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First POST: "We the People"

BY Miranda Neubauer | Wednesday, January 16 2013

Wednesday must-reads

  • At Aaron Swartz's funeral, his father said Swartz was "killed by the government," the Chicago Sun Times reported. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said he planned to investigate the Justice Department's prosecution of Swartz. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) announced on Reddit that she would introduce "Aaron's Law" to change the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Lofgren had earlier spoken with ars technica about the 2013 tech policy agenda. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also praised Swartz, as the Huffington Post noted. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) had expressed his sorrow about the news of Swartz's death on Twitter.

    Curious thing about Darrell Issa's outspokenness on Swartz's death: “Had he been a journalist and taken that same material that he gained from MIT, he would have been praised for it. It would have been like the Pentagon Papers,” Issa is quoted as saying. TechPresident escapee Nancy Scola observes:

    It's a particularly curious statement given that Issa was an original co-sponsor of the Research Works Act, which have limited federal agencies' abilities to require free public access to papers based on their funded work.

  • More commentary, reporting and analysis on the the legal case came from Kevin Cullen, Reuters, NPR, the Huffington Post and Ben Huh, who wrote that "The case against Aaron Swartz was like sending someone to jail for checking too many books out of the library." As Buzzfeed profiled prosecutor Carmen Ortiz, her husband criticized Swartz's family on Twitter. Daniel Lathrop from the Dallas Morning News posted the full court file of the Swartz case.

  • The New York Times and the Rockland County Times reported on how New York state's new gun law, signed yesterday, restricts public access to information about gun permits. New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal criticized the bill, saying it "also revokes automatic public access to gun permit records – a wild over-reaction to a Westchester newspaper’s decision to publish the names of all local holders of gun permits. Publishing those names seemed to have no legitimate journalistic purpose, but closing off public records is not the right response."

    Democratic Assemblyman Thomas Abinanti voted for the bill even though he had concerns about its First Amendment implications. The New York World undertook a deeper analysis of the Journal News' gun data.

  • Former Obama for America National Field Director Jeremy Bird and Battleground States Director Mitch Stewart have founded a new consulting firm called 270 strategies. Related: Democratic polling firms Anzalone Liszt Research and Grove have merged.

  • Pierre Omidyar has launched the Democracy Fund which will invest in "in social entrepreneurs working to ensure that our political system is responsive to the public and able to meet the greatest challenges facing our nation."

  • The White House is raising the signature limit on We the People petitions to 100,000 in 30 days, after already having once increased the threshold from 5,000 to 25,000.

  • Data.gov has launched alpha.data.gov, a reorganized — and very slick-looking — window into the data published by the United States government.

  • Facebook unveiled its new Graph Search function yesterday, and noted as an example that it could help users find music liked by Obama or Romney supporters.

  • Philadelphia's new Director of Civic Technology Tim Wisniewski says his job is to work with outside developers to encourage the creation of new software based on city government data.

  • Also in Philly: PlanPhilly has launched a new web application called License to Inspect that tracks city property violations and construction permits among with other data.

  • For Personal Democracy Plus subscribers, Sam Roudman traces how the Boston Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics was able to repurpose a Chicago app that maps free vaccination locations within about a day.

  • A Honolulu Code for America fellow tells Next American City:

    I didn’t know anything about cities. [Laughs.] Before the fellowship, I might have thought about City Hall as this big, bureaucratic black hole of inefficiencies. And then when you go there, you realize that, my god, there are real people there with real challenges. A lot of people are trying to do the very best they can. It’s true that there are of course government workers who are just there for the job security. But a lot more than that are people are trying make things happen, and be helpful as best they can. It’s the system that what really needs to be shaken up in a big way.

Around the web

International

First POST has been corrected to fix a formatting error that wrongly implied a story about Democratic Assemblyman Thomas Abinanti was mentioned in a New York Times editorial.

News Briefs

RSS Feed today >

The UK Government Wants to Monetize Open Data

A new paper from the chair of the U.K. government's Open Strategy Board outlines the best practices for the government's open data policies. The government-commissioned Shakespeare Review – after author Stephan Shakespeare – looks into ways to monetize open data, and recommends an all-encompassing National Data Strategy.

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Will Silicon Valley "Disrupt" Politics With a Candidate for Congress?

Sean Parker, of Napster fame and now executive general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, has invested in political startups before. But last week, he went a step further — co-hosting a fundraising event for a candidate for Congress. Parker and SV Angel co-founder Ron Conway organized a crowd of Internet industry luminaries to support Ro Khanna, a former assistant deputy secretary in Barack Obama's Commerce Department. Khanna is preparing a challenge to Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), whose newly redrawn congressional district encompasses Silicon Valley. GO

On Threshold of Telecom Revolution, Future of Internet Freedom in Burma Uncertain

Burma (Myanmar) is on the threshold of an Internet revolution, but Human Rights Watch has warned companies to proceed with caution or risk trampling Burmese citizens' rights. GO

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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