Clinton's internet ignorance

By Libby

Frank Rich looks at the Bosnia debacle and ruminates on how the Clinton campaign shot themselves in the foot by ignoring the reality of the intertubes age.

That Mrs. Clinton’s campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton — though surely knowing her story was false — thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first lady’s foreign trip — as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night — and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.

I've been thinking about this myself for a while now. The campaign has done an incredibly poor job of employing the internet to further their narrative and seems to fail to recognize its power. I don't get why. As far as I know, Peter Daou is still their internet guru and surely he's one of the best. A really savvy player who understands the rules of the game well. Their internet outreach should be stellar. It's not.

All I can think is that Clinton and Penn and the rest of the 'leading' advisors of the campaign are ignoring his advice. There's really no other explanation.

More fuel to the conspiracy fire

In 2003 Theresa Neilsen Hayden made one of the greatest blog comments concerning the Bush Adminstration and the 9-11 Commission:

I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

This comment was brought on by the high degree of interconnectedness between Gov. Kean and members of the Bin Laden family, but it applies to many things over the past couple of years. And now Glenn Greenwald has found some more fuel to the 9-11 conspiracy theories as the 9-11 Commissioners are accusing the CIA and Bush Administration of obstructing their investigation by withholding tapes of interrogations under torture.

Arlen Specter's magic bullet theory in the Warren Commission has fueled forty five years of theories. The JFK theories may have been small fish in a small barrel compared to what will be spun out for the next fifty years.

First they came for the druggies, then they came for the activists

By Libby

This is something I meant to post about some time ago that slipped through the cracks. Via Kip Esquire, there's some disturbing provisions in a new copyright protection bill filed in Congress earlier in the month that should raise a red flag for bloggers.

Top Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday introduced a sweeping 69-page bill that ratchets up civil penalties for copyright infringement, boosts criminal enforcement, and even creates a new federal agency charged with bringing about a national and international copyright crackdown.
...

Any computer or network hardware used to "facilitate" a copyright crime could be seized by the Justice Department and auctioned off. The proceeds would be funneled to the agency's budget. The process is called civil asset forfeiture, and typically the owner does not need to be found guilty of a crime for his property to be taken.

The bill is the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act, or PRO IP (H.R. 4279). The civil forfeiture provisions are in Section 202, amending 18 U.S.C. 2318 (which already allows the government to seize counterfeit labels, packaging and documentation).

The bipartisan bill was drafted mainly in response to music and movie downloads but it's not difficult to imagine how it could be expanded to prosecute and indeed persecute, political activists who routinely post copyrighted material on their websites. This bill seems destined to muddy the waters of fair use and could easily be co-opted to shut down the free exchange of information on the internet.

If you think I'm overstating the concern, I'd remind you of how civil forfeiture has come to corrupt our law enforcement agents and has been routinely abused in drug busts. The law was originally enacted to deprive major drug dealers of ill gotten gains, but has since become a cash cow for our LEOs through abusive application of the law. I'd urge you to read point 5 here for a fine example of how easily the system can be perverted by greed.

I've long contended that civil forfeiture shouldn't even be legal. The police can seize property on mere suspicion. They do not need to prove an underlying crime prior to seizure of private assets. In fact, contrary to the basic premise of presumed innocence, the property is considered to be guilty until it proves itself innocent, at a cost so prohibitive that the owner will often not fight because the costs outweigh the value of the seized items. But the small seizures add up to millions in additional revenues for the LEOs.

To add to the concern over this bill, it would create a massive new bureaucracy.

Probably the most extensive part of the PRO IP Act is its creation of a new federal bureaucracy called the White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative, or WHIPER. The head of WHIPER would be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. WHIPER seems to be modeled after the U.S. Trade Representative, with the head of the new agency bearing the rank of "Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary."

The job pays pretty well and the agency itself will depend on its future funding coming from the sales of seized computers. How long do you think it will take them to start expanding the scope of the "copyright crimes" to include the sharing of mainstream media coverage among activists? [h/t Vig and NYC Alberts]

Government blocks public info on search engines

By Libby

This has been a gripe of mine for a long time and now it's confirmed. Experts are telling Congress that governments websites are too difficult to use effectively.

Five years after the U.S. Congress passed legislation to improve electronic access to government information, 2,000 government Web sites contain public information that cannot be accessed through outside search engines, e-government experts said Tuesday. [...]

"Today, too much public information is effectively unavailable to the average American," said John Lewis Needham, Google's manager of public sector content partnerships. "It can't even be found in the federal government's own search engine, USA.gov."

Tell me about it. And even when you do find the sites, their interactive features are terrible. You feel like a rat in a maze trying to navigate through multiple queries that are definitely not designed to be intuitive for the average technodope like myself.

Meanwhile, the article quotes a surprising critic.

Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, questioned why many government Web sites don't make it easier for outside search engines. "Is it accidental?" he said. "Is it that they're not going the extra mile to make this happen?"

Hmmm. That sounds suspiciously like a conspiracy theory. Who would have thought Joe had it in him? But you do have to wonder why they make it so complicated. It does kind of feel deliberate to me.

Gas up and google

By Libby

This looks like a pretty good idea. For all those who are too embarrassed or stubborn to ask for directions, (read that as every man I've ever dated), you'll be able to spare yourselves the indignity of asking a live person and just google up a map.

As part of a partnership to be announced Wednesday, the online search leader will dispense driving directions at thousands of gasoline pumps across the United States beginning early next month.

The pumps, made by Gilbarco Veeder-Root, include an Internet connection and will display Google's mapping service in color on a small screen. Motorists will be able to scroll through several categories to find local landmarks, hotels, restaurants and hospitals selected by the gas station's owner.

After the driver selects a destination, the pump will print out directions. Eventually, Gilbarco Veeder-Root hopes to enable motorists to type in a specific address and get directions.

Sounds like an entirely useful function but it won't be nearly as much fun as getting convoluted directions from some fast talking local character.

Facebook face off

By Libby

Via Avedon, I see Jon Swift was in a tiff with Facebook. His page was abruptly cancelled with no prior warning for violating their no pseudonym policy and they were rather snippy with him when he inquired why he was singled out when there are over 300 Jesus Christ pages and a fair sample of Santa Claus and Easter Bunnies.

Save your outrage though. Jon's Facebook friends leapt into the fray and his page has been restored but he wonders how they determined he wasn't using his real name in the first place. Apparently there are also many other Jon Swifts in the profiles. You have to wonder if the recreational spying the employees engage in, in violation of their own policy, had anything to do with it.

Facebook employees are watching you

By Libby

I think I was supposed to join Facebook so I could sign up to be somebody's friend or something. I never got around to it. I barely have time to keep up with my blogs and the news, much less chitchat on social networking sites. I don't really understand what the point of it all is since it looks like most pages I've looked at aren't updated frequently and the messages consist of mostly, thanks for adding me as your friend or comments whoring their own page. But whatever it's all about, after seeing this, I'm really glad I never signed up.

"My friend got a call from her friend at Facebook, asking why she kept looking at his profile," says a privacy-conscious source at a major tech company. Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone's profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed -- a major privacy violation. If you've been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama's intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it's considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.

Now I expect it's harmless enough for the most part but still I find it kind of creepy that some kid working at Facebook could be tracking your online activity for 'fun.' [h/t David D]

We're number... 15?

by shamanic

Ah yes, coverage of America's lagging implementation and adoption of broadband. I worked for an ISP for four years until just a few weeks ago, and what I know is this: Asia and much of Europe is kicking our butts on this front. Through public-private partnerships and government regulation, their networks are faster, cheaper, more stable, and in a lot of places, nearly universal.

And ours are pokey, unreliable, expensive, and unavailable in many areas. So we're number 15, or 17, or in any event, far from number 1.

Thanks, free market ideologues! I love paying more for less!