• Iceland | The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative
  Iceland is a country with huge economic problems but also with an ambitious idea in development to save freedom of expression: The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. It is a cross-party proposal (19 out of 63MPs are making the proposal) aimed at adopting the strongest press and source protection laws from around the world: "The goal of the IMMI proposal is to task the government with finding ways to strengthen freedom of expression around world and in Iceland, as well as providing strong protections for sources and whistleblowers. To this end the legal environment should be explored in such a way that the goals can be defined, and changes to law or new law proposals can be prepared".

• Spain | We can fix this only together...with or without you?
  In the past days the Spanish Chamber of Commerce launched an initiative to raise the confidence of citizens affected by the economic crisis. The campaign is called "Esto solo lo arreglamos entre todos" ("We can fix this only together") and it is willing to be "the biggest social therapy of the history", in the words of Susana Diaz, one of the consultant working on the project. The campaign consists of a website and several ads by both anonymous citizens and celebrities (the ad campaign costed 4 millions, according to Expansión).
  But so far it has not been well received by lots of citizens who felt betrayed by this sort of sharing responsibilities: on Facebook it is easy to find groups protesting against the campaign, with several hundreds of fans each. The protesters complain that the campaign is opportunist and demagogic, even creating a website called "We can fix this only *without them"*" to send "a message loud and clear to the organizers of the ad campaign and the state: we are not the problem.".
  (thanks to Anna Bellorbì)

• Italy | Is transparency compatible with “robots.txt”?
  PDF friends David Osimo and Alberto Cottica point us out a story from Italy about a “transparency project” launched by the Italian government.
  The initiative, launched some time ago, aimed at publishing relevant information about civil servants, such as paycheck and days of absence. But, as this article points out, most part of this data (including those about the ministry itself) has been published in a directory which is not possible to reach by search engines – using the robots.txt file with “disallow:/operazionetrasparenza/”.
  Here’s David’s take on the story: “The implication is that searching with google the name of a person, you will not find these data. You will have to know that the person is employed by a public administration, and visit the website and check the name. This is obviously limiting the real transparency of the public data.
  I assume the excuse is related to privacy: there are different privacy implications if a personal information is searchable or not. This is an important matter, which I would like to understand better. Yet in this case it appears as an excuse. Real transparency needs machine-readable data, and using robots.txt is a clear contradiction of the principle of transparency."
  Plus, David has another point to make: why is transparency applied first of all to (against) public sector workers and their behaviour instead on how the P.A. spend public money?

• E.U. | Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition
  Last week a document on Internet policy has been realeased by the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council. The document addresses Member States about illegal activities and how to fight them, but there seem to be a little confusion: copyright infringments, racist speech and child pornography are all together in the "Internet frame". A way to justify the imposition of Internet filtering?
  Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of the advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, has very strong words on the issue, defining the document 'disturbing'.

“All innovation involves the application of new ideas – or the reapplication of old ideas in new ways – to devise better solutions to our needs. Innovation is invariably a cumulative, collaborative activity in which ideas are shared, tested, refined, developed and applied. Social innovation applies this thinking to social issues: education and health, issues of inequality and inclusion.”

Charlie Leadbeater, Social enterprise and social innovation: Strategies for the next ten years

In a recent post over on Techpresident, Micah unpacked the three branches of We.Gov. The first is the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency.

While I agree with Micah strongly on all 3 points, for me what none of these quite get to is perhaps one of the most powerful uses of the web within the realm of We.Gov – the ability for people to use the Internet to come together and reimagine public value, not (just) public services per se.

One year ago this month, Russia and Georgia fought a 10-day war over two breakaway Georgian republics. Georgia launched the first attacks, and when Russia responded a day later, its air assault coincided with heavy denial of service and DNS attacks on Georgian government Web sites. Some of these sites went down; others were defaced.

It was the second time in 16 months that Russia--or at least, Russians--had been accused of launching a cyber warfare campaign; the first was in April 2007, when servers in Estonia were barraged for a full month. Count the daylong outages of Facebook and Twitter from earlier this month, and that makes three such assaults.

Given the political and military events that coincided with these attacks, it is safe to assume that they were launched by someone sympathetic to the Russian government. But such accusations have always had to stop short of implicating the Kremlin itself; it's nearly impossible to trace such attacks back to their original source.

But a place called the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit just published a private report (available only to the U.S. government and network security companies; a PDF of the executive summary is available to the public) that attempts to answer the question of Kremlin involvement.

Around this time yesterday, I, along with countless others, tried to bring down the Web sites of Iran's information and justice ministries, and state-sponsored media outlets. The idea was to silence the pro-Ahmadenijad, anti-dissent messages coming from these outlets, and in so doing, strengthen the opposition protests in Tehran.

You didn't have to be computer smart to take part: a developer in San Francisco had set up a push-button tool that would, upon your click, immediately start bombarding 10 Web sites with requests. I clicked Start, and in the 10 little boxes below, I could see the pages load and reload. About half of them were already down.

This was exhilarating. The goal was to promote democracy, and I could actually watch as it happened. Empowering.

But there's more to it than that. I'm conflicted about the virtue of this idea. I'm still trying to sort out my thoughts about what happened, but I know that we will be talking about yesterday morning for years to come. We turned our collective power and outrage into a serious weapon that we could use at our will, without ever having to feel the consequences. We practiced distributed, citizen-based warfare. That is frightening. Here is how my thinking evolved throughout the day:

I'm going to start posting, as much as possible, about the variety of fantastic speakers and panels we're having at Personal Democracy Forum this year, and I'm starting with one of the most unusual, our session with authors Doug Rushkoff and Tara Hunt on "Building the Social Economy: CraigBucks, NewMarks and Making Whuffie."

I stumbled upon this article a few days ago:

General Dynamics Information Technology put out an ad last month on behalf of the Homeland Security Department...Applicants, it said, must understand hackers' tools and tactics and be able to analyze Internet traffic and identify vulnerabilities in the federal systems.

And in the Pentagon's budget request submitted last week...the Pentagon will increase the number of cyber experts it can train each year from 80 to 250 by 2011.

Amid dire warnings that the U.S. is ill-prepared for a cyber attack, the White House conducted a 60-day study of how the government can better manage and use technology to protect everything from the nation's electrical grid and stock markets to tax data, airline flight systems, and nuclear launch codes.

This is a good start. By increasing the cyber-defense workforce, they are being more predictive than they have in years past. Our government usually waits until the disaster has already happened before trying to prevent it.

But this may not be the best way to prevent it. I don't profess to know what the best way is. But I do believe that we shouldn't defer to the normal strategy--open a new office, fill some chairs, maybe form a working group or presidential commission or two--when it comes to solving a new problem.

In addition to the standard practice, we should experiment. Where do we begin experimenting? With an admission:

Those most qualified to defend our networks do not want government jobs*.

In the aftermath of Thursday's Virtual Town Hall, most of us in the tech-politics arena have been pondering one question: How do we improve upon this system to create a better virtual democracy experience? The conversation usually comes back to the problem exemplified by the marijuana questions, which were far and away the most popular questions asked of the president. Some thoughts:

To the tech-politics gurus bemoaning the marijuana questions:

"The marijuana people" did not "game" the system. They didn't "sabotage" it. They didn't get advanced notice. There is no (public) evidence of astroturfing or systems exploitation. They played fair. "Sabotage" is shouting from the back of a room during a Senate testimony. All these people did was show up at the polls. It's the same thing you and I do every other November: they voted. If that's sabotage, then senior citizens are incredibly cunning saboteurs. It's fine to look for better ways of building this system. But stop equating fervent yet fair participation with cheating. I see the marijuana questions as a huge success, in two regards.