Retroactive warfare

• The debate over Bain Capital continued to play out in hashtags over the weekend, such as #romneybainmovelines and in online videos, such as an Obama campaign video titled Your Turn, urging Romney to explain his tenure there. Talking Points Memo analyzed the audio editing in an Obama TV ad which features Mitt Romney's rendition of America the Beautiful while showing headlines on his alleged outsourcing and off-shore bank accounts. On TPM, a reader draws a comparison to the famed "Daisy" ad. On Sunday, a comment by Ed Gillespie that Romney had retired "retroactively" from Bain offered more Twitter fodder, including a @RetroactiveMitt Twitter account. A YouTube user cut all of Romney's TV interviews on Bain into one clip.

Happy offline, warrior online?

• Mark Landler from the New York Times noted how Barack Obama's aggressive "cyberself" — like the Twitter account in his name, which rarely carries posts from the president himself but often carries links to attacks on Romney — can diverge sharply in tone from his in-person campaign demeanor.

Around the web

• The Associated Press snapped some pictures of Mitt Romney relaxing in New Hampshire by the lake with his iPad.

• ICYMI: Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century has unveiled VeepMistakes.com, which features 1,300 pages of opposition research and a large number of videos on potential Romney vice presidents, ABC News reported.

  The super PAC is shining their spotlight on three of the mostly likely contenders: former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio ... American Bridge decided to release the information before Romney picks his running mate in order to give fellow Democrats, as well as the press, a head-start on examining the major vulnerabilities of each of the contenders. ... In addition to the written material, the super PAC, which was formed primarily as a tracking and research organization, is making public large amounts of video footage of the three vice presidential hopefuls.

• The New York Times reported Sunday on a wide-ranging effort by the Food and Drug Administration to monitor the computer activity of scientists who provided information to the media for stories critical of the FDA's medical review process, raising new questions about the Obama administration's record on protecting whistleblowers.

  The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.

  Lawmakers have already come out and criticized the program.

• The NRCC has released a website democratfacts.org/ with "the truth about Congressional Democrats."

• Politico reported on how both sides of the political spectrum go to Facebook's Adam Conner and Katie Harbath for political strategy advice on the social network.

• Mitt Romney is expected to hold fundraisers with the California tech community later this week, just before Obama is expected to raise money in California, including attending a "a small, 'broadly tech-related campaign discussion' somewhere in the East Bay, to which admission will cost $35,800," the San Jose Mercury News reported.

• Newark Mayor Cory Booker held an IAma on Reddit yesterday.

• In a Facebook note, Jessica Morales from Rebuild the Dream criticizes the notion by some progressives that their fellow travelers who sell campaign software to Republicans should be boycotted.

• Techcrunch reviewed how the Internet lobby showed its ability to influence legislation in the D.C. City Council and in Congress.

• In New York Times Sunday Review commentary, two Pro Publica reporters on digital privacy posit that smartphones should be accurately considered "a tracking device that happens to make calls."

• John Moore from GovintheLab says that Verizon threatened legal action if he didn't take down a post about its assertion in court that it should be able to "selectively choose what information should be allowed to stay" on its networks.

• TorrentFreak tries to follow up on the status of U.S. Internet service providers' six-strikes plan for dealing with copyright violations online.

• The Internet Defense League wants to mark its official mid-July launch by raising money to project five large "catsignals" in the sky in New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London and Ulaan Bataar in Mongolia, a reverse Harry Potter-esque Dark Mark sort of an idea.

• Eric Wemple explores why the Boston Globe story on Mitt Romney's Bain Capital record made such an impact when Talking Points Memo and Mother Jones had already done similar reporting.

• On ZDNet, Ed Bott highlights how Facebook has been running Newsfeed ads based on friends' liked political pages, and wonders if "Facebook is damaging your reputation with sneaky political posts."

• Massachusetts officials who helped set up the online health exchanges there are now in demand by other states working to set up the exchanges as part of the affordable health care law, the Boston Globe reported.

• The New York City beverage industry is running online ads like this one on the Daily Caller to promote its New Yorkers for Beverage Choices website.

• A New York City Board of Elections committee has passed new guidelines for election night policies, including having memory sticks from the city's electronic vote scanners brought directly to precincts and having the data be reported directly by poll workers, WNYC reported. The full board is expected to vote on the guidelines Tuesday.

• The New York Post reported how staff of New York City mayoral hopefuls are editing the candidates' Wikipedia pages.

• Mel Wymore, a Democrat running to represent the Upper West Side in the New York City Council in 2013, is running online ads on sites like DNAinfo.com. He has already attracted some attention for being a transgender candidate.

• A Washington Post columnist noted the response generated by a woman's blog post on sexual assault in Washington D.C.

• The city of Gold Bar, Washington, is facing bankruptcy or loss of its incorporated status, and according to ABC News, its financial problems are in large part due to attorney and activist blogger Anne Block, who has been filing public records requests that have cost the city $350,000 since 2009 and have "polarized the city of 2,000 into two factions that consider her either a champion of open government or a toxic liability," ABC reports. "On Block's website, the Gold Bar Reporter, the Massachusetts native routinely accuses city officials of corruption, at times using words like 'evil' and 'promiscuous.' Her records requests have piled up so high that the city has had to hire a sixth employee to handle them while paying a private law firm to defend itself against Block's lawsuits, [Mayor Joe] Beavers said."

• Daily Kos organized its first Google Hangout with Martin O'Malley, Maryland governor and chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.

• On GigaOm, Stacey Higginbotham explores what the Department of Justice's approval of a cable spectrum sale to Verizon could mean for the competitiveness of broadband.

• Vice-President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes has published her proposals aimed at strengthening broadband competition in Europe.

• A microblog written by the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai was inaccessible Friday.

• Indian Internet users have been using social media to track down men alleged to have attacked and molested a teenage girl, as video of the incident circulated online. The New York Times also spoke with a former Indian police officer on the subject.

• An Ethiopian court has jailed prominent blogger Eskinder Nega for 18 years.

• A Slovak teenager faces five years in prison for posting links to unauthorized movie downloads, AFP reported.

• The British government is proposing to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for free starting in 2014.

• The Olympic media center in London may become a Silicon Valley-type area in the future, Reuters reported.

• A British man is accused of impersonating a police officer on Twitter during last year's London riots, giving interviews, and gaining a following of over 3,000.

• Hugo Chavez, expanding on an already heavy use of Twitter for his reelection campaign, has launched an SMS service aimed those Venezuelans who do not have easy access to the web and can elect to receive tweets via text message by "el comandante," even those without Twitter accounts, Reuters reported:

  Supporters who register at www.chavezcandanga.org.ve can choose to receive his tweets in real time, or avoid being woken up by choosing just those he posts between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. Chavez's number of followers - many of whom must have signed up at least partly out of curiosity about how the former soldier famed for his hours-long speeches works with a 140-character limit - currently puts him at 179th in the world, just behind Jamaican-American hip hop star Sean Kingston.By comparison, the top spot is held by singer Lady Gaga with more than 27 million followers.

• The U.N.'s Syria Mission released video from its fact-finding visit site of the military operation at the village of Treimseh.

• Saudi Arabia is considering new regulations that would criminalize insulting Islam including on social media, Reuters reported, citing a Saudi newspaper. "'The (regulations) are important at the present time because violations over social networks on the Internet have been observed in the past months," the sources said.'"

• The New York Times reported on how in the aftermath of fatal floods in southern Russia, the Internet on the one hand is encouraging citizens to question authorities' responses, but also encouraging thousands of volunteers from other cities to aid the victims.