IPhone Public Distrusts Dial-Up Government: Michael Waldman Americans have argued over government’s role since the days when politicians wore powdered wigs. Lately this great debate seemed more like a monologue. Conservatives denounce government with zest. That began to change with Obama’s State of the Union last week, which sketched an appealing picture of government as an engine of economic innovation. We have always been ambivalent about what Thomas Paine called “a necessary evil.” In his landmark 1932 Commonwealth Club speech, Franklin D. Modern conservatism was born, in large measure, to repudiate that view. Threat to Freedom These assaults bit because they came at a time when government seemed unable to meet basic tests, from curbing crime to managing its own finances. Through the years, there have been hiccups and hesitations. All this even though government in the U.S. still is much smaller than elsewhere. Shift Against Government Nonetheless, the public largely buys the Republican critique. Democrat Strategy But he must do much more.
WikiLeaks cables: A guide to Gaddafi's 'famously fractious' family | World news Muammar Gaddafi presides over a 'dysfunctional' family of eight offspring, WikiLeaks cables reveal. Photograph: Sabri Elmhedwi/EPA The leader of the Libyan revolution presides over a "famously fractious" family that is powerful, wealthy, dysfunctional and marked by internecine struggles, according to US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. The documents shed light on how his eight children – among whom rivalries have sharpened in recent years – his wife and Gaddafi himself lead their lives. Muammar Gaddafi The patriarch, now 68, was described by US ambassador to Tripoli, Gene Cretz, in 2009 as a "mercurial and eccentric figure who suffers from severe phobias, enjoys flamenco dancing and horseracing, acts on whims and irritates friends and enemies alike." Safiya (nee Farkash) Gaddafi's second wife travels by chartered jet in Libya, with a motorcade of Mercedes vehicles waiting to pick her up at the airport to take her to her destination, but her movements are limited and discreet. Aisha
Your Life Torn Open, essay 1: Sharing is a trap This article was taken from the March 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. The author of The Cult Of The Amateurargues that if we lose our privacy we sacrifice a fundamental part of our humanity. Every so often, when I'm in Amsterdam, I visit the Rijksmuseum to remind myself about the history of privacy. Today, as social media continues radically to transform how we communicate and interact, I can't help thinking with a heavy heart about The Woman in Blue. On this future network, we will all know what everyone is doing all the time. Every so often, when I'm in London, I visit University College to remind myself about the future of privacy. Unfortunately, Bentham's panopticon was a dark premonition. Yet nobody in the industrial era actually wanted to become artefacts in this collective exhibition.
Juan Cole, American Policy on the Brink Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently took a four-day tour of the Middle East, at each stop telling various allies and enemies, in classic American fashion, what they must do. And yet as she spoke, events in Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, and even Egypt seemed to spin ever more out of American control. Meanwhile, the regime in Tunisia, one of the autocratic and repressive states Washington has been supporting for years even as it prattles on about “democracy” and “human rights,” began to crumble. In Doha, Qatar, in front of an elite audience peppered with officials from the region, Clinton suddenly issued a warning to Arab leaders that people had “grown tired of corrupt institutions and a stagnant political order” and that “in too many ways, the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand.” And there, of course, was the rub. The problem: Washington’s foreign-policy planners seem to be out of ideas, literally brain-dead, just as the world is visibly in flux.
Diplomat Carne Ross Asks: Are the Cables Too Important to Leave to WikiLeaks, the NYTimes, and The Guardian to Sift? I spent yesterday deep in the weeds of WikiLeaks post-mortemizing, first at an invitation-only session run by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, at the Harvard Kennedy School and then in the evening at a jam-packed public event hosted by the Columbia University Journalism School. You can read my live notes from Harvard here and Columbia here. This is what happens, I guess, when you write a quickie book on the topic (pre-order your copies here). I was struck by two things across both events, which featured top editors from the New York Times and the Guardian, and in the case of Harvard, a strong contingent of former top government officials. At best, the Eastern Establishment seems resigned to not being able to prosecute Assange in a serious way, because of how that would also damage more "respectable" journalism, and seems to be hoping this will all go away soon. "Was Tunisia in [our] initial coverage?" Ross concludes with two very important insights:
Tunisian Government Websites Attacked Via DDoS The repercussions of Tunisia’s strict online censorship reached an apex in the Arab country this week as multiple DDoS attacks continue to target the government. Hackers known collectively as the Anonymous group took down at least eight government websites beginning on January 2, according to the New New Internet. In their online manifesto, the group cites government censorship as their primary reason for launching their series of attacks which has brought multiple Tunisian administrative sites this week, including the Ministries site and the Tunisian Industry Portal. “Like a fistful of sand in the palm of your grip, the more you squeeze your citizens the more that they will flow right out of your hand,” the group wrote in the public statement. “The more you censor your own citizens the more they shall know about you and what you are doing.” “Join Anonymous at irc.anonops.ru #opTunisia #OperationPayback” Tunisia’s history of government censorship is and remains prevalent.
Leaked Labour email: lay off Murdoch An email, forwarded on behalf of Ed Miliband's director of strategy, Tom Baldwin, to all shadow cabinet teams warns Labour spokespeople to avoid linking hacking with the BSkyB bid, to accept ministerial assurances that meetings with Rupert Murdoch are not influencing that process, and to ensure that complaints about tapping are made in a personal, not shadow ministerial, capacity. The circular, sent by a Labour press officer on 27 January, states: "Tom Baldwin has requested that any front-bench spokespeople use the following line when questioned on phone-hacking. BSkyB bid and phone-tapping . . . these issues should not be linked. It goes on: "Downing Street says that Cameron's dinners with Murdoch will not affect Hunt's judgement. Referring separately to the phone-hacking allegations, the memo states: "We believe the police should thoroughly investigate all allegations. The memo follows a number of recent high-profile interventions from Ed Miliband in the phone-hacking issue.
WikiLeaks Word Clouds: Iraq and Cablegate WikiLeaks is all over the news at the moment, having pulled the veil off thousands of U.S. diplomatic and Iraq War communications. As we've done before, we looked at the data in a different way: By peeking at the words themselves. WikiLeaks' latest data treasure trove includes hundreds of thousands of communications between diplomats and politicians in the U.S. and overseas, and while the full archive has only been shared with a select group of people, WikiLeaks has posted the whole shebang online for anyone to see--in slices. We grabbed hold of the first slice of data, dismembered it and looked at the communications ("cables" as they're quaintly called) and ran them through a simple word cloud generator. The results are powerful. Guess what word is most on the minds of U.S. diplomats in 2010? But what of the other enormous WikiLeaks treasure trove? It's a different story, of course.
A computational journalism reading list [Last updated: 18 April 2011 -- added statistical NLP book link] There is something extraordinarily rich in the intersection of computer science and journalism. It feels like there’s a nascent field in the making, tied to the rise of the internet. The last few years have seen calls for a new class of “programmer journalist” and the birth of a community of hacks and hackers. I’d like to propose a working definition of computational journalism as the application of computer science to the problems of public information, knowledge, and belief, by practitioners who see their mission as outside of both commerce and government. “Computational journalism” has no textbooks yet. Data journalism Data journalism is obtaining, reporting on, curating and publishing data in the public interest. Visualization Big data requires powerful exploration and storytelling tools, and increasingly that means visualization. Tamara Munzner’s chapter on visualization is the essential primer.
Mapping the connections among the wikileaks, pdfleaks and cablegate mentioning twitter populations with NodeXL On Saturday 11 December 2010 A Symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom ( was held in New York City. I did not attend in person, but the event was streamed live. A colleague of mine, Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc), a sociologist from the University of Maryland ebiquity group, did attend and spoke on the second panel of the day (her blog at Here are some NodeXL generated maps of recent discussions around Wikileaks, pdfleaks, and cablegate in Twitter: These are the connections among the people who tweeted the term “wikileaks” on 11 December 2010. The most between people who tweeted the term “wikileaks” on 11 December 2010. Here is the data file: 20101209-NodeXL-Twitter-wikileaks These are the connections among people who recently tweeted “pdfleaks” in Twitter on 11 December 2010. The most between people who tweeted the term pdfleaks“ on 11 December 2010. Here is the data set: 20101211-NodeXL-Twitter-pdfleaks
Huffington Should Pay the Bloggers Something Now We already know that Arianna Huffington is smart. She and her small team have built a media company from nothing in just a few years, and now they’re flipping it to AOL, where she’ll be content editor in chief. The price sounds bizarrely high to me at $315 million, but so do lots of prices these days in what looks like a new Internet bubble. Others have commented at length on the synergy of the deal. If AOL is going after a link-driven community, the blend could work in the long run. The Huffington Post has been evolving from its origins, as the left-wing op-ed page of the Internet, into a blend of aggregation, curation, pandering — all of which have been done with some genuinely intriguing if not innovative technology initiatives — and some home-grown content. AOL has been rolling the dice at an ever-more-frantic rate lately on digital content. And, based on the email Huffington sent to her bloggers, that’s the model she plans to continue.
WikiLeaks cables: Shell's grip on Nigerian state revealed | Business The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians' every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable. The company's top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew "everything that was being done in those ministries". She boasted that the Nigerian government had "forgotten" about the extent of Shell's infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations. The cache of secret dispatches from Washington's embassies in Africa also revealed that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm swapped intelligence with the US, in one case providing US diplomats with the names of Nigerian politicians it suspected of supporting militant activity, and requesting information from the US on whether the militants had acquired anti-aircraft missiles. Other cables released tonight reveal:
AOL + Huffington Post = disaster? | Emily Bell If a company is to enjoy success in the world of media in general, and content creation in particular, then two ingredients have to be present. One is a strong culture and the other is scale. It explains the success of any number of brands – News Corporation, the Daily Mail, the BBC, the Financial Times – in the recent difficult past. For companies that have scale but lack a culture, or vice versa, the obvious yet so often disastrous solution is to merge. Nothing creates greater comedic value or destroys actual monetary value quicker than trying to acquire a culture in pursuit of scale and getting the whole thing wrong. This is why AOL's purchase of the Huffington Post is causing such intense media interest. Tim Armstrong, who joined AOL as chief executive from Google in 2009, wants both the culture and the growth. Part of Huffington Post's success was its vibrance and its position outside the establishment.
AOL's Tim Armstrong and HuffPo's Arianna Huffington Video Interview on Acquisition Deal | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD Here’s an exclusive video interview BoomTown did with Huffington Post co-founder and Editor in Chief Arianna Huffington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong this morning at Super Bowl XLV in Texas, just ahead of their announcement tonight that the Internet company was buying the news and opinion site. Like both the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers, the pair are going for an Internet content win, after AOL paid $315 million, mostly in cash and a small amount of stock, for the Huffington Post. With the acquisition of one of the Internet’s best-known news brands, AOL is making its biggest move so far as it seeks to establish itself as a content leader on the Web. As part of the deal, Huffington will become editor over all AOL content properties. And editorial material from all these sites will be integrated into the Huffington Post, giving it a huge new infusion of editorial material.