June 2012

At Meeting of Left’s Online Activists, Weighing Impact of Attack Ads

Internet-savvy members of the political left have found the root of their problem — the “super PACs” unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. They just do not know how to solve it.

This year’s Netroots Nation conference fell just days after the failed effort to recall a union-busting Republican governor in Wisconsin. The liberal activists and bloggers who gathered in Providence (RI) for the four-day event were clearly upset that their highly refined ground game could not overcome the huge financial advantage held by the governor, Scott Walker, and his forces. Walker’s victory was attributable only in part to the Supreme Court case that paved the way for unlimited donations to outside political groups. Still, the conference attendees feared that especially in races further down the ballot, super PACs would hit their candidates with a barrage of attack ads that they could not match. “The reality is we’re not going to change the system overnight,” said Daniel Mintz, campaign director at MoveOn. “This is a new world, and if we don’t figure it out, we’re going to have a lot more losses than wins.”

Commerce Secretary John Bryson accused in hit-and-run crashes

Authorities are investigating a series of traffic collisions in the San Gabriel Valley (CA) involving U.S. Secretary of Commerce John Bryson, authorities said.

Sec Bryson was found unconscious in his vehicle and has been hospitalized, officials said. Sec Bryson was driving a Lexus in the 400 block of South San Gabriel Boulevard shortly after 5 p.m. Saturday, when he allegedly rear-ended a Buick as it was waiting for a train to pass, according to a statement released by the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and the San Gabriel Police Department. After briefly stopping to talk to the three men inside the Buick, Sec Bryson left the location in the Lexus and then struck the Buick a second time, authorities said. The men followed Bryson's car and called 911 to ask for police assistance. Sec Bryson continued to drive his Lexus into Rosemead, which is patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. There, he allegedly crashed into a second vehicle near the intersection of San Gabriel Boulevard and Hellman Avenue. There authorities found him alone and unconscious behind the wheel of his car.

Google Fights Back in China

[Commentary] Two giants on the world stage are battling over the future of information. One is an authoritarian regime suppressing access to modern technology. The other is an information company fighting back without support from its home country. The conflict between China and Google is shaping up as the first war of the digital era.

Google recently launched a pair of counterattacks, last week informing Gmail account holders when "state-sponsored attackers" compromise their emails. Gmail users get this pop-up message: "Warning: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer. Protect yourself now." Users are told how to do so, including with a new login process. Governments that stifle information lose the benefit of the doubt with their own people. Even Beijing may not be able to suppress information forever. Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist who took refuge in the U.S. Embassy and was eventually allowed to come to the U.S., last week told the Council on Foreign Relations: "I think even over the last few years as the Information Age has developed so quickly, China's society has gotten to the era where if you don't want something known, you better not do it."

EU Officials Try to Clarify Privacy Rules for the Web

European officials are mounting a new push to clarify -- and enforce -- rules involving small Internet files that can be used to track users, exposing the slow progress of Europe's plan to implement far-reaching privacy rules.

Digital-privacy agencies from the European Union's member countries hashed out new recommendations late last week for how to apply European data-privacy laws to so-called cookies, the common Internet files that websites use to remember things about users. The cookies can also be used by central aggregators to track users' online behavior on the Web. The new guidelines, expected to be released as early as this week, regulators say, more clearly distinguish between relatively innocuous cookies that websites can deploy without users' permission, and those for which regulators want websites to get user consent. Likely to stay on the consent-needed list: the cookies that are used to track users' Web browsing in order to show the users targeted ads.

Brown blasts Murdoch papers at Leveson

Gordon Brown condemned News International’s coverage of his government, saying the press conflated fact and opinion as if it had a “license to deceive” and put its own commercial interests first.

Brown, the former prime minister, told the Leveson inquiry it was wrong to think he had the support of The Sun and other NI titles at any time in his term of office. He said it had become clear that the company was following its commercial interest, aimed at weakening the BBC and Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator. He said a series of articles run in The Sun were “not campaigns relating to objective journalism exposing facts.” “These, unfortunately, were campaigns that were designed to cause discomfort to people that were politically unacceptable.” He said: “News International had a public agenda, an aggressive public agenda. They wanted not just to buy BSkyB, they wanted to change the whole nature of the BBC, they wanted to change Ofcom, they wanted to change media impartiality rules.” He said his government had defended the public interest against that commercial interest. “I did so and I think we did so at a cost,” he said.

Swedes’ Twitter Voice: Anyone, Saying (Blush) Almost Anything

If there is anything to be learned from the @Sweden experiment, a government initiative that entrusts the country’s Twitter account to a new citizen every seven days, it is that there is no such thing as a typical Swede.

The @Sweden program, known as Curators of Sweden, came about when the Swedish Institute and Visit Sweden, the government tourist agency, sought to develop a plan to present the country to the world on Twitter. They hired an advertising company, Volontaire. “Sweden stands for certain values — being progressive, democratic, creative,” Patrick Kampmann, Volontaire’s creative director, said in an interview. “We believed the best way to prove it was to handle the account in a progressive way and give control of it to ordinary Swedes.” The @Swedens are nominated by others — people are not supposed to put their own name forward — and then selected by a committee of three, including Mr. Kampmann. The qualifications are that they have to be interesting, Twitter-literate and happy to post in English. They are told not to do anything criminal, to label political opinions as their own and “not to make it sound like the entire Sweden feels that way.

Swiss Court Orders Modifications to Google Street View

Switzerland’s highest court upheld Google’s basic right to document residential street fronts with its Street View technology, but imposed some limitations on the kinds of images the company can take.

The ruling leaves the service legally intact in Switzerland, which has some of the strictest privacy safeguards in the world. Swiss regulators and Google both said they were pleased with the decision. The Swiss ruling did not involve the collection of private Internet data but focused on the conditions for Street View cars to photograph the country’s streets. In its ruling, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, the Bundesgericht, said Google did not have to guarantee 100 percent blurring of the faces of pedestrians, auto license plates and other identifying markers captured by Google’s Street View cars; 99 percent would be acceptable. The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., says its technology blurs faces and license plates in 99 percent of cases. While the Swiss court sided with Google on the adequacy of its digital pixilation methods, the panel upheld several conditions demanded by the national regulator. Those conditions would require Google to lower the height of its Street View cameras so they would not peer over garden walls and hedges, to completely blur out sensitive facilities like women’s shelters, prisons, retirement homes and schools, and to advise communities in advance of scheduled tapings.

EU Antitrust Chief Sets the Clock on Google Talks

Google has until the beginning of next month to indicate to the European Union's top antitrust official that it is willing to negotiate remedies to allegations of anti-competitive business practices, or else face a formal complaint and possible fines. If negotiations don't yield an acceptable remedy, "formal proceedings will continue through the adoption of a Statement of Objections," said E.U. Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia, in a speech at a legal conference in St. Gallen, Switzerland. "I want to give the company the opportunity to offer remedy proposals that would avoid lengthy proceedings," Almunia said. "By early July, I expect to receive from Google concrete signs of their willingness to explore this route."

Facebook Holds a Vote and Turnout is Low

It has more than 900 million people. It has its own currency. And this month, for the first time, the digital republic known as Facebook held elections of a sort: it offered users a chance to vote on the way the site is governed, including how the company deploys its users’ data. Turnout was spectacularly bad in the digital republic that the writer Rebecca Mackinnon has dubbed Facebookistan. Fewer than 350,000 Facebook users voted, or under four percent. “Given these efforts and the subsequent turnout,” Elliot Schrage, its vice president of communications and public policy, wrote on the site, “We plan to review this process to determine how to maximize our ability to promote user engagement and participation in our site governance process in the future.”

Apple to Pay Millions for Australian 4G iPad Debacle

Apple is facing a penalty of more than $2 million Australian for allegedly misleading consumers by promoting the 4G capabilities of the new iPad despite its incompatibility with Australia’s sole 4G network, run by Telstra.

Apple agreed to pay A$2.25 million in fines and A$300,000 in legal fees to settle the case brought against it by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, though the presiding judge, Mordecai Bromberg of the Federal Court in Victoria, is unsure whether that’s a sufficient penalty. He has declined to approve the settlement until he’s told how many customers felt they’d been misled by the “iPad + 4G” branding Apple used in Australia, and learns more about the company’s finances.

Benton

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