Digital dragnets, the power of Twitter at Taksim Square, and the power of @davidfrum's tweets; Frum once again shows how much more insightful he is than others, here, pointing out how disconnected President Obama is from reality when he writes, "Incredibly, President Obama asks this question despite having two teenagers of his own"; The Guardian's bombshell revelation about domestic spying is only the tip of the iceberg

The Guardian

NSA taps in to systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and others, secret files reveal

• Top secret PRISM program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple

• Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007

By Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill

6 June 2013 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data?CMP=twt_gu

Incredibly, President Obama asks this question despite having two teenagers of his own. twitter.com/BarackObama/st…
— davidfrum (@davidfrum) June 7, 2013

Sure, because what could possibly go wrong with tens of millions of teenagers' personal information being recorded and stored digitally somewhere on school property, and likely being easily accessible by all sorts of computer-savvy creeps, whether there at the school or many hundreds or thousands of miles away?

WSJDigitalNetwork YouTube Channel video: Does the NSA Know More About You Than Google? -WJS's Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto on Verizon's cooperation in handing over metadata to the federal govt. Uploaded June 6, 2013.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A5yLOwX320

The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs a Verizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over 'on an ongoing daily basis' to the National Security Agency all call logs 'between the United States and abroad' or 'wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/us/us-secretly-collecting-logs-of-business-calls.html

New York Times

EDITORIAL: President Obama’s Dragnet

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

JUNE 6, 2013

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism -especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

Read the rest of the editorial at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-dragnet.html

See also:

http://www.newsdiffs.org/diff/245566/245668/www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-dragnet.html

Fox News Channel video: Obama administration pushes back on NSA document leaks 

Published June 07, 2013

http://video.foxnews.com/v/2442581574001/nsa-and-fbi-started-internet-data-mining-in-2007/

On PRISM, admin points to Sec 702 of FISA, says it collects "important and valuable" data from non-Americans politi.co/12vhdG6
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) June 7, 2013

The Guardian's bombshell revelation about domestic spying is only the tip of the iceberg read.bi/191sf7C
— Politix (@bi_politics) June 6, 2013

The NSA Doesn't Need Much Phone Data to Know You're You. bit.ly/18Yjxab
— Niraj Chokshi (@nirajc) June 6, 2013

Obama administration defends its right take all your phone records by @dashb0t via @theatlanticwire read.bi/190nawf
— Politix (@bi_politics) June 6, 2013

Story today: Emails of top Obama appointees remain a mystery #FOIA apne.ws/15x55RP (from @ap)
— Jack Gillum (@jackgillum) June 4, 2013

I'm curious if any Miami or FTL-based federal officials have a similar M.O. to avoid compliance. Not that the local news media will investigate this unless a local federal employee comes forward to say so.

Twitter Proves Pivotal In Dissemination Of Information During Taksim Square Protests mbist.ro/131l3Sz (via @alltwtr)
— mediabistro.com (@Mediabistro) June 3, 2013

What privacy laws? Wash. Post's devastating story on abuse of confidential govt. information by D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray's 2010 GOTV campaign, targeting public housing residents using private govt. info. HUD says use of official lists of residents would “constitute a substantial invasion of privacy”; @mikedebonis, @kitastew

For weeks now, Washington Post reporters Nikita Stewart and Mike DeBonis have consistently impressed on the ethical scandal and criminal probe involving Mayor Vincent C. Gray, while showing how talented and clever reporters who don't take anything for granted, can write informative and illuminating stories about what happens when political dynamite explodes in the hands of D.C.'s most powerful local politician, in a way that that shocks you from hundreds of miles away, even after you lived in the area for 15 years and, frankly, didn't think you could be shocked by anything going on in D.C. govt.

Their latest story concerns the use of confidential personal information in a government database and possible privacy law violations. 

The Washington Post

Mayor Gray’s 2010 campaign had database of public-housing residents

Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s 2010 campaign kept a database with the identities of nearly 6,000 public housing residents it targeted in get-out-the-vote efforts, which appears to be an unauthorized use of private government information.

By Nikita Stewart and Mike DeBonis

Published: July 22, 2012

The database, part of a cache of documents The Washington Post obtained from former campaign workers, includes residents’ names, addresses and telephone numbers. One of the documents designated “team captains” responsible for reaching out to tenants in specific housing complexes.

It is unclear who assembled the list or how the campaign got it, but two campaign workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of an ongoing federal investigation, said it was used in the final week before the Democratic primary election to register residents and get voters to the polls.

Read the rest of the post at 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/mayor-grays-2010-campaign-had-database-of-public-housing-residents/2012/07/22/gJQAiumA3W_story.html


Listen to Mike DeBonis discuss this story on WTOP Radio earlier today:
http://wtop.com/774/2955956/Grays-2010-campaign-used-private-public-housing-data-for-targeted-campaigns


Nikita Stewart at Twitter: http://twitter.com/kitastew   
@kitastew


Mike DeBonis at Twitter is http://twitter.com/mikedebonis/
@mikedebonis


His blog at the WaPo is called District of DeBonis: "More than a city. Not quite a state. Enough for a blog" 

Her blog at the WaPo is DC Wire, where her latest post is that 48 percent of African Americans in D.C. think Mayor Gray should step down and that 44 percent think he should stay. 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/dc-wire

ProPublica's Lois Beckett on how politicians are presenting themselves to different audiences and whether they have a responsibility to tell people about the personal information they collect about them on Facebook, Google and other social media

http://www.propublica.org/article/how-to-win-facebook-friends-and-influence-people
ProPublica

How to Win Facebook Friends and Influence People

by Lois Beckett, ProPublica,  
March 13, 2012, 1:31 p.m.

Instead of picketing outside company headquarters, an advocacy group is using Facebook ads to try to influence people whose profiles identify them as employees of Freddie Mac or JPMorgan Chase.

The anti-foreclosure ad campaign, which launches today, asks Freddie and Chase employees to talk to their CEOs about a veteran -- a former Marine -- who's facing eviction in California.

"This is not any sort of attack on the employees there," said Jim Pugh of Rebuild the Dream, which is running the ad campaign. "We're trying to let them know what's happening."

The ad that targets Freddie Mac employees features a small picture of CEO Charles Haldeman's face, and the message, "Freddie Mac did what???? Freddie Mac is evicting a former Marine who's been trying to pay his mortgage. Tell CEO Haldeman to work out a fair deal with him!" according to a copy of the ad provided by Pugh.

The JPMorgan Chase ad is similar, but with a Chase logo instead of an executive's face.  

We've contacted Freddie Mac and JP Morgan Chase spokespeople for comment, and also reached out to Freddie Mac and JPMorgan Chase employees on Facebook. If you've seen one of these ads, please let us know.

 Targeted online advertising is nothing new. (As anyone who has changed their Facebook status to "engaged" can tell you, a simple update can bring a deluge of new ads.) But political campaigns and advocacy groups are increasingly adopting the same microtargeting tactics that companies use.  

Rick Perry's campaign, for instance, targeted faith-focused ads to people in Iowa who listed themselves as Christians on Facebook, and ads featuring his wife to the state's female conservatives, Politico reported.  

According to FEC data, Endorse Liberty, a super PAC that supports Ron Paul, has led the way on Facebook expenditures, spending a total of $241,508 through January 2012.

And it's not just Facebook and Google where campaigns and activists are doing microtargeting. The music site Pandora announced last year that it would be selling political ad space targeted to the zip codes of particular listeners, the Wall Street Journal reported.

There's nothing inherently problematic about targeted ads. Campaigns have been using direct mail to target particular voters for decades. Digital targeting can be a cost-effective way of spending advertising dollars, especially for smaller groups, like Rebuild the Dream, which sees the ads as a great way to get more bang for their buck in terms of reaching their intended audience. (The group also launched a special donation drive specifically for the Facebook ad buy.) ProPublica even used Facebook ads to try to find sources for our 2009 series, When Caregivers Harm.

But as the ability to use data to reach particular people grows more sophisticated, targeting risks crossing privacy lines, as demonstrated by a recent New York Times article on how Target knew a teenage customer was pregnant before her father did.

What's clear is that if all this microtargeting translates into electoral gains, the scale and sophistication of these efforts will continue to grow, and the data science that gained traction in 2008 will become a regular part of campaigning. In the meantime, the Obama campaign's already substantial data team continues to hire statistical modeling analysts and analytics engineers.

The increasing ease and flexibility of online targeting also raises new questions about how politicians are presenting themselves to different audiences, how much campaigns need to tell their supporters about the personal information they collect -- and what will happen to the massive databases of voter information collected during the 2012 presidential campaign. Will they be sold? Passed on to other politicians?

Rebuild the Dream, which focuses on economic issues, was launched by MoveOn.org in 2011, but has been independent since January, Pugh said. The group's president is former Obama green jobs adviser Van Jones.

Pugh worked on the Obama campaign's digital analytics team in 2008 while also trying to finish a Ph.D. dissertation in robotics, and later did similar work for the Democratic National Committee. He said he was not sure what kind of reaction the ads would receive.

"I would imagine that people are fairly used to targeted ads at this point," he said. But while people who work in politics and advocacy may be used to receiving Facebook ads targeting specific causes, "It's hard to know in advance how unusual it will seem to the employees of Freddie Mac and JP Morgan Chase."
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