Archive: Category: TechPresident

Hoodwinking Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) writes in Politico that we shouldn't allow government to "crash" the Internet party. It's worth reading his op-ed if you want the full gist of the current disinformation campaign against net neutrality. Rubio claims the FCC is going to "play favorites" with Internet service providers, which is like saying SEC plays favorites with stock brokers by requiring them to play by the same rules. He also claims the Internet "is a place…[not] unlike a city or town"--which it is not, it is a set of protocols. And finally, he argues that "it belongs in the hands of our people," which is a welcome sentiment that completely elides the fact that most of it runs thru pipes...

One of the enduring values of the Personal Democracy community is the belief that people using the Internet and other connection technologies can make civic participation easier and more effective. Not only that, we think that activism and community action enabled by tech can involve much more than the "thin" kinds of engagement that are so prevalent today in the advocacy sector. Tech can enable much deeper kinds of connections between people, communities and those with power, and make everyday life better for people in the process. At scale. That, in just a few words, is the essence of today's civic tech movement. It includes any tool or process that people may use to help themselves solve their own problems, influence...

Modern Times Finally, one American state--Oregon--has decided to modernize its political system by automatically registering people to vote, rather than putting the burden on them, Sheila Kumar reports for the Associated Press. Any adult citizen who has interacted with the state's Driver and Motor Vehicle Services Division since 2013 but isn't registered will have a ballot mailed to them before the next election. It's Sunshine Week, and in the Washington Post, Monkey Cage blogger Jason Ross Arnold reviews the Obama administration's promise to be the "most transparent administration in history." His conclusion: it's made some progress but "arguably falls short of what Obama promised." Spoken like a true academic. Nearly 9 in 10 Americans have heard something about government surveillance programs in the...

If last week's turnout at Civic Hall is any indication, a lot of people--technologists as well as organizers--are interested in figuring out how the 21st century economy can be built on more cooperative and less exploitative principles than the libertarian "gig economy" exemplified by companies like TaskRabbit and Uber. Folks came out for a panel discussion called "Think Outside the Boss: Cooperative Alternatives to the Sharing Economy," which was triggered by a thought-provoking essay in Medium by Trebor Scholz, a professor at The New School. He wrote: ...

Reaching House Speaker John Boehner is planning to announce a new investigation into Hillary Clinton's email practices as Secretary of State, including a focus on the 31,000 emails she deleted because she deemed them to be personal, ABC News' Jonathan Karl, Liz Kreutz and Shushannah Walshe report. Yesterday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden held a private but not off-the-record meeting with about two dozen senior techies and privacy advocates attending SXSW, reports Adi Robertson for The Verge. One participant described Snowden's remarks as a "call to arms" to tech companies to adopt more secure communications to "raise the costs" to the NSA of mass surveillance. Talk about "vaporware": Secrecy around StingRay, a cellphone tracking tool used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies...

Shredding Here are the just-published FCC net neutrality rules. Here's my favorite quote from its opening: "Congress could not have imagined when it enacted the [Administrative Procedure Act] almost seventy years ago that the day would come when nearly 4 million Americans would exercise their right to comment on a proposed rulemaking. But that is what has happened in this proceeding and it is a good thing. The Commission has listened and it has learned." Outside of the White House, there is no uniform federal government standard for using official versus personal email, or for what records must be saved, Julie Hirschfeld Davis reports for The New York Times. Patrice McDermott of OpenTheGoverment.org tells her, “It really is chaos across the...

Finessing At a time when government classifies practically everything, The New York Times' Scott Shane talks to secrecy experts who say that it's hard to believe Hillary Clinton's assertion that in her four years as Secretary of State, she "did not email any classified material to anyone." On Vox, Ezra Klein writes that Clinton's avoidance of her official State Department email account shouldn't be seen as unusual in the context of the "transparency theater" that many federal officials conduct (hiding sensitive business from official reporting), but her claim that her email server's security was never breached betrays a dangerous naivete about digital eavesdropping. Press critic Jack Shafer, parses Clinton's reference to her deleting 30,000 personal emails as "not saving" them, and notes that...

Transparency Theater If you want a no-nonsense evaluation of Hillary Clinton's press conference yesterday responding to questions about her reliance on a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State, read Alex Howard's report on techPresident. On both the issues of official record retention and security, her answers--she gave State 30,490 emails she deemed non-private and deleted the rest; and yes, the server was based in her home, set up originally for President Clinton (who doesn't email?!), and guarded by the Secret Service--she left more questions dangling, as he details. That said, the political press is far more interested in the "optics" of the episode, the "how it's playing," than the right or wrong. See for example Glenn Thrush and...

Failures Hillary Clinton is going to hold a press conference in New York sometime in the next few days to address questions about her private email account, Glenn Thrush reports for Politico. (Continuing a trend, Thrush says that the Clinton server was "housed in her suburban New York residence," which despite the New York Times and AP stories he references, remains an unverified assertion, not a fact.) White House press secretary Josh Earnest also acknowledged yesterday that President Obama did "trade emails with his secretary of state" but was not aware how the mail was handled or that she did not have an official account. The State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that "we don't have any reason to believe" that Clinton's...

Long Games The White House and State Department both knew that Hillary Clinton's personal email usage while Secretary of State had become known to House Republicans as early as last August, but as Edward-Isaac Dovere reports for Politico, they deferred to Clinton's staff, which "made the decision to keep quiet" about the issue. Republicans and some Democrats are not happy about the issue, with Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) saying Sunday on Meet the Press that “I think that she needs to step up and come out and state exactly what the situation is. From this point on, the silence is going to hurt her.” BREAKING: Hillary Clinton has changed her Twitter avatar from a photo of her reading her Blackberry to a...