Archive: Category: TechPresident

Violations The State Department's review of the 55,000 emails Clinton did turn over to it may reveal if she violated security policies, Carol Leoonig, Rosalind Helderman and Ann Gearan report for the Washington Post. An unnamed Clinton aide told them, "Of the e-mails that were turned over to State…90 percent were correspondence between Clinton and agency employees using their regular government e-mail accounts, which end in state.gov. The remaining 10 percent were communications between Clinton and other government officials, including some at the White House, along with an unknown number of people 'not on a government server,' the aide said." The National Security Archive's Lauren Harper and Nate Jones offer a definitive analysis of the legal obligations Clinton had as Secretary...

Hotmail Security experts are not impressed by the news that Hillary Clinton ran all her emails through a private server while she was Secretary of State, Andy Greenberg reports for Wired. For example, the ACLU's chief technologist Chris Soghoian comments, “Although the American people didn’t know about this, it’s almost certain that foreign intelligence agencies did, just as the NSA knows which Indian and Spanish officials use Gmail and Yahoo accounts.” Greenberg also points out that Network Solutions, Clinton's domain registrar, had hundreds of its domains hacked in 2010. Stanford computer science geek Jonathan Mayer, who is quoted in Greenberg's Wired story, caveats that "us outsiders can't say, with any certainty, whether this server was more or less secure than the State...

Masters of Their Domain(s) Hillary Clinton's private email account traces back to a URL registered to her family home address in Chappaqua, NY, report Jack Gillum and Ted Bridis for the AP. The exact location of the mail server running the account remains unknown, but Gillum and Bridis oddly speculate that the Clintons might have be running their own "homebrew" system from their home: "Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton's home, an email server there would have been well protected from...

Shemails Remember #TextsFromHillary? it looks like Hillary Clinton's tech cool just lost a lot of its shine. The New York Times' Michael Schmidt reports that during her years as Secretary of State, Clinton "exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business," possibly violating federal records laws and also potentially risking the security of her communications. On Vox, Max Fisher reminds us that Clinton's decision not to use a government email account looks even worse as it came in the context of the still ongoing congressional investigation (from 2007-2009) of the Bush administration's firing of US attorneys for political reasons, and its failure to turn over millions of private emails pertaining to that scandal. John Ellis (Jeb) Bush, who is planning...

Outings In Slate, Reihan Salam argues that the "Snowdenites"--a group that he says is made up of disproportionately younger, male libertarian technophiles--now have the "upper hand" in the politics of surveillance. Among the points he makes: the NSA is having a harder time recruiting young techies and big tech companies are pushing back forcefully against their former allies in government. Time will tell if he's right. On Greenpeace's Mobilization Lab, Michael Khoo of Spitfire Strategies, which helped coordinate the net neutrality coalition, offers ten lessons from "the underdogs' victory." The latest cover of Der Spiegel, featuring Apple's Tim Cook, Uber's Travis Kalanick, Google's Sergey Brin (in ominous Google Glasses), Yahoo's Marissa Mayer and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, ticked off CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis,...

Revisions In the wake of yesterday's 3-2 vote to reclassify broadband under Title II, net neutrality's intellectual father, Tim Wu, writes in the New Yorker that "the most pessimistic theories of lobbyist power clearly need to be revised." He also suggests that the broadband industry may actually decide to accept this new status quo, since it appears to ratify a marketplace where broadband providers currently make absurdly high profits. Marvin Ammori explains why this FCC decision will stand up in court when prior attempts by the agency to defend net neutrality failed. He notes that after losing one critical court case (Comcast v. FCC) for failing to use Title II, the agency's then-chairman Julius Genachowski ignored the court's clear direction to invoke...

A week ago, digital ethnologist Mark Pesce gave a talk here at Civic Hall on the topic of "Hypercivility." As you will see from watching the video, it's an extension of years of research and thinking he has done on the effects of hyperconnectivity on our world. Be forewarned, this is not an "easy" talk to watch or digest. While Pesce definitely has our social-media-powered "Age of Outrage" on his mind, he grounds his talk in a much more serious place: post-genocide Rwanda, which he recently visited. Humans, Pesce says, like their cousins the apes, may have inherent capacities (if not tendencies) for murderous, genocidal rage. And when we let ourselves accentuate our differences, history shows we are capable of...

Impossibles This morning the FCC is voting to reclassify broadband service under Title II of the Communications Act. Public Knowledge's Harold Feld sums up the significance of this event: Reclassification was a thing that should not be possible, and which therefore nobody but a handful of us believed could happen. It did not happen because some powerful person or special interest wanted it. It did not happen because John Oliver made a funny video. It happened because hundreds of lawyers, grassroots organizers, and policy advocates persuaded over 4 million people to stand up for their rights and demand that the government act to protect them from the unrestrained corporate power of broadband access providers. It shows — to everyone’s surprise —...

Off the Books Yesterday's blockbuster story by Spencer Ackerman in the Guardian about the Chicago police's "black site," an "off the books interrogation compound" where people have been beaten, shackled and denied access to lawyers prompted an impassioned response from veteran civic hacker Daniel O'Neil, the head of the Smart Chicago Collaborative. Noting the long history of open crime data in the evolution of the city's larger open data movement, O'Neil writes, "The idea that the Homan Square facility, at the corner of Homan and Fillmore, is a place where police are 'keeping arrestees out of official booking databases' certainly is not a shining star in this history." O'Neil reminds us of the radical critique offered by the late Aaron Swartz of...

Challenges The relationship between Silicon Valley Democratic donors and putative 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will likely pivot along two different lines, report Philip Rucker and Matea Gold for the Washington Post. Hard-core techies offended by the NSA's hacking of their systems may not warm to her much, while women fighting the industry's overall tilt already love her. Or, as longtime fundraiser Wade Randlett, who sits on the national finance committee of Ready for Hillary put it, "Out here, middle-aged women are the equivalent of the 22-year-olds in 2007. They are as crazy for Hillary as the kids were for Barack.” Semi-related: At yesterday's cyber-security summit at New America, Alex Stamos, Yahoo's chief information security officer, challenged NSA director Michael Rogers over...