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Joseph Marks

Staff Correspondent

Joseph Marks covers government technology issues, social media, Gov 2.0 and global Internet freedom for Nextgov. He previously reported on federal litigation and legal policy for Law360 and on local, state and regional issues for two Midwestern newspapers. He also interned for Congressional Quarterly’s Homeland Security section and the Associated Press’s Jerusalem Bureau. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s in international affairs from Georgetown.

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DHS and ACLU Dispute Electronic Border Searches in Court

July 8, 2011 The Homeland Security Department will defend border agents' unlimited authority to search U.S. citizens' laptops, digital cameras and other electronic devices in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn this afternoon. The lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2010, charges that such unlimited search authority violates citizens' Fourth Amendment ...

FEMA and FCC commit to more training before implementing emergency mobile alerts

July 8, 2011 Local emergency managers need more training before the nationwide rollout of an emergency-alert text messaging system, industry officials told a House panel Friday, warning that ill-considered texts about minor events could result in cell users not taking the alerts seriously. The Personal Localized Alert Network will be rolled out in ...

Town Hall Tweets Did Reflect Tweeting Public...Sort of...

July 7, 2011 Journalists really are different from people, as a latter-day Fitzgerald might have said. Or at least different from Tweeple. A Boston Globe study of questions Tweeted in advance of President Obama's first Twitter town hall found substantial differences from questions asked by journalists during the president's last few news conferences. ...

Did Twitter town hall bring something new to the table?

July 7, 2011 A day after President Obama's first Twitter town hall, pundits and techies were still debating whether there was something new under the silicon or if the president had merely transferred his oratorical skills to a new platform -- one, incidentally, where questioners couldn't ask followups or be caught by cameras ...

Pot Tops Tweets for Obama Town Hall

July 6, 2011 With just an hour to go before President Obama's first-ever Twitter town hall, the most retweeted question under the #Ask Obama hashtag is whether he'd consider legalizing marijuana to lower the burden on U.S. courts and prisons and raise government revenue. Legalization, with nearly 5,000 retweets, is followed by questions ...

Plenty of 140-character questions, few new answers in Obama's Twitter town hall

July 6, 2011 After days of anticipation -- a long time in the Internet Age -- President Obama's first Twitter Town Hall on Wednesday ended up covering much of the same ground as a live town hall with the difference that questions were limited to 140 characters. The Twitter town hall, announced July ...

Will Social Media Ask Obama What MSM Hasn't?

July 5, 2011 As social media enthusiasts -- and critics -- gear up for President Obama's first Twitter Town Hall Wednesday afternoon, one major question is whether social media questioners will differ from their mainstream media counterparts -- in focus, emphasis, both or neither. During the eight weeks leading up to the announcement ...

USAID cellphone program aims to enhance Afghan media

July 5, 2011 The U.S. Agency for International Development is promoting a project to give Afghan mobile phone users free nationwide access to Afghanistan's newspaper, radio and TV news stories. The project -- called Mobile Khabar, which roughly translates to "mobile news" in Pashto, Dari, Arabic and other regional languages -- is based ...

Survey Says Feds not Tracking Data Center Capacity

July 1, 2011 Just about a quarter of federal information technology officials say their department has a system in place to track savings from a governmentwide push to shut down and consolidate data centers, according to an unscientific survey from MeriTalk, a government IT industry group. The survey was mostly conducted in person ...

Microsoft plugs cloud to feds

July 1, 2011 Microsoft officials are touting the company's new cloud-based Office 365 as a good choice for federal customers because of its tiered subscription structure and secure management. Office 365, unveiled at an event Tuesday in New York, is an updated version of the software giant's Business Productivity Online Standard Suite and ...