, a community platform that was founded in 2008 by Ben Berkowitz, a computer programmer living in New Haven, Connecticut, and his friends Miles and Kam Lasater and Jeff Blasius. They started the site after Berkowitz, who was then 28 years old, tried to report some unsightly graffiti on a neighbor’s building. After calling the New Haven city government, nothing happened. “I got the idea that my neighbors were reporting similar things, but there was no accountability and no collaborative discussion," he recalled later. So he and Kam Lasater hit upon the idea of creating a website where...

Precrime The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux have obtained and published the US government's secret (though "unclassified") rulebook for placing people on its main "known or suspected terrorist" database, as well as the no-fly list and selectee list, which triggers extra screening at airports. The ACLU's Hina Shamsi, head of its National Security Project, reviewed the document and told The Intercept, "“Instead of a watchlist limited to actual, known terrorists, the government has built a vast system based on the unproven and flawed premise that it can predict if a person will commit a terrorist act in the future. On that dangerous theory, the government is secretly blacklisting people as suspected terrorists and giving them the impossible task of proving themselves...

Angry News Feed Is Facebook News Feed making political conflict worse? Josh Klemons of Foreign Policy makes that provocative suggestion in a fascinating post that looks at how his feed seems to have changed as the Israel-Gaza conflict has worsened. Since the News Feed algorithm shows a user more of whatever they appear to engage with, someone who posts or comments frequently in defense of one side will be shown more content reinforcing that stance, leading to an impression of greater polarization, he worries, convincingly. Related: Nathan Matias, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab, has posted a terrific summary of a recent seminar given there by Christian Sandvig, Karrie Karaholios and Cedric Langbort on ways that researchers can audit the...

Addressable Transcendence In the New Yorker, Nathan Heller has a long and subtle dissection of San Francisco's culture war between tech money and local tenant activists that you will want to sit with and carefully digest. Here's one key graf: Des a society that regards efficiency and advancement as its civic goal have any true investment in the mechanisms of representative public life? The West Coast radicalism of the twentieth century arose from the revelation that, in moments of extreme frustration or injustice, power could be claimed and wrongs could be corrected by exiting the system. What started with the dropout hippies and the direct-action campaigns of the sixties reverberates both in the protests of tech’s critics and in the work-arounds, hacks,...

Power Brokers Bradford Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, is profiled by Nick Wingfield in the New York Times as "a de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large" and the catalyst in recent initiatives by major companies to band together in urging reform of government surveillance practices. The New York Times zeroes in on Edward Snowden's recent charge, in an exclusive interview with the Guardian, that sexually explicit photos intercepted incidentally were often shared among NSA coworkers. Storyful's Megan Specia explains how journalists digging through social media sites were able to find connections between the Donetsk People's Republic separatist militia and the downing of Malaysian Air Flight MH17. Markos Moulitsas, the founder and owner of the DailyKos.com community blog, announced on Saturdaythat his...