Barack Obama | TechPresident

Obama Loves You Back

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, March 16 2012

We don't think it's a coincidence that just days after the site ObamaLovesYouBack.com appeared online, the Obama '12 team sent out an email from Michele Obama titled "I Love You Back" and reading: Dear _____ I see this ... Read More

Romney Campaign Hijacks Obama Campaign Manager's Fundraising E-Mail Again

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, March 14 2012

Mitt Romney's campaign manager Matt Rhoades sent out a fundraising e-mail Tuesday night, but most of the writing in the note was done by Jim Messina, President Obama's campaign manager. Rhoades had forwarded Messina's ... Read More

Yes They Can: What Voters Have Lost and Campaigns Have Gained From 2008 to 2012

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, March 13 2012

The Short-Form Birth Certificate Obama 2012 Coffee Mug (from his Facebook Timeline)

Is the Internet empowering voters as much as it did in 2004 and 2008? Or have campaigns regained the upper hand, with their sophisticated use of data-mining? That was the question we debated Sunday afternoon in Austin, at the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference. Read More

San Francisco, Organizational Hub for a New Class of National Politicos

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, March 8 2012

From left to right: Chris Kelly, Christine Pelosi and Fred Davis at Rally's Super Tuesday party. Photo: Rally.

What was unusual about an evening Super Tuesday gathering in San Francisco was that many of the people there aren't working in a startup aimed at making some commercial aspect of life easier, faster and more fun. Instead, they are part of a generation of people with both political and tech savvy, using the web to fundamentally alter politics in general and specific campaigns in particular. For these people, the promise of a networked world and a new, networked politics — where people connecting outside the by-all-accounts-flawed and scandal-fraught party apparatus are starting to make an impact — is coming into focus. And rather than using their knowledge of the technology world to start the next Facebook, they're building a cadre of Silicon Valley companies that work in public affairs — not just non-profits, government, and civic life, but politics and campaigns. Read More

GOP Campaign Vet Leaves CRAFT Media/Digital to Start a Firm Focused Outside the "Partisan Arena"

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, February 29 2012

Longtime GOP digital and communications strategist Michael Turk is branching out on his own after having spent the past two years with his partners and colleagues at the Republican-leaning political media consulting firm CRAFT.

Team Obama's Questlove Endorsement

BY Miranda Neubauer | Thursday, February 16 2012

In a video, Questlove, the drummer and joint frontman of the The Roots, the in-house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, endorsed Barack Obama's reelection as part of the campaign's African Americans for Obama effort. "When I started supporting Barack Obama in 2008 he promised to bring real change and hope to our country and community as a whole," he says in the video. "This is not a quick fix. It's not like you can take a wand, 'BING,' and just make magic overnight. He needs eight years to finish the mission and we need to have his back." Read More

How Low Can You Go? Why the $3 E-mail Ask is Working

BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, February 16 2012

Panhandler in San Francisco, February 2008. Source: Wikimedia Commons

All of a sudden, campaigns everywhere are literally begging for as little as $3 in their email fundraising pitches. Are Americans tapped out? Or is something else going on here? Read More

Team Obama's West Coast "Technology Field Office"

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, February 16 2012

The San Francisco Chronicle's Joe Garofoli writes that Barack Obama's re-election campaign has launched a "technology field office" in San Francisco, the better to attract the ideas and talent of geeky Left Coast supporters. Read More

Barack Obama's "Story of Us," Told Through a Computer Screen

BY Nick Judd | Friday, February 10 2012

To commemorate the fifth anniversary of the day Barack Obama first announced his candidacy for presidency of the United States, his campaign has released this video, which has some stylistic similarities to Google's unfailingly optimistic ad spots in the same way many videos in this election season so far have resembled action movie trailers. Read More

Romney's and Obama's Teams Take It To The Tweets

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Friday, February 3 2012

Mitt Romney's campaign says President Obama is too focused on re-election. Picture: Courtesy Romney for President

The business of political fund-raising has taken a new turn this campaign season, with the latest twist seeing Barack Obama's re-election effort and Mitt Romney's pursuit of the Republican nomination each piggyback their ... Read More

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Chilean Anti-Corruption Resource: A Crowdsourced Database of Social and Political Connections

In countries where a small minority of social circles have a majority of the political and economic power, personal relationships can affect major decision-making, a serious concern of anti-corruption activists. A new web platform stores personal profiles of key players in Chilean business and politics, complete with biographies and personal and professional connections through family, education, social circles, employers and coworkers, to make tracking social relationships and conflict-of-interest easier. Called Poderopedia (from the Spanish word for power), the project sounds kind of like LinkedIn, but the creation and management of profiles is being crowdsourced out to journalists, activists and concerned citizens.

Middle Eastern Telecom Accused of Working With Saudi Arabia to Spy on Citizens

Mobily, an arm of the state-owned Middle Eastern telecom giant Etihad Etisalat, has been accused of working with Saudi Arabia to develop software that would allow the government to bypass protections for social media users. The exposé comes from Moxie Marlinspike (neé Matthew Rosenfield), an expert in a certain type of malicious Internet attack called MITM (man-in-the-middle), whereby attackers intercept and secretly alter private messages exchanged via email and other social media platforms. GO

Saudi Religious Leader Warns Twitter Users of Consequences in the Afterlife

In late March, Saudi Arabia's top religious cleric said Twitter was for clowns and corrupters. Earlier this week, he said anyone using social media, in particular Twitter, “has lost this world and the afterlife.” His comments might be laughable, if they did not come at a time when the Saudi government is looking into monitoring or blocking social media sites and eliminating user anonymity.

thursday >

What The Other Silicon Valley Immigration Group Is Doing This Month

A bipartisan coalition of political advocacy, business and tech groups are moving ahead to launch a social media blitz next week designed to persuade members of the Senate to vote in favor of immigration reform legislation supported in Silicon Valley. "We're going to create a virtual digital storm," said Jeremy Robbins in a Wednesday ... GO

The New Yorker Hopes "Strongbox" Is a Wiretap-Proof Sieve for Leaks

The New Yorker yesterday became the first outlet to implement DeadDrop, a new system for sources to submit information to journalists online in a more secure and anonymous way than, for example, email. GO

Female Organizer of Pakistan's First Hackathon Stresses Collaboration Over Competition

After Pakistan banned Valentine's Day this year, Sabeen Mahmud started an online protest in which people uploaded photos to mock the government ban. In the weeks following she received death threats and menacing phone calls, and early on she had to stay home from work. That did nothing, however, to keep her from further organizing. Last month, the café she started in Karachi hosted Pakistan's first ever hackathon, which tackled problems including sanitation, crime, disaster management, and education. She even invited a government representative to observe the initial conversations, tackling sensitive areas like government inefficiency and elections.

wednesday >

White House Innovation Fellows Project Spins Off Into A Business

Clay Johnson and Adam Becker joined the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to help the White House fix the way government does business. Now they're turning that mission into a business themselves. GO

Fighting Fires With Data, New York City Launches New Safety Inspection System

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that New York City has implemented city-wide a new risk based inspection system focused on fire safety that is driven by analytics from multiple city agencies. GO

Chinese Netizens Use Digital Initiative to Gain Media Attention for Unsolved Poisoning Case

Last month a medical science student at a Shanghai university died from poisoning, allegedly murdered by his roommate. The specifics of the crime echoed a case from the mid-1990s, in which a 19-year-old student was poisoned with thallium. That case has once again been thrown into the media spotlight, but after 18 years the media has changed and the spotlight means a trending hashtag on Sina Weibo or an online petition to the U.S. President.

PDF France 2013: “Au Code, Citoyens!”

This year PDF France will take place in Paris on June 13, with the theme "Au Code, Citoyens!" ("To Code, Citizens!") The speakers' lineup includes some of the continent's leaders in the digital revolution. GO

tuesday >

Website Imitation is Flattery in New York City Council Race

A New York City Council candidate who had made his name as a technology consultant and spearheaded an open government initiative several years ago found parts of his website copied by another City Council candidate in a different borough, as Politicker first reported. GO

Mike Honda Locks Up Establishment Support, But Challenger Has Ear of the Silicon Valley Elite

Some of Silicon Valley's most influential business people will hold a fundraiser in San Francisco this Thursday for Ro Khanna, the 36-year-old lawyer who's challenging 71-year-old California Democrat Mike Honda for his 17th Congressional District seat. The names at the top of the invite: Ron Conway and Sean Parker. They're apparently forming a committee to help Khanna build his campaign. The other bold-face names who are listed as part of the 'committee in formation' include Salesforce.com's Founder and CEO Marc Benioff, Benchmark Capital General Partners' Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton, tech entrepreneur Shawn Fanning, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, her big data venture investor husband Zach Bogue, and Conway's SV Angel colleague, Founder and Managing Partner David Lee. GO

Tools to Keep Independent Media Online in Hostile Environments

Websites and media outlets in developing countries or countries with corrupt or repressive regimes struggle daily to fend off hacker attacks, some from their own government — like the Malaysian news portal Sarawak Report, which techPresident reported was taken down in April by sustained denial-of-service attacks. The negative attention controversial reporting draws can scare local advertisers away as well, making it difficult for a media company to support itself. Media Frontiers offers two services to websites dealing with either of those problems.

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Ahead of September Elections, German Pirate Party Picks Its Platform

The German Pirate Party held its election year convention over the weekend and approved its party platform, following lengthy debate over the role that online decision-making should have within the party, as German news sources reported and the party outlined on its own web platforms. GO

Peruvians Petition their President to Stick Up for their Digital Rights

Peru’s civil society advocacy groups have started an online petition outlining their ‘non-negotiable’ demands for digital rights and freedom of speech. The campaign was prompted by the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. Lima, Peru, will soon host the 17th round of secretive TPP trade talks, which will take place from May 15 – 24.

Gun Control Advocates Take Aim At LivingSocial for Promoting Guns and Alcohol

A coalition of advocacy groups is launching a new campaign this week against the promotion of American gun culture. The campaign focuses on the daily deals site Living Social, which hasn't stopped promoting social events Hunter S. Thompson would have loved (they promote shooting off guns and letting off steam and drinking.) GO

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