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That Zucks? Facebook Founder's First Political Fundraiser To Be Besieged By Activists

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, February 13 2013

California activists are capitalizing on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's fundraising swing through Palo Alto Wednesday, bringing attention to the Republican's record on reproductive health services. Read More

Climate Change Activist Lands White House Meeting After His One-Man Protest

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, February 12 2013

Remember Brad Johnson, the climate change activist who interrupted White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett's speech during RootsCamp last November? Read More

ICYMI: NationBuilder's Co-Founder Joe Green Leaves To Join Andreessen Horowitz

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, February 7 2013

NationBuilder's Co-Founder Joe Green announced Wednesday that he's stepping down from day-to-day operations at the company and joining the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Green ... Read More

Social Fundraising Platform Rally Plants Its Flag in Europe, Opens Up in Berlin

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, February 7 2013

Photo: Onnola/Flickr

Rally, the San Francisco-based social fundraising platform, whose users range from Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign to thousands of more esoteric personal charitable causes, threw open its doors for business ... Read More

Are the Democrats Going to Sell Your Political Opinions? If They Were, Now They're Not

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, February 6 2013

The head of a company that markets information about Democratic voters told ProPublica's Lois Beckett that the private sector might be a "growth area" for his business — and now he tells techPresident the data indicates he should roll back that comment. Read More

White House Posts 'Help Wanted' Sign Online for Civic-Minded Hackers

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, February 5 2013

The White House on Monday said that it's ready to receive applications for the next round of presidential innovation fellows -- civic minded programmers and entrepreneurs interested in working on and implementing new ... Read More

Members of Congress To Attend Aaron Swartz Memorial In DC

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Monday, February 4 2013

Several members of Congress, including Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, are scheduled to attend a memorial for Internet activist Aaron Swartz Monday evening on Capitol Hill, where they'll also hear his friends' ... Read More

The RIAA Wants Members of the House to Share Music Over Spotify, A File-Sharing Network

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, January 31 2013

The Recording Industry Association of America on Thursday implored the chief administrative officer of the U.S. House to allow its members to stream and share music using Spotify, a legal music sharing service that's the ... Read More

A Second Amendment Advocate's Foe Gets All Up In His Namespace

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, January 31 2013

Derek Bovard, a conservative in Colorado who recently donated Organizingforaction.net to the National Rifle Association, is getting a taste of his own medicine. Read More

URL Related to Obama's "Organizing for Action" Now Goes to NRA Website

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, January 29 2013

A Web domain using the name of President Obama's grassroots lobbying group Organizing for Action now points to the National Rifle Association's web site. Derek Bovard, a computer technician in Castle Rock, Colo., registered the domain name organizingforaction.net after seeing a report about the formation of the lobbying group on Fox News last Friday. Bovard, a Republican who voted for Mitt Romney in the last election cycle, says that he bought the domain for $10 and would be willing to part with it for $10,000. Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed friday >

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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monday >

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.

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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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