There's no telling if he's going to buy a tape from the Video Professor, or just have his son-in-law sit down with him for a few days, but John McCain has decided to learn how to use the internet.
"I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself," McCain told the New York Times in an interview that appeared Sunday. "I don't expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need."
Even so, McCain bluntly admits, "I don't e-mail. I've never felt the particular need to e-mail." 
That latter admission is surprisingly frank given that most people on Capitol Hill constantly keep up with work, and each other, via their BlackBerries.
It's also a comment that puts McCain decidedly out of step with the millions of Americans who've woven web, wireless and social networking technologies into the fabric of their daily lives -- especially the so-called Millennial Generation, those born between 1982 and 2002.
Unlike large portions of previous young voter blocs, this connected generation votes (at least those who are old enough), and is very civic minded,according to the researchers.
In sharp contrast to McCain, Obama's campaign constantly updates the Obama's Twitter account with the candidates latest activities on the campaign trail. Obama has 46,195 followers on Twitter. He apparently follows 48,040 Twitter accounts.
Twitter, a service that people usually use to provide friends and acquaintances with personal updates and on-the-spot thoughts, fits with the personal tone and oratory used by Barack Obama to reach the Millennials. The Obama campaign's constant updates through its own blog, and through Twitter, helps to fuel a sense of collective involvement among his supporters: making them think they're part of the campaign, actively engaged with it, and with the candidate.
Obama's latest tweet on Sunday night, for example, let his supporters know that he spoke in San Diego at the National Council of La Raza's annual conference. The entry led to a YouTube video of the speech.
And on July 4th, Obama's campaign tweeted that the candidate was "hosting a 4th July family picnic in Butte, MT, and celebrating Malia's 10th Birthday! Watch it live ..."
Prior to the advent of the web, it would have been unimaginable for a political candidate to provide these relatively frequent updates to such large numbers of people. And who would have wanted a fax with these kinds of details cluttering up the office?
But on the web, these updates are unobtrusive little notes, which can keep large numbers of ardent supporters filled in on the latest movements of their rock-star candidate -- on their own schedule.
The McCain campaign, for its part, seems to have allowed a prankster to take over the John McCain name on Twitter: The latest entry, from a month ago, reads: "I'm going to the bathroom before my next speech! Coffee ran right through me!"
McCain has been the object of much ridicule by liberals in the past month because of his frank admission in a Yahoo/Politico interview that he's computer illiterate.
More recently, his aide Mark Soohoo was mocked mercilessly when he said at a politics and technology conference that McCain was "aware of the internet."
Yet the McCain campaign has hired tech-savvy staffers to liaise with bloggers online, and to get his campaign's key messages out online. They include Matt Lira, a former aide to Rep. Eric Cantor R-Va, and blogger Patrick Hynes, among others.
Even if he doesn't feel the need to e-mail, perhaps he should check out tools such as Twitter to reach the Millennials. It's not just about the coolness of such tools; it's about getting a candidate's unique persona and voice through a medium to connect to a new generation.
(For more on social media and political campaigns online, check out Jim Hopkinson's Wired.com podcast The Hopkinson Report.)
Photo: Associated Press/Jeff Chiu
See Also:
(below right: Photo: CRoss Industry Standard Process for Data Mining)
YouTube personal data will be masked in info handed to Viacom
East Bay Business Times
Google Inc. said Monday that its YouTube subsidiary will be able to hide user information in records that it will turn over to Viacom Inc.
Mountain View-based Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) said New York-based Viacom "and the other litigants have backed off their demand for YouTube user viewing histories. We have reached agreement to anonymize the data."
Earlier this month a federal court ordered San Bruno-based YouTube to give Viacom user names, IP addresses and viewing histories, which in turn sparked concerns over privacy issues.
Viacom (NYSE:VIA) -- the parent company of Comedy Central, MTV, Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon -- had sued Google and YouTube for alleged copyright infringement in a $1 billion suit.
Viacom said at the time that YouTube had almost 160,000 unauthorized Viacom clips on its site, and they have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.
Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal
ISPs seeking to find new ways to make money by profiling their customer's online habits are likely re-considering after powerful House lawmakers turned their anti-tracking ire on a second large telecom in recent months.
In June, Charter Communications -- the nation's fourth largest ISP -- shelved its plan to make money by letting others snoop on and categorize the web surfing habits -- including searches -- of its customers, following a May inquiry from Congress about the plan.
This go round top members of the House Commerce committee, including chairman John Dingell (D-Michigan) and top Republican Joe Barton (R-Texas) and telecom subcommittee head Reps. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) are targeting the Fortune 500 telecom company Embarq.
The lawmakers want to know whether the company informed its customers earlier this year that it was testing web tracking technology that would chronicle their every move online. They also want to know whether the test of web surveillance technology from NebuAd complied with federal communications law.
Monday's letter to Embarq comes as ISPs are trying to find ways to be more than just providers of pipes -- and trying to find new ways to raise revenues and control traffic on their network. These attempts include violating accepted internet protocol to return pages with ads when a user types in a non-existent URL and sending fake packets to file sharers' computers in order to scale back their traffic usage. The latter tactic, adopted by Comcast to control BitTorrent video file sharing, is likely to draw an official rebuke from federal regulators in August.
Rep. Markey is clearly not waiting for answers to know what he thinks of such technology:
"Surreptitiously tracking individual users' Internet activity cuts to the heart of consumer privacy," Markey said in a written statement. "Embarq's apparent use of this technology without directly notifying affected customers that their activity was being tracked, collected, and analyzed raises serious privacy red flags."
Embarq, a Fortune 500 telecom bundling company spun-off from Sprint and employs some 18,000 people , tested technology from NebuAd, a controversial advertising firm that collects data about users from inside their ISPs and uses those profiles to serve targeted ads on pages around the net. Third-party advertising networks such as DoubleClick collect some of the same information, but only do so from select web pages on the net. By contrast, NebuAd sits in the pipe and can see everywhere a user goes.
NebuAd pays ISPs to install sniffer boxes on the network, which then categorize users as it reads the traffic between a user's computer and websites. According to one report, NebuAd also adds rogue JavaScript to pages from Google and Yahoo as part of its tracking technology.
Some advocacy groups and privacy lawyers argue that NebuAd's snooping on web traffic in order to determine what ads to serve to a user violate federal wiretapping laws. NebuAd disagrees saying it throws away URLs as profiles are generated and that its pseudonymous profiles could now be reverse-engineered to identify a person. They also say users can opt-out, though its unclear exactly how that works or how effective it is.
Specifically the Congressmen want to know where the test happened, how many subscribers were affected, whether customers were told ahead of time, and why the test was opt-out rather than opt-in.
While Embarq's privacy page no longer makes mention of the test, the opt-out page remains live.
The congressmen want answers to their questions by July 21.
Neither NebuAd nor Embarq immediately responded to requests for comment.
Photo: Congressman Edward Markey
See Also:| FISA "Compromise" Completes Transformation of US into Full Police State  By Larry Chin | |
Global Research, July 11, 2008 | |
On July 9, 2008, the US Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation permitting government spying, including immunity to telecommunications companies involved in secret domestic surveillance programs. With the stroke of George W. Bush’s pen, the US is now a police state by definition. The extent of the spying program, and its larger implications, have been revealed by Mark Klein, who blew the whistle on secret domestic spying program of Bush/Cheney’s National Security Agency (NSA) and AT&T: AT&T whistleblower: spy bill creates infrastructure for police state The update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, called the "FISA compromise", or more appropriately, the "spy bill", largely completes the triumph of the Bush/Cheney administration and a bipartisan criminal consensus. By convenient design, the FISA revision derails pending law suits filed against the Bush administration’s corporate spying partners (AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and Verizon), silences (the largely empty-to-begin-with) congressional investigations into Bush administration’s illegal domestic spying program. Presidential nominee Barack Obama and the Democrats have now moved to silence all discussion about the issue. Fear itself, a.k.a. spying itself Between the false flag mass murder of 9/11 and the creation of the "war on terrorism", the USA Patriot Act and this new FISA revision, the Bush-Cheney administration and its enthusiastically complicit congressional partners, have achieved total victory--world war, open criminality, and the end of law itself. It gives the US government unprecedented new spying powers and sweeping new legal cover for spying that goes well beyond even the original FISA law---which itself was an abomination that already permitted the US president broad surveillance powers. Given the fact that the US government is a wholly corrupted criminal organization by definition, the political spin over "oversight", warrants, the involvement of the Inspector General, etc. is all the more transparently ridiculous: the operatives of such apparatuses do not investigate or punish their own. Nor do they voluntarily stop the lucrative and intoxicating criminal activity that is their lifeblood. In fact, the debate over the spy bill is a red herring, clouding the larger central (purposely unaddressed) issue: the "war on terrorism" lie itself. The mass murder of 9/11 was a false flag operation, orchestrated and executed by the Bush administration. The "war on terrorism" is a perpetual covert operation, an endless pretext for war and murder, supported by a bipartisan consensus. (See "Who is Osama bin Laden?" and "Al-Qaeda:the database".) No 9/11, no "war on terrorism", no war in the Middle East. No "war on terrorism" lie, no dictatorial powers for the White House, and no beefed-up FISA. Given that the "war on terrorism" is a lie, the need for unprecedented spying is also a lie. Just as 9/11 remains the endless pretext for endless war and terrorism, it also remains, in its countless propaganda manifestations, the justification for open totalitarian rule of force and intimidation within US borders. The totalitarian criminal agenda is fully endorsed by neoliberal Democrats, including Barack Obama. According to the Obama campaign, "Senator Obama has said before that the compromise bill is not perfect. Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, Senator Obama chose to support the FISA compromise." The pro-surveillance Democrats, led by Senator Jay Rockefeller and Obama (whose lame hemming-hawing justifications can be read here) are repeating asinine lies, and groundless excuses. In calling criminal spying and covert operations "important surveillance tools", Obama is showing his truest colors. Obama, whose politics and rhetoric have been consistently in line with the Bush/Cheney agenda on all of the most telling issues (war in Afghanistan, war on Iran, "terrorism", "homeland security", globalization, and most recently, other right-wing positions), is a smooth-talking and appealing front for the Bush-Cheney status quo. Obama and McCain, like Bush-Cheney, will continue to push the endless "war on terrorism" lie, and embrace every single criminal act conducted in the name of this propaganda construct. All "homeland security"/Big Brother measures such as FISA, in any form, provides political cover for the US government to engage in criminal activity. Any politician, be it Bush/Cheney or Obama, who approve of any sort of "surveillance" is guilty of committing a criminal act, and of raping the Constitution along the way. Cynical posturing and election-year flatulence from Obama’s legion of defenders and fans cannot hide what has happened, or who is responsible. The rape of the US Constitution is so overt and so egregious that it has set off a wave of outrage and backlash, spawning unusual new grassroots coalitions. Clearly, however, the powers that be, including the Obama camp, has casually dismissed this relatively small portion of the US public out of its election-year calculations, regardless of how stridently they organize, blog, blow whistles or file law suits. Senator Russ Feingold (whose own record on opposing the Bush administration is less than stellar) warned that the FISA revision "could mean millions upon millions of communications between innocent Americans and their friends, families or business associates overseas could now be legally collected." It means much more than Feingold states, and it has for many years---perhaps decades. Spying: the pre- and post-9/11 norm Returning again to the expose by whistleblower Mark Klein, his detailed and stomach-turning expose, which includes materials from the key court cases, exposes the fact that the NSA began breaking into local telephone circuits in 2001. As pointed out by Robert Parry, the current program may have been in place before 2001. In other words, the spying program never had anything to do with international "terrorists", and everything to do with a larger police state agenda, including the power to identify, designate and destroy individuals whose opinions run counter to those of whichever Big Brother is "in charge". This is a long-planned program that 9/11 allowed to push to full fruition. It is a well-documented fact that the US government’s spying capabilities are overwhelming, and that continuous illegal surveillance has always trumped congressional oversight, and the law itself. Obviously, the light reigning-in of criminal covert operations in the post-Watergate 1970s has been completely undone in the decades since. Investigators such as former NSA operative James Bamford (author of the expose of the NSA, Body of Secrets) and Mike Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil have thoroughly detailed the pervasiveness and effectiveness of a wide range of spying and intelligence programs used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies. These include Echelon and PROMIS, which are used by operatives in criminal fashion, as ordered by high-level officials, specifically to get around all oversight. Completely unaddressed throughout the years of noise over spying and FISA, the Total Information Awareness Program (formerly known as DARPA, and spearheaded by Iran-Contra participant John Poindexter) has found new life as the IARPA program. Nobody is talking about IARPA. Nobody will. Welcome to hell, again The George W. Bush administration seized the White House in 2000 by way of an openly stolen election, then cemented its criminal power into place with the unprecedented 9/11 mass murder, and its two resulting abominations: the fabricated "war on terrorism" (the pretext for endless global war), and the USA Patriot Act (the full-scale destruction of the Constitution, and the militarization of the US homeland). These continuing atrocities were the works of a bipartisan "war on terrorism" consensus, a full partnership at the top echelons, whose overriding agenda is the survival of the criminal racket known as the Anglo-American empire. The deepening of the war and security state has continued unabated. Under a US congress with a Democratic Party majority, nothing been done to stop, reverse or undo the world war, boundless US government criminality, open corruption, or the absolute and systematic rape of law itself. Now, particularly with a looming US presidential election, leading members of both political parties have shown their true colors: as flagrant proponents of military-intelligence/"homeland security", and enthusiastic destroyers of the Constitution. In The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Victor Marchetti and John Marks wrote in 1974:
Today, exemplified by actions of the bipartisan US consensus, assisted by an acquiescent and dumbed-down populace, the clandestine mentality is not clandestine. "Professional amorality" is the norm---celebrated openly, and opposed by few. In other words, your life and all of your communications---from your emails, your web searches, medical records, and financial information, to your reading this article and clicking this web site---has been "hoovered up" by the US government’s spying machine, to be used against you at some future time, if the powers that be so choose. If 9/11, the Patriot Act, and the relentless destruction of law since 2000 have not already make abundantly clear, a "Homeland Security" police state within US borders, courtesy of the spy bill, is now complete. Not even the trappings of a democracy remain. | |
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