Archive: Year: 2015

Revisions In the wake of yesterday's 3-2 vote to reclassify broadband under Title II, net neutrality's intellectual father, Tim Wu, writes in the New Yorker that "the most pessimistic theories of lobbyist power clearly need to be revised." He also suggests that the broadband industry may actually decide to accept this new status quo, since it appears to ratify a marketplace where broadband providers currently make absurdly high profits. Marvin Ammori explains why this FCC decision will stand up in court when prior attempts by the agency to defend net neutrality failed. He notes that after losing one critical court case (Comcast v. FCC) for failing to use Title II, the agency's then-chairman Julius Genachowski ignored the court's clear direction to invoke...

A week ago, digital ethnologist Mark Pesce gave a talk here at Civic Hall on the topic of "Hypercivility." As you will see from watching the video, it's an extension of years of research and thinking he has done on the effects of hyperconnectivity on our world. Be forewarned, this is not an "easy" talk to watch or digest. While Pesce definitely has our social-media-powered "Age of Outrage" on his mind, he grounds his talk in a much more serious place: post-genocide Rwanda, which he recently visited. Humans, Pesce says, like their cousins the apes, may have inherent capacities (if not tendencies) for murderous, genocidal rage. And when we let ourselves accentuate our differences, history shows we are capable of...

Impossibles This morning the FCC is voting to reclassify broadband service under Title II of the Communications Act. Public Knowledge's Harold Feld sums up the significance of this event: Reclassification was a thing that should not be possible, and which therefore nobody but a handful of us believed could happen. It did not happen because some powerful person or special interest wanted it. It did not happen because John Oliver made a funny video. It happened because hundreds of lawyers, grassroots organizers, and policy advocates persuaded over 4 million people to stand up for their rights and demand that the government act to protect them from the unrestrained corporate power of broadband access providers. It shows — to everyone’s surprise —...

Off the Books Yesterday's blockbuster story by Spencer Ackerman in the Guardian about the Chicago police's "black site," an "off the books interrogation compound" where people have been beaten, shackled and denied access to lawyers prompted an impassioned response from veteran civic hacker Daniel O'Neil, the head of the Smart Chicago Collaborative. Noting the long history of open crime data in the evolution of the city's larger open data movement, O'Neil writes, "The idea that the Homan Square facility, at the corner of Homan and Fillmore, is a place where police are 'keeping arrestees out of official booking databases' certainly is not a shining star in this history." O'Neil reminds us of the radical critique offered by the late Aaron Swartz of...

Challenges The relationship between Silicon Valley Democratic donors and putative 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will likely pivot along two different lines, report Philip Rucker and Matea Gold for the Washington Post. Hard-core techies offended by the NSA's hacking of their systems may not warm to her much, while women fighting the industry's overall tilt already love her. Or, as longtime fundraiser Wade Randlett, who sits on the national finance committee of Ready for Hillary put it, "Out here, middle-aged women are the equivalent of the 22-year-olds in 2007. They are as crazy for Hillary as the kids were for Barack.” Semi-related: At yesterday's cyber-security summit at New America, Alex Stamos, Yahoo's chief information security officer, challenged NSA director Michael Rogers over...

Bows As was widely expected, "CitizenFour," Laura Poitras' powerful documentary about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, won the Best Documentary Oscar last night at the Academy Awards. In the New Yorker, Amy Davidson explains why this is a big deal. Here is Snowden's statement on the award. Poitras' main companion on the Oscar stage, her Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald, gets some heat from investigative journalist Ken Silverstein, who recently resigned after working 14 months for First Look Media. Charging First Look management with "dishonesty" about allowing journalists to fearlessly and independently report, Silverstein posted a series of comments to his Facebook page, including this: "Glenn’s role at FL is troubling in some ways, especially standing by silently (as far as I can tell) and...

Sim Pickings NSA and GCHQ stole the encryption keys used to scramble global cellphone communications for billions of phones, report Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley in a blockbuster report for The Intercept. This gave the spy agencies "the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted," Scahill and Begley write. "The only effective way for individuals to protect themselves from [this type of] theft-enabled surveillance is to use secure communications software, rather than relying on SIM card-based security," they add. Secure software includes email and other apps that use Transport Layer Security (TLS), the mechanism underlying the secure HTTPS web protocol. The email clients included with...

Portents The White House has its first chief data scientist, DJ Patil, a veteran of LinkedIn, eBay, PayPal, Skype and Greylock Partners, blogs CTO Megan Smith. On Backchannel, Nancy Scola takes a close look at a startup called DataMi that is pioneering a new way for many more companies to offer mobile phone users "sponsored data." The prospects look bright--but they may break the principle that on the Internet all bits are treated equally. Major tech and media companies are joining Twitter's fight to overturn Patriot Act gag orders preventing any disclosures regarding the National Security Letters it receives, Jeff John Roberts reports for GigaOm. Google is escalating Cryptowar II with a statement to a congressional committee that the Justice Departments insistence on expanded...

AmBushed When your friends ask you in a few weeks, how did John Ellis (Jeb) Bush get to the front of the 2016 Republican presidential pack, tell them to read this piece by Ben White and Marc Caputo in Politico. Bush is replaying his brother's 1999 strategy of overwhelming his putative rivals by outfundraising them early, but with one twist, they report: All this money flows to Bush’s Right to Rise PAC and a separate super PAC that can take money in unlimited sums. The way that Bush set up the two committees — at the same time and with the same attorney, former Romney super PAC lawyer Charlie Spies — is “unique,” said elections law lawyer Kenneth Gross, a former attorney...

This Thursday, Civic Hall is welcoming digital ethnographer Mark Pesce, in town briefly from his home base in Australia, to give a talk on "Hypercivility" and I want to give some background on why I am personally so excited to hear what he has to say. In a sentence, it's this: Pesce has been consistently ahead of the curve on how mass connectivity is changing politics and civic life, and I always learn something new when I hear him speak. The first time Pesce spoke at Personal Democracy Forum was in 2008, a talk he titled "Hyperpolitics, American-Style." Recall that at that moment, we were at the high point of Internet-powered politics in America--Barack Obama's grassroots network had just overwhelmed Hillary...