Conversation starters

• The list lives: The Obama campaign sent out an email asking supporters to watch a video related to tax breaks at issue as part of the fiscal cliff talks and join an online conversation around the prompt, "What does $2,000 mean to you?"

• In a blog post, Catherine Bracy details her experience leading Obama for America's technology field office, a San Francisco outpost where volunteers built software tools that were experiments or campaign "nice-to-haves" but were not priorities in Chicago.

• Republican former political technologist Jordan Raynor, now working on a civic startup called Citizinvestor, disagrees with Nate Silver's projection that Silicon Valley is a "lost cause" for the GOP.

• Internet service appears to be mostly restored in Syria. In the wake of the shut-off, Google and Twitter reactivated a Speak2Tweet phone service. A State Department spokesperson said that the U.S. has provided 2,000 communication kits to Syrian opposition members. The BBC reported on life in Syria during the blackout.

From techPresident

• The Obama campaign used friends asking friends on Facebook to reach five million voters, a preponderance of whom couldn't be reached any other way, Obama for America Digital Director Teddy Goff said Friday.

• Digital maps in Egypt are prompting a conversation about harassment, Lisa Goldman reported.

Around the web

• The House passed the STEM JOBS Act Friday, though Democrats and the Obama administration remain opposed. Mayor Michael Bloomberg welcomed its passage.

• Former NSA Director John McConnell is warning that there could be a digital equivalent of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks, a strike that could significantly hurt the country's banking system, power grid, and other essential infrastructure unless action is taken, CNET reported.

• The National Archives posted 1,000 unsealed Watergate records online.

• Alliance for Savings and Investment, a coalition of dividend-paying companies, investor organizations and trade associations, along with the Edison Electric Institute and American Gas Association, are behind a Defend My Dividend campaign that includes an online component against a "dividend tax hike," Reuters reported.

• The Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the Science Coalition have set up the website "Science Works For Us" to detail how the possible sequestration would impact federally supported research.

• The Washington Post's Max Fisher noted that an image attributed to Avaaz.org circulating on Facebook celebrating the U.N. vote on Palestine confuses the Solomon Islands with Micronesia and has been shared over 11,000 times.

• The FTC is investigating online ads of mortgage-loan services firms, especially those claiming affiliation with the Obama administration. The FTC also reached a settlement with an affiliate marketers that allegedly used deceptive ads to sell weight-loss products.

• The always-on convenience of cell phones is both their greatest benefit to phone owners and their biggest flaw, according to a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

• Florida Gov. Rick Scott's administration has launched a transparency effort called Project Sunburst that makes his emails publicly available, but Governing.com writes there's little point in using it because Scott, his chief of staff, and top agency heads are all wary of communicating via email.

• After posting on Twitter about his voting problems on Election Day, actor Christian Slater posted a copy of a rejection letter he received from Florida election officials that misspells his name as Christina and says his vote couldn't be counted.

• The newly ordained Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Rhode Island, Very Rev. W. Nicholas Knisely Jr., is one of only six Episcopal bishops in the country who use Twitter, the AP reported.

• A Baltimore blogger surrendered to police after a four-hour stand-off which he broadcast through an account on Spreaker.com.

• A Kansas appeals court attorney was fired for making insulting comments about the state’s former attorney general on Twitter.

• Josh Fox's Occupy Sandy film is available online. The Verge reported on an effort to catalogue photographs found in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on Facebook with the place where they were found. CNN reported on a Jersey City hurricane relief effort organized over social media.

International

• An Ecuadorean blogger has been detained after publishing a post detailing how he accessed information about President Rafael Correa to highlight a government website's vulnerability, according to Global Voices.

• Britain's Leveson report on media conduct contains erroneous information about the founding of the newspaper The Independent that apparently resulted from blindly copying Wikipedia information. Charles Arthur writes for the Guardian that the report ignores the Internet.. Author J.K. Rowling, who had testified about her negative experiences with the British press, expressed unhappiness about Prime Minister David Cameron's stated unwillingness to implement proposed media regulation, and said she supports an online petition calling for its implementation. Robert Cookson writes for the Financial Times that British newspaper publishers are angry about plans to regulate the press but not blogs, websites and social media networks.

• Several Bittorrent sites have had their .eu domains put on hold by the European Registry of Internet Domain Names.

• The Armed Forces of the Philippines plan to set up a cybersecurity war room.

• A pilot public Berlin WLAN system operated by a German cable network operator and offering 30 minutes of free Internet has been accessed over 30,000 times in one month.

• German advertisers have formed a a self-regulation initiative focused on online behavioral advertising.

• A British rural broadband project has received EU approval.

• European Digital Rights warned that a European regulation on the protection of personal data could open the way to a voluntary three strikes system.

• Quartz explored why Opera remains a popular browser in Belarus. Short answer: Belarus' state-governed Internet infrastructure is so terrible, Opera's emphasis on efficiency and features to limit bandwidth use make it a go-to option.

• A man in Greece was arrested on suspicion of having stolen 9 million personal data files in what is believed to be the biggest breach in the country's history, the AP reported.

• Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev received negative attention for posting several inflammatory tweets about neighboring Armenia.