President Obama's official campaign launch events this weekend featured a dash of Obama for America technological pizazz. The Washington Post Washington Post notes:

Both the Ohio rally and an event later Saturday in Virginia were intended by the Obama campaign to showcase its technological firepower in engaging supporters and gathering information about them to serve the campaign through the fall. Campaign workers carried iPads to collect attendees' names and contact information. "Pop-up" field offices were intended to give supporters a feel for what happens at a real campaign office - and allow them to volunteer and work phone banks on the spot. Large screens at the two "Ready to Go" rallies displayed comments and pictures from supporters following the events on Twitter, Facebook or www.barackobama.com. Web sites were set up so rally-goers could "check in" on various social networks to let their friends and family know they were there. And attendees were encouraged to sign up for text messages, which required handing over their cellphone numbers.

The New York Times reported Saturday on how Obama and the campaign are increasingly gearing up for the reelection effort:

Mr. Obama, who three years ago became the first president to demand a BlackBerry to keep in touch with the outside world, has now become the first sitting president to rely on an iPad to stay informed. He watches campaign commercials, offering his seal of approval to the first wave of advertisements to be used against Mr. Romney, and he follows his rival through newspaper articles and blogs ... The rallies for the president on Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Va., are expected to help capture the enthusiasm of students before the summer begins ... Campaign aides will register volunteers with iPads, and keep their information for the fall campaign. Aides said more than 48,000 people signed up by text message to win "Backstage with Barack" passes.

ICYMI: The FBI has been asking Internet companies not to oppose a proposal under which they would have to offer backdoor access for possible government surveillance, CNET reported.

The Romney campaign has begun running online ads with the message Obama Isn't Working, showing a line in front of an unemployment office.

Mitt Romney-backing super PAC Restore Our Future had been accepting credit card donations with an insecure system, the Washington Times reported.

General Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, urged in a letter to Senator John McCain that legislation be adopted that would require companies providing critical services such as power and transportation to protect their networks against cyber-attacks, writing that, "recent events have shown that a purely voluntary and market driven system is not sufficient." The Department of Homeland Security has recently reported a cyber-attack it says is aimed at natural gas pipeline companies. Senate Democrats are expected to make some changes to cybersecurity legislation to attract Republican votes after the House passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, a bill that would clear the way for private companies to share information with the government and one another, but would not impose any minimum standards for information security.

FORA.tv has video from the Guardian's Activate Summit held last week, including a talk by Yochai Benkler on the activism that stopped the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's bolo tie has a Twitter feed.

A report on New York City's 911 system found that it "sometimes sends firefighters or police officers to the wrong address. Operators sometimes waste precious seconds and sow confusion by failing to follow a standard script when taking information from callers. And, sometimes, an emergency operator can ask eight questions about a caller's location and other details, then patch in another operator who asks six more questions, before getting to the most important one: 'What is the emergency?,'" the New York Times noted.

Amtrak conductors are going to get iPhones to scan tickets, and passengers will be able to print out tickets to be scanned or present tickets on their smartphones themselves. It will also help Amtrak manage seating better if riders don't show up at the last minute, and allow passengers to more effectively modify reservations.

NYU's Wagner Graduate School has released a guide to open data for transportation agencies.

New York City is asking for ideas and feedback on the city's digital roadmap.

A middle school student's Change.org petition asking Seventeen magazine to print one unaltered photo spread per month has reached over 56,400 signatures out of a target of 75,000.

The Guardian recently released a free online handbook for data journalism.

The New York Times' Andrew Revkin credited the "online spin cycle" for ending within 24 hours a billboard ad effort in Chicago by the climate-change skeptical Heartland Institute which compared people who believe in global warming to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. The ad directed drivers to the institution's website, where it linked to a quiz where users could guess whether passages were from Kaczynski's manifesto or Al Gore's book Earth in the Balance.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised concerns over cyber-intrusions in her talks with Chinese leaders, Reuters reported.

European Commissioner of the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes said at Berlin's re:publica conference, "we are now likely to be in a world without SOPA and without ACTA."

ICANN is still working on restarting and testing its new domain application system, three weeks after it was taken down when ICANN discovered it was exposing private data, and said it also planned to inform companies and organizations whose data might have been exposed.

The European Commission is proposing an online age-based authentication system that would limit minors' access to some content.

A French court ruled that the online correspondence of a researcher at CERN with a presumed member of Al Qaeda constituted a criminal act, the New York Times reported, and he has been sentenced to five years in prison. His lawyer said it was the first conviction of charges of "criminal association based solely on Internet activity."

The Washington Post reported on the role that Twitter and microblogs played in spreading information about Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng in spite of censorship attempts:

When Chen was driven from the U.S. Embassy to a nearby hospital and made a telephone call from the van to The Washington Post, the news broke first on Twitter. It was Chen’s friend Zeng Jinyan, another activist, who first informed the world via Twitter that Chen had been left alone by U.S. officials at the hospital and was afraid. Zeng also tweeted that thugs in Shandong province, where Chen is from, had threatened to beat his wife to death, and that Chen wanted to leave China for the United States.And the next day, Zeng broadcast on Twitter that she was being followed by plainclothes police and had been placed under house arrest. She even warned journalists not to try calling her....“It is almost mind-blowing to see his friends posting on Twitter conversations with him, things like who picked him up in Beijing and where,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, a China expert with the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It’s a total sea change from how this may have been handled decades ago.”