Archive: Category: TechPresident

Company According to a new international survey on Internet security and trust, about 700 million people have taken steps to increase their online privacy since hearing of Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA and GCHQ surveillance, analyst Bruce Schneier reports. Of 29 major consumer-facing web companies--including social networks, fitness tracking, dating, payment, messaging, mapping and music apps, only ten responded directly to a series of questions form BuzzFeed's Charlie Warzel about how their privacy policies governed employee access to their users' data. (Most of their so-called privacy policies, which really must be referred to as "data usage" policies, are silent on the issue.) In fairness, the companies were only given 36 hours to comment. Microsoft has been joined in its fight against US Justice...

In 2007, WikiLeaks received and published documents revealing corruption and misconduct perpetuated by the former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi and his family. The story, which was then front-paged by the Guardian, helped Julian Assange’s nascent whistleblowing platform gain crucial momentum. Now, history is coming full circle asThe African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) has launched afriLeaks, a pan-African whistleblowing platform, by gathering together a dozen partner media companies. “The primary purpose of afriLeaks is to provide a highly secure vehicle between whistleblowers and the media or investigative NGOs of their choice to allow for both connections and protection between both,” says journalist and ANCIR member Khadija Sharife to techPresident. According to Sharife, “afriLeaks itself acts as a neutral...

Mood Slime The leaked Sony emails show how the MPAA movie lobby paid state Attorneys General to go after Google, Mike Masnick writes in TechDirt. Aaron Sorkin on the hacked Sony emails: they're not "newsworthy" and powerful people like him should band together to keep them out of public view. (And Sony is demanding that news organizations stop reporting on the "stolen information" being posted online by hackers.) Inside Uber's huge lobbying effort, which employs at least 161 people, as reported by Rosalind Heiderman for the Washington Post. She writes, "Uber’s approach is brash and, so far, highly effective: It launches in local markets regardless of existing laws or regulations. It aims to build a large customer base as quickly as possible. When...

Cloudy "The Internet is not a CIA creation," Sir Tim Berners-Lee tells Reuters, responding to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is also not a big truck. For Newsweek, Lauren Walker explains how House Speaker John Boehner killed the FOIA Improvement Act. Public opinion is "overwhelmingly pro net neutrality" according to a new analysis by data science company Quid for the Knight Foundation, looking at news coverage, blogs, 120,000 tweets using the hashtag #netneutrality, one million public filings to the FCC and a lobbying analysis of 2.500 filing from 2009 to mid-2014. “'The encyclopedia that anyone can edit' is at risk of becoming, in computer scientist Aaron Halfaker’s words, 'the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal...

It’s no secret that governments and political actors now make use of social robots or bots—automated scripts that produce content and mimic real users. Faux social media accounts now spread pro-governmental messages, beef up web site follower numbers, and causeartificial trends. Bot-generated propaganda and misdirection has become a worldwide political strategy. Robotic lobbying tactics have been deployed in several countries: Russia, Mexico, China, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Azerbaijan, Iran, Bahrain, South Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco. Indeed, experts estimate that bot traffic now makes up over60 percent of all traffic online—up nearly twenty percent from just two years ago. The ways politicos’ use social bots in efforts to sway public opinion are ever-evolving and...

Listicalization President Obama wrote a line of code at a Code.org event at the White House, and Zachary Seward covers the news for Quartz. With word circulating of police eavesdropping on civil rights protesters, the FCC has issued a warning reminding state and local government law enforcement agencies that jamming or interfering with cellular communications is illegal. "Although today's smartphones may enable persons to engage in communications that are bothersome to others, this does not provide the right for persons, or even for state or local agencies—including state and local law enforcement—to operate jammers. In fact, use of signal jammers by state or local authorities is generally prohibited," the FCC says. Emily Bell, the director of Columbia University's Tow Center, can't resist noting...

Frauds According to long-time conservative activist Brent Bozell, ForAmerica is "not a fake, make-believe army." As he tells Shane Goldmacher and Tim Alberta of National Journal, "this is 7 million people who are active in the political conversation, who are conservatives." But this "digital army" has been built, Goldmacher and Alberta report, "by the paid acquisition of its members through targeted advertising," raising the age-old question: is it for real? Nearly all of its $2.5 million in funding in 2013 came from a single donor. Related: MoveOn.org is spending $1 million to build a draft movement for Senator Elizabeth Warren in Iowa and New Hampshire, Jonathan Martin reports for the New York Times. It's not all that surprising that by the end of...

Platforms Here's a visualization of tweets using the hashtags #ICantBreathe, #BlackLivesMatter and #HandsUpDontShoot (color-coded) from November 24-December 5, worldwide. When #ICantBreathe explodes on December 4th you will be amazed. Kriston Capps maps out the "unprecedented scale" of the protests across America for CityLab. The teenage girls who make up the heart of the One Direction fanbase on Tumblr are all posting about race relations in America in the wake of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner non-indictments, writes digital strategy consultant Kaitlyn Dowling in an intriguing bit of zeitgeist-sniffing on Medium. Police in Chicago appear to be using sophisticated eavesdropping technology to monitor the cellphone conversations of people involved in the recent street protests, reports Mike Krauser for CBS Chicago. After reminding us of the...

Omens Another digital mogul with aspirations to remake journalism, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, is dealing with turmoil at The New Republic, the magazine he bought two years ago. His latest moves to turn it from a magazine into a "digital media company" by reducing the number of print editions and moving its staff to New York have triggered an apparent staff rebellion, led by the resignations of its editor Franklin Foer and longtime book editor Leon Weiseltier. As Dylan Byers reports for Politico, several more staff members "are now planning to show up at the magazine's offices on Friday and resign." According to Jonathan Chait, one of the many writers nurtured into prominence by TNR, is that Hughes and his handpicked...

Phubbing In the Intercept this morning, Ryan Gallagher details how the NSA's Aurora Gold program secretly spies on hundreds of companies and individuals globally in order to better hack into cellphone systems, and also secretly introduces flaws into communications systems to more easily tap them. "The operation appears aimed at ensuring virtually every cellphone network in the world is NSA accessible," he writes. In Vanity Fair, Sarah Ellison has an excellent and detailed report on the turmoil at Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media. She writes, referring to Omidyar and co-founder Glenn Greenwald: "Here’s the basic recipe: Combine two types of strong-willed visionary—one cool and analytical, the other fervent and outspoken. Add a dash of messianic outlook to the ingredients. Heat under pressure....