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First POST: Behind the Curtain

BY Miranda Neubauer | Friday, December 7 2012

Morning must-reads

  • From the home team: A recent White House blog post announcing it is contributing to the Drupal community signals another step for the Obama administration towards more open interaction with developers outside of government.

    What we didn't say: Functionally, it also makes it easier for the White House to get some talent behind improving its We the People online petition platform, which is based on Drupal and is a favored project of Obama's digital communications team. As the White House acknowledges, Drupal and other open-source tools are just that, tools, and developers will tell you that different problems require different tools. But it's worth noting that the White House is getting more comfortable with regular interactions with communities around open-source development projects.

  • The data beard speaks! Ethan Roeder, data director for Obama for America, writes in a New York Times column that people should stop freaking out about what he does for a living:

    Virtually all of the offline data that people like me traffic in is boring, basic and publicly available. Want to know the year of birth for everyone who is registered to vote in Ohio? Just Google “Ohio voter file download.” There you go. I was born in 1976. Now we’re even.

    How do we predict whether people are going to vote or not? We look at the voter file. It tells us how often a person votes, although not for whom. Not all strategists agree about how to interpret this information, but the source of the data is no secret.

    What’s really new in politics today is not the data itself but how campaigns make sense of it. Cheaper and more plentiful computing power allows campaigns to process far more information than ever before to look for patterns, trends and correlations ... Contemporary data practice ... frees campaigns from having to make assumptions about voters in the first place. In 2011 and 2012, the Obama campaign, with the help of more than two million volunteers, had more than 24 million conversations with voters ... Numerous avenues of listening, combined with the digital capacity to hold on to qualitative feedback, make campaigns aware of the differences among voters’ motivations, attitudes, protestations — not just their demographics and voting history. In a nation of over 200 million eligible voters, technology is allowing campaigns to finally see through the fog of the crowd and engage voters one by one.

  • Wired detailed the method the Obama campaign's technology team used to find and patch cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that could have allowed outsiders to take control of Obama for America web properties.

  • .Nxt writes about the WCIT's conference's split over the definition of "operating agencies." Jermyn Brooks, independent chair of the Global Network Initiative, in the International Herald Tribune, welcomes the attention that activists have focused on the conference and outlines his own concerns. Boing Boing published details on the "deep packet inspection" standard endorsed earlier by the U.N. via Asher Wolf. Public Knowledge also posted a dispatch from the conference and noted that "it's clear that the efforts by global civil society groups on behalf of transparency and free expression have had at least something of an impact ... the ITU agreed to webcast is plenary sessions and the meetings of the "Review Committee," which is the committee that will be discussing proposed changes to the International Telecommunications Regulations ("ITRs"). " Ambassador Terry Kramer says the U.S will be working "day and night" to prevent Internet regulations in the treaty, the Hill reported.

  • The Open Society Foundation criticizes the closed negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a broad trade agreement that will also include intellectual property provisions. Techdirt suggests the U.S. is hypocritical in calling for transparency at the WCIT negotiations but not at the TPP.

  • A federal advisory panel is calling for a broad overhaul of the government secrecy system.

  • Republican Study Committee staffer Derek Khanna will be let go from his job in January after he authored a report critical of current copyright law.

  • Netflix is facing an SEC probe for information CEO Reed Hastings posted about the company on Facebook.

  • Pro Publica reports that the FCC is refusing to address criticism of, or proposals to reform, its online system for tracking political ad buys.

  • The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has launched a new website mormonsandgays.org, where it states that same-sex sexuality is not a choice, but acting on it doesn't conform with church teachings.

  • The retirement of South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint to head the Heritage Foundation has given rise to calls for South Carolina native Stephen Colbert to take his place. Matt Ortega set up a web site in support of this effort, and Colbert encouraged his viewers to tweet to Governor Nikki Haley.

  • A New York Times interactive lets readers offer their own solution to the fiscal impasse.

  • Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman explore methods other than censorship to dealing with issues such as the controversial anti-Muslim video.

  • New Media Rights is leaving the Utility Consumers’ Action Network but will continue to speak out for the rights of bloggers from its new home at California Western School of Law.

  • "Socialism" and "capitalism" were the most searched-for words through Merriam Webster online this year, and "Look-ups of malarkey spiked 3,000 percent in a single 24-hour period this year, making it the largest increase of a single word by percentage," the AP and NBC News reported.

  • Apple's Tim Cook announced that the company would manufacture computers in the U.S. next year.

  • Zach Seward from Quartz used a tool developed by his colleague Michael Donohoe, which is a database of New York Times crossword clues and answers from October 1996 through 2011, to track changing references to AOL.

  • The New York Post reported that the NYPD and Occupy Wall Street were able to work together to prevent crime in Red Hook after Hurricane Sandy.

  • The Rockaway newspaper The Wave is back publishing in print after publishing online for several weeks after Sandy.

  • A new website maps anti-prostitution demand initiatives across the country.

  • A researcher used plagiarism detection software to compare the language press releases and news coverage use when discussing Muslims.

  • A grant from Google is helping to fund drones that can help track poachers for the World Wildlife Fund.

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