Archive: Category: TechPresident

Edges Today at 2:35 ET, President Obama will have a town-hall meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina with the women's news sites BlogHer and SheKnows, streaming live there as well as WhiteHouse.gov, focusing on checkbook issues as we all get our tax returns done. The moderator, BlogHer's Lisa Stone, explains more here. Friday, the White House is also hosting a Tech Meetup which will be streamed live at 9am ET. While we're on the subject of White House tech, you can send feedback on its news redesigned website here. Related: Speaking at the Omidyar Network's "Business of Civic Tech" conference at Civic Hall yesterday, White House CTO Megan Smith said that the United Kingdom's government was about two years ahead of the US, and...

Anomalies No Labels, which co-founder Mark McKinnon once styled as a "MoveOn for the middle," is trying to organize a push in New Hampshire to rally uncommitted voters around its centrist agenda, reports Eleanor Clift for the Daily Beast. In terms of website security, so far Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio score highest according to a survey by Paul Schreiber, a senior web developer at FiveThirtyEight, reports Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai for Motherboard. Their sites are encrypted by default, though as 18F technologist Eric Mill notes, that hasn't stopped them from using third party trackers. After misusing a chart from rival FiveThirtyEight, Vox founder Ezra Klein graciously apologizes and explains his site's approach to aggregation and attribution. Claire Cain Miller reports on a new project led...

In It To Win It Until yesterday, Hillary Clinton identified on her Twitter handle as a "Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD…" Now there are a few changes: "Wife, mom, grandma, women+kids advocate, FLOTUS, Senator, SecState, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, 2016 presidential candidate. Tweets from Hillary signed –H." Somehow, the Clinton announcement wasn't streamed live on either Periscope or Meerkat, and so far neither live-streaming service has surfaced any video of her on her road-trip to Iowa. Still, it's the #MeerkatElection, right? Clinton's announcement tweet has been retweeted more than 95,000 times and favorited almost 92,000 times as of this morning. By comparison, of the two...

Ladies Who Launch Hillary Clinton is going to launch her presidential campaign while on the way to Iowa on Sunday, Lauren Gambino reports for The Guardian. Here's some more background on Stephanie Hannon, the Google vet who has been hired to be the Clinton campaign's CTO, courtesy of Alex Howard. He notes her prior focus on open data standards as offering some possibly mixed encouragement for open government advocates; I'm a little worried about her hold on grammar (see the first slide in her open data presentation). It's "its," not "it's." Today in sousveillance: In Mexico, a top government official was forced to resign after a local aircraft enthusiast posted some photos of the official and his family boarding a state-owned helicopter...

Organizers Longtime Googler Stephanie Hannon will be the CTO of Hillary Clinton's emerging presidential campaign, the first woman in that position on a major campaign, Philip Rucker reports for The Washington Post. Hannon is currently Google's director of product management for civic innovation and social impact. Robby Mook, the soon-to-be official campaign manager of the soon-to-be Clinton campaign, is the first openly gay manager of a presidential campaign, Andy Kroll and Patrick Caldwell report for Mother Jones. Also, they write, "He's a political nerd who lives and dies by data and nuts-and-bolts organizing." He's also another veteran of the 2003-4 Howard Dean presidential campaign, the breeding ground for many of today's top Democratic campaign talent. As Kroll and Caldwell note: Jeremy Bird, a...

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...