Archive: Year: 2014

In December, we reported on the demise of Ruck.us, which, in the words of its founder Nathan Daschle, had aimed to be "the world's first ever political-social network." Back then, while announcing Ruck.us' failure, Daschle promised that he and his team were "going to pivot away from Ruck.us as a social network and toward Ruck.us as a digital toolkit for political candidates." Now the new Ruck.us is here, in beta form, and indeed, that's what it is--a campaign-in-a-box platform for candidates who need to manage their web presence, complete with a custom URL, email lists, integration social media and, most critically, a simple way to raise money from supporters. Essentially, if you are a political candidate, Ruck.us is pretty similar in function...

Tony Meow Now The Upshot, the New York Times' new data-driven news vertical, has launched. Most interesting, from editor David Leonhardt's introductory note: Perhaps most important, we want The Upshot to feel like a collaboration between journalists and readers. We will often publish the details behind our reporting — such as the data for our inequality project or the computer code for our Senate forecasting model — and we hope that readers will find angles we did not. We also want to get story assignments from you: Tell us what data you think deserves exploration. Tell us which parts of the news you do not understand as well as you’d like. Dan Gillmor, the first mainstream journalist to blog, who was way...

Oligarchs For a Little Less Corruption Jamie Johnson, a scion of the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical giant, "reports" for The New York Times' Style Section (!) on a recent closed-to-the-media summit of young American billionaires, the children of some of the country's great oligarchs. They were discussing "collaborations between the [Obama] administration and philanthropists," in the words of Thomas Kalil, the deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, who organized the meeting. About that story, Paul Krugman comments, "Yes, Democrats pay a lot of attention to plutocrats….but it's quite wrong to say that the parties' behavior in office is the same." Alexander Burns and Alex Byers report on Sean Parker's growing foray into national politics. “He’s got political views on...

Stardust A day after questioning Vladimir Putin live on Russian TV, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden turns to the Guardian to call out the Russian president for lying about surveillance programs and compares his answer to President Obama's original sweeping denials of the NSA's domestic programs' reach. The Daily Beast's Eli Lake's condemnation of Snowden for "participating in a Soviet-style propaganda play" now looks a bit like a rush to judgment. Mike Masnick of TechDirt compares Snowden's gambit to Sen. Ron Wyden's questioning of James Clapper, and praises him for challenging Putin. The 2014 Boston Marathon will be monitored by hundreds of new surveillance cameras backed up by sophisticated software, and the PrivacySOS blog asks whether they'll be dismantled once its over, nothing that "numerous...

Huffington's Law? Edward Snowden made a surprise appearance (by video) on live Russian TV this morning during an annual call-in show where President Vladimir Putin takes questions from the public. Snowden's question: "Does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?" received this answer, reports The New York Times' Robert Mackey, "Our intelligence efforts are strictly regulated by our law…we don't use this on such a massive scale and I hope that we won't." Mackey notes that it would have been interesting had Snowden asked Putin about Pavel Durov, the founder of VKontakte, who revealed yesterday that the Russian intelligence agency had asked it to "hand over personal details of Ukrainians who were using it...

Tipping Points Former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg is spending $50 million to build a grassroots network of women, and mothers in particular, called "Everytown for Gun Safety" that will focus on expanding background checks for gun buyers. Notes New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters, "[Bloomberg's] financial commitment to reducing gun violence could grow. When asked how much he was willing to spend, he tossed out the $50 million figure out as if he were describing the tip he left on a restaurant check. 'I put $50 million this year, last year into coal, $53 million into oceans,' he said with a shrug, describing his clean energy and sustainable fishing initiatives. 'Certainly a number like that, $50 million. Let’s see what happens.'” Remember when...

Launches Alex Byers of Politico reports on the launch of Brigade, a startup aimed at boosting American civic engagement, funded by tech moguls Sean Parker, Ron Conway and Marc Benioff. Details are scarce but its staff will include PDM friend Adam Conner, late of Facebook DC. Access Now has launched "Encrypt All the Things" campaign, which is aimed at getting web service providers to harden their sites against surveillance. Significance Labs has opened its doors and is seeking fellows who will get $50K and three months of support at Blue Ridge Foundation to build products aimed at helping the 75 million Americans who live on less than $25,000 a year. Check out Homeless GoPro. ""It's hard when so many people act like they don't...

Bleeding Hearts Friday, Bloomberg's Michael Riley reported that the NSA knew about the Heartbleed bug for at least two years and instead of reporting it, "regularly used it to gather critical intelligence." While the office of the Director of National Intelligence immediately issued a statement denying the report, on Sunday, The New York Times' David Sanger reported that President Obama decided last winter to leave a large exception for "clear national security or law enforcement" uses of such flaws in Internet security--rejecting the recommendation of his own NSA review advisory committee Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, told Sanger that the process of reviewing when such issues are discovered "is biased toward responsibly disclosing such vulnerabilities." People with long memories may also...

In Transit Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are making their first visit to the US since helping break the NSA surveillance story, to accept a Polk Award along with Ewen MacAskill and Barton Gellman here in NYC Friday midday. They are flying with an ACLU lawyer and will be met by other ACLU staff on arrival. Both face the risk of being subpoenaed by federal prosecutors. I'll be live-tweeting from the event, assuming there's connectivity. WikiLeaks tweets that they are on Flight SIA26 bound for JFK, having been dropped off at the Berlin airport by Tor's Jacob Appelbaum, no stranger to border security harassment. The appointment of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Dropbox's board of directors has prompted an online protest...

WhatsNext? Could WhatsApp actually be the "killer app" of the upcoming Indian national elections? Amin Ali and Atul Thakur write for The Times of India that "Unlike social networking websites which need internet profiles, WhatsApp operates in relative web oblivion. The application does use the internet but no search engine would be able to detect WhatsApp profiles, groups or chats. Real-time response also makes WhatsApp the most effective social networking tool for political campaigning." Our Jessica McKenzie rounds up "Everything You Need to Know About Social Media and India's General Election." Consider this a preview of what we are likely to see in the US as the 2016 presidential cycle heats up: Google offering a "Google score" for how politicians are trending...