“ [Privacy threatened] The threat by the United Arab Emirates to shut down mobile services on BlackBerrys like e-mail and text messaging underscores a growing tension between communications companies and governments over how to balance privacy with national security. While communications companies want to be able to ensure that their customers’ messages are shielded from prying eyes, governments increasingly insist on gaining access to electronic messages to track down criminals or uncover terrorist plots.
August 6, 2010
August 3, 2010
“ [Surveilance cameras in China] Roughly a year ago, Urumqi’s ethnic Han and Uighur populations took part in the worst ethnic rioting in modern Chinese history, killing at least 197 people. The riots caught the Communist Party and the local government unaware. Now at least 47,000 cameras scan Urumqi to ensure there are no more surprises. By year’s end, the state news media says, there will be 60,000. Video surveillance is hardly uncommon in the West. But nowhere else is it growing as explosively as in China, where seven million cameras already watch streets, hotel lobbies, businesses and even mosques and monasteries — and where experts predict an additional 15 million cameras will sprout by 2014. Much of the proliferation is driven by the same rationales as in Western nations: police forces stretched thin, rising crime, mushrooming traffic jams and the bureaucratic overkill that attends any mention of terrorism.
July 21, 2010
“ It is truly fascinating to watch how fast and how broad the Government 2.0 revolution is spreading globally. Australia has recently launched it’s Declaration of Open Government. The United States launched its Opengov movement earlier this year at the federal level and the White House is already showing the highlights from around the U.S. government. Japan, Russia, India, Britain, Singapore are all starting to jump into the movement. The Kremlin evemn has its own Twitter feed. Twitter now has a list of “official accounts” devoted just to leaders of governments.
July 20, 2010
“ When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems. This progressive era is being promulgated without much popular support. It’s being led by a large class of educated professionals, who have been trained to do technocratic analysis, who believe that more analysis and rule-writing is the solution to social breakdowns, and who have constructed ever-expanding networks of offices, schools and contracts.
July 1, 2010
“ [Looking for more “macaca” moments] the Democratic National Committee is starting up “The Accountability Project,” a Web site that will showcase recordings of Republican candidates and other campaign documents collected by regular folks.
[…]
“What we are encouraging here is a simple tracking project – regular citizens recording events and speeches only – not trying to create a story, not asking questions, not catching members or candidates unaware,” Mr. Woodhouse wrote in an e-mail message.
[…]
“What we are encouraging here is a simple tracking project – regular citizens recording events and speeches only – not trying to create a story, not asking questions, not catching members or candidates unaware,” Mr. Woodhouse wrote in an e-mail message.
June 3, 2010
“ [Being sued for protesting online] After a towing company hauled Justin Kurtz’s car from his apartment complex parking lot, despite his permit to park there, Mr. Kurtz, 21, a college student in Kalamazoo, Mich., went to the Internet for revenge. Outraged at having to pay $118 to get his car back, Mr. Kurtz created a Facebook page called “Kalamazoo Residents against T&J Towing.” Within two days, 800 people had joined the group, some posting comments about their own maddening experiences with the company. T&J filed a defamation suit against Mr. Kurtz, claiming the site was hurting business and seeking $750,000 in damages.
May 31, 2010
“ [New UK government] The coalition says it will:
• take steps to open up government procurement and reduce costs;
• publish government ICT contracts online.
• create a level playing field for open-source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.
• require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000.
• create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis
• require all councils to publish meeting minutes and local service and performance data
• require all councils to publish items of spending above £500, and to publish contracts and tender documents in full
• ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.
• take steps to open up government procurement and reduce costs;
• publish government ICT contracts online.
• create a level playing field for open-source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.
• require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000.
• create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis
• require all councils to publish meeting minutes and local service and performance data
• require all councils to publish items of spending above £500, and to publish contracts and tender documents in full
• ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.
May 26, 2010
“ [Positive results for online government] Americans haven’t de-friended the government just yet, according to a recent Pew report: 61 percent of adults looked for information or made transactions on a government Web site in the last year, while almost a third employed social media like social networking sites, blogs, text messaging, e-mail or online video to get government information.
May 21, 2010
“ [Andrew Keen on “the internet is ideology”] One of the mistakes we make about the Internet is that it’s technology. It isn’t; it’s ideology. The Internet was built by people who questioned authority. The Internet is bound up in a fundamental assault on the notion of expertise, on what Jimmy calls “the mainstream media,” which includes shows like this, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. And the idea that representative democracy, experts — whether in media, in politics, in the arts, in legal affairs, in intellectual affairs — are unreliable and need to be replaced by what Jimmy calls “the people” is deeply dangerous. What I most fear about the Internet — which…we all use; I’m as addicted as everybody else — is the way we take this technology, which has no center, is flattened, has done away with authority and expertise — we take this technology to prove the ideological, idealized theories of Jimmy Wales. The truth is, we need expertise, we need authority, we need to remind ourselves of the foundations of representative democracy.
