Archive: Year: 2015

Hot Seats Yahoo Politics' Alyssa Bereznak reviews Sen. Rand Paul's campaign website. She likes it a lot more than she did Sen. Ted Cruz's site. Brian Fung of the Washington Post says Paul's most "genius" move in his effort to appeal to young techies is his willingness to take donations in Bitcoin. The most interesting piece of Paul's campaign website, to me, isn't that original: he's copying his father's decision to show, in seeming real-time, the names of recent donors to his campaign, along with a running tally of the total. When Ron Paul did this, it enabled his most ardent supporters to create the first "money-bomb" for his candidacy, since a group of people pledging to all donate at once could see,...

Busting Loose Following John Oliver's hilarious exposition Sunday on how Edward Snowden could do a much better job of convincing Americans to care about NSA hyper-surveillance, The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald jumps to Snowden's defense by showing that he (Greenwald, not Snowden) doesn't have much of a sense of humor. On YouTube, the Oliver-Snowden interview is at 2.7 million views and rising--one million in the last 12 hours alone. Apparently, in the wake of that interview, CanTheySeeMyDick.com was available, and an activist/coder named Olivier Lacan took good advantage of that opportunity, reports Ross Miller for The Verge. Security research Quinn Norton helpfully reminds us that the problem isn't just that the government spies on people's online communications, it's that the companies that make the...

Exposures John Ellis (Jeb) Bush, who speaks fluent Spanish and is married to a Mexican woman, listed himself as "Hispanic" on his 2009 voter registration form, The New York Times Alan Rappeport reports. Poor Edward Snowden. Shown some person-on-the-street interviews by John Oliver highlighting Americans who don't know who he is, or believe he is the guy running Wikileaks, he rubs his eyes and grimaces, realizing that the issues raised by his whistleblowing are too complicated for many people to understand Then Oliver asks about the NSA's viewing of naked photos--which Snowden says is commonplace--and shows Snowden that people on the street would be very upset if they knew the government had a "dick-pic" program. Or, as Oliver puts it: "Bulk...

Unveilings Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago is blocking the release of emails between him, his chief of staff, and Michael Sacks--the vice chair of a quasi-public agency that handles the city's outreach to the business community, who also happens to be one of the mayor's top political donors, Matthew Cunningham-Cook and David Sirota report for the International Business Times. Since all three are public officials, their email correspondence is subject to public records requests. Do you want to use live media to change the political process in 2016? One way--quasi-demonstrated here by BuzzFeed's Jason Ross--is to pull back the veil on the "spin alley" scene during and after a political debate. Ross reports from behind the scenes of yesterday's "Leaders' Debate" in...

Big Things Apparently, "The 2016 election will be live-streamed," says Michael Calderone in the Huffington Post. How does he know? Because Mark Halperin bought a tripod for his iPhone and says, "We are all C-SPAN now." Funny, I didn't realize C-SPAN had such high ratings. Wait! Calderone also writes, "Just how much value live video adds to the already frenzied political process is anyone's guess." No, actually, "Mobile is going to be the big thing in 2016," Democratic strategist Chris Lehane tells Dylan "Meerkat" Byers of Politico. It gets better, in a jargony way. Says Lehane: "The ability to really translate the power and opportunity of big data to allow for nano-targeting communications with precision-targeted messaging is dependent on the ability to lever the...

Transparency Matters The 2016 presidential campaign is looking more and more like a return to pre-Watergate days of money in politics, with several candidates--John Ellis (Jeb) Bush, Scott Walker, Rick Santorum and Martin O'Malley--deliberately delaying even the announcement of their "testing the waters" phase of campaigning (which comes with contribution limits and disclosure requirements), even though they are obviously already swimming deep in the waters, drawing a formal legal complaint filed at the FEC by two campaign finance watchdog groups, as Eric Lichtblau reports for the New York Times. Now, as Ed O'Keefe and Matea Gold report for the Washington Post, Bush endorsing the creation of a new group that will collect unlimited amounts of money in secret on his behalf even...

Waking Up Hillary Clinton's deleted emails may be recoverable, computer forensics experts tell Joseph Marks and Rachael Bade of Politico. Her attorney David Kendall has declined a request from Benghazi committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) to turn her server over to an independent third party, saying that it was pointless because the records were deleted. Many of the members of the House Appropriations Committee in charge of overseeing the FBI and its director, James Comey, and his proposals for requiring flaws be built into encryption tools, openly admit they know nothing about encryption, The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald points out. Google's senior VP for communication and policy, Rachel Whetstone, literally uses a laughing baby gif to take News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch down a...

Clueless Responding to calls by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and other tech leaders to boycott Indiana because of new legislation permitting discrimination against gay couples, progressive blogger Melissa McEwan, founder and manager of the Shakesville group blog, argues in Model View Culture that what the state actually needs if it is to become more progressive is more, not less, investment by progressive tech leaders. She writes, as resident of the state: The idea that we need more pressure in order to be moved to do something is absurd. People on the precipice don’t have the luxury of principled resistance….The truth is, progressives with resources have been boycotting Indiana for decades. That’s actually why we’re in this situation. If you want to know...

Net Effects Responding to the skepticism expressed by GOP campaign strategist Alex Lundry about Hillary Clinton's reported plan to hire 1000-plus digital staff, Ethan Roeder, the data director for the Obama 2012 campaign emailed me to respond with, well, data. He writes: "2012 numbers - 260 digital staff, 117 data, about 50 analytics and 50 tech. That's close to 500. In 2008 you could literally fit our analytics and tech teams together in a closet. Total staffing across these departments was in the ballpark of 200. Compare that to 500 staff in 2012 and it's not hard to imagine a team of 1,000 in 2016." The Clinton campaign is plotting a kind of "listening tour" to reintroduce her to the American people,...

Data-Driven Hillary Clinton's digital team comes into full focus in Darren Samuelson's detailed report in Politico. In addition to Obama alum Teddy Goff as chief digital strategist, the campaign is hiring Katie Dowd as digital director, Jenna Lowenstein as a digital deputy, BlueLabs Elan Kriegel (who ran state battleground analytics for Obama in 2012) as analytics director, Matt Ortega as communication-digital connector and Andrew Bleeker as a top outside adviser. The new name in that mix, Matt Ortega, for those who need a refresher, is really good at making timely and funny microsites poking fun at the opposition (recall 2012's EtchASketchMittromney.com, MultipleChoiceMitt.com and NotAnotherTexasgovernor.com). Samuelson also reports that Clinton "is building a New York-based campaign that senior party operatives say could ultimately...