I'm starting to get into twittering. I blog and write so much that my first impulse was to not want to do that much of it, but I'm starting to enjoy it now...

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If you want to join me, http://twitter.com/JohnAmato.

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You can follow the site at crooksandliars, or just the Music Club at cnlmusicclub.

It's all Howie's fault by the way, He's a twittering fool...

It looks like twittering beat cable in updating the recent elections.

Also use this thread to explain how twitter works for you, and any tips you have, if you use it please. Knowing the basics goes a long way.

I'm trying for 5000 followers.

My hat off to Natasha Chart of MyDD and OpenLeft for pointing me to this fantastic take on the issue of Web2.0, censorship and political activism.

With web 2.0, we’ve embraced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on - the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.

Author Ethan Zuckerman looks at political activism in Tunisia, China and Bahrain and how the respective governments tried to shut down the activists by blocking access to various sites like Daily Motion and YouTube, only to create more activists upset at the censorship of their right to look at cute kitties. The entire essay with all its links is well worth your time.

But that's international activism. Here at home, the internet has enabled a whole new swath of citizen journalists. And they are picking up the slack for the old media:

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I noticed this last week, because my internet access was unusually slow. I wondered then what was going on and finally read about the Bay Area cuts. This additional perspective isn't all that reassuring:

There may be more security issues than ever with a so-called smart grid controlling power distribution in the country.

The real likelihood that hackers can break into such a grid is actually not a possibility, but an inevitability. What is always overlooked when these fancy initiatives are unveiled is the nature of the Internet.

What we need is a distribution system that relies on computer technology for management, but which is completely off the Net itself. Nobody wants to do that.

It is crazy to put all of our eggs in one Internet basket, as the telecommunications scene worldwide is subject to too much hacking. Even a non-Internet network cannot be secured.

This problem goes further than hackers online -- it goes to our overdependence on interconnectivity through common connections.

This week in the San Francisco Bay Area, the fiber-optic cable network was purposely sliced at four distinct locations. Where a hacker cannot succeed, bolt cutters will do.

[...] Once the cables were cut, Internet service was flaky for the region and completely out for 50,000 customers. On top of that, the landlines would not work and the cell-phone towers in the area went dead.

Does anyone find this sort of interdependency a little disconcerting? It is as if someone was testing the grid for either redundancy or failure points.

Much of the problem stems from the issues with technologies such as fiber optics. They require a level of public trust to work, because the cables must be clearly marked to prevent public works and contractors from accidentally cutting them.

In most parts of the country, there are signs up and down highways, across bodies of water and even in cities marking the location of a fiber-optic line. There are even maps of these things and where they are located.

How much work would it take to find some choke points that you could cut for the purposes of disrupting data communications in an area? How would this affect the so-called smart grid?

The peculiar nature of the four cuts around the Bay Area indicated to me that someone was mapping how they would affect the region, keeping in mind that by cutting the cable in key areas you might be able to take down half the country. If more cuts are made in the future, then someone is trying to reverse-engineer the network to find the most vulnerable points of disruption.

Chalk this up as forcing you to become big brother:

Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.

The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.

"While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children," U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said at a press conference on Thursday. "Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level."

Joining Cornyn was Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said such a measure would let "law enforcement stay ahead of the criminals."

Two bills have been introduced so far--S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Each of the companion bills is titled "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act," or Internet Safety Act.

So in essence, if you have a wireless router in your home then you would be required to log all access to that router and keep those logs for two years. Why? Because your neighbor might do something bad and use your internet connection to do it.

What has me scratching my head is the situation of failure. What if my $50 Linksys decides to bite the dust after one year? Do I have to store that router for another year to comply with this law?

How about people who have routers without logging, or that has very limited logging that might only keep X number of records and couldn’t possibly store the data for two years? Will these people have to go out and by new routers now?

This legislation will really cause outcries from privacy advocates. Just the idea that some people may have to go out and buy new hardware simply to become a new “big brother” for our government is very troubling.

If John were to ask his hard-working staff to "go boldly and seek the accolades of
AOL/Time/Warner", well, you can imagine what their reaction would be.

But Time Magazine thinks we rock anyway.

Everyone at C&L works long and hard to make this corner of the internet worth the visit seven days a week. It's not done for the awards, naturally, but it's always nice to be recognized for what we do.

John Amato:

I'm very grateful for everyone who helps put this blog together and for all the help our readers give. I think it was Dan Manatt of Politics TV that called me the Vlog Father a few years ago when we were talking on the phone. I thought that was pretty funny and we laughed about it. TIME used it.

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This could affect the blogosphere as we know it, most specifically news aggregators:

A copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit filed last month against The New York Times Co., owner of The Boston Globe and its Boston.com website, is being watched closely by news organizations, Internet researchers, independent bloggers, and companies that aggregate news online by linking to a variety of news sites.

At the heart of the complaint, lodged by GateHouse Media Inc., which publishes 125 community newspapers in Massachusetts, is the question of whether Internet news providers will be able to continue the practice of posting headlines and lead sentences from stories they link to on other sites.The case has been scheduled for trial in US District Court in Boston as early as Monday.

"This is the first case where these intellectual property issues have come to a head," said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge. "If the judge was to rule for GateHouse on every point, it would have far-reaching implications for the news and information ecosystem that underlies the Web as we know it."

Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., a school for professional journalists, said the case could result in new guidelines for how much, if any, content from one website can be used by another. "This is standard procedure across the Internet now," she said. "Newsrooms adopted the procedure from other practitioners."

And were wondering why:

Millions of people across the Middle East and Asia have lost access to the internet after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean suffered severe damage.

Huge numbers in Egypt and India were left struggling to get online as a result of the outage, when the major internet pipeline between Egypt and Italy was cut.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) throughout the region, including those in United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, also reported problems. International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem.

    In the midst of all the convention hooplah, some important stories get missed. That seems to be the case with the tale of Bush ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been engaged in some very irregular cozying up with Pakistani presidential hopeful Asif Zardari.

Mr. Khalilzad had spoken by telephone with Mr. Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, several times a week for the past month until he was confronted about the unauthorized contacts, a senior United States official said. Other officials said Mr. Khalilzad had planned to meet with Mr. Zardari privately next Tuesday while on vacation in Dubai, in a session that was canceled only after Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, learned from Mr. Zardari himself that the ambassador was providing “advice and help.” “Can I ask what sort of ‘advice and help’ you are providing?” Mr. Boucher wrote in an angry e-mail message to Mr. Khalilzad. “What sort of channel is this? Governmental, private, personnel?” Copies of the message were sent to others at the highest levels of the State Department; the message was provided to The New York Times by an administration official who had received a copy.

A senior American official said that Mr. Khalilzad had been advised to “stop speaking freely” to Mr. Zardari, and that it was not clear whether he would face any disciplinary action.

State and White House officials from Negroponte on down are said to be furious with Khalilzhad for his planned vaction with Zardari and his unofficial contacts at a time when the US wants to be seen as neutral in the Pakistani presidential race. Zalmay is an old political hand who knows the rules and White House plans but decided to break them anyway. Why?

Well, maybe its just that, like other neocons, Khalilzhad doesn't think the rules apply to him. The founding PNAC member certainly didn't mind interfering in Afghan elections to get his old buddy Karzai elected (although that was probably on White House orders). Maybe he felt he could do the same for his new friend Zardari with impunity.

But the worrying element is that there have been rumors for a while that Khalilzhad, who is Afghan born, has his sights on the Afghani presidency himself. While Karzai has been confrontational with Pakistan about its ISI intelligence agency and their support for the Taliban (something Zardari has been helpless to do anything about). He's also allied himself strongly with India in response to Pakistani treatment of Afghanistan -something that led to the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul recently, carried out by ISI proxies.

If Khalilzhad does have his sights on the presidency, then he could be a very different matter. Despite his neocon credentials he was an early and staunch supporter of the Taliban - chaperoning their officials to a Unocal Oil party in their honor and declaring in a 1996 WaPo op-ed that "The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran." He went on to say that the Taliban's brand of Islam was more akin to that of Saudi Arabia...

Zardari is by some accounts quite unstable and paranoid - if an alliance with the ambassador would definitely appeal to the highly corrupt Pakistani politico. He might think that he would thereby get U.S. protection, just like Musharraf did, by default even if the Bush administration didn't originally intend to extend it. Kalilzhad might be thinking that Zardari can leverage him into power. India, I'm sure, has thought of all this already and will have been burning up the phones to the White House since the story broke, demanding to know what the runaway ambassador thinks he was doing.

  Monica Crowley on The McLaughlin Group is just the gift that keeps on giving.  She says that the downside of Obama's internet juggernaut is that "bloggers" use his platform to plant "reverse racism" (huh?) on his website.    But "God love" John McCain for trying to use the internets because he's of a different generation. 

Download | play   Download | play   h/t Heather

Monica?  Maybe sometime you'd like to talk to my dad, who is six months older than McCain.  Call him on Skype anytime, except when he's busy photoshopping.  Geez.  

Jamie covered this a few weeks ago, but now it's official.  Score one for us on net neutrality.

UPI:  (h/t Nate)

Broadband Internet customers of cable television giant Comcast should be free to use file-sharing software, the Federal Communications Commission says.

The commission voted Friday to order Comcast to stop blocking its Internet customers from using BitTorrent, an online software application that enables users to share large movie, TV show and music files, The Hollywood Reporter said.

Commission Chairman Kevin Martin split with his Republican colleagues to join the two Democratic members to produce a 3-2 vote against Comcast. The precedent-setting decision was hailed by supporters of so-called net neutrality, which maintains Internet service providers should be barred from discriminating among various types of traffic.

"It was unreasonable for Comcast to discriminate against particular Internet applications, including BitTorrent," Martin wrote in his majority opinion. "They delayed and blocked customers using a disfavored application even when there was no network congestion."

Whodathunk Kevin Martin would stand up against his Republican colleagues for what's right?  But that only slightly makes up for the wholly egregious new policies of the Homeland Security office: 

The gropers at the Department of Homeland Security, not content with patting you down and rummaging through your underwear, now say that they can confiscate electronics brought into the U.S. for any reason, anytime, and share the devices and their contents with anybody.

The Washington Post reports:

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Translation into plain English: Homeland Security can take your stuff for any reason ("without suspicion of wrongdoing"), for however long it wants to ('unspecified period of time").

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Translation: DHS the information on your electronic devices with anyone it wants to share the information with ("other agencies and private entities").

 Lovely.  I guess the terrorists can't hate us for our freedoms if we have none left.

The FCC has ruled that Comcast is violating internet rules in their continued effort to block BitTorrent traffic:

The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint against Comcast Corp. that the company had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of "file sharing" software that allows them to exchange large amounts of data.

"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

A lot of people hear BitTorrent and think of illegal file swapping. That is a reasonable concern, but there are also a lot of legitimate uses for BitTorrent and for Comcast to punish those legitimate users simply because some people use the technology for illegal purposes is wrong.  Of course there are other problems presented here. A main one being the fact that a large portion of this country has no competition in deciding who their internet provider is. If they don't chose a company like Comcast, or any of the other giants,  then they are stuck with dial-up internet, or one of the other, more costly, solutions, such as satellite internet. 

Hopefully this will put us a step closer to getting some actual net neutrality legislation, something that is long over do. 

It's a brave new world, I tell you...

New TeeVee:

If you wanted to keep your obsession with hyperactive YouTube phenomeon "Fred" a secret, you're in for some bad news. A federal judge yesterday ordered that records of every video watched on YouTube be handed over to Viacom as part of its ongoing $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google.

According to the ruling:

The motion to compel production of all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website is granted.

In case you were wondering::

Defendants' "Logging" database contains, for each instance a video is watched, the unique "login ID" of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user's computer ("IP address"), and the identifier for the video.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is up in arms over the ruling and has a breakdown of how this decision may actually violate federal law.

Gee, ya think?  Considering that my husband, myself (for both personal and business reasons) and all our kids use this computer from time to time, including looking up things on YouTube, I have to laugh at the profile that they'd try to construct on us as a user.  But as whythawk at Scholars&Rogues points out...it could have far more serious outcomes:

Yahoo turned over user information to the Chinese government that was used to track down a dissident journalist, Shi Tao, and send him to a labour camp. It was the moment that the Internet knew sin.

Now, Judge Louis Stanton has decided to force Google/YouTube to disclose a complete set of data on all YouTube users. As TechCrunch reports: "That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). Stanton dismissed Google's argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely "speculative.""

TechCrunch goes on to express concern that this throws open the opportunity for copyright holders to sue individuals for watching their materials on YouTube. That [should be the] least of anyone's concerns.

Over the past few years democrats and other "subversives" in places like Iran, Morocco, Egypt, Zimbabwe, China and other hell-holes of civil liberties have used their camera-phones to send broadcasts directly from the front-line of vicious conflicts.

Imagine if that information is used to not only trace, but eliminate, those "subversive" elements. This goes beyond the slippery slope straight into the abyss of immorality and oppression.

CNN:

Stephen Colbert may have already earned the title of "Greatest Living American" but now he can add "Webby Person of the Year." [...]

Colbert's use of the Internet, including challenging the "truthiness" of Wikipedia, attracting 78 members per minute to the Facebook page for his candidacy for president and his ability to get fans to rack up donations online for DonorsChoose.org earned him the award.

Over the past few weeks, Colbert fans have helped raise more than $188,000 through DonorsChoose.org in honor of their favorite presidential candidate to provide nearly 45,000 PA students with needed books, technology, and supplies. Last year, when Stephen Colbert ran for president, supporters donated more than $65,000 for South Carolina classrooms.

The star-studded International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences' Webbys awards ceremony will take place June 10 in NYC at the Museum of American Finance and guests will include Colbert and Webby Artist of the Year will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas, whose Barack Obama speech inspired "Yes, We Can" video went beyond viral. You can still get tickets now before they run out.

Oh, and yeah, I'll say it before Stephen does: suck on that, TIME!

Emails are circulating that Jason Leopold has apparently decided to leave Truthout to start his own site, BackgroundBriefing.org, sometime in the next few months. Truthout's Executive Director Marc Ash assured readers that Leopold's departure is in no way related to Leopold's reporting back in May of '06 that Karl Rove had been indicted and that he had tendered his resignation -- stories that every last one of us who waited so impatiently for Fitzmas remembers all too well -- stories that never panned out but Marc Ash asserts that Truthout "stood by the factual accuracy of our reports, and we stand by them now." While that's probably true enough as that all happened more than a year and a half ago, certainly that whole saga took a heavy toll on the organization ever since.

In Leopold's defense, perhaps we may yet find out someday that his sealed indictment story was right all along but it seems a safer bet that he was punked by Rove and Co., and in Jason's case, that sure wouldn't be the first time he tried to deliver the goods on a story bigger than most journos out there could handle and came out on the short end of the stick. I will say that there's something to be admired for even being willing to try to unravel one of the biggest corporate scandals of all-time and to come out so strongly against a venomous White House like he did, but there's also been a lot of harsh criticism of Leopold's work along the way: Two that stand out is this one in the Columbia Journalism Review and another in WaPo by Howie Kurtz, so it comes as quite a surprise (Nicole spotted it) that Howie apparently just last week decided to post a comment at the bottom of the year and a half old CJR article, blasting the author and defending Leopold's reporting, which he wrote "has since proved reliable and trustworthy."

That's quite an endorsement from a former critic-- if it's true that Howie Kurtz wrote it and it wasn't someone else posing as him in the comments. I'm just sayin', because if it was Howie, doesn't he owe Jason something in an article to that effect, and not just some buried comment on an ancient thread that seemingly goes against what he's previously said in print?

NY Times:

...for decades, presidential campaigns have been the exclusive province of a small bevy of ad makers and strategists who profited from the illusion that they, and only they, could foresee the electorate’s every reaction to everything. The results of that period are now in: a marked decline in voter participation, an uptick in cynicism toward public service and a heap of critical policy challenges that have gone unaddressed.

The print edition continues this thought:

So you're running for president? That's terrific. As you know, the New York Times Editorial Board is involved in a project along with the nonpartisan group techPresident to use the Internet to expand voter participation in the 2008 presidential campaign. In the last two months, citizens posted video questions aimed directly at all the candidates. Then they voted to select the best questions (see www.10questions.com). And now the candidates have begun posting their video answers. We hope those candidates who haven't responded can find time before Dec. 15 to take this opportunity to a) listen to citizens asking unmoderated questions and b) speak directly to those citizens. To join in, please visit techPresident.com or 10Questions.com.