Cybersecurity news

• As the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act heads towards the House floor, the White House said in a statement that senior administration advisers would recommend President Barack Obama veto the bill in its current form. The House Rules Committee last night passed rules for debate concerning the bill that leave out what privacy activists consider to be key amendments.

  The bill paves over legal and liability hurdles for private companies to share cybersecurity-related information with the government and with each other. The White House and digital rights groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology have come out in opposition to the bill, saying that it does not do enough to protect personally identifiable information.

  The bill is scheduled for consideration this morning.

Prepping for the general

• For Personal Democracy Plus readers like you: What the Republican National Committee's digital team is doing for Mitt Romney.

• The Obama campaign says that supporters who sign up to receive local campaign updates on their phones will be automatically entered in a contest to meet the President backstage at his first official campaign rallies.

Around the web

• MoveOn says that it is trying to raise $200,000 to "put an ad on the Facebook page of every college student in America" about the potential rise in interest rates on student loans in July.

• The Huffington Post has unveiled its interactive polling map for the general election. Ezra Klein had previously showcased an interactive tool to predict the election's outcome.

• The House passed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, which is aimed at creating an online platform to track how federal money is spent.

• A new meme compares current, former and soon-to-be former presidential candidates with characters on Game of Thrones.

• Bradley Manning's trial has been scheduled for Sept. 21 through Oct. 12. According to the A.P., his "supporters have raised funds to place posters in the Washington Metro subway system this week portraying him as a whistleblower, patriot and hero."

• OpenSecrets.org reports on a hearing yesterday that could pave the way toward electronic filing of Senate campaign finance reports.

• The Senate passed a bill to aid the Postal Service that includes the creation of a chief innovation officer position.

• Buzzfeed offers "45 Totally Superficial Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Run For President In 2016."

• Stephen Colbert now has more Super PAC backing than Ron Paul.

• The Columbia Journalism School's Brooklyn Ink looked into how Cover the Night, the Invisible Children-backed postering campaign to drum up attention to central African international criminal Joseph Kony, did or did not play out in New York City, and was underwhelmed by what it found. U.S. officials told a congressional panel that Kony's influence "been significantly degraded."

• Protesters targeted Facebook's New York City offices, but the company refused to accept signatures from an online petition organized by UltraViolet asking the company to include women on its board of directors.

• "Don't take my tweets too seriously," Rupert Murdoch said in testimony before Britain's Leveson Inquiry.

• Ron Kampeas from JTA notices that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has slightly different messages in the Hebrew and English versions of his video greetings for Israeli Independence Day.

• The Wall Street Journal has a tool allowing readers to compare and analyze the most recent and past statements by the Federal Reserve Bank.

• Three Republican lawmakers criticized the FCC proposal to put local TV broadcasters' files online.

• The Tax Court is not as transparent as it could be, Reuters reports.

  The Tax Court's orders and opinions are readily available online, but documents filed as part of its proceedings are not. Seeing these filings requires either a trip to the court to search its sole public computer or a request in writing. By contrast, proceedings of district, appellate and bankruptcy courts are on the Web through the widely used, paid site known as PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, run by the Administrative Office of the Courts.

   

• The New York Office of Court Administration is proposing a pilot program in which attorneys could e-file documents in some criminal cases and family court proceedings.

• The District Attorney's office has seized the laptop, iPad, and iPhone of Gawker's Fox Mole.

• George Zimmerman's website has been taken down by request of his attorney.

• Nevada has reached an agreement on sales taxes with Amazon. The Governor of Alabama has urged the legislature to support online sales tax legislation.

• Some questions have been raised about the terms of service of the new Google Drive service.

• Public interest groups and some telecom companies are complaining because Verizon and some cable companies are only making information on their spectrum deal available in a format using an expensive document management system.

• The question over what federal databases exist, and whether there is one indicating citizenship, played a role in the Supreme Court hearing on Arizona's immigration law. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli told Justice Sonia Sotomayor that while, for example, there is a database of all passport holders, there is no citizenship database.

• A New York Times editorial supports a New York state plan for a real-time online database to keep track of prescriptions for controlled substances.

• The National Endowment for the Arts for the first time gave grants to web-based projects, while making cuts to its funding for some PBS shows.

• Two MIT students have created an interactive map that visualizes energy use in specific neighborhoods in more than 40 American cities.

• NASA is testing a new real-time network of GPS sensors that could lead to faster and more accurate earthquake analysis.

• A top Chinese official is now said to have been brought down by party leaders due to his extensive wire tapping of President Hu Jintao and other top government officials, the New York Times reported. He is said to have worked with the creator of China's "Great Firewall" to install a "a comprehensive package bugging system covering telecommunications to the Internet," according to the Times. Earlier, there were reports that China was increasing its efforts to control information online by having microblogging accounts deleted. The Guardian reported that a web address linked to the official's family had been bought for $100,000. Chinese Internet users had been discussing online a recent letter to the Harvard Crimson by the official's son, who is a student at the university.

• A Canadian newspaper ended up pulling an election column offline that was published prior to the results coming in, but ended up assuming the wrong election outcome.

• The Liberal and Democratic Parties in the European Parliament have rejected ACTA.

• In a long feature, Der Spiegel explores how the challenges and the vision as the German Pirate Party seeks to "reinvent politics."

• A German court ruled that people who give their bank information to "phishing" websites despite bank warnings are liable for their own losses.

• Olympics officials appear to have admitted that rules preventing visitors from uploading video and images online will be unenforceable.

• The BBC looks at how Twitter has influenced political debates.

• Google Ideas is helping to launch a new social network for former extremists, survivors, nonprofits and private sector leaders to come together to prevent young people from becoming involved in violent extremism.

• Techdirt criticizes news coverage linking accused Norwegian killer Anders Breivik's deeds with his playing of computer games.

• The ICANN system to request new top-level domains has been offline since April 12.

• Human Rights Watch criticizes Jordan's charges against the publisher of an online news site.

• Pro-Kremlin activists are increasingly engaged in hacking news or opposition sites for political purposes, a report says.

• Hong Kong filmmakers say YouTube needs to do more to protect copyright.

• Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Al Gore and Craig Newmark are among the inaugural inductees into the Internet Hall of Fame presented by the Internet Society.