"Doxing" donors?

• From Friday: A high-dollar donor to Mitt Romney is saying that private life his coming under excessive scrutiny after President Barack Obama's campaign named him online as a Romney supporter and opponent of same-sex marriage. Investigating campaign donors is nothing new, but the Wall Street Journal explains in an opinion column that donor Frank Vandersloot drew the line when a former Senate Democratic staffer — working for an outside group, Focus GPS — started seeking his divorce records. The world is a decreasingly private place, and one could make the case that the size of Vandersloot's donations might bring him a level of access and influence in the campaign that invite scrutiny of what he would do with that access. But even then, do sites like this one, which seems to invite supporters to, in Internet parlance, "dox" a list of targets, go too far?

A Mother's Day plea

• Trayvon Martin's mother released a Mother's Day video asking people to oppose Stand Your Ground laws. An online gun broker's auction site pulled shooting targets that resembled Martin. .

Sailing to more seats in Parliament

• The German Pirate Party won seats in its fourth state election in North Rhine-Westphalia, the largest German state. As the New York Times explained, "It is difficult to overstate North Rhine-Westphalia’s importance in German politics. With a population of nearly 18 million, it is home to more than one out of every five Germans (California, by comparison, is less than one-eighth of the American population)." According to the preliminary official results, the Pirate Party received 7.8 percent of the vote, coming out to 20 seats in the state parliament. While all the parties also ran their campaign online, the Social Democratic Party, which received the majority with nearly 40 percent of the vote, particularly embraced the web, as Ministerpresident Hannelore Kraft regularly used Twitter. Her campaign also raised some eyebrows with a contest encouraging supporters to submit poster designs online, with the winning design determined by voting on Facebook bearing the message "Curry sausage is SPD." Yesterday she retweeted on Twitter a picture of a 16 X 10 foot version of the poster hanging from the party's headquarters in Berlin. A media researcher on WDR television noted yesterday that her conservative opponent did not tweet for himself, with his social media accounts referring to him in the third person. Some news reports suggest Kraft could have a national future, including as candidate for chancellor, but so far she has denied that interest.

Around the web

• Conservatives say they will use Facebook, text messages and other social media channels to mobilize opponents of same-sex marriage as the election campaign heats up.

• In the Huffington Post, Howard Fineman writes about how the Obama campaign is in many ways following the approach of previous Republican campaigns.

• An appeals court declined to compel the National Security Agency to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request requesting details on NSA's relationship with Google.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation outlines in detail its problems with a judge's ruling requesting that Twitter hand over an Occupy protester's data.

• With Republican support, a budget bill passed by the House last week would eliminate the American Community Survey, a detailed annual survey of Americans conducted by the Census Bureau.

• Facebook has revised its data use policy and has created a new hub for its user terms and policies. Facebook Chief Privacy Officer-Policy Erin Egan will be answering questions about the changes on Facebook today.

• Verizon has refused to comply with a subpoena demanding that it submit the personal details of Internet subscribers accused of pirating books from the "For Dummies" series.

• The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to look into allegations that Microsoft plans to impede the running of Firefox and Chrome on new Windows mobile devices.

• The California Assembly passed a bill denying employers the right to access private social network information.

• The town of Fort Lee, N.J., has banned texting while walking.

• Puerto Rico plans to open new Internet centers and offer more free WiFi connections in public plazas. About one fourth of Puerto Rico's 3.9 million inhabitants are connected to the Web now, according to the A.P.

• As promised, the European Commission has asked the European Court of Justice about the compatibility of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement with Europe's fundamental rules. The agreement, which met widespread public opposition throughout Europe earlier this year, is before Parliament now.

• At Britain's Leveson Inquiry on media ethics, Rebekah Brooks, a former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. subsidiary News International, outlined now-Prime Minister David Cameron's learning curve when it came to text-speak:
  

  "Occasionally he would sign them LOL - 'lots of love,' " Ms. Brooks told the Leveson Inquiry on media ethics and practices, speaking of Mr. Cameron's text messages to her when he was the leader of the opposition, "until I told him it meant 'laugh out loud.' Then he didn't use that anymore."

• Rival Spanish activist groups protesting the government's austerity policies have been in dispute over the movement's social network outlets, the Guardian reported.

• Iran's telecommunications ministry is banning local banks, insurance firms and telephone operators from using foreign-sourced emails to communicate with clients. Earlier, a "fatwa" by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei emphasizing the illegality of antifiltering tools was itself filtered by the country's censorship system because it used the term "antifiltering."

• A Moroccan court sentenced a rapper to prison after he was charged with insulting official state institutions and accused of posting a song online that was insulting to police.

• Bahrain has extended the detention of an activist arrested for posting tweets considered insulting to the government.

• Jordan has released on bail a news website editor charged with anti-regime incitement.

• Uganda says it has captured a senior commander in Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army.