INTERNET PRIVACY
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agree that the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 goes far beyond its stated purpose by granting the government unprecedented powers to monitor our online activities.
TECHNOLOGY AND THE LAW
The indictment of internet activist Aaron Swartz for allegedly downloading 4.8 million articles from JSTOR under a guest account raises questions
INTERNET POLICY
Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill and other experts gathered to discuss online privacy issues and legislation before Congress at a recent CAP event.
Innovation
Public policymakers need to grasp these converging distinctions to ensure our economy remains competitive and entrepreneurial.
PODCAST
The lessons learned from the French Minitel network in the 1980s are still important as the FCC considers net neutrality today. A philosopher of technology talks about the importance of digital democratic innovation.
One Thursday in May, a State Department staffer suggested a simple idea to get U.S. citizens involved in the government’s relief efforts in Pakistan. The following Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a simple text donation program. Sending the [...]
WONK LAB PODCAST
It’s not the campaign anymore. Some of the best tools for getting the President’s message out and getting the administration’s work done require special consideration on WhiteHouse.gov. Swire explains the laws that constrain and the rules that advance new media for the government.
Techies who eagerly anticipated the announcement of a “cyberczar” along with the release of a 60-day cybersecurity review this week may have been disappointed today. President Obama outlined the position’s responsibilities but did not name an appointee in his remarks [...]
News leaked Friday that Aneesh Chopra, Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, has been appointed the first federal CTO. President Obama made the official announcement Saturday. While working in Virginia, Chopra lead a highly successful effort to ramp up broadband [...]
Sunlight Labs, the web development shop of the Sunlight Foundation, runs an occasional series on “Redesigning the Government,” in which they offer redesign and information architecture advice for federal agencies. Today, they’ve conceived a website that doesn’t yet exist, but [...]
This week, the Federal Communications Commission will begin designing a plan for improving broadband access and speeds for all Americans. The comment period for how to spend taxpayer funds on the project, which includes $7.2 billion from the American Recovery [...]
Government Technology indicates that two major media outlets, The New York Times and the BBC, are reporting that President-elect Obama will announce his pick for White House Chief Technology Officer this week. Among the speculative short listers is Science Progress adviser Vint Cerf.
TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Speedy access to the Internet for every American is about so much more than expanded broadband access. It’s about all aspects of advanced communications and information technology.
White House CTO is a new job, but the forthcoming Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President, now in production and due in bookstores in January, devotes a chapter to recommendations for the post in the new administration. Mitchell Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is the author.
The servers are obviously having a tough time handling the traffic load (I’ve gotten a few errors throughout the day), but President-elect Obama’s transition project has already hit the ground running with a box of web 2.0 tools to organize the next administration at change.gov.
While all eyes are on the presidential election today, the five-member Federal Communications Commission will cast its own momentous vote on whether to open up “white spaces” for general use. White spaces are unused sections of the analog television broadcast spectrum–the space between channels. Once the transition to digital TV is completed in February, the FCC will keep about 49 TV channels of the spectrum active.
Open access publishing is great, but what if you can’t capture your research in words? Over at the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, Jeffery Young reports that in order to expand the reach and accessibility of their historical elections mapping project, digital historians at the University of Richmond moved their data from an in-house system to two platforms familiar to many web surfers: Google Maps and Google Earth.
INTERNET
The next transition team must make the most of modern information and communications technology to shape, coordinate, and run the process of moving the next president into office. Here are some suggestions on how that can work.
A new report from the Communication Workers of America provides more data on a problem we already knew about: the past seven years have been bad for broadband policy.
INTERNET
If the Internet is a force for democracy, then is there a moral imperative to bring the World Wide Web to citizens living under repressive regimes?
Science Progress and American Progress's Doing What Works project teamed up to produce a set of policy proposals that the Obama administration and Congress can adopt to reinvest in the building blocks of American science, innovation, and economic competitiveness. Read the overview of the five reports.
Science Progress proceeds from the propositions that scientific inquiry is among the finest expressions of human excellence, that it is a crucial source of human flourishing, a critical engine of economic growth, and must be dedicated to the common good. Scientific inquiry entails global responsibilities. It should lead to a more equitable, safer, and healthier future for all of humankind.