Morning must-reads

• Businessweek has a long feature on the science of the Obama campaign e-mails.

  It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most effective. “The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people,” Fallsgraff says. “ ‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.” Another blockbuster in June simply read, “I will be outspent.” According to testing data shared with Bloomberg Businessweek, that outperformed 17 other variants and raised more than $2.6 million....We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,” says Showalter. “Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, ‘How could we make things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s eye to.” Another unexpected hit: profanity. Dropping in mild curse words such as “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” got big clicks ... Fortunately for Obama and all political campaigns that will follow, the tests did yield one major counterintuitive insight: Most people have a nearly limitless capacity for e-mail and won’t unsubscribe no matter how many they’re sent. “

  Alexis Madrigal also offered his take on the article.

  If the "ugly" winners story sounds familiar: It's because Showalter explained the story to techPresident a full week ago.

• Erick Erickson from Red State joins the drumbeat of Republican observers who say that Mitt Romney's came even as the consultants working at the top levels of his operation, some of whom always seem to get major Rrepublican contracts during high-stakes elections, made millions of dollars. This is all the more disturbing, Erickson observes — citing the LA Times — because several top companies working on the campaign share office space and senior leadership, outlining a small group of people who have made a large amount of money on a campaign plagued by missteps and, ultimately, failure.

• Ben Smith writes that as a monumental policy debate mounts in Washington, the Obama administration seems poised to make 2012 a repeat of 2009 — by not mobilizing the massive email list the president built over the course of his campaign.

• Ana Marie Cox writes that the Obama White House has won the hashtag wars. Anthony DeRosa also analyzed how the White House's hashtag was used by supporters and opponents.

• An event at the New Organizing Institute before Rootscamp explored how campaigns of the future will use data.

• Syria was cut off from the Internet yesterday. The Syrian government attributed the Internet cutoff to "terrorists" who targeted Internet lines, Reuters reported, and suggested engineers were working on repairing the main communications and Internet cable. Analysts here in the U.S. say Syria's Internet infrastructure is controlled by the Syrian government, making it more likely that Bashar al-Assad's administration is behind the outage. The New York Times also noted that the official Syrian government websites are hosted in the United States.

• An interactive from Yahoo News highlights the different types of actions We the People signatories are demanding from the White House.

Around the web

• The image released of President Obama with Mitt Romney became fodder for memes almost immediately, from Big Bird sticking his head through the door, a bare-chested Joe Biden interrupting the conversation, Obama remarking "Yes, Lincoln's eyes are following us around the room. It takes some getting used to," and everything in between.

• The Senate Judiciary Committee voted to require warrants for police searches of e-mail and online communications, although the Senate isn't expected to vote on the bill until next year. Kashmir Hill explained the role that a measure benefitting Netflix plays in the passage of the legislation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation praised the e-mail measure and the fact that an amendment to the Video Privacy Protection Act, the measure supported by Netflix, limits consumers' blanket consent to share their online video viewing histories so that they need to be asked to give their consent every two years.

• An appeals court ruling states that law enforcement officials can conduct video surveillance within a home without a warrant.

• The Wall Street Journal reported on how Washington D.C. is paying startup newBrandAnalytics to gather comments about city services via social media and convert them into grades posted on the platform grade.dc.gov/

• Facebook has a guide for the new members of the 113th Congress.

• James DeLong writes for the National Review about what a Republican policy on copyright should look like. Virginia Postrel also offers her thoughts on reforming copyright inspired by the the now-withdrawn Republican Study Committee report on the subject.

• The Republican Study Committee held a multi-member town hall on Twitter, the Hill reported.

• Scotusblog is once again seeking Supreme Court press credentials. It currently gains access, Andrew Beaujon reports, because its reporter Lyle Denniston also files for WBUR Boston.

• Open Secrets notes that technology industry lobbying, led by Google, has increased, even as lobbying in general declined.

• Facebook likes were reportedly used as evidence for terrorism support in an indictment against several suspects in California.

• Greenpeace activists have created a fake Amazon Web Services platform to raise awareness of what kind of energy the company uses for its cloud services.

• State Tech Magazine highlights an interview with Chicago CTO John Tolva about Code for America in the city, where CfA fellows worked on an Open 311 platform that launched in October.

International

• The Verge highlights a new online interactive documentary from Frontline on David Coleman Headley, the Pakistani-American behind the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Among other tools, the project made use of the new Mozilla Popcorn media toolkit.

• The United Nations Development Programme has launched open.undp.org, "a project and funding data browser that maps 6,000+ projects in 177 countries and discloses more than $5.8 billion in funding," Development Seed notes on its company blog.

• As the U.N. General Assembly geared up to vote on the resolution to change the status of the Palestinian territory from "observer" to "non-member observer state," the U.N. Twitter accounted falsely tweeted, "On Day of Solidarity with Palestinians, Ban Ki-moon stresses urgency of reaching 1-state solution.” A U.N. social media staffer later tweeted, "Sorry all -- terrible typo on my part and then went into a telephone conference call before catching it." Yair Rosenberg wrote on Twitter that "this may be the biggest typo in the history of international relations."

• India plans to revise enforcement of an Internet law by barring "lower-level police officials from arresting people for making offensive comments on social networking sites unless the case is first reviewed by a senior police official," the New York Times reported. The changes follows an incident in which a 21-year-old from the outskirts of Mumbai was arrested after she had posted her irritation on Facebook that the city was shut down following the death of a hard-line right wing politician. A friend who clicked like on the post was also arrested. The student has filed public interest litigation with the Supreme Court calling the law that led to her arrest unconstitutional.

• Gawker conducted a phone interview with Julian Assange with a focus on his new book.

• A Kenyan filmmaker who lives in Missouri is funding a film about postelection violence and rebuilding in the country via Indiegogo and also hopes to distribute the film via the DVD piracy market.