Science Addiction

A dormant blog by Devanshu Mehta

Tag: Politics

October 22, 2008

Change Congress

The Change Congress project has been trying to compile a comprehensize database on the positions of members of congress on the subjects of earmark reform, lobbyins money and PAC money. There are two ways people can help.

  1. Pester Your Member of Congress: ask them to tell C-C where they stand on the issues.
  2. TAG a politician: If you find an article or a resource that talks about a particular politicians position on the influence of money in politics, tag them on the C-C web site.

That’s it! It’s a simple, but powerful way to assemble a scorecard.

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October 22, 2008

Kos: Taking on the System

I recently read Markos Moulitsas Zuniga’s (of DailyKos) Taking On the System, and was thoroughly impressed. It is partly a history of the Netroots- the progressive online movement that powered Dean, winning back the Senate and House in 2006 and now Barack Obama. But it is mainly a guide to online (and offline) activism in the Internet age. Ultimately it demonstrates that activists can use the modern web tools of citizen journalism to bypass the traditional gatekeepers- in political parties, in the media and everywhere else.

More than anything else, though, it inspires me to action. Haven’t I been blogging more often recently?

P.S.: I just love the name Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. Sounds like an old South American Revolutionary.
Taking on the System outline

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October 20, 2008

The Twitter Vote Report Project

As I had mentioned a few days ago in my round-up of citizen journalism efforts for the 2008 elections here in the United States, Twitter is proving to be ground-zero for the election zeitgeist.

Now we get the Twitter Vote Report project, which has introduced a few tags for election-day reporting about voting issues.

  • #votereport- for reporting basic voting issues
  • #machine- for reporting voting machine issues
  • #registration- for registration problems
  • #wait:time- for waiting time, where ‘time’ is number of minutes
  • #EP[two letter state code]- for serious legal issues in that state (e.g. EPOH in Ohio)
  • zipcode: to denote your exact location

A lot more is being planned to mine, use and act upon this information. There is a code jamming session on the 24th of October and guides are being developed for situations in which the above codes should be used.

techPresident highlights some of the issues that still need to be worked out:

  • How do you get real people to use this, as opposed to the twitterati.
  • Do we let the response be organic or organized?
  • How to clarify the intent of this project (as opposed to the many others being organized)

And so forth. It’s all worth watching and participating in.

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October 20, 2008

EFF Challenges Constitutionality of Telecom Immunity in Federal Court

nsa_logo

No Such Agency...

EFF, fighting the good fight–

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Thursday challenged the constitutionality of a law aimed at granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president’s illegal domestic wiretapping program.

In a brief filed in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, EFF argues that the flawed FISA Amendments Act (FAA) violates the federal government’s separation of powers as established in the Constitution and robs innocent telecom customers of their rights without due process of law. Signed into law earlier this year, the FAA allows for the dismissal of the lawsuits over the telecoms’ participation in the warrantless surveillance program if the government secretly certifies to the court that either the surveillance did not occur, was legal, or was authorized by the president. Attorney General Michael Mukasey filed that classified certification with the court last month.

The constitutional challenge is set to be heard on December 2. EFF has more information on the NSA spying issue.

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October 20, 2008

Resources for Getting Your Vote Counted

Nancy Scola at TechPresident has put together a set of resources to help you vote and make sure it counts. Especially interesting are resources for college students who vote where they go to school and the large variety of rules regarding voting by felons.

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October 19, 2008

John McCain: For and Against Net Neutrality?

I was reading John McCain’s Technology Policy page on his web site and the following stood out:

John McCain Will Preserve Consumer Freedoms. John McCain will focus on policies that leave consumers free to access the content they choose; free to use the applications and services they choose; free to attach devices they choose, if they do not harm the network; and free to chose among broadband service providers.

When Regulation Is Warranted, John McCain Acts. John McCain does not believe in prescriptive regulation like “net-neutrality,” but rather he believes that an open marketplace with a variety of consumer choices is the best deterrent against unfair practices.

The problem? The first paragraph about “preserving consumer freedoms” lists four things that McCain will protect- access content, apps and services, attach devices, and choice of service providers. In the next paragraph, he says that he does not believe in net-neutrality. The problem is that those four freedoms are what the FCC and other independent activists have adopted as the four principles of Net Neutrality.

So- is McCain simply against using the word net-neutrality, while agreeing with it on the four core principles? Lawrence Lessig has a detailed video about McCain’s policy, where he makes the argument that McCain is against regulating network neutrality but would rather leave them to “faith” on the network companies. The video follows (after the jump): Read the rest of this entry »

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October 18, 2008

The Intellectual Property Enforcement Bill

This is not a love song

Mickey Mouse politics

While (still) President Bush signed the sorry Intellectual Property Enforcement Bill in to law last week, EFF reminds us of a few victories we won over the past few months that stripped it of things like:

  • Higher damages for filesharing.
  • A vast government IP enforcement bureaucracy.
  • The Attorney General’s office will no longer become “pro bono lawyers for private copyright holders regardless of their resources.”

We should always celebrate the small victories (and, in this case, thank Public Knowledge for fighting the good fight). There will still be a “Copyright Czar”, but that position will be appointed by the President. And all indications are that we might get a President who takes a bit more nuanced position on these issues. Wired’s Threat Level blog is taking votes on who should be appointed to that position. My vote is with Lessig.

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October 17, 2008

Citizen Journalism Resources for Election Day

citizen journalism

in India

This election will be remembered as the first one where traditional media relied heavily on citizen journalism and new media. Take a look at Twitter’s Election 2008 live feed to get a feel for the political zeitgeist. Or how Free Press created “Rate the Debates”:http://www.freepress.net/debates to provide actual input from people before the pundits could formulate their conventional wisdom. Or how C-SPAN and NPR mined twitter for live fact checking, dialtests and general citizen journalism.

Well, election day will be no different. Twitter will probably end up being the place to gain a sense of the situation on the ground, but a lot of other web sites are hoping to provide people with the tools to report voter suppression, other problems and experiences. Here are a few resources:

SourceWatch.org’s Election Protection Wiki

The Election Protection Wiki is a non-partisan, non-profit collaboration of citizens, activists and researchers to build a one-stop-shop for reports of voter suppression and the systemic threats to election integrity. We collect just the straight facts that are fully referenced to external, verifiable sources, and we need your help.


Wired’s Election Problem Reporting Site

Over the next weeks, if you have trouble at the polls, either during early voting or on Election Day, we’d like you to add your issue to our map. Be sure to provide as much detail as possible. You may also include links to video or audio.


YouTube & PBS: Video Your Vote

YouTube’s Video Your Vote, a non-partisan program produced in partnership with PBS, encourages American voters to document their voting experiences.

Whether it’s a video shot at the polls on Election Day, an account of your early voting experience, or you filming yourself filling out an absentee ballot — we want you to upload it here.

The Video Your Vote channel is also a one-stop-shop to view exclusive videos from voter registration experts, election reform activists, and state officials, as well as video footage from the PBS archives for a historical look at voting through the years.


Voter Suppression Wiki

This site is designed to be a hub of information and action around efforts to suppress votes in the 2008 U.S. elections.


Citizen Media Law Project Blog
Has a lot of resources on the legality of documenting your vote and the areas in and around polling places.

The New York Times Polling Place Photo Project

The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this years primaries, caucuses and general election. By documenting local voting experiences, participants can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.

Twitter Vote Report Project

Anyone with a Twitter.com account can use their cell phones or their computers to send a message and notify voters and election monitors around the country.

I will add more to this page as I discover them.

UPDATE: Some resources to make sure your vote gets counted.

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October 17, 2008

Seasons Givings: 2008

A few years ago, this blog made the front page of Slashdot with a list of “geek” charities and projects that I thought were worth my donations.

For this year, I have a shortened list- a couple of old favorites and a couple of new favorites. Let me start with the new:

DonorsChoose.org
In their own words:

DonorsChoose.org is a simple way to provide students in need with resources that our public schools often lack. At this not-for-profit web site, teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund.

Proposals range from “Magical Math Centers” ($200) to “Big Book Bonanza” ($320), to “Cooking Across the Curriculum” ($1,100). Any individual can search such proposals by areas of interest, learn about classroom needs, and choose to fund the project(s) they find most compelling. In completing a project, donors receive a feedback package of student photos and thank-you notes, and a teacher impact letter.

This is fantastic- and you can select a school close to your home if you want. They funded over $6.4 million worth of school projects in 2008.

Kiva

Kiva lets you make loans to the working poor- you will be repaid, but without interest. You can fund real people, with real small business projects. They partner with expert microfinance institutions in the regions where you lend money. I’ve been lending small amounts of money to projects all over the world for a couple of years now- it works, the money has always been repaid.

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And then there are a few old favorites- no surprise if you read this blog regularly.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

If you believe in any of the things I write about here- defending your rights in the digital world- then EFF is fighting for you. Just today, they announced that they are challenging the constitutionality of the law granting telecom immunity to the companies that helped the government in its domestic illegal wiretapping.

Creative Commons

For an idea about why I support Creative Commons, check out my article about why this blog is CC licensed. I joined the Creative Commons network a couple of days ago- if nothing else, it gives you a free, privacy-protected openID profile.

And a few honorable mentions:

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October 15, 2008

White Spaces Update

Media and internet legal scholar Susan Crawford has an update on white spaces on her blog:

Today, with Congress in recess, leaving less room for last-minute-Lucy-with-the-football lobbying gambits, the FCC appears to be poised to release a report saying the white spaces can be used without necessarily causing interference to existing broadcasts.

Lucy pulls back the football

If you’re unfamiliar with the issue, she has a brief introduction to white spaces in the article. A few weeks ago, we also had a video from the People’s Production House that described the issue in non-technical terms. In short- there are a lot of frequencies that will become available when the digital television transition occurs next year and there is a lot of interest from certain entities with deep pockets in keeping them locked away. This report from the FCC is potentially a step in the right direction.

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