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The New York City Mayor's Race: Analog Candidates in a Digital World

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, June 18 2013

If New York techies (yes, Adolfo, that word is okay) came to a technology policy forum in Queens Monday night expecting to be shown respect and consideration by people competing for their vote, they left wanting. (Two heavyweight candidates, Council Speaker Christine Quinn and former Comptroller William Thompson Jr., did not even show up.) Monday night, hosted by the Coalition for Queens and a smattering of local Democratic and technology groups, wasn't about showing which mayoral candidate knows the most about technology. It was about showing which candidate has the combination of temperament, intellect and leadership skill to work with the city's technology community and lead global a city in the 21st century. That's a test no candidate for mayor of New York has passed so far. Read More

First POST: Answers

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, June 18 2013

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Congressional hearings continue on National Security Agency surveillance; federal officials consider Bitcoin; and more in today's round-up of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

First POST: Revelations

BY Nick Judd | Monday, June 17 2013

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Knowledge loss in open government, a new social networking partnership for New York City, and a whole mess of new information in the ongoing NSA surveillance debate lead today's round-up of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

First POST: Late Takes

BY Nick Judd | Friday, June 14 2013

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Fallout continues from disclosure that the National Security Agency is spying on Americans, compiled in today's round-up of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

Where TIME Lost the Plot on Snowden and Spying

BY Nick Judd | Friday, June 14 2013

Michael Scherer doesn't seem to have time for allegations of government misconduct. Rather, it's the bits and bytes of an online political philosophy that attracts his imagination, an Internet culture typified by the 2.3 million Reddit users who logged in last month. His recent article in TIME Magazine takes shaky steps towards the idea that there is a culture of technologically savvy twentysomethings who are "challenging" to a stable democracy. This is not incisive commentary on the zeitgeist of young America, this is the construction of a folk devil. I said so in a previous piece, and he has emailed me to defend his ideas. Read More

Michael Scherer Doesn't Know We've Argued Over NSA Spying Since Before Millennials Were a Thing

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, June 13 2013

It would be easy to argue that the latest national security leaks are thanks to some combination of Internet culture and Millennial entitlement, as Michael Scherer does in Time's bizarre new cover story and David Brooks tried to do in an intellectually lazy op-ed hanging Edward Snowden, 29, around the neck of "the more unfortunate trends of the age." This overlooks the fact Snowden is part of an argument, now more than 30 years old, over senior government officials who have skirted the Constitution and then withheld the truth about it to Congress and to the American people. Brooks and Scherer are victims of a logical fallacy. Snowden the leaker of NSA secrets can't be a function of his particular time and place. People have been leaking NSA secrets of exactly this nature since before Snowden was even alive. Read More

First POST: Shell Games

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, June 13 2013

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Generals and senators duel over the truth of surveillance; reporters turn their pens on the whistleblower instead of the leak; and more in today's round-up of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

First POST: Hearings

BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, June 12 2013

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Members of Congress question what they've been told about surveillance of Americans; federal officials take flak for their IT project reporting; and more in today's round-up of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

What Happens When You Collect "Metadata" On Multinationals Instead of People?

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, June 11 2013

Chris Taggart. Photo: Esty Stein / Personal Democracy Media

"In a highly connected, networked world, where the network's evolving all the time, the power comes from being able to connect the dots," OpenCorporates founder Chris Taggart told me. "And at the moment ... citizens, people, other companies even don't have the ability to connect those dots." That's where OpenCorporates comes in — a vast, freely available database of information about the world's corporate world. Read More

First POST: Starting Somewhere

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, June 11 2013

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: A growing response to NSA surveillance revelations and more in today's round-up of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

News Briefs

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Cory Booker Hires Democratic Organizing Veteran Addisu Demissie To Manage Senate Run

Newark Mayor Cory Booker has hired a veteran of the Democratic organizing world Addisu Demissie to manage his run to succeed the late New Jersey Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. GO

ShareProgress Debuts Social Sharing Optimization Tools

ShareProgress, a left-leaning tech startup in downtown San Francisco, launched its social sharing optimization platform Tuesday after several months of testing with the progressive advocacy group CREDO Action. GO

New Organizing Institute to Move from Collecting Election Data to Organizing Election Officials

The New Organizing Institute, a progressive nonprofit that trains campaigners and is no led by former Obama for America data director Ethan Roeder, is launching a new initiative next week aiming to "fix that" for local elections. NOI will announce a national network where local election administration officials can congregate to share solutions to common issues. It's a transition for a team at NOI that had previously been managing the Voting Information Project, which collects data on polling places, election districts and voter registration deadlines and prepares it for third parties in machine-readable format. In the 2012 election cycle, backed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and partnered with Google, VIP made information available in all 50 states. GO

Russian SOPA Passed First Reading

A first draft of a law nicknamed “Russian SOPA” was approved by the Russian parliament last Friday, June 14. Like the original Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill will establish penalties and procedures for online copyright violations.

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monday >

Czech Prime Minister Resigns Following Corruption and Surveillance Scandal

The prime minister of the Czech Republic resigned yesterday, irreparably damaged by a corruption scandal and the possibility of impropriety in his personal life. According to the Czech constitution, his entire government will also have to relinquish office.

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Mayors of New York City and San Francisco Announce "Digital Cities" Summit

The Mayors of New York City and San Francisco announced Friday that they're co-hosting meetings in the Fall and early next year to examine the "best practices" that lead to tech-enabled economic growth. The meetings are follow-ups to the initial Bloomberg Technology Summit held last year in New York City. This year's summit in New York ... GO

New York State Joins GitHub to Get Feedback on Open Data Policy

New York is the first state to publish an initial draft of its open data guidelines on GitHub to seek feedback from the public, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in a press release Thursday. GO

Brazilians Protest Forced Evictions on YouTube and in Mock World Cup

Tomorrow Brazilians who have been forced out of their housing in advance of the 2014 World Cup will stage their own “People's Cup” in Rio de Janeiro to draw awareness to forced evictions.

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A “Fix-Rate” for Corruption: Integrity Action Wins the Google Global Impact Award

“From wanachi (“citizen”) to up there,” Emmanuel Dzombo explains with an upward sweep of his hand, is how Integrity Action has begun to reverse the bureaucratic top-down approach that has often blocked development work in Kenya. Dzombo is a local leader in Chengoni, Kenya, a country that ranks towards the very bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index – at 139. The organization believes it could do more, and Google.org seems to agree. The Google Impact Challenge will provide the charity with £500,000 that will allow it to develop a mobile application for tracking and collecting data from citizens. GO

Crowdsourced "Danger Maps" Track Air, Soil and Water Pollution in China

Chinese citizens are exposing sources of pollution and other environmental problems by contributing to the partially crowdsourced website 'Danger Maps'. So far, the Chinese government is letting them get away with it.

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U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board To Meet Next Wednesday

A long dormant independent agency that was at least nominally supposed to exercise a modicum of oversight over the booming intelligence-industrial complex is scrambling to meet up next Wednesday, but the public will still be none the wiser about what it plans to do, since it is a closed door meeting. The only indication that the toothless ... GO

Despite Software Problems, Civic Hackers are Pedaling Bike Share Data

Reporters are shoaling around the news that New York City's new bike sharing system, Citi Bike, is benighted with problems stemming from its high-tech software. But that's not putting the brakes on plans to explore what programmers might do with data generated by the system by hosting a Citi Bike Civic Hack Night later this month. GO

Grassroots Republicans Are Not Waiting for the RNC To Revamp Their Digital Strategy

Several members of the Republican Party rank and file aren't waiting around for the GOP to reinvent itself on the technological front. They're organizing events themselves to explore what a tech-enabled GOP might look like for the 2014 cycle. GO

wednesday >

New Russian Law Makes Publication of Information on Gay Rights Illegal

On June 11 the Russian parliament passed a bill against “homosexual propaganda” that effectively outlaws gay rights rallies and bans informational or pro-gay rights material from publication in the media or on the Internet. Violators of the law will risk heavy fines and censorship and, in the case of a media outlet, risk being shut down. It had near unanimous support, passing in a 436-to-0 vote, with only one abstention.

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Macedonia Draft Law to Regulate and Restrict the "Last Arena for Freedom of Speech"

The draft of a media regulation law in Macedonia has journalists and press freedom watchdogs up in arms. The proposed Law on Media and Audiovisual Media Services was written by the government behind closed doors and without input from the media or NGOs. It has been interpreted as a decisive move on the part of the government to limit speech online in a country where press freedoms are already limited. Until now, Internet-based news sites were not regulated like print media.

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Trying to Prosecute Online Piracy in Canada? Good Luck!

A private firm that is monitoring Canadians who download pirated content online has found itself at the center of a legal battle. GO

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