Liminal states

An op-ed piece by Edward Luttwak the New York Times last week relied on a very questionable description of Obama as a “Muslim apostate” to argue that he’d have a hard time reaching out to Muslim leaders and would be at risk of assassination if he visited any countries with a lot of Muslims. It was widely criticized in the blogosphere.

Yesterday, Clark Hoyt, the “public editor”, weighed in:

I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong….

Continue Reading »

Part 1 of a series

Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008 ended with me presenting Dear Potus 08 and circulating the letter to the presidential candidates for signatures, and then a closing plenary by Clay Shirky (notes below). It was exhiliarating as always, and I’m now simultaneously exhausting, revved up, and suffering from jet lag. So I figured I’d blog about it.

Continue Reading »

I’m at a tutorial on Tuesday discussing “elections 2.0” at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, and one of the things I want to cover is Web 2.0 technologies’ positive role in countering deceptive campaign practices. I’m planning on using some examples from the Obama activism work I’ve been doing on Facebook, as well as some other sites I’ve tracked:

• the “know your rights” work the One Million Strong for Barack group did for Texas and Ohio. group members got calls from a couple of people who had attended the Texas caucuses saying how valuable it was
• the Courage Campaign’s “count every vote” petition in Los Angeles County, which led to counting most (not all) of the votes on the deceptive ballots
• Continue Reading »

when reading blogs, make a point to get a range of perspectives, starting with those that are shut out from the mainstream news.

Reviewing an earlier draft of Allies in the blogosphere, one of my friends asked me for more details on this. Rather than bury it in an comment, I figured that it was worth a thread of its own — because that’ll also give me a chance to ask others the same question.

As an experiment, for the last year I’ve been getting virtually all of my political news online, mostly avoiding newspapers, magazines, and TV. At first I’d start out each day by checking Google News, the New York Times, and a few blogs on specific topics, like Juan Cole’s Informed Comment on Iraq. Then I added Yahoo! News (which gets feeds from Huffington Post and Real Clear Politics as well as CNN). This gave me some different perspectives and a few more stories but it was still pretty limited.

Continue Reading »

The Hillary Clinton group got overrun with trolls last night. A Facebook bug — that’s been reported and unfixed since February — prevented the admins from being able to react. I saved a snapshot of a series of 25 threads with sexist (and in many cases racist) subjects; I won’t quote them, but trust me, they’re vile. In the middle of this was a plaintive plea for adult behavior by an Obama supporter — with a bunch of responses from trolls. Sigh.

Update: Will Bower’s Glitch-Plagued Clinton Facebook Group Cries Foul; Obama Page Glitch Free in the Huffington Post has administrator Candy Elizabeth’s excellent open letter.  Why yes, now that you mention it, that is the same Will Bower who was mentioned in comments in How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech on Tales from the net.  Small world!

Members of the Clinton group migrated to a private group, always a good thing to do in a situation like this. This morning, the board seems calmer but it’s hard to know whether that’s just a temporary lull. There are aftermath threads like since only the trollzz are here thread and (in the Obama group) The Hillary group has become a trollfest.

Continue Reading »

Andy Borowitz breaks the story in the Huffington Post:

In an act that campaign insiders said indicated an irrevocable break with his former pastor, Sen. Barack Obama today de-friended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Facebook.

It looks like all the fears about the divisiveness within the Democratic party are, if anything, understated. I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten. According to Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod:

“Every day, Rev. Wright was sending Sen. Obama new Facebook applications like ‘What Superhero Are You?’ and ‘What 1980’s Toy Are You?'” Mr. Axelrod said. “After awhile, enough is enough.”

Yeah really.

The One Million Strong for Barack group is reeling over the news. Discussion here.  Thanks to Wintana for posting this — there’s been a disgraceful lack of coverage in the mainstream media.

The headline’s from Project Vote’s post on OpenLeft, which also has a great quote from their board member Donna Massey:

The real purpose of strict photo voter ID rules is to make it more difficult for some Americans to vote. It’s the voters who are less likely to vote who are also less likely to have government issued ID, such as young people, the poor, elderly, and Americans of color. A University of Washington study, for example, found that in Indiana 22 percent of African-American voters lack proper identification compared to 16 percent of white voters. Twenty-one percent of voters earning less than $40,000 a year lack the necessary ID compared to just 13 percent of those earning more than $40,000. All Americans have a right to vote, even if they don’t have a photo ID.

SCOTUSblog has the details on the 6-3 decision.

Update, March 27: The Columbus Dispatch reports statewide officials say prosecution for Limbaugh is very unlikely: “lying through your teeth and being stupid isn’t a crime.” Ari Melber’s Limbaugh’s Lying Voters Under Investigation on The Nation’s Campaign Matters blog has a lot more.

Kim Zetter’s The Mysterious Case of Ohio’s Voting Machines, on Wired’s THREAT LEVEL, has context for Ohio in general. From earlier in the month, Lingering questions in Ohio and Uncounted delegates & Ohio’s delegate math on Dan Tokaji’s excellent Equal Votes Blog cover the equally-important non-Limbaugh issues.

(originally posted March 7)

Art House Queen’s picture of the streets blocked surrounding the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections symbolizes voter disenfranchisement across the state. They ran out of ballots in Sandusky County and Franklin County; voting machines broke down in Montgomery County and no doubt elsewhere; a dozen computer memory cards spent the night in the back of a sherriff’s van in Lucas County before being counted; in Obama stronghold Cuyahoga County, voter privacy was compromised and huge numbers of provisional ballots still haven’t been counted.

The Secretary of State is “very pleased”, citing it as improvement over 2004 despite horrible weather; and very importantly, the move to paper ballots in Cuyahoga County went well, and the state’s pressuring Diebold to refund the $21 million for the decertified voting machines. Democracy in America, 2008. Nothing to see here, move along, move along …

Except …

Continue Reading »

Originally posted as a comment about The Day After.

There’s an interesting thread started on Feb 8 in the One Million Strong for Barack group on Facebook, How many Political Cards Hillary has played and whats more to come? I went back and looked at it today seeing how accurate it was; here was my summary:

Continue Reading »

Facebook once again is in the middle of major flakiness right now: links to nowhere, spontaneous logouts. The best thing to do when something like this happens is to treat it as a sign that it’s a good time to take a break from Facebook for a little while. So I decided to write this blog post.

Given the high tensions on all sides, the ongoing troll infestation in the group, and examples in the election campaign of what certainly seem to be some Republican dirty tricks being played, it’s natural to wonder whether this is some kind of attack like those described in “How to Rig an Election”. Speaking as somebody who’s had a lot of software engineering and computer security experience, my initial answer is probably not.

Continue Reading »

Like a lot of political sites these days, the Barack Obama Facebook page and One Million Strong for Barack group have been suffering from an infestation of trolls and hate speech. Obama supporters, like others, use Facebook to help with “get out the vote” work (for example posting links to information about polling places) and phonebanking — and get their questions answered. Especially with the key Ohio and Texas votes on Tuesday, the trolling’s a lot worse than just a nuisance: it’s an example of the dirty tricks described in How to Rig an Election.

The group’s admins are doing a great job of trying to keep things under control, and Facebook is apparently working on tools to help them. There are only a few admins, though, so in the short term, it seemed like a good time for a “community defense” effort. Building on Classy Williams’ earlier idea of a troll registry, I started up a thread, and sent out mail to a “secret” group of about 60 people who were concerned about the trolling. Here’s a greatly expanded version of what I said, with some background for non-Facebookers.

Originally posted March 3

Most recent update May 6

Continue Reading »

Update, March 6: democracy largely (albeit imperfectly) prevailed in the LA County mess; 47,153 “double bubble” votes were counted in Los Angeles County. What about Ohio? We shall see …

Julia Rosen’s Victory post yesterday on Courage Campaign’s blog announced Dean Logan’s agreement to count every possible LA County decline-to-state ballot, and followup mail from Rick Jacobs today reiterates: we won!

After weeks of bad news, here’s the good news: Tens of thousands of “Decline-to-State” (DTS) voters — who intended to cast a ballot for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton on Super Tuesday — will now have their “double bubble” votes counted by the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters.

And it’s because of you.

Continue Reading »