Nancy Scola

Todd Park, who took over the job of US Chief Technology Officer nearly two and a half years ago, is returning home to California at by the end of August. He will, according to those familiar with the situation, remain part of the White House team, helping to recruit technologists to government service and keeping an eye on how the evolution of tech might impact the creation of public policy.

And Park's departure reopens the debate over what the nature of the US CTO role should be. One read of the job suggests that, in ideal times, the CTO post should be far more focused on developing public policy than rebooting botched IT projects. Also renewed by Park's decision to head west is the question of what sort of person should fill the US Chief Technology Officer’s slot.

The recently-launched United States Digital Service (USDS) is modeled on the UK Cabinet Office's Government Digital Service which helps deploy new citizen-centric technologies throughout British government.

Since its launch in 2010, GDS has emerged as the gold-standard in the global world of digital government.

DirecTV and Dish Network customers may notice something a little different this election season: Your television ads know who you are.

The satellite television providers have partnered with Democratic and Republican data shops to harness information about their 20 million customers and deliver television ads tailored to the viewer.

The technology, known as "addressable advertising," is the latest front in a growing battle to reach voters.

The television providers will take over a customer's digital video recorder, or DVR, when it's not in use -- likely in the middle of the night. The targeted ads are downloaded. When a cue is sent by an advertiser of the perfect moment to run, one of those ads are picked off the box and run on the television screen, appearing just like any ol' television commercial.

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) called for legal reforms that embrace an understanding that the mere act of handing over digital data doesn't mean giving way a user's right to privacy.

What Sen Wyden, long a spirited privacy advocate, is pressing for is reform of the so-called "third-party doctrine," or the idea that by releasing data to another person, business or entity one gives up some Fourth Amendment protections. The doctrine is rooted in the 1979 Smith v. Maryland decision, in which the Supreme Court found that telephone users had no reasonable reason to believe that their calling records are private.

Wireless service provider T-Mobile began offering its customers an alternative. Under a free feature on some plans, T-Mobile users can now stream music services like Pandora, iTunes Radio, Rhapsody, and Spotify all day long without having to worry about sapping their data caches.

T-Mobile calls it "Music Freedom," and it's part of a quiet but powerful global trend.

There is a trade-off for consumers, though. In return for low-cost service, users are, in some cases, being corralled into a limited view of the Internet. Rather than wandering freely from site to site, they have gained gatekeepers who have power over what they see.

BitTorrent -- perhaps best known in the tech world for providing the Internet plumbing for Pirate Bay, a notorious site frequently used to illegally share copyrighted material -- is now making a play for the mainstream.

Travelers on both coasts are being greeted by BitTorrent ads that are in line with traditional Madison Avenue marketing: "Your Data Belongs to You," reads one such billboard on New York City's TriBeCa neighborhood. Reads another, in San Francisco's SoMa, "People > Servers," using the mathematical symbol for "greater than."

More than a dozen years after getting its start as a grad school project, BitTorrent is making a push to sell itself to a mainstream audience, in light of the growing interest in law enforcement cellphone tracking, the recent Supreme Court case over who owns user data, even Anonymous's hacking efforts.

As much as some places in the United States have struggled to get good, affordable, accessible Internet connectivity, one type of spot on the map has struggled even more than most: tribal lands. One somewhat bright sign in all this, as is the case in so many challenged communities, is libraries.

Where solid Internet connections are difficult to come by, public libraries often are a lifesaver.

A new report from the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums finds that some 89 percent of tribal libraries are providing some kind of public Internet access, which compares moderately well with the 100 percent of all public libraries in the United States that do so.

Still, dig a bit into the data, and problems re-emerge. Even if tribal libraries are providing Internet connectivity, they are lagging behind their non-tribal counterparts in providing the tools to make use of it and the services that ride on top of it.

Lawmakers, including the chairman and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who have pressed the Federal Communications Commission to keep national security in mind when choosing a new management of the National Portability Administration Center, have now gotten support from the law enforcement community.

The FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Secret Service have weighed in, telling the FCC that they believe that the agency should take into consideration how well any vendor might "satisfy the important law enforcement, public safety, and national security equities" of local and federal authorities.

The FBI, DEA and Secret Service maintain that they take no position on Telcordia's potential selection as the next contractor in particular. But they highlight some of the sensitivities of using the system in the course of their work.

Doug Madory is the senior analyst of Renesys, a small New Hampshire-based firm specializing in what it calls "Internet intelligence." Madory writes much of the company's coverage of news events.

Madory and his colleagues have the rare ability to see in real time where a nation is situated in the global digital fabric.

The insights found into which dictator has kicked his country off the Internet for how long is a byproduct of Renesys's core work of selling information on the flow of Internet traffic to Internet service providers. But by monitoring the Internet's vital signs, the company can see how the ever-evolving global network of networks fits into global events.

PDFs can be the bane of open government advocates' existence: digital, yes, but often far more difficult to work with than other electronic file formats. But there is perhaps a bright spot for them over in the United Kingdom.