Archive: Year: 2014

Cockamamie and Catastrophic Testifying before Congress yesterday, USAID administrator Rajiv Shah denied that ZunZeno, the ill-fated "Cuban Twitter" project it funded, was neither covert nor intended to influence political conditions or spur opposition movements in Cuba. ""The purpose of the program was to support access to information and to allow people to communicate with each other," Shah told Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Leahy said the project was "cockamamie" and not adequately described to Congress. Meanwhile, the AP's Jack Gillum, Desmond Butler and Peter Orsi reported that some of the draft messages produced for ZunZeneo were overtly political. Emily Parker writes for Reuters that while the Internet is starting to transform lives in Cuba, "foreign government intervention to help Cuban bloggers can often do...

Stunts USAID spokesman Matt Herrick denies that the ZunZeneo mobile-messaging project was "covert," says that the GAO felly vetted it, and also says the agency's role was not hidden from potential CEO candidates for its front group. In addition, he says the AP's claim that USAID hoped to spur the formation of anti-government "smart mobs" were only "case study research and brainstorming notes," not an official goal of the project. Cuban officials say that ZunZeneo was not the only tech-powered project aimed at "subverting" its government, according to Marc Frank of Reuters. They also pointed to a program, Martinoticias, that tried to use social media to get around Cuba's jamming of US radio and TV signals but spamming cellphone users. Narendra Modi's...

USAID's Exploding Cigar In "Bay of Tweets," Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci explains why USAID's covert and abortive project to build a "Cuban Twitter" was not only doomed for failure, it also "just handed a golden talking point" to every authoritarian leader in the world "to justify their suppression of the Internet." Robinson Meyer pieces together a bit more of the back-story to the State Department's Internet Freedom efforts that "ZunZeneo" was part of, including the launch of Humari Awaz (a Pakistani mobile phone-based social network), which appears to also have had a limited run as a viable service. Just posted here at techPresident: Longtime Latin America expert and new media scholar Anne Nelson on "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People--The Problem w ZunZeneo...

Corruption, Shmorruption! By a 5-4 majority, the Supreme Court ruled this morning in McCutcheon vs FEC that "spending large sums of money in connection with elections, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder's official duties, does not give rise to quid pro quo corruption. Not does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner 'influence over or access to' elected officials or political parties." Also, the same majority ruled that the Pope is not Catholic, the sky is not blue, and that bears shit in bathrooms. The new potential cap on direct individual contributions to federal parties, candidates and committees will rise from $123,000 to more than $3.6 million as a result, according...

Slippery Slopes The as-yet unreleased Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA's interrogation program--which is at the center of a still-unresolved battle royal over allegations that the agency snooped on computers being used by Senate staff conducting the investigation--finds a "long-standing pattern" of the agency lying to both the Justice Department about the value and efficacy of its use of torture on CIA detainees, report Greg Miller, Adam Goldman and Ellen Nakashima for the Washington Post. "It's Not a Crime When the Govt Does It, Dept.": Glenn Greenwald excoriates the NSA's top brass for revealing to the Los Angeles Times that the agency has been collecting and analyzing "every Iraqi email, text message, and phone-location signal in real time" while simultaneously condemning...

Displaced In case you missed it, the latest Twitter storm this weekend was over a bad joke comedian Stephen Colbert made in the course of making fun of Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder. The joke, which played off of Colbert's stereotype of an anti-Asian bigot, got repeated without context by his show's Comedy Central account, triggering a #CancelColbert trend. Here's Variety's story on the uproar, Twitter activist Suey Park's piece in Time about her anti-Colbert efforts, a piece in Deadspin bashing Park for overplaying the issue, and David Karpf's judicious sum-up, which he titled "Hashtag Activism Isn't Activism." In Salon, Andrew O'Hehir takes a step back from the #CancelColbert controversy and suggests that "the intense and overheated focus on misbegotten tweets and...

Font of Wisdom Rep. Mike Rogers, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has announced he is not seeking re-election. Spencer Ackerman and Nadja Popovich do a side-by-side comparison of three rival plans for reforming the NSA: President Obama's, the USA Freedom Act (sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner), and the FISA Transparency and Modernization Act (sponsored by Rep. Rogers). This "Cyber Warfare Real Time Map" from Kaspersky Labs is straight out of science fiction. And a great self-promotion. KimDotCom, the New Zealand-based MegaUpload founder who is fighting extradition to the US, has launched a new political party, the Internet Party. Now Turkey is banning YouTube along with Twitter, Reuters reports. Mother Jones offers a map of the countries that block Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. Speaking of mapping, the...

Starting today, we're going to be running short interviews of many of the great speakers coming to Personal Democracy Forum 2014, conducted by our terrific new conference coordinator Sonia Roubini. First up, An Xiao Mina, who first appeared at PDF 2012 and who will will be giving a main hall talk. She is also helping us curate a breakout panel focused on how organizers make the move from political memes to movements. 1. How did you come to be interested in tech and its impact on society? I’ve long been passionate about the role of communications technologies in helping marginalized individuals find voice and community. It was in China, however, when I truly started to see technology’s potential. While working for...

Secret Sharers Former President Jimmy Carter says he'd consider pardoning Edward Snowden. In case you missed it, here's the video of Barton Gellman, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras discussing the Snowden revelations (via Skype conference call) with moderator Roger Cohen at the Sources and Secrets conference. Lee Rainie of Pew Research does an "ask me anything" with Reddit. Most interesting response from him: "I really am drawn to the ideas of my friend, David Weinberger, that the performance of the reddit community is a harbinger of new knowledge structures, new information flows in society, and new ways that engaged community members can interact with experts and the powerful." Brian Cheski, the founder of Airbnb offers his vision of a "shared city" made of...

Turning Points NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden welcomed the news that President Obama was planning to propose legislation to curtail the agency's mass collection of phone metadata. In a statement released by the ACLU, he said, "President Obama has now confirmed that these mass surveillance programs, kept secret from the public and defended out of reflex rather than reason, are in fact unnecessary and should be ended. This is a turning point, and it marks the beginning of a new effort to reclaim our rights from the NSA and restore the public's seat at the table of government." Trevor Timm reports that a competing piece of legislation coming from Republican Rep. Mike Rogers called the "End Bulk Collection Act" would actually expand the...