Protesters marching to Union Square from Bryant Park. Photo: Miranda Neubauer / TechPresident

The White House deceptions that kept O's Afghanistan trip a secret

• One year after announcing the death of Osama Bin Laden, President Barack Obama made an unannounced trip to Afghanistan to sign a security agreement with President Hamid Karzai, a trip that ended up being rumored hours before it was officially announced, when Afghani news reports spread to Twitter and Buzzfeed. The Administration had released a fake schedule for the President that indicated he was in the White House rather than on Air Force One. The New York Times noted that the White House also kept up a steady stream of blog posts and press releases coming from the President's office.

Occupied

• Some Occupy Wall Street protests held yesterday to celebrate May Day resulted in violent clashes with police and arrests. The mayor of Seattle issued an emergency order after May Day action Google trend searches for "may day protests" seem to have peaked in Seattle. while non-Occupy related May Day labor demonstrations took place in Asia and Europe. In Oakland, a judge has ordered the city and its police department to submit a plan stating how they will handle complaints over previous Occupy demonstrations, threatening sanctions if they do not do so.

Everybody be appy

• The Republican National Committee has released its new Facebook application, while the Republican House's New Media Challenge on social media platforms is still ongoing.

• The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee announced a new deal for its candidates to use a software package from NGP VAN, which provides campaign management software, at greatly reduced cost.

Around the web

• Newt Gingrich announced in a YouTube video that he would be announcing the suspension of his campaign today.

• The DCCC has created a Facebook list "Red to Blue 2012" as part of its effort to highlight Democratic races around the country.

• The Social Security Administration is now offering online statements for all workers 18 and older that indicate their estimated benefits when they retire at ssa.gov.

• Military officials are recommending that the Pentagon's two-year-old cyberwarfare unit be upgraded to a full combatant command status.

• Paul Krugman answered questions on Reddit as a Forbes column calls Reddit AMAs "the new 'Colbert Bump.'
  The new 'Inside the Actor’s Studio.' Possibly even up and coming replacement for oft-sought Rolling Stone cover/interview."

• Public interest groups have filed documents as part of the Federal Communications Commission's review of the circumstances that could call for a cut-off in cell service stating that government agencies should never take that step even in an emergency.

• House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's Oversight YouTube page topped 2 million views this week, making it the most viewed committee channel in Congress. Over 900,000 of those views came in the first four months of this year, committee staff say.

• Researchers are examining politically-oriented tweets to see if users are treating information in a journalistic way, even as non-journalists, such as whether they try to verify information.

• Boston's Kendall Square, a popular site for the region's technological companies and start-ups, is struggling with bad cell reception.

• Avaaz has begun publishing the Daily Briefing, an online media site covering "people-powered" around the world.

• A Kansas military boarding school involved in a lawsuit over possible abuse of cadets ordered its students to hand in their cell phones, from which a staff member then deleted hundreds of images related to the school.

• For the first time, global media freedom showed no overall decline, according to a survey by Freedom House, the A.P. reported.

• German cryptologists say they found Al Qaida documents — embedded inside a pornographic movie on a memory disk found on an Al Qaida operative last year — that discussed plans to seize cruise ships, CNN reported.

• More and more technological entrepreneurs are tracking their physiological data around the clock in what's increasingly referred to as the "Quantified Self."

• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will be helping a British government initiative to make all taxpayer-funded academic research available for free online.

• The New York Times highlighted the increased popularity of the hashtag #NewSudans as Internet users urged Sudan and South Sudan to step back from warfare.

• A livestream of Rupert Murdoch and his son, James Murdoch, giving testimony in front of Britain's Leveson inquiry on media conduct last week drew a worldwide audience of over two million people in 215 countries. A British Parliament report released yesterday concluded that Murdoch was "not fit" to lead a major international company like the News Corporation.

• Olympics officials are now saying that visitors to the games can post photos online as long they are not for profit.

• In New York Times commentary, a former columnist for the Berliner Zeitung writes of the German Pirate Party:
  

  The Pirates’ insight is that the Internet is both message and medium ... Using a software package they call Liquid Feedback, the Pirates are able to create a continuous, real-time political forum in which every member has equal input on party decisions, 24 hours a day. It’s more than just a gimmicky Web forum, though: complex algorithms track member input and generate instantaneous collective decisions ... There’s no reason the party’s lessons couldn’t be applied elsewhere, including the United States. One of the biggest problems for President Obama has been to maintain the vigorous online following that Candidate Obama generated in 2008. But while the Obama campaign at least gave the impression that he was influenced by input from his supporters, they have been shut out of the White House. If Mr. Obama had followed the Pirate method, he would not only have sent updates via Facebook and Twitter, but he would have involved larger numbers of supporters in an extensive dialogue and given them an actual say in determining such priorities as which issues to pursue in his first months in office and how much to reach out to conservatives.

• A Pakistani court recently ordered that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority not block any website except in accordance with the provisions of the Pakistan Telecommunication Act of 1996. Pakistan had previously started accepting bids for a statewide Internet filter.