The celebrity storm system

• A note from the editor: At around this time every year, the barometric pressure for celebrity, power and wealth reaches record lows in Washington, D.C. Anyone who relies on hot air for their livelihood is caught up in the weather system of D.C. society and sucked into this stormy maw, which touched down this weekend at the Washington Hilton.

  Here's what some of the rest of us got up to this weekend while the hoi polloi were laughing along with the president:

  The Wall Street Journal hosted an event to highlight privacy-awareness applications. Among the biggest attention-getters were CryptoCat, an application for conducting encrypted chats by phone or web, and MobileScope, a service that tracks and reports on the data being transmitted by your mobile phone — which is, usually, quite a bit more than you'd expect.

  Closer to the eye of the storm, just one awful D.C. Metro ride away from the White House Correspondents Dinner, an international group of transparency and open government activists got together for TransparencyCamp. Among the folks represented there: Open Data Albania, a collaborative that collects and analyzes data about the government of Albania and partners with journalists to build context to explain how that country works; Global Integrity, which partnered with others to build a 50-state corruption report card for the United States; and LittleSis, which looks to map connections and influence at the highest levels of American society.

  TransparencyCamp was put on by the Sunlight Foundation, where techPresident's Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisers and which just released Scout, a tool to track people and keywords as they appear anywhere in federal lawmaking or across many state legislatures.

  Few were so caught up in the wonky business of trying to open governments as to completely miss the warm breeze billowing from D.C. this weekend.

  In his remarks, President Barack Obama made frequent reference to how much more connected — and, erm, transparent — government has become.

  "Four years ago, I was locked in a brutal primary battle with Hillary Clinton," he joked. "Four years later, she won’t stop drunk-texting me from Cartagena."

Stirring the pot

• The Obama campaign released a video suggesting that Mitt Romney might not have gone after Osama Bin Laden. Meanwhile, conservative Super PAC American Crossroads has released a video criticizing Obama for being a "celebrity president," pegged in no small part to the president's appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

• On Friday, Michael Calderone took another look at the prominent role Twitter has been playing in the campaign. It's just completely unclear why: The flurry of "War on Moms"/Obama Eats Dogs stories from the past few weeks surely brought the last of us onboard with the idea that Twitter is a sort of green room for national media stories. While incubating there, stories collect comment from campaign surrogates and outside observers the way a celebrity guest might put on makeup before stepping on the set of Morning Joe. What we've all left minimally explored so far is what conditions create outsider interventions on Twitter — how we might see things like Slow Clap for Congress, which creates a spontaneous burst of political energy out of people who had previously eschewed politics, more often.

Around the web

• A New York congressman has introduced legislation with the acronym SNOPA that would make it illegal for employers or educational institutions to access employees' or students' social network account information.

• From Friday: Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and his presumptive Democratic opponent Elizabeth Warren have released their tax returns. Meanwhile, the campaign's language is getting harsher in e-mails to supporters, the Associated Press noted.

• CNN covers how the Tea Party's approach to campaigning is evolving this year:

  Tea party booster Americans for Prosperity spokesman Levi Russell said his group is supplying volunteers with suitcases stuffed with cell phones to set up mini phone banks in activists' homes. "This is a whole new thing that AFP has been putting in place and really hasn't really talked about too much," Russell said. He said the group has purchased "a few thousand" phones. It's also arming volunteers "with tablets, like iPad-style," Russell said. "They're going door-to-door, knocking on doors. They're making phone calls," the spokesman said.

  Related: How outside groups are using the Internet and mobile technology in campaigns this year.

• According to a Federal Communications Commission report released by Google, supervisors may have been aware of a "rogue" engineer's efforts to collect WiFi data from Google Street View cars. Meanwhile, the New York Times looked at the pressure Google is facing from the European Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, with regulators in Argentina and South Korea also looking into the company. The Times looked at a free course offered to Google employees that promotes introspection.

• The Obama administration is going after fraudulent marketing practices aimed at veterans in which online websites play a big role.

  Some postsecondary schools try to attract current and former military service members using deceptive military-themed websites that appear to be government-run or connected to the GI Bill benefit system, administration officials said. Commercial sites like GIbill.com, for instance, give the appearance of being generalized information sites about the benefit but in fact direct users to a narrow list of mostly for-profit institutions....Much of the advertising is tied closely to online searches for terms like "GI Bill." As a result, the Obama administration wants to trademark the term "GI Bill" so it can't be used as an enticement.

• Voters in Virginia still remember the "Macaca moment," which heralded the arrival of today's never-off-script, Panopticon politics, as George Allen is campaigning again.

• The New York Times profiled of Brooklyn gardeners who worked to identify all vacant lots in the borough, and then created an online map and mobile app with information about the plots in an effort to promote community gardens.

• A bank responded to a Change.org petition questioning its decision to not forgive tens of thousands of dollars in loans made to a Rutgers University student who had passed away.

• Writing about a meeting of digital entrepreneurs last week titled Hacking Society, Naomi Wolf writes that a global movement is needed to stop enemies of Internet freedom.

• The New York Times looked at the influence of Twitter and YouTube on the Mexican presidential campaign.

• The Palestinian Communications Minister has resigned, citing web censorship ordered by the Palestinian Authority.

• The New York Times noted that after an attack against Syrian security services, "The state news agency published gory photographs of human remains on the English-language version of its Web site, echoing gruesome images regularly shared by activists on YouTube and attributed to Syrian government attacks. "

• The BBC looks at a new Taliban propaganda effort, which includes outreach on their website and social media accounts.

• An Egyptian commission which decided on the candidates that could run in the upcoming presidential election posted accounts of its interviews with candidates on its Facebook page.