Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Nancy Scola

How Obama's Tech Tools are Changing the Debate

Nancy Scola, The Atlantic — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:41:40 -0500

Just 10 days after a petition supporting cell phone unlocking posted to the White House's We the People site surpassed the 100,000-signature mark that triggers an official response, the Obama Administration today replied, saying, "The White House agrees with the 114,000 of you who believe that consumers should be able to unlock their cell phones without risking criminal or other penalties." (The technologists organizing around the petition had offered an incentive: They'd jailbreak one phone for anyone who'd contribute a signature.) The response is signed by R. David Edelman, a senior White House adviser on Internet policy who is just a half-dozen years removed from his senior year at Yale. A pro-unlocking policy, said the statement, is "common sense, crucial for protecting consumer choice, and important for ensuring we continue to have the vibrant, competitive wireless market that delivers innovative products and solid service to meet consumers' needs."

The episode is of a piece with a pattern that's the talk of policy circles. The Obama Administration's fluffy not-quite-press engagements -- not just the We the People petition site, but also things like its Google Hangouts -- keep nudging conversations. And for all the fuss over the goofy White House response to request that the federal government build its own Death Star, there's something bigger at work. In a recent article titled "Obama, the Puppet Master," Politico's Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei argued the White House has "taken old tricks for shaping coverage" and "put them on steroids," bypassing the traditional press -- and, by implication, accountability. But that framing doesn't fully capture what's actually going on.

Partly by design (i.e., the self-locking of the Obama Administration into public participation) and partly a product of the fact that people who mix it up online and who work in government both lean nerdy, we're witnessing the White House's digital platforms draw attention to obscure, often intensely geeky issues and turn them into major policy issues.

Congressman Darrell Issa's call to the Internet's right side

Nancy Scola, The Atlantic — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:42:13 -0400

On the national stage, California Republican Darrell Issa has been known for a curiously colorful variety of things. As chairman of the U.S. House of Representative's lead oversight committee, Issa, has been the thorn in the Obama Administration's side over the "Fast and Furious" gun-walking operation that found Attorney General Eric Holder in congressional contempt and how the Department of Energy's billions in stimulus dollars are being spent. It was six-term, 58-year-old Issa who was the responsible for not letting Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke testify at that contraception hearing. He's also the entrepreneur who made a fortune in car alarms and other electronics, money he used to fund the 2003 recall of Governor Gray Davis. It is, rather famously, Issa's voice that says "Protected by Viper...Stand back!" in the '90s TV commercials.

But in the tech world, the congressman from north of San Diego is known for something quite particular. Darrell Issa emerged during this winter's debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act as a politician willing to question Washington dogma about how you go about protecting copyright online. Issa and a suddenly swelling band of allies asked tough, tech-savvy question about what the legislation would do to the Internet's workings: the effect of website blackouts on the domain-name system, for example, and the liabilities the bill would place on sites like YouTube and everyday blogs to patrol for infringement. Darrell Issa sounded the alarm over SOPA. The Internet came running.

Post-SOPA, Issa says he's eager to keep attention on how Internet policy gets made in Washington. He recently changed his Twitter avatar from a cartoon cop to a superhero in the shadow of a "cat signal," the digital alert of the brand-new Internet Defense League, a coalition of activists and web companies that sports the tagline, "Make sure the Internet never loses. Ever." In an interview, Congressman Darrell Issa makes his case for why a conservative approach is the best hope for keeping the Internet full of win.

Before SOPA put tech policy so much in the news, Democrats and liberals arguably carried the mantle as champions of the Internet in Washington. But that seems to be shifting, with new talk of a conservative vision for Internet policy.

Issa: The short and easy to understand answer for anyone is that conservatives have long staked out the ground that government does best what it does least, and when it comes to the Internet the same has to be applied.

Overregulation can and would undoubtedly destroy creativity, as would certainly picking sides, winners and losers, whether it's overregulating with net neutrality -- which is essentially taking by government fiat through the administration and the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] -- or the attempts legislatively with SOPA and PIPA [The Senate's Protect IP Act] or TPP [The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multilateral trade agreement currently being negotiated], where the administration may in fact have a considerable impact on movement over the Internet by international agreement.

On all of these, conservatives would say, where is the pressing absolute need? Where is the constitutional obligation and right? And weigh that against personal liberty, the First Amendment, and so on.

Let's take the Digital Bill of Rights you put together with [Oregon Democrat] Senator Ron Wyden. One critique in conservative corners is that you're dabbling in "rights inflation." We already have rights under the plain ol' Bill of Rights, and when you talk about things like "openness" and "accessibility" it suggests that there has to be some for government to ensure those rights. What does "Digital citizens have a right to access the Internet equally, regardless of who they are or where they are" mean, for example, if it doesn't mean government advancing some sort of broadband policy?

Issa: Equal access and being paid for by somebody else to get access at your station are two different things. I read the Digital Bill of Rights on equal access to be about an equal opportunity to access it, not some sort of "We'll guarantee you 256k to the home," as they did in Korea.

It doesn't change the fact that Republicans and Democrats have supported broadband rollout, some subsidies. But a better example would be that there is some regulatory history over ensuring that there is both access that you pay for and competition to ensure that you don't overpay when it comes to telephone, Internet, and, for that matter, television. All of that has a long bipartisan history.

Read the full interview at The Atlantic.

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Defining the 'We' in the declaration of Internet freedom

Nancy Scola, The Atlantic — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:15:51 -0400

Last week, a collection of Internet bold-faced names rolled out a Declaration of Internet Freedom. Groups like the advocacy organization Free Press and the New America Foundation's Open Technologies Institute took the lead on its creation, and the first batch of signatories included the likes of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Harvard Law School professor and former Obama administration official Susan Crawford, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing, Internet pioneer and Google evangelist Vint Cerf, Ben Huh of ICanHasCheezburger.com and related sites, and a raft of other groups and individuals who make good livings on or around the Internet. The plan is for the public to debate, edit, and remix the document's core principles, "as only the Internet makes possible," as two of the planners put it. But here's what the Declaration of Internet Freedom held at its creation:

We stand for a free and open Internet.

We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles:

Expression: Don't censor the Internet.

Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.

Openness: Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create and innovate.

Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don't block new technologies, and don't punish innovators for their users' actions.

Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone's ability to control how their data and devices are used.

With bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), treaties like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and holidays like Independence Day (July 4th) in the news, it's an opportune time for a project like this. It's also the right time to poke at its meaning. For one thing, as Atlantic Wire's Rebecca Greenfield pointed out, the declaration's bare-bones founding principles are strikingly vague. The application of "defend[ing] everyone's ability to control how their data and devices are used" is going to get very complicated, very quickly, especially when so many of the social platforms and tools that Internet users love, like Facebook and Google, are built on a trade-off between data and access. And yet at the same time, the principles are easy to get behind. Few people think what they're doing is censorship, and it's a decent bet everyone from AT&T to the Motion Picture Association of America to even the Chinese government believes that they're abiding by some version of "openness."

Read more at The Atlantic.

(Image via Anteromite/Shutterstock.com)

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The community organizing geeks who could revolutionize campaign tech

Molly Ball and Nancy Scola, The Atlantic — Fri, 18 May 2012 14:05:49 -0400

The websites for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney look practically the same: sleek, snazzy, red-white-and-blue. But peel back a layer, and there's a difference -- the fundamental difference, in fact, between how Democrats and Republicans use technology.

Obama's site was custom-built starting in 2008 by the consulting firm Blue State Digital. It's a fully integrated platform for everything from fundraising to social networking -- the Rolls-Royce of campaign tech, complete with price tag. Romney's interface, on the other hand, didn't even originate with the campaign; it was based on a platform purchased off-the-shelf from a corporate customer-service vendor called Salesforce.com, then modified (also starting in 2008) to meet the needs of a political campaign.

In short, Team Obama has home-grown its tools, while Team Romney has bought commercial products and taped them together. But both approaches are labor-intensive and hugely expensive, and neither approach is really optimal. One requires devoting a big chunk of the campaign's energy to essentially functioning as a tech start-up; the other requires settling for off-the-shelf tools that don't have politics in their DNA.

Now, two visionary geeks want to change that.

Joe Green and Jim Gilliam, the founders of a new software platform called NationBuilder, envision a world where any campaign -- from local school board to issue-based protest movement, without regard to ideology -- could access the same versatile, inexpensive suite of software and instantly have at its fingertips the ability to connect with voters and donors online, a capacity that was supposed to reshape American politics in the age of the Internet, but has yet to be fully realized.

Read the full story at The Atlantic.

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