Archive: Year: 2014

System-Gaming Don't miss Simon Van Zuylen-Wood's excellent and detailed look in National Journal at how a bevy of tech entrepreneurs have been trying, so far with limited success, to hack Capitol Hill and fix what ills Washington. The feature is built around a close-in profile of "video-game tycoon and budding campaign finance reformer" Jim Greer and his CounterPAC, but it also reveals the reasoning behind libertarian Peter Thiel's quirky investment in Lawrence Lessig's MayDay PAC and nicely captures the contradiction between the massive investments major tech players are making in political lobbying and the against-the-grain efforts of some independent tech money to game the system for good. He writes: …when the tech world does inch successfully into the realm of politics and...

Gimme Shelter Must-read: Sarah Jeong in Forbes on the connection between intimate partner violence and surveillance technology. "As women's shelters across the country have learned," she writes, "privacy tools are not just for journalists, whistleblowers, spies and criminals." This two-minute video from Hollaback shows how much street harassment a woman walking through New York City experiences in a single day. (I'd share the original link but the page appears to be down.) The actress who volunteered to be in Hollaback's videa is now getting rape threats online, and the organization is fighting back by asking supporters to report the threats to get them deleted, reports Sheila Anne Feeney for Newsday. Cops in California and elsewhere are illegally seizing and sharing naked photos from the...

Tribes Edward Snowden on his life in Russia, as interviewed by Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen Cohen of The Nation: he's often recognized in computer stores. And regarding his questioning of Vladimir Putin about Russian surveillance practices: "Yeah, that was terrible! Oh, Jesus, that blew up in my face." Also, here is Snowden on how the Internet has made politics more polarized: What we’re seeing now, or starting to see, is an atomization of the Internet community. Before, everybody went only to a few sites; now we’ve got all these boutiques. We’ve got crazy little sites going up against established media behemoths. And increasingly we’re seeing these ultra-partisan sites getting larger and larger readerships because people are self-selecting themselves into communities. I...

Inventions The deal between the Data Trust, the RNC's voter data arm, to begin sharing voter files with i360, the Koch brothers analytics house, did not come easily, reports Jon Ward for Yahoo! News, in an in-depth article on the state of Republican tech efforts. He writes, "Too many Republican consultants and state parties still see data as an asset to be hoarded, rather than a tool that gains power and value the more it is shared with and used by like-minded allies." Wait, isn't sharing = socialism? Speaking of GOP tech: In case you haven't had this story targeted to you already on your Twitter feed, here's Steven Freiss' feature profile of Vincent Harris, who now must be referred to as...

Spoilers Tough words on the GOP's 2016 digital gap from one of its own, South Carolina consultant Wesley Donahue. Speaking to Darren Samuelsohn of Politico, Donahue said, "There is a massive talent gap. Half those [presidential campaigns] will have digital staff that don't know what the hell they're doing. They'll end up with some dude who plays on Facebook all day, which somehow makes him a digital expert." New York City councilman Ben Kallos, the most tech savvy elected official we know (he posts his draft legislation on GitHub!), is profiled as "The Agile Politician" in Fast Company Labs by Jay Cassano. (We see what you did there.) Our Sarah Lai Stirland reports on the most tech savvy candidate for statewide office...

Hot Spots At Tsinghua University in Beijing, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg did a half-hour public Q&A in Mandarin, the language of his wife Priscilla Chan, which he has been studying. He noted that Facebook, which is banned in China, is working closely with Chinese companies to reach global audiences through its advertising platform. Noting how relaxed Zuckerberg was speaking in Mandarin, tech writer Steven Johnson tweeted, "I think this will turn out to be one of those threshold moments we talk about 20 years later." Neelie Kroes, the departing EU digital commissioner, has given a parting speech warning that "analogue Europe" is holding back "digital Europe" with its fears, reports Mike Masnick of TechDirt. Johana Bhulyan is sticking to the Uber labor beat,...

Reminders Despite paying lots of lip service to the need for vastly improved voter data integration, the national GOP remains stymied in its efforts as the 2014 elections approach, reports Patrick O'Connor for the Wall Street Journal. Reading between the lines of his solid story, it looks like Andy Barkett, the engineering whiz who came from Facebook to be the RNC's CTO, was stung by the depth of infighting between competing GOP political technology vendors. Here's a new wrinkle for an old GOTV technology: in North Carolina and New Mexico, Planned Parenthood is asking voters to record a phone message to themselves, reminding them to vote on Election Day, reports Bethany Blakeman for Campaigns and Elections. They are also testing using recorded...

Can you be a "connected citizen" if you don't know that you are connected to government? That's the question that's been on my mind since Waze, the crowdsourced traffic data company recently acquired by Google, announced a major new partnership with ten local cities and governments around the world called "Connected Citizens." Under this program, Waze will be giving city, state and county authorities like the New York Police Department and Rio de Janiero's Operations Center real-time traffic incident data (aggregated and anonymized) and in turn getting timely and relevant data from the authorities about scheduled events (construction, marathons and the like) that can also cause traffic problems. Since the program's announcement, dozens more governments have been applying to join...

Patient Zero Pew Research Center for the People & the Press' new study on the different media sources most trusted (or distrusted) by conservatives and liberals in America is getting a lot of attention today, even though it basically reports what we already know: conservatives trust Fox News and distrust most other news sources; liberals trust a range of outlets including the New York Times, NPR, the BBC and PBS. What surprised me about the Pew study is that its scoring of Americans across the liberal-conservative spectrum, based on their responses to a set of ten core questions, appears to show that the portion of Americans who are "mostly" or "consistently" conservative is just 27%, while the portion who are "mostly" or...

Front Pagers If you are in the political news business, or if your interests are in any way affected by what gets covered in political news, stop everything and read this piece on the power of Facebook's trending topics feed, by The Kernel's Aaron Sankin. He looks at how more online publishers are jumping to cover those trending topics, with this result: "while Facebook may be the traffic heart of online journalism, it is pumping increasingly thin blood through its veins….by structuring trending topics in the way it has, Facebook is making it more difficult for all but the most mainstream stories to break through. More news outlets will all chase the same stories and a larger number of those stories...