Archive: Category: TechPresident

Cycles Writing for Wired, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler explains his proposed new rules "to preserve the internet as an open platform for innovation and free expression." By classifying internet service under Title II of the Communications Act, he says "enforceable, bright-line rules will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services" and these rules will also fully apply to mobile broadband. In the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer charts how activists managed to make Title II reclassification into a politically feasible, even desirable, approach for the FCC to take when a year ago it seemed like a fantasy. In the Hill, Mario Trujillo highlights six key points about the FCC chairman's proposal. A few details we'd like fleshed out: what...

Correlations This is civic tech: In Chicago, open government data tracking the work of city snow plows, scraped and displayed on ClearStreets.org, an app made by the Open City civic hacker group, shows that a relatively quiet dead-end street recently got a lot of attention from snow-removal crews. As Dan Mihalopoulos reports for the Chicago Sun-Times, the street, which was plowed five times during and after last weekend's winter storm is where City Alderman Ed Burke, the council's senior and most powerful member, lives. A few blocks away, streets were still unplowed. Privacy reformers are not very impressed by the changes President Obama is making in the NSA's current surveillance programs, report Dan Roberts and Dominic Rushe for The Guardian. CNN's Chris Moody...

Foreshadowing Confirming weeks of speculation, Steve Lohr of The New York Times reports that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is going to "propose regulating Internet service like a public utility" as a telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act, but they will take a "light-touch approach" to applying that decision. The actual proposal from Wheeler to his fellow commissioners is expected tomorrow. Wheeler also has given the cities of Chattanooga, Tennessee and Wilson, North Carolina a preemption allowing them to ignore state laws preventing them from building their own broadband networks, reports Jason Koebler for Motherboard. In his new budget, President Obama is asking for $105 million to create digital teams in 25 government agencies modeled on the new US Digital Service,...

Info-Kale Internet Says Go: It's taken a long time, but in the fight over net neutrality rules at the FCC, open internet activists appear to have moved from simply blocking bad laws (read: SOPA, PIPA) to constructively supporting better policy (read: reclassifying broadband as a communications service), reports Dominic Rushe for The Guardian. The Open Technology Institute's Danielle Kehl takes to The Hill to stamp down ill-founded concerns that reclassifying broadband as a communications service would somehow lead to the United Nations' takeover of the Internet. Steven Levy reports on how Facebook is continually tweaking News Feed, aiming to make it the central daily experience of its more than 1.3 billion users. The problem, he explains, is that the company's algorithms are taught...

Upgrades Having beaten her, now they want to join her: Obama 2012 digital alums Teddy Goff and Andrew Bleeker are among the many hoping to work on Hillary Clinton's emerging presidential campaign, Darren Samuelsohn reports for Politico. The US government's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has reiterated its call for President Obama to stop the mass collection of America's phone meta-data, Spencer Ackerman reports for The Guardian. "“It’s now well past time for the administration to have developed alternative procedures and alternative relationships with the telephone companies to stop the daily flow of data to the government,” one member of the board, James Dempsey, said. Newly released documents add further detail to the DEA's planned use of license plate readers to track...

Blogrolling CBC News, in collaboration with the Intercept, reports on the most recent revelation from the Snowden archive: Canada's electronic spy agency tracks millions of downloads daily as part of their program "Levitation." Related: How to leak to the Intercept, by its security expert Micah Lee. Correction: Yesterday I had the wrong link to Darren Samuelsohn's report in Politico about the shake-ups in the RNC's digital team. Here's the right one. There's renewed urgency behind writing regulations governing the civilian use of drones now that one has crashed onto the White House lawn, Julian Hattem reports for The Hill. Yay, Andrew Sullivan has decided to stop blogging! While I won't miss Sullivan's voice, your mileage may vary. The larger news in Sullivan's announcement is...

Jargon Busters The Republican National Committee's tech operation is getting reshuffled, Darren Sameulsohn reports for Politico. Headed to the Koch brothers' i360 data analytics shop: Chuck DeFeo, the RNC's digital director. Out as CTO: former Facebook engineer Andrew Barkett. Stepping into their shoes: Mindy Finn, most recently at Twitter but with tons of digital experience stretching back from Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty to Bush-Cheney '04 (plus a stint at the nonpartisan Voting Information Project); and Azarias Reda, currently the RNC's chief digital officer. The 2' x 2' drone that crash-landed on the White House lawn early Monday morning was piloted by a drunk employee of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency who was off-duty at the time, report Michael Shear and Michael Schmidt...

Stalking Government documents obtained by the ACLU show that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been tracking the movement of millions of vehicles across America using license plate readers. "If license plate readers continue to proliferate without restriction and the DEA holds license plate reader data for extended periods of time, the agency will soon possess a detailed and invasive depiction of our lives," blogged Bennet Stein and Jay Stanley of the ACLU. Related: On Gizmodo, the EFF's Rainey Reitman lays out their master strategy for defeating mass surveillance worldwide. It includes getting tech companies to "harden their systems," convincing more people to encrypt their own communications, and a host of legal and policy fights. Some law enforcement officers want Waze to disable...

Video Stars YouTuber Hank Green, one of three popular hosts of channels on the giant site that got to ask President Obama questions after the State of the Union last week, pushes back on media criticism that their access to the president demeaned the office. On Medium, he writes, "I feel like there’s an actual and honorable goal in all of this. America needs to convince young people that there are good reasons to be civically involved. Millennials are soon to be the biggest hunk of the electorate and, if the mid-terms are any indication, they simply don’t care. And that shouldn’t be surprising since no one is connecting to them in the ways they connect with each other or talking...

Moneyballed The Gates Foundation is going to fund the creation of a "massive self-registered database of 'global citizens'" that qualified nonprofits will then be able to access., reports Randall Lane of Forbes. The "database gatekeeper" will be the Global Poverty Project, he reports. Lane comments: "The results could herald the Moneyball era of activism, with the database sortable by interest area, region or any number of fields." According to Lane, Gates says: “The dream is to have people in the big list declare, ‘OK, I’m particularly interested in the environment.’ And then we go to Al Gore’s people or whatever, and say, “OK those people, you figure out what messages go to them.” If they say health, OK we’re enough of...