Booker's brain

• The uproar over Newark Mayor Cory Booker's comments about the Obama campaign's targeting of private equity continued yesterday, as the Republican National Committee promoted a petition for supporters to "stand with Cory," with a clip from his appearance on Meet the Press. Earlier, the Obama campaign explained why it had edited its version of Booker's explanatory video.

  Republicans were also running Google ads with the message Stand with Cory alongside some searches for Cory Booker, PolitickerNJ reported.

Petitioning for open access to academic research

• Several open access advocates are promoting a We the People petition that would "Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research." The petition's supporters are calling attention to the petition with a website access2research.org and on social media. Begun on May 13, it has just under 6,000 signatures for a goal of 19,032 by June 19.

A new focus on the Internet from the Kremlin?

• Russian activists are concerned about the new minister of communications in President Vladimir Putin's cabinet, the Washington Post reported:

  Putin named Nikolai Nikiforov, a 29-year-old tech-savvy public relations official from Kazan, as minister of communications. That suggests the Kremlin has finally decided to focus on the Internet, which it has essentially ignored until now, a move that might not be favorable for those who rely on social media to organize against the party in power.

Around the web

• The Obama campaign has started a Joe Biden on the Road board on Pinterest.

• According to the latest fundraising numbers, Republicans could begin outspending the Democrats, particularly due to the influence of conservative Super PACs, the New York Times reports:

  But even as the gap narrows, Republican and Democratic expenditures reflect starkly different bets on how to best spend money in the race’s first phases. Mr. Obama has used his early cash reserves to finance the creation of a massive political and technological infrastructure, placing field workers in swing states and using sophisticated data-mining techniques to rebuild his winning coalition from 2008.

• The RNC has ended its relationship with an adviser tied to the controversial anti-Obama ad proposal submitted to Joe Ricketts.

• Paul Ohm, a law professor and privacy expert at the University of Colorado, plans to join the FTC in August as a senior policy adviser focusing on Internet and mobile markets.

• More Facebook employees have donated to the Obama campaign than to the Romney campaign, according to The Street.

• The U.S. Justice Department was the target of a hacker attack attributed to Anonymous and said to have retrieved internal email messages, Agence France-Presse reports.

• Google released a new congressional district map constructed using data from Azavea, the Philadelphia-based geographic software firm.

• The White House Office of Public Engagement held a briefing for Latinos active in social media.

• LinkedIn has registered its first Washington D.C. lobbyist.

• Cory Doctorow highlights a recent article by Michael Hastings in Buzzfeed which revealed that new congressmen had a proposed a law lifting government limits on how the government can spread propaganda domestically.

• Stephen Colbert has inspired the creation of numerous oddly named Super PACs across the country, particularly on college campuses, such as Why Not ZoidPAC?, Cats For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Americans For A Better Tomorrow, Yesterday.

• MPAA head Chris Dodd told Variety that Hollywood needs a new approach to promote future antipiracy legislation. "We're going to have to be more subtle and consumer-oriented," he said. "We're on the wrong track if we describe this as thievery."

• A majority of small business owners are not excited about the opportunity for crowdfunding through the JOBS Act, according to a survey.

• Boston-area transit riders can now use an iPhone app to "See Something, Say Something". The MBTA released the application, which allows users to anonymously share pictures, text, and location details with a dispatcher.

• A writer for Betabeat dressed up as a man to attend Sunday's Orthodox Jewish rally against the unfiltered Internet in New York City. The New York Times also has a video report from the event. On the train back to Williamsburg, several Orthodox participants in the rally showed Forward writer Josh Nathan-Kazis their "kosher phones."

• About 150 security cameras will be installed in Jewish Orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn almost a year after the shocking murder case of a young Hasidic boy, which was in part solved by camera footage.

• The Alabama legislature has passed a strict new immigration bill that would require the state to publish online the names of all undocumented immigrants who appear in court.

• The AP traces the origination of the term "pink slime" from a U.S. microbiologist's e-mail to a colleague to an online petition by a food blogger with the message "Tell the USDA to STOP Using Pink Slime in School Food" that collected more than 200,000 signatures in a week.

• Italian comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo and his Five Star Movement have had another "shocking" success in local elections, Reuters report, winning the vote for mayor in the town of Parma.

  [The party] has a mastery of the Internet and social media that is light years in advance of any of the traditional parties. Polls say the movement has become Italy's third largest political force and its growing impact echoes the success of outsiders elsewhere in Europe, as the economic crisis has eaten away at the credibility of old-style party systems. In prosperous Parma, famous for its ham and cheese, the movement's candidate Federico Pizzarotti exceeded all expectations by coming from behind in a run-off ballot to take around 60 percent of the vote against his centre-left rival...According to Grillo, Pizzarotti's victory in Parma was achieved with a campaign budget of just 6,000 euros.

• A company in Britain is offering a SIM card that parents can control remotely to prevent their children from using a mobile phone during certain hours.

• As the campaign for the Egyptian presidential election heats up,supporters are posting fan songs and videos about the candidates online. A blogger offers an aggregation of recent polls for the election and AFP looks at the candidates that Egyptian revolutionaries such as Wael Ghonim are supporting.

• A Yemeni militant group explained on Facebook the rationale for a suicide attack that caused hundreds of deaths and injuries.

• A group of researchers are organizing an effort to assemble the tree of life for all 2 million named species through an online data collection and visualization website.

• Brazil's president said the country doubled its high-speed Internet connections within a year.