Archive: Category: TechPresident

Secret Sharers Former President Jimmy Carter says he'd consider pardoning Edward Snowden. In case you missed it, here's the video of Barton Gellman, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras discussing the Snowden revelations (via Skype conference call) with moderator Roger Cohen at the Sources and Secrets conference. Lee Rainie of Pew Research does an "ask me anything" with Reddit. Most interesting response from him: "I really am drawn to the ideas of my friend, David Weinberger, that the performance of the reddit community is a harbinger of new knowledge structures, new information flows in society, and new ways that engaged community members can interact with experts and the powerful." Brian Cheski, the founder of Airbnb offers his vision of a "shared city" made of...

Turning Points NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden welcomed the news that President Obama was planning to propose legislation to curtail the agency's mass collection of phone metadata. In a statement released by the ACLU, he said, "President Obama has now confirmed that these mass surveillance programs, kept secret from the public and defended out of reflex rather than reason, are in fact unnecessary and should be ended. This is a turning point, and it marks the beginning of a new effort to reclaim our rights from the NSA and restore the public's seat at the table of government." Trevor Timm reports that a competing piece of legislation coming from Republican Rep. Mike Rogers called the "End Bulk Collection Act" would actually expand the...

It's time to announce our theme for Personal Democracy Forum 2014. Although last year, it was "Think Bigger," and in 2012, it was "The Internet's New Political Power," the Snowden revelations and recent events around the world have made it hard for us to be so aspirational. To be honest, it feels like we are living in both the best of times and the worst of times. So this year's theme may at first glance appear to be a contradiction: "Save the Internet | The Internet Saves." To many observers, 2014 feels like the year when we could lose the battle for the open Internet. On top of longstanding threats to net neutrality and the continuing challenge of the digital...

Collective Hallucination The Obama administration is proposing legislation to end the NSA's collection of bulk phone records and instead have phone companies hold that data, while requiring individual orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain specific metadata. The government could also seek information on callers up to two "hops" from the number under suspicion. The number of Americans with a security clearance has risen, for the fourth consecutive year, to 5.1 million, reports Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. That's more than 28 of the 50 states. Jonathan Zittrain explains in The New Republic why the US government's decision to give up its Commerce Department contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) does not equal...

Role Models Among the tech execs who met with President Obama Friday to get an update on his NSA reforms: Google's Eric Schmidt, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix's Reed hastings, Box's Aaron Levie, DropBox's Drew Houston and Palantir's Alexander Karp, “While the U.S. government has taken helpful steps to reform its surveillance practices, these are simply not enough,” Facebook said in a statement released after the meeting, Bloomberg's Roger Runningen and Chris Strohm report. “People around the globe deserve to know that their information is secure and Facebook will keep urging the U.S. government to be more transparent about its practices and more protective of civil liberties.” George Washington University--a school that attracts a lot of students interested in politics and government service--asks...

Circumlocution and Circumvention We're watching the Sources and Secrets conference live online this morning; it's streaming at www.cuny.tv/sourcesandsecrets until 1pm ET. Among the speakers: Bob Woodward, Jeffrey Toobin, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Bart Gellman, Jill Abramson, Bill Keller, Quinn Norton, Katrina vandal Heuvel, Robert Litt. Richard Ledgett, the NSA's deputy director, appeared at TED yesterday via Skype (but not via robot) to respond to Edward Snowden's talk the day before, but judging from the audience's tweets, he didn't do all that well. Sen. Harry Reid has stepped into the battle between his colleague Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the CIA, ordering a "forensic examination" of the Intelligence Committee's computers to determine whether its staff hacked the agency's network. The German Parliament has formally launched...

Take Me To the Moon Larry Page, Google co-founder, who is known for his interest in "moon shot" scale projects, offered a bit of his vision of the future at TED. "In technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change," he said. The incongruity of saying this to interviewer Charlie Rose was presumably not discussed. Page also said, "We need to know what surveillance the government is doing. We need to debate that, or we can't have a functioning democracy." And he added, "For me it's tremendously disappointing that the government did this without telling us first." The NSA's top lawyer says US tech companies "were fully aware" of the agency's data collection program, Spencer Ackerman writes for The Guardian. This contradicts many...

Weird Nerds Starting in 2009, the NSA has been collecting, recording and saving 100% of some foreign country's phone calls, keeping them for a month so they can be played back in full when needed, Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani report for the Washington Post. At least six countries are being targeted by the program, code-named RETRO. They add, "Present and former U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide context for a classified program, acknowledged that large numbers of conversations involving Americans would be gathered from the country where RETRO operates." Edward Snowden appeared at TED via a two-way robot simulcast, and renewed the call he made at SXSW for tech companies to make encryption a standard feature of their...

Sympathy for the Developer Code for America's Catherine Bracy argues that the latest controversy over gender discrimination at a tech workplace (this time at GitHub) is connected to the naive belief in "holacracy"--or organizational structures without hierarchy. She writes: I’m starting to think all of the problems we’re seeing with Silicon Valley these days—the ineptitude at politics, the clumsiness with handling inequality in SF, the lack of gender and racial diversity in the industry—are actually rooted in a systemic failure to understand how power works. As we move to an era where tech is central to our culture and economy, smart founders and investors will come to realize that stacking their companies full of people who understand politics and can create...

Openly Closed It's Sunshine Week, and the AP's Ted Bridis and Jack Gillum reports that the Obama administration censored or denied access to government files at a greater pace in 2013 than in any previous year. They note that, "Citizens, journalists, businesses and others last year made a record 704,394 requests for information, an 8 percent increase over the previous year. The government responded to 678,391 requests, an increase of 2 percent over the previous year. The AP analysis showed that the government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them, in 244,675 cases or 36 percent of all requests. On 196,034 other occasions, the government said it couldn't find records, a person refused to...