tea party | TechPresident

Tracking Twitter Reactions to the CNN/Tea Party Republican Debates

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, September 13 2011

The post-debate spin room has moved online, with reporters looking to Twitter for reactions as much as to their usual bullpen of consultants and observers, and candidates taking jabs at one another in real time. All of ... Read More

Sunlight at a South Carolina Tea Party Rally

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, April 19 2011

South Carolina State Treasurer Curtis Loftis delivered a fired-up address on open government during a lightly-attend Tea Party Tax Day rally in Columbia: I want you to know what we’ve done since I’ve been in ... Read More

Please Stop Calling the Freshmen

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, November 15 2010

That is, in fact, the subject line on a fairly frantic email that the Tea Party Patriots, one of the umbrella groups claiming to represent local tea party outfits, blasted out to their list Friday night. Read More

Tea Partiers Call Their Congresspeople. On Their Cells.

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, November 12 2010

The Tea Party Patriots got upset yesterday when it turned out the Claremont Institute, the California-based conservative think tank, had scheduled its DC "freshman orientation" for new Republicans members of ... Read More

Email Watch: Tea Partiers Fundraise for a "Hose in the Mouth" of Opponents

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, October 29 2010

Wow, with our days to go, the gloves are officially off. An email comes in from the Tea Party Patriots. (Which one are they, again?) The subject line: "Total Annihilation." And the time for mincing words has ... Read More

Tea Party vs Netroots; Rs vs Ds: Whose Online Base is Bigger?

BY Micah L. Sifry | Saturday, September 25 2010

Two stories published in the last few days make the claim that in this cycle, the online Right is whomping the online Left. First, in Investor's Business Daily, reporter Brian Deagon's story is headlined: "Tea Party ... Read More

"The Establishment is Dead; Long Live the Establishment!"

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, September 21 2010

David Paul Kuhn has a somewhat hyperbolic post up on Real Clear Politics today that is well worth reading. Titled "R.I.P. Political Establishment," the post argues that the rise of the Tea Party movement--epitomized by ... Read More

Tracking the Tea Party, and Its Trackers

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, September 9 2010

The Starfish and the Tea Partiers

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, August 2 2010

Ken Vogel reports that the "Atlas Shrugged" of the tea party movement is a tech-world favorite about the surprising power of distributed organizations: Read More

Net-Powered, Cable-Boosted Politics Won Last Night

BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, May 19 2010

With challengers like Rand Paul, Joe Sestak and Bill Halter all beating candidates backed by the Washington establishment last night in primaries in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Arkansas, John Harris and Jim Vandehei have ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed monday >

The UK Government Wants to Monetize Open Data

A new paper from the chair of the U.K. government's Open Strategy Board outlines the best practices for the government's open data policies. The government-commissioned Shakespeare Review – after author Stephan Shakespeare – looks into ways to monetize open data, and recommends an all-encompassing National Data Strategy.

Will Silicon Valley "Disrupt" Politics With a Candidate for Congress?

Sean Parker, of Napster fame and now executive general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, has invested in political startups before. But last week, he went a step further — co-hosting a fundraising event for a candidate for Congress. Parker and SV Angel co-founder Ron Conway organized a crowd of Internet industry luminaries to support Ro Khanna, a former assistant deputy secretary in Barack Obama's Commerce Department. Khanna is preparing a challenge to Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), whose newly redrawn congressional district encompasses Silicon Valley. GO

On Threshold of Telecom Revolution, Future of Internet Freedom in Burma Uncertain

Burma (Myanmar) is on the threshold of an Internet revolution, but Human Rights Watch has warned companies to proceed with caution or risk trampling Burmese citizens' rights. GO

friday >

Chilean Anti-Corruption Resource: A Crowdsourced Database of Social and Political Connections

In countries where a small minority of social circles have a majority of the political and economic power, personal relationships can affect major decision-making, a serious concern of anti-corruption activists. A new web platform stores personal profiles of key players in Chilean business and politics, complete with biographies and personal and professional connections through family, education, social circles, employers and coworkers, to make tracking social relationships and conflict-of-interest easier. Called Poderopedia (from the Spanish word for power), the project sounds kind of like LinkedIn, but the creation and management of profiles is being crowdsourced out to journalists, activists and concerned citizens.

Middle Eastern Telecom Accused of Working With Saudi Arabia to Spy on Citizens

Mobily, an arm of the state-owned Middle Eastern telecom giant Etihad Etisalat, has been accused of working with Saudi Arabia to develop software that would allow the government to bypass protections for social media users. The exposé comes from Moxie Marlinspike (neé Matthew Rosenfield), an expert in a certain type of malicious Internet attack called MITM (man-in-the-middle), whereby attackers intercept and secretly alter private messages exchanged via email and other social media platforms. GO

Saudi Religious Leader Warns Twitter Users of Consequences in the Afterlife

In late March, Saudi Arabia's top religious cleric said Twitter was for clowns and corrupters. Earlier this week, he said anyone using social media, in particular Twitter, “has lost this world and the afterlife.” His comments might be laughable, if they did not come at a time when the Saudi government is looking into monitoring or blocking social media sites and eliminating user anonymity.

thursday >

What The Other Silicon Valley Immigration Group Is Doing This Month

A bipartisan coalition of political advocacy, business and tech groups are moving ahead to launch a social media blitz next week designed to persuade members of the Senate to vote in favor of immigration reform legislation supported in Silicon Valley. "We're going to create a virtual digital storm," said Jeremy Robbins in a Wednesday ... GO

The New Yorker Hopes "Strongbox" Is a Wiretap-Proof Sieve for Leaks

The New Yorker yesterday became the first outlet to implement DeadDrop, a new system for sources to submit information to journalists online in a more secure and anonymous way than, for example, email. GO

Female Organizer of Pakistan's First Hackathon Stresses Collaboration Over Competition

After Pakistan banned Valentine's Day this year, Sabeen Mahmud started an online protest in which people uploaded photos to mock the government ban. In the weeks following she received death threats and menacing phone calls, and early on she had to stay home from work. That did nothing, however, to keep her from further organizing. Last month, the café she started in Karachi hosted Pakistan's first ever hackathon, which tackled problems including sanitation, crime, disaster management, and education. She even invited a government representative to observe the initial conversations, tackling sensitive areas like government inefficiency and elections.

wednesday >

White House Innovation Fellows Project Spins Off Into A Business

Clay Johnson and Adam Becker joined the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to help the White House fix the way government does business. Now they're turning that mission into a business themselves. GO

Fighting Fires With Data, New York City Launches New Safety Inspection System

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that New York City has implemented city-wide a new risk based inspection system focused on fire safety that is driven by analytics from multiple city agencies. GO

Chinese Netizens Use Digital Initiative to Gain Media Attention for Unsolved Poisoning Case

Last month a medical science student at a Shanghai university died from poisoning, allegedly murdered by his roommate. The specifics of the crime echoed a case from the mid-1990s, in which a 19-year-old student was poisoned with thallium. That case has once again been thrown into the media spotlight, but after 18 years the media has changed and the spotlight means a trending hashtag on Sina Weibo or an online petition to the U.S. President.

PDF France 2013: “Au Code, Citoyens!”

This year PDF France will take place in Paris on June 13, with the theme "Au Code, Citoyens!" ("To Code, Citizens!") The speakers' lineup includes some of the continent's leaders in the digital revolution. GO

tuesday >

Website Imitation is Flattery in New York City Council Race

A New York City Council candidate who had made his name as a technology consultant and spearheaded an open government initiative several years ago found parts of his website copied by another City Council candidate in a different borough, as Politicker first reported. GO

Mike Honda Locks Up Establishment Support, But Challenger Has Ear of the Silicon Valley Elite

Some of Silicon Valley's most influential business people will hold a fundraiser in San Francisco this Thursday for Ro Khanna, the 36-year-old lawyer who's challenging 71-year-old California Democrat Mike Honda for his 17th Congressional District seat. The names at the top of the invite: Ron Conway and Sean Parker. They're apparently forming a committee to help Khanna build his campaign. The other bold-face names who are listed as part of the 'committee in formation' include Salesforce.com's Founder and CEO Marc Benioff, Benchmark Capital General Partners' Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton, tech entrepreneur Shawn Fanning, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, her big data venture investor husband Zach Bogue, and Conway's SV Angel colleague, Founder and Managing Partner David Lee. GO

Tools to Keep Independent Media Online in Hostile Environments

Websites and media outlets in developing countries or countries with corrupt or repressive regimes struggle daily to fend off hacker attacks, some from their own government — like the Malaysian news portal Sarawak Report, which techPresident reported was taken down in April by sustained denial-of-service attacks. The negative attention controversial reporting draws can scare local advertisers away as well, making it difficult for a media company to support itself. Media Frontiers offers two services to websites dealing with either of those problems.

WeGov

Timeline

Online Organizing

Revolution 2.0