It seems like ancient history, but it wasn’t that long ago that the Blogosphere forced traditional media to re-think a story — that of a senior Congressional politician starting a speech with a yearn for the pre-civil rights era.
The politican was US Rep. Trent Lott. The occasion was (Sen.) Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. The time was December 2002. The outcry led to Lott’s resignation.
Weblogs at Harvard points us to a Shorenstein Center case study of that story, analyzing the events and players.
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A California state elections official implies that the Secretary of State was coerced into verifying electronic voting machines that “caused polls to open late and voters to be turned away March 2.”
Preliminary research suggests that 36 percent of the San Diego County’s 1,611 polls were unable to open on time for the primary; it is unknown how many voters were turned away or how many did not return. Is this how we want to run a democracy?
The accusation came at a public hearing on the issue. Electronic voting machines were praised by representatives of the disabled community, who said that they were much easier to use than punch cards. I certainly hope so! But would they have been easier to use than paper and pen/pencil and optical scanners? I doubt it — and the scanned paper system is cheaper. And more secure.
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Reuters reports that China has shut down two blog websites because content has been deemed “objectionable.”
Unlike the US Federal Communications Commission — which has been cracking down on objectionable “indecency” since the Jackson/Superbowl fiasco — the Chinese government objects to political free speech.
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One of the issues in the privacy debate is how easy it is to find public information that was once known only to insiders and how easy it is to combine data bits to create new information.
That same principle applies to a database developed by U.S. Representative Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), ranking member on the House Committee on Government Reform.
Its contents? Specific, misleading statements (237 of them) made by President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in the months leading up to the American invasion of Iraq.
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Most techie folk, when they talk about meta-data, are deep into a discussion of how to best search Web sites. But lots of things have meta-data: the information about when a file was created and modified as well as its file size are also meta-data.
This week, meta-data disclosures are nipping at the heels of the California Attorney General’s Office.
According to Wired.com, Microsoft Word is revealing information that public officials probably would have preferred remain hidden.
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