Morning must-reads

• The White House was encouraging citizens to use the hashtag #My2k to "speak out to keep taxes from
  going up on the middle class." The Heritage Foundation quickly responded by purchasing a promoted tweet against that hashtag. Ad Age reported, "the #my2k hashtag had about 41,000 mentions as of this afternoon, according to Twitter. Whether they're helping the president's cause is up for debate, since a quick perusal of tweets with the hashtag show a significant portion attacking him." Mother Jones highlighted the 10 best and worst tweets from the campaign.

• Nate Silver writes that Republicans, face-to-face with the facts of a ho-hum technology infrastructure on their side compared with what turned out to be a world-class operation supporting the Democrats, are statistically unlikely to be able to staff up with enough top-level technologists to compete. Based on campaign finance contributions from top technology companies and Barack Obama's margin of victory in Silicon Valley, Silver writes, it appears that elite engineers with a conservative bent may just be too hard to find.

  Let's take a trip down memory lane: The Republican Party has had its chance with A-list engineering talent. The national committee once had Cyrus Krohn, lured from Microsoft, at its digital helm. Krohn left the RNC and went back to Microsoft. Then they had Todd Herman, another Seattle-area tech sector alumni, as new media director. Herman left the RNC and most recently co-founded a company with Krohn and some other RNC alums, CrowdVerb, that was acquired by WPP — the same corporate parent of Democratic technology epicenter Blue State Digital. So it isn't as if the party hasn't had the opportunity to make the most of people who are familiar with what technology infrastructure should look like.

  The question now is, who will the Republicans tap next, and will they afford their next digital director any greater leeway to get things done?

• Summarizing the results of a survey of Obama for America campaign volunteers, Jeremy Bird wrote in an e-mail that "Almost half of all survey respondents forwarded campaign emails, and more than one-third communicated with friends on Facebook -- both great ways to pass along information about the President's positions and plans, as well as opportunities to get involved."

  Dashboard watch! Bird also noted that "a majority" of survey respondents volunteered into a field office, though "many ... got involved instead through the campaign's online tools such as Dashboard and the call tool."

• Kyle Rush, who worked as deputy director of frontend web development at Obama for America, profiled the campaign's $250 million fundraising platform.

• WeGov headliner: Pakistan is considering a bill to require government approval for all digital mapping projects.

Around the web:

• New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren's social media activity will be supervised after some of her tweets and Facebook posts were taken to be biased and offensive, New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan wrote yesterday. In a post, John Cook from Gawker headlined the controversy "New York Times Bureau Chief Isn’t Chief of Her Own Tweets," while New York Magazine used the headline "New York Times Israel Reporter Assigned Social Media Babysitter." Sullivan herself drew a response from Electronic Intifada co-founder Ali Abunimah for referring to him, following the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, as "a Palestinian activist who argues for Israel's destruction."

• Wired looks at how the Israel-Gaza war is still continuing online despite the cease fire.

• Stevie Wonder might pull out of a concert at an IDF fundraiser after an online petition calling on him to cancel his appearance drew more than 3,600 signatures on Change.org.

• The new six-strikes system planned for U.S. Internet providers has been delayed to early 2013 as a result of Hurricane Sandy.

• BoingBoing noted that SOPA sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) is set to be chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

• The Eletronic Frontier Foundation offers the guide "Don't be a Petraeus: A Tutorial on Anonymous Email Accounts."

• The Obama administration opposes the revised STEM Jobs Act.

• Google has partnered with NGOs who aid veterans to set up an online platform via Google Plus to help veterans find careers.

• Julian Sanchez writes about problematic delays in getting responses to FOIA requests.

• Brewster Kahle, the entrepreneur behind the Internet Archive, has founded the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union in New Jersey together with a former banker.

• Julian Assange is suffering from a chronic lung infection "that could get worse at any time," according to the Ecuadorean Ambassador in London, the BBC reports.

• A photo of an NYPD officer giving boots to a barefoot homeless man, taken by a tourist from Arizona who sent it to the department, has gone viral from the NYPD's Facebook page.
  

• ICYMI: Gawker's Adrian Chen profiled Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, who was convicted last week for his role in a high-profile 2010 breach of AT&T customer data and could now face up to 10 years in federal prison.

Digital policy advocacy comes to Germany

• Several German lawmakers have reacted negatively to what they see as propaganda from Google in opposition to a law that would require search engines to pay a license fee for snippets of news appearing in search results. The New York Times has more:

  The unusually public salvos from Google caught many German lawmakers by surprise. Chancellor Angela Merkel raised the issue at a working dinner Tuesday with a group of lawmakers from her party, the Christian Democratic Union, including Peter Beyer, a member of the Bundestag from Ratingen, a town near Düsseldorf. “She asked us how many e-mails we’d received and we told her,” he said Wednesday during an interview, adding that he had received fewer than 10 from Google supporters. “Most of us had only received a few, three or four. She and the rest of the C.D.U. are still behind this law." ... Germany’s main technology industry association, the Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media, known as BitKom, has come out sharply against the proposal, saying it will curb investment in the German digital economy ... A letter to Bundestag members signed jointly by 16 copyright law professors, the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law, and Grur, an association representing 5,300 German copyright lawyers, warned that the law could cost Germany jobs ... By midday Wednesday, one day into the campaign, Google said that 25,000 people had signed its petition and that it expected a half-million people to have viewed its Web site ... [Christoph Keese, the senior vice president of Axel Springer, publisher of Bild and Die Welt], predicted that Google’s public relations offensive might cause a backlash among German lawmakers, who are unaccustomed to targeted, issue-oriented Internet lobbying.

International

• Pew released a new study on Arab-American media, including its digital presence and the role of social media in reporting on the Arab Spring.

• Salon reported on the controversy over high school student ID cards in Texas that contain RFID chips.

• A Cairo court sentenced seven expatriate Coptic Egyptians to death in absentia for their alleged role in the production of the controversial anti-Islamic video "Innocence of Muslims."

• The 20 winners of the first African News Innovation Challenge were announced with winning projects focused on citizen journalism, investigative reporting and source protection.

• The name of the Israeli party led by Kadima Tzipi Livni is simply The Tzipi Livni Party after the use of the term The Movement in news articles "resulted in unbecoming, scatological jokes on Facebook and Twitter about bowel movements," the Jerusalem Post reported.

• The death of an Iranian blogger in prison has prompted a blame game within Iran, according to the L.A. Times.