Archive: Category: TechPresident

Bows As was widely expected, "CitizenFour," Laura Poitras' powerful documentary about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, won the Best Documentary Oscar last night at the Academy Awards. In the New Yorker, Amy Davidson explains why this is a big deal. Here is Snowden's statement on the award. Poitras' main companion on the Oscar stage, her Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald, gets some heat from investigative journalist Ken Silverstein, who recently resigned after working 14 months for First Look Media. Charging First Look management with "dishonesty" about allowing journalists to fearlessly and independently report, Silverstein posted a series of comments to his Facebook page, including this: "Glenn’s role at FL is troubling in some ways, especially standing by silently (as far as I can tell) and...

Sim Pickings NSA and GCHQ stole the encryption keys used to scramble global cellphone communications for billions of phones, report Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley in a blockbuster report for The Intercept. This gave the spy agencies "the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted," Scahill and Begley write. "The only effective way for individuals to protect themselves from [this type of] theft-enabled surveillance is to use secure communications software, rather than relying on SIM card-based security," they add. Secure software includes email and other apps that use Transport Layer Security (TLS), the mechanism underlying the secure HTTPS web protocol. The email clients included with...

Portents The White House has its first chief data scientist, DJ Patil, a veteran of LinkedIn, eBay, PayPal, Skype and Greylock Partners, blogs CTO Megan Smith. On Backchannel, Nancy Scola takes a close look at a startup called DataMi that is pioneering a new way for many more companies to offer mobile phone users "sponsored data." The prospects look bright--but they may break the principle that on the Internet all bits are treated equally. Major tech and media companies are joining Twitter's fight to overturn Patriot Act gag orders preventing any disclosures regarding the National Security Letters it receives, Jeff John Roberts reports for GigaOm. Google is escalating Cryptowar II with a statement to a congressional committee that the Justice Departments insistence on expanded...

AmBushed When your friends ask you in a few weeks, how did John Ellis (Jeb) Bush get to the front of the 2016 Republican presidential pack, tell them to read this piece by Ben White and Marc Caputo in Politico. Bush is replaying his brother's 1999 strategy of overwhelming his putative rivals by outfundraising them early, but with one twist, they report: All this money flows to Bush’s Right to Rise PAC and a separate super PAC that can take money in unlimited sums. The way that Bush set up the two committees — at the same time and with the same attorney, former Romney super PAC lawyer Charlie Spies — is “unique,” said elections law lawyer Kenneth Gross, a former attorney...

This Thursday, Civic Hall is welcoming digital ethnographer Mark Pesce, in town briefly from his home base in Australia, to give a talk on "Hypercivility" and I want to give some background on why I am personally so excited to hear what he has to say. In a sentence, it's this: Pesce has been consistently ahead of the curve on how mass connectivity is changing politics and civic life, and I always learn something new when I hear him speak. The first time Pesce spoke at Personal Democracy Forum was in 2008, a talk he titled "Hyperpolitics, American-Style." Recall that at that moment, we were at the high point of Internet-powered politics in America--Barack Obama's grassroots network had just overwhelmed Hillary...

Losses RIP David Carr. The media web is filled with sorrow for his untimely end; I think Dave Weigel captures best why this is such a personal loss for so many people. Early errors on the technology front by John Ellis (Jeb) Bush have some Democratic techies crowing, reports Darren Samuelsohn for Politico. The Bush tech team has redacted personal details of most of the more than 12,000 individuals whose data was exposed by his release of emails from his days as Governor of Florida, the Guardian reports. #ThanksObama explained, and pwned by the President. The next Knight News Challenge is focused on better informing voters and increasing civic participation around elections. There's $3 million available from Knight, the Democracy Fund, Hewlett Foundation and Rita...

Foundations Yesterday at NetGain, a conference on the intersection of philanthropy and the Internet held at the Ford Foundation, the biggest and boldest idea I heard came from Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive. It's called "Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web." Here's a joint op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy from Alberto Imbarguen of the Knight Foundation, Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation and Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation, calling on foundations to "jump-start a digital revolution for the common good." Also at NetGain, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio made a strong plea for increased philanthropic investment in projects that bring affordable high-speed internet access to disadvantaged communities. Related: In Gotham Gazette, Kristen Meriwether explains how...

Oversharing Tuesday saw the "mass exodus" of senior staff and employees from the New Organizing Institute, reports Evan McMorris-Santoro for BuzzFeed, apparently due to conflict with executive director Ethan Roeder, Barack Obama's former campaign data guy. NOI's board of directors refused to fire Roeder at the staff's request, prompting mass resignation. In a post explaining her decision, software developer Shannon Turner wrote, "the NOI I left today is not the NOI I joined." Ethan Czahor, the CTO of John Ellis Bush's (that's "Jeb" to the plebes) new political action committee "Right to Rise" resigned yesterday after reporters like Igor Bobic of the Huffington Post discovered he had started deleting past tweets of his that were sexist and homophobic. Speaking of John Ellis Bush (Jeb), T.C. Sottek reports for The Verge on...

Impacts Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain writes an "open letter" to British PM David Cameron, explaining why the British government's insistence on banning the use of strong encryption so as to be able to eavesdrop on online communications is a "very bad idea." The EFF's Jillian York explains why it is important to develop alternative funding streams for privacy software, noting that much of the field is dependent of money from the US government, with paradoxical results. BuzzFeed is interviewing President Obama Tuesday and its editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, wants your questions. Why the recommendations of Google's advisory panel on the right to be forgotten will probably be forgotten. The Oscar's of Tech? Katie Jacobs Stanton, the VP of global media at Twitter, went to the...

Scenarios How a "ragtag band of activists" won the battle for net neutrality. Brendan Sasso reports on how Marvin Ammori, Stanford's Barbara van Schewick, David Segal of Demand Progress, Fight for the Future (led by Tiffiniy Cheng and Holmes Wilson), Public Knowledge and Free Press, plus a big chunk of the start-up community led by Etsy, Kickstarter and Tumblr, got the FCC to shift its posture on the issue. See also David Dayen's report in The New Republic on the fight. Bloomberg's David Weigel reports on how conservatives opposed to net neutrality are trying to make their own viral campaign take off. Most investigative journalists in America believe the government has probably collected data about their communications, the Pew Research Center reports in...