Archive: Year: 2015

Blogrolling CBC News, in collaboration with the Intercept, reports on the most recent revelation from the Snowden archive: Canada's electronic spy agency tracks millions of downloads daily as part of their program "Levitation." Related: How to leak to the Intercept, by its security expert Micah Lee. Correction: Yesterday I had the wrong link to Darren Samuelsohn's report in Politico about the shake-ups in the RNC's digital team. Here's the right one. There's renewed urgency behind writing regulations governing the civilian use of drones now that one has crashed onto the White House lawn, Julian Hattem reports for The Hill. Yay, Andrew Sullivan has decided to stop blogging! While I won't miss Sullivan's voice, your mileage may vary. The larger news in Sullivan's announcement is...

Jargon Busters The Republican National Committee's tech operation is getting reshuffled, Darren Sameulsohn reports for Politico. Headed to the Koch brothers' i360 data analytics shop: Chuck DeFeo, the RNC's digital director. Out as CTO: former Facebook engineer Andrew Barkett. Stepping into their shoes: Mindy Finn, most recently at Twitter but with tons of digital experience stretching back from Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty to Bush-Cheney '04 (plus a stint at the nonpartisan Voting Information Project); and Azarias Reda, currently the RNC's chief digital officer. The 2' x 2' drone that crash-landed on the White House lawn early Monday morning was piloted by a drunk employee of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency who was off-duty at the time, report Michael Shear and Michael Schmidt...

Stalking Government documents obtained by the ACLU show that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been tracking the movement of millions of vehicles across America using license plate readers. "If license plate readers continue to proliferate without restriction and the DEA holds license plate reader data for extended periods of time, the agency will soon possess a detailed and invasive depiction of our lives," blogged Bennet Stein and Jay Stanley of the ACLU. Related: On Gizmodo, the EFF's Rainey Reitman lays out their master strategy for defeating mass surveillance worldwide. It includes getting tech companies to "harden their systems," convincing more people to encrypt their own communications, and a host of legal and policy fights. Some law enforcement officers want Waze to disable...

Video Stars YouTuber Hank Green, one of three popular hosts of channels on the giant site that got to ask President Obama questions after the State of the Union last week, pushes back on media criticism that their access to the president demeaned the office. On Medium, he writes, "I feel like there’s an actual and honorable goal in all of this. America needs to convince young people that there are good reasons to be civically involved. Millennials are soon to be the biggest hunk of the electorate and, if the mid-terms are any indication, they simply don’t care. And that shouldn’t be surprising since no one is connecting to them in the ways they connect with each other or talking...

Moneyballed The Gates Foundation is going to fund the creation of a "massive self-registered database of 'global citizens'" that qualified nonprofits will then be able to access., reports Randall Lane of Forbes. The "database gatekeeper" will be the Global Poverty Project, he reports. Lane comments: "The results could herald the Moneyball era of activism, with the database sortable by interest area, region or any number of fields." According to Lane, Gates says: “The dream is to have people in the big list declare, ‘OK, I’m particularly interested in the environment.’ And then we go to Al Gore’s people or whatever, and say, “OK those people, you figure out what messages go to them.” If they say health, OK we’re enough of...

Monkeying A careful look at the Republican-led net neutrality bill shows it provides net neutrality "in name only," report Stanford law professor Barbara van Schewick and grad student Morgan Weiland in the Stanford Law Review. They write, "the bill is so narrowly written that it fails to adequately protect users, innovators, and speakers against blocking, discrimination, and access fees." See also Hamza Shaban in The Verge on "how the new Republican Congress plans to undercut net neutrality." Heads-up! With the net-neutrality fight cresting at the end of February with the FCC's pending vote on its open internet rules, there will be no better place to be than "F2C: Freedom to Connect 2015" (#F2C15) on March 2-3 at Civic Hall. The long-running conference curated...

Punch List In last night's State of the Union speech, President Obama reiterated his support for "a free and open internet" and promised to "extend its reach to every classroom and every community, and help folks build the fastest networks." On his "Tales of the Sausage Factory" blog, Public Knowledge's Harold Feld explains why "that little paragraph actually packs some good punch in Washington speak." The President also gave strong emphasis to his administration's cyber-security agenda, notes Cory Bennett of The Hill. The full text of Obama's speech was posted online in advance by the White House on Medium, giving the web audience the same access to the text that attendees and reporters have long enjoyed, notes Alan Yuhas for The Guardian. Senator Joni...

Goggles In the New York Times, Jonathan Weisman parses the "shifting politics of net neutrality" as the FCC prepares to vote, noting how some Republicans are now adopting "the language of the net neutrality movement." Ready for Hillary, the pro-Clinton Super PAC, is negotiating to give its Facebook and Twitter assets to Emily's List, reports Liz Kreutz of ABC News, while it will give its 3 million-member email list to Clinton's official campaign once it is set up. "The average life of a web page is about a hundred days," historian Jill Lepore writes in her fascinating New Yorker story on the Internet Archive's efforts to save the web before most of it gets deleted. She covers problems like "link rot," "content drift,"...

Urgency What would MLK say? Eighty people own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world, Mona Chalabi reports for FiveThirtyEight. Since 2009, the wealth of those eighty has doubled in nominal terms, she adds. Republicans on Capitol Hill are dropping their long-standing opposition to net-neutrality rules, reports Kate Tummarello for Politico. Now a bill being developed by Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) bans "paid prioritization" and extends net neutrality protections to wireless networks. Bloggers are due the same free speech protections as journalists, according to a federal appeals court ruling Friday, Dan Levine reports for Reuters. Congrats to DataKind (a founding organizational member of Civic Hall) for winning a renewed grant of $1.1 million from the Knight...

Inners In the New York Times, David Sanger reports on a new National Academy of Sciences study that claims their is "no effective alternative" to the bulk collection of metadata about all phone calls made in the US if the goal is tracking terrorism suspects. In ArsTechnica, Cyrus Farivar reports on a Swedish Pirate Party activist who created a wifi network called "Open Guest" at a security and defense conference and then logged the activities of the politicians, military officials and journalists who used it, all to protest mass surveillance. (h/t Mark Pesce.) In the Guardian, Ian Black offers a selection of the translated writings of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who has been sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes (delivered...