17126918
submission
metrometro writes:
"Earlier this summer, the visualization website Swivel.com disappeared from the internet (only the externally-hosted blog is still there). To find out what happened, I tracked down and interviewed Swivel's two founders, Brian Mulloy and Dmitry Dimov." The Swivel.com CEO's refreshingly humble comments point to some broader questions with open data: How much of this is actually useful? And how many people have the skills to use it?
12257446
submission
metrometro writes:
A TSA officer in Miami allegedly jumped a coworker with a police baton after a backscatter X-ray training that included a supervisor making jokes about his penis size while he was scanned. Local NBC reports, "Sources say [TSA officer Rolando] Negrin stepped into the machine during the training session and became embarrassed and angry when a supervisor started cracking jokes about his manhood, made visible by the new machine... According to the police report, Negrin confronted one of his co-workers in an employee parking lot, where he hit him with a police baton on the arm and back." I feel safer already.
11480706
submission
metrometro writes:
The Washington Post reports that "A former senior executive with the National Security Agency has been indicted on 10 felony charges related to the alleged leaking of classified information to a newspaper reporter in 2006 and 2007, the Justice Department announced Thursday morning. Thomas A. Drake, 52, headed an office in the NSA's signals intelligence and engineering directorates at Fort Meade between 2001 and 2005, U.S. officials said." Alleged leaks were to an award winning intel reporter, then at Baltimore Sun. Based on her stories, her source mostly trashed NSA leadership for lack of direction.
Of note: the government says the alleged NSA mole uses Hushmail, which is all the endorsement I need for a security system.
6393789
submission
metrometro writes:
In a bizzare departure from the open gov movement he helps lead Lawrence Lessig highlights "the perils of open government". Lessig argues that having too much information will make people (in turn) more confused, easily mislead, or sad. "Reformers rarely feel responsible for the bad that their fantastic new reform effects. Their focus is always on the good... Likewise with transparency. There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it."
The Sunlight Foundation and others have issued immediate rebuttals. Lessig is on the Sunlight Foundation's advisory board, for now.
3582745
submission
metrometro writes:
Encrypted on a US military server with the Orwellian but not-very-secure password "progress", an unclassified document intended to lay out the thematic content of military messages to the media (read: spin), regardless of the details of the story at hand. Whistleblowing portal Wikileaks.org posted the document, a link to the original server and the password on their website. The entire server (http://oneteam.centcom.mil) has since been taken offline.
