Digital Media

Has Google finally grown up? The care with which it has handled facial-recognition technology seems to support this thesis. Compare it with Facebook. When Zuckerberg's social network unveiled its facial-recognition technology in June, it found itself in the middle of a global privacy backlash.

The United States of America was forged in resistance to collective reprisals—the punishment of many for the acts of few. In 1774, following the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passed a series of laws—including the mandated closure of the port of Boston—meant to penalize the people of Massachusetts. These abuses of power, labeled the "Intolerable Acts," catalyzed the American Revolution by making plain the oppression of the British crown.

Yesterday, New America Foundation's Rebecca MacKinnon testified before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing on "Promoting Global Internet Freedom."

China operates the world’s most elaborate and opaque system of Internet censorship. But Congress, under pressure to take action against the theft of intellectual property, is considering misguided legislation that would strengthen China’s Great Firewall and even bring major features of it to America.

Originally posted on DanBlah.com and cross posted from the Open Technology Initiative.

While I am by no means a seasoned investigative journalist, I have the good fortune to work with some. Looking ten years back I couldn't imagine a media organization considering geek qualifications a core part of an investigative team. In 2011, turning a geek into an investigative journalist is a no-brainer.

Originally posted on DanBlah.com

While I am by no means a seasoned investigative journalist, I have the good fortune to work with some. Looking ten years back I couldn't imagine a media organization considering geek qualifications a core part of an investigative team. In 2011, turning a geek into an investigative journalist is a no-brainer.

Hidden in all the bad news about California’s troubles is this delightful paradox: Californians, while living in a state that experts say is ungovernable, have within their reach new tools that give them greater power to govern themselves than ever before.

Back in the day, when bad guys used telephones, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies would listen in with wiretaps. As long as phone companies cooperated—and they had to, by law—it was a relatively straightforward process. The Internet, however, separated providers of communications services—Skype, Facebook, Gmail—from those running the underlying infrastructure. Thus, even if the FBI obtains a suspect's traffic data from their Internet service provider (ISP)—Comcast, Verizon, etc.—it may be difficult to make sense of it, especially if the suspect has been using encrypted services.

Until very recently books about cybercrime came in two forms. Some authors—the majority of whom had a national-security background—thought it their moral obligation to warn civilization of the impending arrival of an "electronic 9/11," a "Digital Pearl Harbor" or a "cyber-Katrina"—a catastrophe that no stock exchange or central bank would survive unscathed. Others—predominantly computer experts and academics—opted for a more humdrum approach, producing dry tomes full of impenetrable jargon.

In the spirit of doing what one does best and linking to the rest, I’ll dispense with a lengthy overview of the controversy that erupted when AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Silicon Valley power-broker and TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington announced the launch of what they called “the CrunchFund” — a venture fund that will “invest in start-ups, including some that [Arrington] and his staff write about” on TechCrunch,