Category Archives: edemocracy

Laptops, smartphones and social media allowed in U.S. House press gallery

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The C-SPAN coverage of the resignation of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and tributes to her in the United States House of Representatives included something new: the House-controlled cameras provided an unusual display of extra TV camera shots in the House chamber, including the Giffords family in the House gallery.

In general, the viewing public does not get to see what’s happening elsewhere in the House. “These additional angles added much to the public’s appreciation for this Congressional action,” said Howard Mortman, communications director for C-SPAN, “and might lead one to ask, why not permit such camera shots every day?”

Mortman also alerted me to another interesting development: According to a new Roll Call story, journalists now can bring their laptops into the press gallery and use them to report on what’s happening. Reporters have to ask to do it — and they’ll need to have fully charged laptop batteries — but Superintendent Jerry Gallegos told Roll Call that he will allow laptops in for special events.

“It won’t be something that at this point we’ll be doing on a daily basis, just because power is an issue out there,” he said. “But because the House changed their rules allowing BlackBerrys on the floor … it didn’t make sense for Members to be able to tweet and not be able to have reporters get the tweets.”

It’s not the first time computers have graced the gallery, Gallegos said. The decision to allow laptops goes back to then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). But the gallery staff tired of arguing with testy writers about why plugging multiple power cords into limited outlets and running wires across the floor is a fire hazard.

“Early on, they weren’t going to be able to operate without plugging in,” he said. “It was very obvious that was going to create a safety hazard.”

Thankfully, battery technology has evolved since the 1990s and the House Chief Administrative Office equipped the chamber with Wi-Fi in August. So, Gallegos said, “It just seemed like now was the time.”

Even if the laptops run out of battery power or have connectivity issues, however, reporters will now have another option: Mortman tells me that iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys and other smartphones will also be allowed into the press gallery of the U.S. House on a “trial basis.”

As a result, we should expect to see more livetweeting and Facebook updates from journalists on-site. That said, there’s a major caveat: Mortman said that the trial will be monitored to ensure that no photos or video are recorded.

Given the role that smartphones now play in the professional lives of journalists of all beats, political, tech or otherwise, the limitation on pictures and video is notable. There’s a good chance that the trial could be tested, as soon as a newsworthy event occurs off the C-SPAN camera. Late last year, during a debate over the payroll tax, House staff shut down C-SPAN cameras. Government staff acting to limit the capacity of a journalist to record a debate between elected representatives in the People’s House might raise valid First Amendment questions.

“One day, hopefully, the House (and U.S. Senate) will also allow in independent media TV cameras,” said Mortman.

Benkler on SOPA, PIPA and the moral authority of a networked commons

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In a guest post on TechPresident, Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, aYochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and author of The Wealth of Networks and The Penguin and the Leviathan.

“Seven Lessons from SOPA/PIPA/Megauplaod and Four Proposals on Where We Go From Here” is a compelling read, exploring what we’ve learned about the power of a networked commons in the last week and making substantive suggestions about a way forward.

“We need to be thinking not about what compromises to make around SOPA/PIPA and the OPEN Act, but about what the architecture of freedom in the networked environment requires of copyright law more generally,” writes Benkler. He offers readers recommendations for a way forward for free expression and copyright in the 21st century, not simply more opposition to the proposals contained in Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), which, for the moment, remain indefinitely delayed in Washington.

I found the most powerful lesson from Benkler to be his final one, however, where he highlights the “moral authority of the networked citizenry vs. the power of money.”

“The power we saw in the hands of networked people is a fundamentally more legitimate source of power than corporate money. Democracies are by and for the people. We believe in one-person, one-vote; and while corporate organizations are enormously useful, and can make us more effective in the pursuit of our life plans and dreams, at root it is us, human beings, flesh and blood, who are the foundational constituents of a democracy. That is why Wikipedia played such a critical role: unlike all the other major sites that shut down. Wikipedia is not a company; Wikipedia, for this purpose, functioned as a mini-democracy within a democracy, where people who continuously volunteer for the public good came together to do something new for the public. *Wikipedia represents a moral force that no commercial site can ever hope to replicate.* Some sites, like Reddit, are sufficiently based on users that they can structure their future protest actions as democratic debates, letting users decide. Extending the debate and collective decision-making feature of the Wikipedia decision to other platforms should play an important role in the future, and will also help to solidify the alliance between networked citizenry and the companies that provide the infrastructure of networked discourse. If the technology industry wants to continue its battle with Hollywood as a battle among paid lobbyists, it may do so, likely at its own peril. But if the industry wants to be able to speak with the moral authority of the networked public sphere, it will have to listen to what the networked public is saying and understand the political alliance as a coalition.

“*The greatest hope from the events of the past two weeks is that we are beginning to see a re-emergence of the possibility of a truly engaged citizenry after decades of the rise of lobbying and money.* I suspect that it is too soon to go after legislative changes that target that ambitious goal directly, as Micah discussed yesterday (“After SOPA/PIPA Victory, Tech is Thinking of Tackling Political Reform.”) But if we can use the enthusiasm and focus to make significant inroads in this narrow and specifically actionable item, perhaps we will also begin to hone a more general a new model of democratic participation for a new generation. A model of citizen participation that is as far from the couch potato’s passivity as the Internet is from broadcast.”

For more on the open Internet Benkler and why this matters, watch our interview from last year’s eG8 Summit, where 20th century ideas clashed with the 21st century economy.

Benkler’s peroration eloquently captures the strong sense I felt last Friday that something had changed last week, when I wrote about the Web changing Washington. I wrote then and believe now that what we saw in the beginning of this young year will reinvigorate the notion that participating in the civic process matters.

As I said then, we’re in unexplored territory. We may have just seen the dawn of new era of networked activism and participatory democracy, borne upon the tidal wave of hundreds of millions of citizens connected by mobile technology, social media platform and open data. If so, that era will also include pervasive electronic surveillance, whether you’re online and offline, with commensurate threats to privacy, security, human rights and civil liberties, and the use of these technologies by autocratic government to suppress dissent or track down dissidents. These issues go straight to the heartwood of Rebecca Mackinnon’s compelling, important new book, “Consent of the Networked: The Global Struggle For Internet Freedom.” Finding a way for forward will not be easy but it’s clearly necessary.

In that context of those concerns it’s hard to feel aglow with optimism about what comes next. What we’ve seen so far in 2012, however, has left me feeling more optimistic about what’s happening in the intersection of citizens, open government and the Internet than I’ve had in some time. All that said, I’m heartened to read that Benkler wrote about “hope.” Traditionally, hope has been one of the most powerful forces for positive social change throughout our shared history.

That optimism, however, must be tempered with realism. Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies and webmaster at Washington Watch, shared two other important commentaries on the week in his post considering whether on the networked activism over SOPA and PIPA is a harbinger of things to come or an aberration:

He’s not unrestrained, but Larry Downes sees the remarkable downfall of legislation to regulate the Internet’s engineering as a harbinger of things to come. Jerry Brito, meanwhile, tells us “Why We Won’t See Many Protests like the SOPA Blackout.”

They’re both right—over different time-horizons. The information environment and economics of political organization today are still quite stacked against public participation in our unwieldy federal government. But in time this will change. Congress and Washington, D.C.’s advocacy and lobbying groups now have some idea what the future will feel like.

So far, it feels pretty darn interesting. The future, as cyberpunk noir writer William Gibson has famously said, is already here: it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

As Wikipedia prepares to go dark in protest, prospects for SOPA and PIPA dim in Congress

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Online pressure to rethink anti-piracy bills that threaten the Internet industries, security and online free speech continues to build, although, as the New York Times reported, many still expect these online piracy bills invite a protracted battle. There are, as it turns out, quite a few people willing to stand up to these bills.

More notable criticism of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives and the PROTECT IP Act in the U.S. Senate went online this weekend. Tim O’Reilly made his case for why SOPA and PIPA are bad industrial policy this weekend. The EFF explained how SOPA and PIPA violate White House principles supporting free speech. The MIT Media Lab came out against the bills with a lucid post by Joi Ito and Ethan Zuckerman explaining why they oppose SOPA and PIPA.

And, despite the paucity of coverage on the TV networks whose parent companies helped write the bills, a prominent blog post on SOPA and PIPA at Craiglist will continue to raise awareness online. The most intense day of online protest looks yet to come: On Wednesday, many websites will “blackout” to protest these bills, including Reddit. The biggest of these to date is Wikipedia’s SOPA initiative: co-founder Jimmy Wales shared on Twitter that Wikipedia will be “blacked out on Wednesday.

For those left wondering why such opposition persists after some sensational headlines this morning, prospects for the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House are significantly damaged but the legislation is not “dead.” Rather, the legislation is shelved until ‘consensus is reached.’ I believe that the writer at the Examiner sourced Rep. Darrell Issa’s statement from late Friday night when he wrote that Rep. Cantor made a ‘surprise statement.’ There’s no such statement in the House Majority Leader’s social media accounts or at GOPLeader.gov. As of this afternoon, requests for a statement to Rep. Cantor’s office have not been returned.

Here’s what actually was released: “Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote,” said Rep. Issa in a prepared statement released late Friday night.

Seasoned security scribe Bill Brenner is more reasonable in his caution at CSO Online and at his blog, where he writes that:

It appears SOPA is headed for the shelf due to the rising tide of opposition. Details on the site where I do my day job, CSOonline. I also wrote a post warning people that this isn’t over by a long shot.

Why is it important to be careful about declaring this legislation dead? Consider recent experience on another controversial bill. The White House indicated that they won’t accept a bill that damages freedom of expression or security this weekend. Remember, however, the statements of his administration regarding H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). President Obama signed the military spending bill into law at the end of 2011. He added an important coda to it, however:

“My Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens,” wrote President Obama in a signing statement.

It’s the actions of presidential administrations in the future, given detention powers in the NDAA, that worry many observers, including the ACLU. Once such executive authority is granted, it will likely take years for the judicial system to provide a check or balance. And given that the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security has already been taking down websites for over a year, caution for this White House’s position here is warranted.

In one scenario, consider that a heavily amended version of SOPA and PIPA that do contain DNS provisions could make it through Congress, once “consensus is reached” in the House and a filibuster from Senator Wyden in the Senate is overcome.

In the absence of clearer guidance from the House Majority Leader’s office on what’s acceptable in the bill, it remains possible that a deal could still be made which legislative leaders then feel represents “consensus” — Rep. Smith has said he’ll pull the DNS provisions, for instance — and then SOPA could be brought to a vote. The President could add a signing statement and, well, you get the idea.

The Senate version’s of an anti-piracy bill (The PROTECT IP Act) is set for a potential vote next week. 14 Senators are currently publicly opposed to it. Without support from the House or the White House, of course, its prospects to become law in this Congress are damaged but not eliminated. Senator Leahy has indicated that he’d recommend study the impact of the DNS provisions after passage, not pull them entirely. Brad Plumer, who wrote that lawmakers are backing away from online piracy bills, offered this analysis:

Now, that doesn’t mean these bills, or their most controversial features, are dead and buried. Leahy, for one, was pretty clear that still supports passing a bill with DNS-blocking — he just thinks that feature should be studied carefully before it actually gets implemented. (As TechDirt’s Michael Masnick points out, that sounds like a compelling reason to slow down and reconsider before passing the bill, rather than enacting a provision that lawmakers don’t fully understand.)

UPDATE: On Tuesday, January 17th, Rep. Lamar Smith said that markup of SOPA would resume in February. So no, SOPA is not dead. Here’s the statement his office released:

Chairman Smith: “To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America’s intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy.

“Due to the Republican and Democratic retreats taking place over the next two weeks, markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act is expected to resume in February.

“I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House that saves American jobs and protects intellectual property.”

One of the most powerful politicians in the U.S House has publicly voiced his opposition to the bill, consistent with past opposition to regulatory burdens created in Washington. “The internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free enterprise in history,” said Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), in a statement opposing SOPA. “It should stay that way. While H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, attempts to address a legitimate problem, I believe it creates the precedent and possibility for undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse.”

He’s right. These bills would upend the predictable legal environment created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, subjecting online innovators to a new era of uncertainty and risk. Legal experts from the top law schools in the country warn that they would damage free speech. Human rights experts warn that they would would force pervasive scrutiny and surveillance of Internet users’ online activities. Venture capitalists warn would chill the growth of social media and conscript every online platform into a new role as content police. The government’s own cybersecurity experts, at Sandia Labs, warn that these bills would damage DNSSEC, harming national security at a time when American government, businesses and consumers face attacks on their networks and computers every day. The founders of the Internet and World Wide Web warn that would lay the groundwork for an increasingly balkanized Internet, directly undercutting U.S. foreign policy advocacy in support of a single, global, open network.

If you’re curious about where your elected officials in Washington stand, learn whether your U.S. Representative or Senators support SOPA or PIPA using SOPAOpera.org, a Web application made by ProPublica using public data. (A full database is available at ProPublica.org, along with the methodology behind it.)

While Wikipedia and other sites blacking out at this scale is an an unprecedented action, what happens offline is still critical. That’s where laws are still made, after all. While new means of collective action enabled by the Internet are increasingly important, particularly with respect to generating coverage of these bills by the broadcast media, the voices that Representatives and Senators listen to most are those of their constituents. If these bills are important to you, the most effective action that any concerned citizen that wants to talk to Congress can take remains to go see your Senator or Congressman in person, call them or write them a letter.

Rep. Smith pulls DNS provision from SOPA, Rep Issa postpones hearing, White House responds to epetition

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The Friday night news dump lives on: at 12:30 AM last night, I received an email from the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: according to the release, Rep. Lamar Smith said he will remove the domain name provision from the Stop Online Piracy Act. Rep. Darrell Issa says he’ll suspend next week’s hearing with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian & other Internet experts. As you may have heard, the United States Congress is considering anti-piracy bills that could cripple Internet industries that are engine of the dynamic economic growth all around the world: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives and the PROTECT IP Act in the U.S. Senate.

Here’s the release:

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa today announced that a hearing scheduled for Wednesday, which was to examine the impact of Domain Name Service (DNS) and search engine blocking on the Internet, has been postponed following assurances that anti-piracy legislation will not move to the House floor this Congress without a consensus.

“While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act, I am confident that flawed legislation will not be taken up by this House. Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote,” said Chairman Issa. “The voice of the Internet community has been heard. Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal.”

“Earlier tonight, Chairman Smith announced that he will remove the DNS blocking provision from his legislation. Although SOPA, despite the removal of this provision, is still a fundamentally flawed bill, I have decided that postponing the scheduled hearing on DNS blocking with technical experts is the best course of action at this time. Right now, the focus of protecting the Internet needs to be on the Senate where Majority Leader Reid has announced his intention to try to move similar legislation in less than two weeks.”
http://www.keepthewebopen.com

This isn’t the end of the news, however: on the same night, this morning, the White House responded to the “We The People” epetition asking the President to veto the Stop Online Piracy Act & PROTECT IP Act. Cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt, US CTO Aneesh Chopra and OMB intellectual property enforcement coordinator Victoria Espinel wrote it. While they don’t address the veto requested in the epetition, the White House did come out strongly against the DNS provisions in the bills.

Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected. To minimize this risk, new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity. Any provision covering Internet intermediaries such as online advertising networks, payment processors, or search engines must be transparent and designed to prevent overly broad private rights of action that could encourage unjustified litigation that could discourage startup businesses and innovative firms from growing.

We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk.

Taken in context with Senator Leahy’s statement on reconsidering DNS (albeit not removing it from the bill) and Rep. Lamar Smith saying he’ll remove a DNS provision from SOPA, one of the major concerns that the tech community appears to have been heard and validated. Read my past coverage of SOPA and PIPA at Radar for these concerns, including links to the bills and a white paper from Internet engineers.

The White House, however, did write that “existing tools are not strong enough” and that they want legislation to move forward. That could well be the OPEN Act supported by Senator Ron Wyden and Rep. Darrell Issa.

The MPAA has also weighed in on the Congressional moves. (PDF. Michael O’Leary, senior executive VP for global policy and external affairs for the MPAA:

“We fully support Chairman Smith in his efforts to protect U.S. workers, businesses and consumers
against online theft. We believe his announcement today regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act and
Senator Leahy’s earlier announcement regarding the PROTECT IP Act will help forge an even
broader consensus for legislative action, and we look forward to working with them and other
interested parties in passing strong legislation utilizing the remaining tools at our disposal to protect
American jobs and creativity. We continue to believe that DNS filtering is an important tool, already
used in numerous countries internationally to protect consumers and the intellectual property of
businesses with targeted filters for rogue sites. We are confident that any close examination of DNS
screening will demonstrate that contrary to the claims of some critics, it will not break the Internet.”

Gary Price, who forwarded the MPAA response, also notes that “on Thursday, the Library of Congress named a new Director of Communications. She starts at the end of this month. She was key in the founding of the Pro-SOPA Copyright Alliance and
also worked for the MPAA.

We’ll be seeing reactions to this all weekend. I’ll link to the best of them tomorrow from this story. For now, a couple of things seems clear:

1) The technical concerns of the Internet community appear to have been heard. It’s also likely that the federal government’s own cybersecurity experts, including Sandia Labs and Schmidt himself, influenced Congressional actions here. Senator Leahy, however, has not committed to remove DNS provisions entirely from PIPA, only to research them upon passage. That’s likely to be unsatisfactory to many concerned with the bills. “Trust us” to study it after passage is a tough sell.

2) The White House is supporting the arguments that online piracy is a a “real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers.” That statement should have been supported with more evidence from the government’s research institutions.

3) The response from the White House has to be considered an open government win, with respect to an epetition resulting in a statement from the top IT officials in the country. That said, posting it on a Friday night Saturday morning, as opposed to a response from the President during his Friday news conference, buried* diminished the impact of the news and muted its political impact.

4) Most American citizens oppose government involvement in blocking access to content online, particularly when the word “censor” is accurately applied. When asked if ISPs, social media sites and search engines should block access — as they would under SOPA — only a third of Americans agree.

The White House stated that “we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

It will be up to the American people to hold them accountable for the commitment.

Update: Here’s Erik Cain, writing at Forbes on the White House response on SOPA:

This pretty clearly pits the Obama Administration against SOPA/PIPA. It also calls for more open and honest discussion about these bills and the problems they seek to address. Since there has been almost no discussion or debate until very recently on the legislation in question, this is a very welcome development.

I admit that while I’m pretty glad to see the administration come out with this sort of in-depth statement on the matter, I have a hard time trusting the president on these issues. His veto pen notably did not come out to quash the NDAA – a bill he vowed at one point to not let past his desk.

Then again, internet regulations may have wide, bipartisan support but still nowhere near the support that a defense funding bill has. Obama may have seen a political fight he couldn’t win, read the writing on the wall, and backed off of the NDAA rather than suffer a blow right before an election. The same does not apply to SOPA/PIPA.

So an executive veto on these bills seems much more likely, though at this point – with various congressmen starting to speak out, lots of companies threatening blackouts of their websites – including Wikipedia and Reddit – we may see the momentum behind these bills grind to a halt. The White House statement on the matter will only help push the conversation in congress. That’s a good thing.

Here’s Matt Yglesias, who writes at Slate that the Obama administration came out against SOPA and PIPA:

It increasingly looks like the SOPA/Protect IP fights are turning into an example of how the political system sometimes does work correctly after all. The con forces on these bills initially looked numerically overwhelmed in congress and hugely outspent. But opponents really mobilized vocally, got people and institutions who don’t normally focus on politics to write about this, and perhaps most important of all demonstrated that more people genuinely cared about this issue than most members of congress initially realized. Now the momentum has slowed incredibly and the White House technology policy team has come out against these bills.

To look a gift horse in the mouth for a second, however, I note that the White House statement does contain a “reasonable” to-be-sure line stating that “online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.”

Greg Sandoval and Declan McCullagh for CNET: DNS provision pulled from SOPA, victory for opponents:

Without the DNS provision, SOPA now looks a great deal more like the OPEN Act, a bill introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), which was designed to be an alternative to SOPA. A watered-down SOPA means Smith improves his chances of getting the bill through Congress but at this point, nothing is assured.

Late today came word that six Republican senators have asked Majority Leader Harry Reid to postpone a vote on Pro IP, also known as PIPA. The senators wrote: “Prior to committee action, some members expressed substantive concerns about the bill, and there was a commitment to resolve them prior to floor consideration.”

Leahy issued a statement which appears to be a reply to the request by those senators. He argued that the PIPA vote should go ahead as planned.

“Saying no to debating the [Pro IP Act] hurts the economy,” Leahy wrote. “It says no to the American workers whose livelihoods depend on intellectual property-reliant businesses. And it says yes to the criminals hiding overseas stealing American intellectual property…all Senators should agree that this is a debate we must have…and should support cloture on the motion to proceed on January 24.”

It sounds as if Leahy is trying to keep some of the bill’s supporters from bolting. There’s little question now that some SOPA and PIPA backers in Congress are in retreat and seeking some kind of compromise in the face of significant opposition.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing: Lamar Smith and Patrick Leahy blink, pull DNS-blocking out of PIPA and SOPA

After repeatedly insisting that establishing a national censoring firewall with DNS-blocking was critical to the Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill’s sponsor (and chair of the House Judicial Committee) Rep Lamar Smith has blinked. He’s agreed to cut DNS-blocking from the bill, in the face of a threat from rival Rep Darrell Issa, whose House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was preparing to hear expert testimony on the harm that this provision would do to national security and the Internet’s robustness against fraud and worse.

Even without its DNS provisions, SOPA remains terminally flawed, creating a regime that would be terminally hostile to any site that contains links and any site that allows the public to post comments on it. But attention has shifted to PIPA, the Senate version of the bill, which is nearly as bad, and which is rocketing towards an imminent vote.

Timothy Lee at ArsTechnica: Obama administration joins the ranks of SOPA skeptics:

Combine all those concerns, and the statement is a fairly sweeping condemnation of SOPA and PIPA in their current form. Espinel and her colleagues appear to have left enough wiggle room in the statement to allow the president to sign a future version of the bill that addresses some, but not all, of the critics’ concerns. But the bill’s sponsors are now going to have to work hard to satisfy critics and build a consensus in favor of passage.

Tim O’Reilly at Google+ on the White House response to the epetition on SOPA and PIPA:

I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups. The offending paragraph is as follows:

“Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.”

In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?

In my experience at O’Reilly, the losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate content. Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of O’Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway; meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of others are buying content from us, many of them in countries that we were never able to do business with when our products were not available in digital form.

History shows us, again and again, that frontiers are lawless places, but that as they get richer and more settled, they join in the rule of law. American publishing, now the largest publishing industry in the world, began with piracy. (I have a post coming on that subject on Monday.)

Congress (and the White House) need to spend time thinking hard about how best to grow our economy – and that means being careful not to close off the frontier, or to harm those trying to settle it, in order to protect those who want to remain safe at home. British publishers could have come to America in the 19th century; they chose not to, and as a result, we grew our own indigenous publishing industry, which relied at first, in no small part, on pirating British and European works.

If the goal is really to support jobs and the American economy, internet “protectionism” is not the way to do it.

*The White House emailed me later in the morning to point out that the epetition response was posted on Saturday morning.

#AskState: U.S. State Department to take questions from Twitter at the podium

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Under Secretary McHale Participates in the State Department's First Global "Twitter Q&A"

Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith Mchale, center, participates in the State Department's first global Twitter Q & A, at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 2011.

As part of what it is calling “21st Century Statecraft Month,” State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland will be taking questions from Twitter from up at the podium during the Daily Press Briefing each Friday afternoon during the month of January. Questions can be submitted using the #AskState hashtag.

The questions will be selected from the Department’s 10 official Twitter feeds, which now include tweets in Arabic, Chinese, English, Farsi, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Urdu:

Whether this is a public relations exercise or another step towards the next generation of digital public diplomacy will depend upon whether State is willing to directly take on its fiercest critics, a constituency that will likely be active on the #askstate hashtag.

While this is an interesting experiment, it’s important to note that the State Department will still be choosing which questions to answer. In a press briefing, Nuland can choose the questioner but not the question. If Nuland would commit to taking the 3 most retweeted questions, say, that would be one thing. Here, they can be selective. For instance, if asked about the Wikileaks saga, sales of American surveillance gear to foreign governments or past State Department involvement in South America, will they take the questions?

There’s also the quiet reality that P.J. Crowley, the former state department spokesman, was (and is) quite active on Twitter as @PJCrowley during his tenure. As far as I know, Nuland doesn’t have an account, which effectively means they’re doing less of that particular brand of 21st century digital diplomacy, not more. @JaredCohen, who has moved on to Google, is similarly no longer a voice for ‘digital diplomacy’ on Twitter, leaving the mantle of being State’s primary “face” on social media on the shoulders of @AlecJRoss, although, to be fair, dozens of other staffers, embassies and officials are on Twitter now as well, from @USMariaOtero to UN @AmbassadorRice.

I’ve posed a question about the State Department’s official stance on the Stop Online Piracy Act, since its passage would seem very likely to directly impact its Internet freedom policy and funding for circumvention technologies. If State takes the question, they’d post it on their YouTube channel.

Below, I’ve embedded a Storify that includes a sample of many other questions that have been asked to date:

http://storify.com/digiphile/askstate-questions-from-twitter-for-the-at-stated.js

[View the story “#AskState: Questions from Twitter for the @StateDept” on Storify]

Make Thomas.gov a platform, suggests House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer

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Rep Steny Honey at the Congressional Hackathon

How governments deal with social media has been a focal point of friction, fantasy and fierce real-time discussion around the globe in 2011. Tonight in Washington, the first “Congressional hackathon” convened Members of the House of Representatives, staffers, media, developers and citizens at the Capitol Building in Washington to talk about how social media, open government and technology could make the “people’s house” work better for those it represents. I embedded a Storify below that collects tweets and pictures from the event, plan to file a full report at Radar tomorrow and will share video when it becomes available.

In his remarks, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer addressed how social media is affected Congress and his caucus and open government in the Executive branch. He also cited the growth of open data in cities as a model that Congress should consider for the future of Thomas.gov:

“For Congress, there is still a lot of work to be done, and we have a duty to make the legislative process as open and accessible as possible. One thing we could do is make thomas.gov – where people go to research legislation from current and previous Congresses – easier to use, and accessible by social media. Imagine if a bill in Congress could tweet its own status.

“The data available on thomas.gov should be expanded and made easily accessible by third party systems. Once this happens, developers, like many of you here today, could use legislative data in innovative ways. This will usher in new public-private partnerships that will empower new entrepreneurs who will, in turn, yield benefits to the public sector. One successful example is how cities have made public transit data accessible so developers can use it in apps and websites. The end result has been commuters saving time everyday and seeing more punctual trains and buses as a result of the transparency. Legislative data is far more complex, but the same principles apply. If we make the information available, I am confident that smart people like you will use it in inventive ways.”

If Hoyer and the House leadership would like to see that happen, several attendees at the hackathon suggested to me that Congress could take a specific action: collaborate with the Senate and send the Library of Congress a letter instructing it to provide bulk legislative data access to THOMAS.gov in structured formats so that the developers, designers and citizens around the nation can co-create a better civic experience for everyone.

Here’s the story of the rest of the event, as told in tweets and pictures:

http://storify.com/digiphile/the-first-congressional-hackathon.js

View the story “The first Congressional hackathon” on Storify]

Can a Congressional hackathon make the House of Representatives more social?

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It’s time to think different about hacking in Congress. Later this afternoon, I’ll be strolling over to Capitol Hill to participate in what I believe is an unprecedented event: developers working with a bipartisan group of lawmakers and staffers to figure out how to “hack Congress” to make it work better for citizens. Details on the Facebook hackathon are over at the House Majority Leader’s website.

There are a number of reasons that I’m optimistic that we’ll see useful results from today’s efforts.

First, the Republicans have been invested in this area on this since before last year’s election, when the GOP leadership put embracing innovation on the agenda. In April, they sent a letter to the House Clerk regarding legislative data release. Then, in September, a live XML feed for the House floor went online. Yes, there’s a long way to go on open legislative data quality in Congress but there’s support for open government data on both sides of the aisle. Dan Schuman, blogging about what the Sunlight Foundation hopes to see from what he calls a “wonk-a-thon,” lists the many other ways the House has yet to catch up with 21st century technology:

We have yet to see bulk access to THOMAS or public access to CRS reports, important legislative and ethics documents are still unavailable in digital format, many committee hearings still are not online, and so on.

As Schuman highlights there, the Sunlight Foundation has been focused on opening up Congress through technology since, well, there was a Sunlight Foundation. To whit: “There have been several previous collaborative efforts by members of the transparency community to outline how the House of Representatives can be more open and accountable, of which an enduring touchstone is the Open House Project Report, issued in May 2007,” writes Schuman.

Second, the people coming to Congress for some civic coding today aren’t your average group of developers: they’re from Facebook. If you’ve been following technology news, you know that there’s been a fierce competition for development talent in Silicon Valley for years now, with Google and Facebook specifically focused on attracting the best and brightest. It’s fair to say that the world’s largest social network, predicted to go public next year, has had some success on that front. These developers are, naturally, likely to be looking for ways to integrate legislative data, video and RSS into Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol and Facebook’s platform.

Third, I here that there are some new tools for making the process of forming legislation more open to the people set to go online. I’m looking forward to reporting that out to the country.

Will talent, vision and opportunity combine to make the People’s House a more social, open place? Stay tuned.

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Gov 2.0 goes mainstream with a new Associated Press article on open government data

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We live in interesting times. Last week, NPR listeners learned about “local Gov 2.0.” This weekend, civic applications and open data emerged further into the national consciousness with a widely syndicated new Associated Press story by Marcus Wohlsen, who reported that a “flood of government data fuels rise of city apps. Here’s how Wohlsen describes what’s happening:

Across the country, geeks are using mountains of data that city officials are dumping on the Web to create everything from smartphone tree identifiers and street sweeper alarms to neighborhood crime notifiers and apps that sound the alarm when customers enter a restaurant that got low marks on a recent inspection. The emergence of city apps comes as a result of the rise of the open data movement in U.S. cities, or what advocates like to call Government 2.0.”

The AP covered Gov 2.0 and the open government data movement in February, when they looked at how cities were crowdsourcing ideas from citizens, or “citizensourcing.”

It’s great to see what’s happening around the country get more mainstream attention. More awareness of what’s possible and available could lead to more use of the applications and thereby interest and demand for civic data. For instance, on the @AP’s Twitter feed, an editor asked more than 634 “Hundreds of new apps use public data from cities to improve services. Have you tried any?”

Wohlson captures the paradigm behind Gov 2.0 well at the end of his article:

“New York, San Francisco and other cities are now working together to develop data standards that will make it possible for apps to interact with data from any city. The idea, advocates of open data say, is to transform government from a centralized provider of services into a platform on which citizens can build their own tools to make government work better.

Open311 and GTFS are data standards of this sort. What lies ahead for Gov 2.0 in 2012 has the potential to improve civic life in any number of interesting ways. I look forward to sharing that journey.

The 2012 Barack Obama campaign joined Google+. When will he host his first @WhiteHouse hangout?

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As 2011 comes to a close, the Internet and social media are playing an increasingly big role in Politics.  Google has been trying to attract politicians to Plus, with mixed success. That’s changed rapidly over the last month. Google’s published a guide to Google+ for politicians to help them on their way. With the addition of the president’s campaign this morning, I think it’s likely that today will be a tipping point for Google Plus adoption in the political space.

As Drew Ulanoff reported at the Next Web, the 2012 +Barack Obama campaign for president joined Google Plus today. The Page has been verified by Google: this is the real thing.

The president’s campaign will be able to do more than ask questions on Twitter or post a picture of Bo on Facebook with Plus, however: he’s be able to host a Hangout with and then broadcast it live through Google’s platform using improved features that rolled out this fall. In the future, that might include mobile hangouts with the president through Android devices.

Of course, that’s already true for all of the leading Republican contenders to be next president of the United States. All of campaigns of the candidates currently leading in the polls to be the Republican nominee for president are on Google+, including +Mitt Romney, +Herman Cain, +Newt Gingrich +Ron Paul. Romney participated in the first of a series of Hangouts with candidates from the GOP primary. Bachmann, Santorum, We can expect more of them this winter.

Politicians, by nature, are drawn to crowds — particularly registered voters from their home districts. For Plus to be worth the additional time of elected officials or their staff, they’ll need to get substantial returns on that investment. If the presidential campaigns are there, it will show what’s possible to others and draw politically engaged citizens in.

The prospects for that outcome are looking better recently: Google Plus traffic surged after the addition of brands and media companies this fall. If people see it as an attractive destination to interact with candidates and their campaigns, that’s likely to continue. To date, aside from notable exceptions like +Bernie Sanders, congressmen, mayors, governors and other elected officials have not yet joined in bulk. We’ll see if that changes after the Thanksgiving holiday.

When is the first presidential Hangout?

Chris Taylor (“Barack Obama joins Google+“) writes that “at least one prominent user was making active use of the site Wednesday: President Barack Obama.” Ulanoff at The Next Web? “it’s definitely the President himself.”

Well, not so much. It’s campaign staffers, not the leader of the free world, just as it is on @BarackObama on Twitter or the Obama 2012 Facebook page. The only tweet the president has composed and sent went out from the @WhiteHouse account (more on that later).

Taylor makes it clear that he knows that Obama is not using the account himself — “it isn’t being run by the President himself, but by his reelection campaign” — but the imprecision here doesn’t help matters for readers. That’s doubly so when Google executive +Vic Gundotra writes “Welcome Mr. President! Follow the President at +Barack Obama” in introducing the new page.

As is often the case, Nick Judd has some of the smartest analysis of the intersection of campaigns and politics, over at techPresident. In his post on team Obama joining Google+, he gets to the heart of the issue: whether candidates or sitting elected officials use a given social platform to its fullest capacity to engage constituents and built community, as opposed to yet another (virtual) podium to deliver messages and speeches. So far, the Obama campaign isn’t going there.

Campaigns are using these channels primarily as another outlet for information to reach a different audience — if any candidate has used a brand page to actually go back and forth with constituents, beyond hangouts by Gingrich and Romney, it hasn’t appeared on the techPresident radar. But that isn’t stopping the hopey-changey crowd from asking: One of the most prevalent comments on Obama 2012’s first post, from around 9:17 a.m., is a request for a Google Hangout with the commander-in-chief.

There’s nothing wrong with reaching new audiences, of course — particularly for those trying to get elected — but how political accounts use social media will factor into whether they’re successful reaching and engaging them, much less influencing them. Each platform has developed its own culture and styles, from the reblogs and retweets of Tumblr and Twitter to the “Ask Me Anything” forum — or AMAs – on Reddit. (For an interesting thought experiment, imagine if the president did an AMA like former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.)

As Carl Franzen points out at TPM IdeaLab, as Google+ gets political it’s encouraging politicians to create pages, not profiles. Future analysis of the social network’s political prospects might dwell upon that initial choice. Facebook, by way of contrast, has been transitioning many fans of pages to subscribers of profiles. Senator Sanders has a profile, although the use of the third person makes it clear that its’ staffers that are updating his page.

Danny Sullivan makes another important point at SearchEngineLand: while Barack Obama joins Google, White House is still not there. (It may be a while yet, depending upon how quickly the respective legal teams at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway can work out an agreement. They did it for YouTube eventually, so stay tuned.)

There’s a larger point to make about how, where and why our elected leaders choose to use social media. Radio and television dramatically changed how political leaders could communicate with citizens domestically and humanity globally during the 20th century, both for good and ill.  In the 21st century, that capacity has further expanded and will continue to do so, in ways both expected and unexpected. Politicians can speak to the electorate whenever and where ever they are, if they choose to subscribe emails or follow profiles. Citizens can, in return, speak back using new connection technologies and, of course, speak to one another. That conversation is ongoing, whether or not an elected leader chooses to participate in it.

When President Obama stepped to the podium in the first Twitter Town Hall, he did something unexpected: he asked a question. In return, he received a selection of answers that Jack Dorsey shared at the end of the event. For this remote participant, that moment was the most interesting aspect of event, singular as it was in many respects. The president asked a question, the public replied and he read the responses.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/flash_media_player/player5x2.swf

Given the demands on the president’s time, using Twitter like this all day isn’t likely to be scalable (he might consult with Newark Mayor @CoryBooker about his experience) but it’s not hard to see the potentially utility of asking a good question occasionally and collecting the answers with ThinkUpApp or something similar. The same is true for other elected leaders too, naturally.

Given that Plus enables comments and Hangouts, there are new possibilities for sharing presidential questions and answers there as well. If the president decides to “Hangout” at the White House* himself, he’d be tapping into a new form of the potential of the Internet to connect him with the people he was elected to serve. Given the president’s current job approval ratings, he could expect to encounter some discontent, but then that’s part of the role. As with any position of great responsibility, it has its pluses and minuses.

*Mike Kruger, director of new media at the Department of Commerce, pointed out a key stumbling block for the use of Hangouts by federal agencies and the White House: they’re “easier for campaign to do. Hangouts fail 508 compliance/accessibility.”

Open Government Data and Government as a Platform in Austria [PRESENTATION]

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Dr. Peter Parycek (@parycek shared his presentation on open government data today. If you’re interested in an Austrian perspective on the growth of open government data, you’ll find it interesting. (A good bit of German required near the end.)

Open Government Data

View more presentations from Peter Parycek

Parycek is affiliated with the Center for E-Government at Danube University in Germany and writes at the Digital Government blog. As he shares at the end of the presentation, there’s a Gov 2.0 Camp in Vienna on December 2nd. If you’re interested in open data and nearby, that sounds like an optimal place to connect with other people in this growing international community.