Archive: Category: TechPresident

One of the highlights of this year's Personal Democracy Forum Poland-Central/Eastern Europe (PDF PL-CEE) conference* last Thursday and Friday in Warsaw was the talk by Szitlana Zalischuk, the founder of Ukraine's Center UA civic group. "Democracy is weak," she warned the 300-plus attendees, who had come from 25 countries around the world to learn from each other about the potential of technology to enable positive social change. The "EuroMaidan" movement may have forced Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych out of office, but it was far from clear that non-violent civic activism was going to win the day in the face of an invasion of Crimea and more not-so-veiled threats of force from Russia. At the same time, she reminded everyone of the...

The Senator Protests Taking the simmering fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee to a whole new level, yesterday Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) publicly accused the agency of violating federal law and undermining Congress' ability to oversee its actions. At issue: the agency's interference with the committee's investigators, who have been reviewing its detention and torture programs, and which appears to have included snooping on the computers being used by Senate staffers in their investigation. Feinstein used her floor speech (full text here) to reveal for the first time that in 2010 the CIA had also removed documents from the computer system being used by her staff. It's worth recalling that one of the triggers behind this whole fight is...

Dorian Mode The man Newsweek identified as the inventor of Bitcoin denies it, reports the AP's Ryan Nakashima. An account belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto on the P2P Foundation site, which had been dormant for 3 years, has posted this message: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto." Redditors aren't happy that Nakamoto (if it is indeed him) was "doxxed," Andrew Beaujon reports for Poynter. Newsweek's editor says they're standing by the story, reports Gawker's J.K. Trotter. PandoDaily attacks Newsweek for "putting a man's life at risk." By the way, if this is your first exposure to the P2P Foundation, definitely check them out. Its founder, Michel Bauwens, is currently advising Ecuador on how to become an "open social knowledge, commons based society." Edward Snowden's testimony to the European Parliament...

Don't Spill Anything The CIA's monitoring of Senate staffers computer usage apparently came to light after the agency complained to the Senate Intelligence Committee that aides working on the committee's investigation of its detention and interrogation program had printed out secret documents pertaining to that program and removed them from CIA headquarters. This, reports McClatchy DC's Jonathan Landay, Ali Watkins and Marisa Taylor, led "to a determination that the agency recorded the staffers’ use of the computers in the high-security research room." Asked by McClatchy DC about the apparent CIA monitoring of Intelligence Committee computers, President Obama--who was then eating lunch during a visit to Connecticut with four New England governors--said, "I'm going to try to make sure I don't spill anything...

Launch Codes Foreign Policy's Shane Harris reports that Russian forces are "jamming cell phones and severing Internet connections" between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, but so far they have not launched full-fledged cyber attacks on Ukraine's government or infrastructure. Reuters reports that the mobile phones of members of the Ukrainian Parliament have come under attack. Inside Russia, more than a dozen websites on VKontakte linked to the Ukraine #maidan movement have been shut down by the country's Internet monitoring agency, AP reports. Our Jessica McKenzie offers a roundup of resources to help you follow the Ukraine crisis. PDF Poland-CEE, coming up this March 13-14 in Warsaw, will include a special focus on Ukraine, "featuring civic activist and journalist Svitlana Zalishchuk and Roman Udot, co-chairman...

Kicking Off The New York Times' Robert Mackey reports on how Ukraine's #EuroMaidan activists are using social media to try to counter the Russian narrative about what is taking place in the eastern part of their country. Global Voices' Tetyana Bohdanova takes the pulse of social media users in Ukraine and Russia and finds many worrying that "In case of war, everyone will lose!" In case you missed it, here's our Carole Frediani's new report on the role of the Internet and social media in the #EuroMaidan movement's rise. The Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism was broken into and seized by masked gunmen yesterday, David Kaplan reports, but not before the center's entire web history was backed up by the Internet Archive in...

Tools The new installment of the Knight News Challenge is focused on strengthening the free and open Internet. $2.75 million will go to those with a good enough idea--the deadline for the first round of applications is March 18. David Meyer reports for Gigaom on the rise of consumer-friendly privacy tools like Mailpile. Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation explains why they're backing open source encryption tools. (Maybe Knight can send them a check?) WTF? The Houston City Attorney has issued a cease and desist order against Uber, demanding that it stop "transmitting or aiding in the transmission of form e-mails to City officials." He adds, "the excessive number of e-mails has gone unabated, to the point that it has become...

Whiz Kids "It's just a website. We're not going to the moon." Steven Brill's cover story account in Time Magazine of how a relatively unheralded group of tech stars swooped in to save HealthCare.gov last fall is studded with such gems. That quote is from Google engineer Mikey Dickerson, one of the squad. As Brill cogently writes: "This is the story of a team of unknown--except in elite technology circles--coders and troubleshooters who dropped what they were doing in various enterprises across the country and came together in mid-October to save the website. In about a tenth of the time that a crew of usual-suspect, Washington contractors had spent over $300 million building a site that didn't work, this ad hoc team...

The Internet Is… Comcast's toughest and most knowledgeable critic, Susan Crawford, explains why Netflix's agreement to pay the giant cable conglomerate a premium for better handling of its streaming video service is an "arbitrary" tax that sets a terrible precedent for other high-capacity innovative uses of the Internet in the U.S. Nilay Patel has written a passionate screed for The Verge whose title says it all: "The Internet is Fucked (but we can fix it)." Time magazine is running a fun excerpt from Julia Angwin's new book, Dragnet Nation, describing her quest to break free from Google's tracking on her online search habits. VC Marc Andreessen explains why he is so bullish about the future of the news business. Ralph Nader wants a billionaire...

Post-Ambition and Fear Not The Obama Administration has developed an offensive cyberwar plan to disrupt the Syrian military, but not deployed it because of an ongoing debate inside the government over the possible consequences of its use, David Sanger reports for The New York Times. Culminating a series of reports done with NBC News, Glenn Greenwald explains in greater detail the work of Britain's GCHQ Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group to "monitor and influence internet communications, and covertly infiltrate online communities in order to sow dissension and disseminate false information." The slide deck accompanying the story is pretty chilling. Words spoken by Will Smith and Sylvester Stallone in "After Earth" and "Rocky Balboa" get repurposed into an inspiring video tribute to Ukraine's protest...