Yogi Land

This week’s convergence of politics and digital is all about debate and how it’s filtered through social media.

In the past week, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum took on (and lost to) a college student, Google is ramping up for another GOP debate and we’ve got stats on how the Republican candidates stack up against each other on social.

This is the Week in Politics & Digital.

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Santorum Video Goes Viral

When presidential candidate Rick Santorum visited Penn State, he probably wasn’t expecting an audience-made video to go viral. In it, he defends his stance on homosexuality. One student stands up to Santorum and the fireworks start flying.

The video has received more than 100,000 views since it was posted August 31.

Google Launches Site to Crowdsource Debate Questions

Fox News and Google are co-presenting the next GOP presidential debate taking place on September 22. Google’s site, FOXNews/Google Debate, is collecting text and video questions from users to be asked during the debate. Users can also scroll though submitted questions and vote on ones they find most relevant.

Social Decision Releases Stats on the Republican Field

Just listening to the media, it’s hard to tell which Republican candidates are at the front of the field. Social Decision, a news and analytics site, has put together a study with numbers from Klout and Real Clear Politics. The study shows Rick Perry owns the majority of Twitter mentions, with 30.66%. Michele Bachmann was best able to convert her tweets into action at the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa, while Newt Gingrich had the lowest poll numbers compared to his number of social media followers.

Image courtesy of Flickr, familymwr

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“C.I.A. John,” the AP-profiled analyst-of-mystery responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden for more than a decade, has been spotted in a photo posted to the White House’s Flickr account.

The Observer now claims to have used the photo to identify John — John is his middle name — though it has yet to publish his full name. In exchange for keeping mum, The Observer reporter Aaron Gell was granted off-the-record conversations with John’s associates.

“An acquaintance volunteered that he recognized the man in the photo and proceeded to put a name to the face,” Gell writes of the identification. “A few web searches turned up details of the man’s personal life. In college, he’d played basketball. No superstar by any means — he was mostly a practice player — he’d been aggressive enough to catch the eye of the team’s coach, who later spoke glowingly of John’s unusual shooting style.”

The photo at the center of the accidental reveal is one of the now famous behind-the-scenes Situation Room photos the White House uploaded to Flickr in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death.

“C.I.A. John” makes an appearance in two of these photos, one clearly depicts the proclaimed hero standing tall in the back of the room, behind Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta, with his eyes shut as President Obama addresses members of the national security team on May 1, 2011.

How do we know that this is, in fact, “C.I.A. John”, the man the Associated Press calls the most important person in the hunt for bin Laden? As The Observer notes, “the story also dangled a more tantalizing clue.”

That clue actually comes in the second paragraph of the piece. “Hidden from view, standing just outside the frame of that now-famous photograph was a career CIA analyst,” the AP reveals.

After the AP piece was published on Tuesday, July 5, Cryptome’s John Young took just nine hours to locate John in the photos.

“He did it with the sort of simple deductive reasoning that wouldn’t be out of place in a Miss Marple novel,” Gell writes. “It seems that although the man’s face was cropped out of the famous Situation Room photo, his pale yellow necktie was not. He also appeared to be unusually tall. The White House, as part of an all-out effort to trumpet its signature intelligence triumph, had released a number of photos on that day to media outlets around the world. Mr. Young simply checked the administration’s Flickr feed for shots of a man with the same build and taste in neckwear.”

Now, John’s appearance in the official press photos is raising questions as to whether the White House intended its hero to be publicly celebrated after all. Some, like Young, believe this incident to be intentional, while others will find this to be an epic blunder of an administration that has been perhaps too avant garde in its approach to social media.

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The White House Situation Room Flickr Photos

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Obama in the Situation Room

President Barack Obama makes a point during one in a series of meetings in the Situation Room of the White House discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, May 1, 2011. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon is pictured at right. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Obama in the Situation Room

President Barack Obama listens during one in a series of meetings discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Preparing to Address the Nation

President Barack Obama talks on the phone in the Oval Office before making a statement to the media about the mission against Osama bin Laden, May 1, 2011. The President made a series of calls, including to Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and others, to inform them of the successful mission. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Preparing to Address the Nation

President Barack Obama edits his remarks in the Oval Office prior to making a televised statement detailing the mission against Osama bin Laden, May 1, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Obama and Staff in the Situation Room

President Barack Obama talks with members of the national security team at the conclusion of one in a series of meetings discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Obama and Staff in the Situation Room

Staffers get a key update on the progress of the bin Laden compound raid. A confidential document has been pixelated in the foreground.

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Tennessee residents: Come July 1, 2011, the state may punish you with jail time or fines should you “transmit or display an image” online — social networks such as Facebook and Twitter included — that has the possibility to “frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress” to anyone who sees it.

The state of Tennessee amended Tennessee Code Title 39, Chapter 17, Part 3 of its harassment law, which was previously focused on malicious person-to-person communication, to apply to anyone transmitting potentially offensive images on the web.

The exact language of the law now reads:

(a) A person commits an offense who intentionally:

(4) Communicates with another person or transmits or displays an image in a manner in which there is a reasonable expectation that the image will be viewed by the victim by [by telephone, in writing or by electronic communication] without legitimate purpose:

(A) (i) With the malicious intent to frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress; or

(ii) In a manner the defendant knows, or reasonably should know, would frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress to a similarly situated person of reasonable sensibilities; and

(B) As the result of the communication, the person is frightened, intimidated or emotionally distressed.

No electronic communication is safe under the new law, as subsections have been added to included images shared via social networks where the victim could possibly see it. The bill now includes language that requires social networking sites to hand over the offending materials to the government if there’s a warrant or court order or if the person who posted the images provides consent.

The vague nature of Tennessee’s amended harassment law has many calling it unconstitutional, including UCLA School of Law professor Eugene Volokh.

Volokh describes several behaviors that will soon be illegal:

• “If you’re posting a picture of someone in an embarrassing situation — not at all limited to, say, sexually themed pictures or illegally taken pictures — you’re likely a criminal unless the prosecutor, judge, or jury concludes that you had a ‘legitimate purpose.’
• “Likewise, if you post an image intended to distress some religious, political, ethnic, racial, etc. group, you too can be sent to jail if governments decisionmaker thinks your purpose wasn’t ‘legitimate.’ Nothing in the law requires that the picture be of the ‘victim,’ only that it be distressing to the ‘victim.’
• “The same is true even if you didn’t intend to distress those people, but reasonably should have known that the material — say, pictures of Mohammed, or blasphemous jokes about Jesus Christ, or harsh cartoon insults of some political group — would ’cause emotional distress to a similarly situated person of reasonable sensibilities.’
• “And of course the same would apply if a newspaper or TV station posts embarrassing pictures or blasphemous images on its site.”

The amendment was passed May 18, signed into law May 30 by Governor Bill Haslam and will go into effect July 1.

This is not Tennessee’s first foray into controversial digital legislation. The digitally-conscious-but-not-exactly-savvy state previously made it illegal to share passwords to sites such as Netfix.

[via Ars Technica]

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jonathanparry

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President Obama is expected to make a live announcement from the White House momentarily to tell the nation and the world that Osama Bin Laden is dead, CNN is currently reporting on air.

We’ve embedded the live video feed from The White House above. More to come.

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The United States government has made its IT Dashboard, a cost-cutting tool for federal transparency, freely available for anyone, especially other governments, to use and customize.

The IT Dashboard gives citizens important information on how the government uses tax money for technology initiatives across various agencies. Citizens can see how government investments are paying off, and they can compare types of IT spending over time by accessing easy-to-reach charts and graphs.

But this clarity of and access to vital information isn’t just good for citizens; it’s also used by the Federal Government, including Congress, to make important decisions about IT budgets and spending. Open-sourcing this cost-saving tool is part of the government’s larger plan to save on IT by eliminating redundant efforts. In other words, the IT Dashboard already exists and has been paid for, and the government isn’t going to hide that light under a bushel.

Here’s a video demonstrating some of the features of the federal IT Dashboard:

The government is working with Code for America for this release. In am announcement, CfA said, “The IT Dashboard was a major component of the process the Federal Government employed to save over $3 billion in just its first two years of deployment.”

In addition to the Dashboard, the government is also open-sourcing the complementary TechStat Toolkit, a set of tools and processes for reviewing any yellow or red flags that might pop up while using the Dashboard.

In this video, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra talks about the results the government has seen by using the IT Dashboard and how those results were achieved:

But open-sourcing something like this isn’t a cakewalk. The government worked with FOSS and government experts, Code for America and CfA’s Civic Commons project to get the job done.

Project lead Karl Fogel wrote on the Civic Commons blog, “We knew from the beginning that a high-profile project can’t be open sourced casually. It’s not enough to just put an open license on the code, move development out to a publicly visible repository, and call it done.”

He continued to note that for the Dashboard, Civic Commons had to ensure that all the code and documentation was safe for public use (i.e., not classified or a government secret) and audit the code; reduce dependencies on proprietary libraries; write documentation; ceate non-sensitive, non-classified sample data; work with the Drupal community; and much more.

Interested parties can download the Dashboard code now at SourceForge. While the Dashboard is intended to help governments cut costs and manage IT budgets, we can see such tools coming in handy at just about any large company, tech or otherwise.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, GottfriedEdelman

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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has finally conceded, after 18 days of protests calling for his resignation. As a military council takes charge of Egypt, people around the world are sharing their reactions over Twitter and other social sites.

YouTube partnered with curation startup Storyful to chronicle the most important uploads from the protest on its CitizenTube channel, which will continue to give on-the-ground snapshots of reactions to both Mubarak’s address yesterday, when it was anticipated that he would step down but he did not, and today’s announcement. Here is one video that was included on the channel today.

Twitter is erupting with comments from all over the world. The Guardian has mapped those tweets coming from the region itself. We’ve gathered some tweets here to give a snapshot of the reaction, including an observation that someone has already updated Mubarak’s Wikipedia article and the New York Times tweeted in Arabic. (The Times was trying to locate a source for a reporter.)

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As the uprising in Egypt enters its sixth night, social media is active all over the world, and to a much lesser extent, inside of Egypt itself.

The government has officially shut down the Internet in Egypt, bringing the information flow from the country to a trickle. However, resourceful Twitter and Facebook users are still managing to get tweets and SMS messages out of the country using clever methods.

Why is there an uprising going on in Egypt? Egyptians are rebelling against the nearly 30-year reign of President Mosni Mubarak and the government corruption associated with his regime. The country’s troubles include a lack of jobs and poor living conditions, and the protesters charge the ruling elite with squandering the country’s resources. They want Mubarak out.

We’ve been closely watching the social media aspects of this revolution since it began, and in case you missed our coverage, here’s a recap:

8-Year-Old Girl Lectures Egypt’s Mubarak on YouTube [VIDEO]

Twitter Declares, “The Tweets Must Flow”

BlackBerry Service Restored in Cairo? [UPDATED]

Visualizing Egypt’s Internet Blackout [GRAPHIC]

Facebook & Twitter Both Blocked in Egypt

Leaders React to Communication Blackout at World Economic Forum in Davos [VIDEO]

How Users in Egypt Are Bypassing Twitter & Facebook Blocks

Internet Reportedly Down in Syria

The Twitterverse Responds to Protests in Egypt [STATS]

Twitter Blocked in Egypt As Protests Turn Violent

YouTube, Flickr Show Escalating Violence in Egyptian Protests

Internet Access & SMS Blocked in Egypt as Protests Escalate

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Both Facebook and Twitter have closed accounts corresponding to Anonymous, a formerly 4chan-linked group organizing a string of DDoS attacks on organizations that refuse to work with WikiLeaks.

We realize that first sentence is quite a brainful; let’s break down the drama for newcomers to this saga of politics and technology.

WikiLeaks is a controversial (to say the least) whistleblower site. WikiLeaks recently drew the particular ire of the U.S. government after releasing a whopping 250,000 cables from American embassies and diplomats; some of those leaked documents didn’t have proper redactions and may have exposed active government operatives to danger.

Due to political pressure and citing TOS violations, organizations from Paypal to Amazon Web Services began denying service to WikiLeaks. That’s when things got interesting.

A loosely organized consortium of hackers — that would be Anonymous — who felt these anti-WikiLeaks actions were wrong decided to put some pressure on MasterCard et al. themselves by executing DDoS attacks on the websites of the offending institutions. Dubbing their initiative “Operation Payback,” Anonymous has succeeded in taking down all or part of the websites of Visa, MasterCard, PayPal (which has since released funds to WikiLeaks) and Swiss bank PostFinance. The group even went after U.S. politicians who had made negative or even threatening remarks about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, including Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Lieberman.

Anonymous also set up Facebook and Twitter accounts promoting awareness of their mission and links to tools to carry out the DDoSs.

The group’s Facebook account was closed first; shortly thereafter, according to some reports, Anonymous began leaking what it claimed were MasterCard credit card numbers to its Twitter account. The Twitter account was shut down in short order, as well.

Since DDoS attacks aren’t exactly legal, and a group organizing and promoting DDoS attacks on major financial and tech institutions isn’t exactly legal, either, it’s no surprise that Facebook and Twitter have swiftly shut the accounts down, as the purpose of Operation Payback is a flagrant violation of any web service’s terms of service.

However, WikiLeaks’s own Twitter and Facebook accounts remain operational.

Of course, Anonymous is expected to keep creating new accounts as quickly as Facebook and Twitter squash them; it’s a bit like Whack-a-Mole or doing battle with a hydra, in that sense. Fighting Anonymous is a task we wouldn’t wish on anyone.

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Adding an interesting twist to the ongoing (and recently escalating) WikiLeaks saga, the site’s founder, Julian Assange, has agreed to meet with UK police regarding allegations of sexual assault in Sweden and a pursuant extradition warrant.

Assange was added to Interpol’s wanted list last week; Sweden had issued an arrest warrant based on accusations of sexual assault made by two Swedish women. Assange has been calling these accusions a smear campaign.

The WikiLeaks founder is calling for supporters to contribute to his bail fund; he will need between £100,000 and £200,000. The exact amount is to be negotiated in court today.

Various governments and corporations have been putting some pressure on WikiLeaks and Assange over the past several weeks. The site’s DNS service, web servers and even bank accounts have all been shuffled around as high-profile entities such as Amazon, MasterCard and Paypal refused to work with WikiLeaks.

The site’s whistleblower mission has also been under particular scrutiny since its recent leak of more than 250,000 cables to and from U.S. embassies and diplomats, some of which expose the names of active operatives in secret and critical situations.

Assange has said he believes the United States is behind the arrest warrant and extradition attempt; indeed, many U.S. politicians have not had kind words for Assange in recent days. Several conservatives, including Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, have even said he should be assassinated or executed.

We’ll continue to follow WikiLeaks news as it unfolds, but at this point, even we’re wondering if the level of vitriol coming from U.S. politicians is enough to make Assange feel safer in the custody of police than on the street.

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If you were hoping Google would help you save precious seconds in your search for “Sex and the City 2 torrent,” prepare to have your hopes dashed. The search giant is cracking down on piracy in a few ways, including blocking piracy-related terms from autocomplete.

Google has blacklisted a few terms in its time, including “naughty words” and terms like “lesbian.” But this new measure goes beyond protecting children from hate speech and pornography.

Google General Counsel Kent Walker wrote today on the company blog that Google is instituting a new set of actions to help prevent copyright infringement.

In addition to providing more and better access to legally distributed content, such as YouTube clips from a movie posted by the studio itself, Google is also taking some anti-piracy measures. The company says they’ll improve the process for DMCA takedown requests, beginning with Blogger and Search content and eventually including all Google products. For responsible submitters, Google will act on requests within 24 hours. The company says they’re also trying to improve “counter-notice” procedures for people who believe their content was wrongfully removed from the web.

Google is also cracking down on sites that display copyright-infringing material while using AdSense.

Finally, the search company will start blocking certain terms in autocomplete. As walker wrote, “While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose.”

That means that, like “lesbian,” “torrent” will soon be shifted to Google’s naughty list because more people use that term to search for illegal or inappropriate content than for legitimate, legal content.

The past couple years in particular have been a turbulent one for file-sharing and piracy. With Homeland Security seizing websites, the Pirate Bay getting shut down and citizens getting sued by the recording industry, voices like Richard Stallman’s are resonating more and more with the average Internet user. To many of us, these anti-piracy actions seem like an ad hoc, punitive solution to a systemic problem: The recording and film industries are still learning how to come to terms with — and make money from — the Internet.

What do you think of Google’s new position on piracy?

Image courtesy of expressmonorail.

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