The move, as well as a similar delay on a vote of a companion bill before the House of Representatives, appears to be the clearest indication yet that Wednesday's Wikipedia blackout and Web protest swayed lawmakers. On Thursday, several lawmakers dropped their support of the controversial measure and all four Republican presidential candidates took stands against it.

"There's no reason that legitimate issues raised about PROTECT IP can't be resolved. Counterfeiting & piracy cost 1000s of #jobs yearly#pipa," he tweeted.

Meanwhile, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, also said he would "indefinitely" delay a vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act pending before the house.

"I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy," Smith said in a statement Friday. "It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products."

But not all lawmakers are happy with the delay.

"More time will pass with jobs lost and economies hurt by foreign criminals who are stealing American intellectual property, and selling it back to American consumers," SOPA sponsor Rep. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in a statement. "The day will come when the Senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem."

Google has also launched an extensive Egyptian elections page full of info on candidates, major issues and polling stations. The information is provided by Egypt's Higher Elections Committee, but Google's page enhances the content with Google News, Maps and its other election tools. Google is building tools and programs to improve elections around the world, and this landmark election in Egypt is a storybook example of Web technology as a force for open and accountable government.

The Mubarak regime tried, even as it fell, to restrict access to Web services in Egypt in order to contain the uprising. It first blocked Twitter, then Facebook and Google services, and then it went for a full-on Internet blackout. The Internet struck back, though. Anonymous targeted Mubarak's regime websites, and hackers and bloggers in Egypt and around the world lent their support, even facing arrest.

Google lent its support, too, featuring YouTube videos of the uprisings. The extensive resources Google offers Egyptian voters on its elections page today follow through on that support with an effort to make democracy better through Web technology.

You can read more about Google's celebration of this historic election on the Google blog.

"We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove. Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests."

"The whole world is watching," as protesters around the country have reminded officials since they first began to occupy Wall Street. With this week's escalations, now would not be a good time for Google to engage in censorship. The wording of its notice about denying the removal requests is encouraging, but it's carefully chosen to suit a particular situation.

Google complies with 93% of U.S. removal requests. It has decided that the best course of action is to maintain transparency and respond on a case-by-case basis. That transparency has upset governments, and the refusal to censor police brutality videos surely made some city officials unhappy.

But Google's record is spotty. Just this month, it handed over a WikiLeaks volunteer's Gmail data to the U.S. government, which used an old and controversial law to request it without a warrant from a judge. Google is pushing for updated laws that better reflect the media of today, but in the meantime, its record on upholding free speech is touch-and-go. Google has done the right thing with these police takedown requests, but the world should keep watching.

What do you think Google's responsibilities are regarding government requests?

Google launched its interactive transparency report last year. U.S. requests for google user data have spiked in the past six months, and Google complies 93% of the time. Google's transparency efforts have displeased some governments, but its compliance with requests have upset some civilians, too. In this increasingly weird new world, Google can only err on the side of more transparency while pushing for better laws.

How a Web company responds to government requests is a public test of its values, and users should take note. As we saw this month, Google handed over a WikiLeaks volunteer's Gmail contacts and IP address in response to a court order under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which allows the government to demand this information without even notifying the user.

Electronic communications have changed a bit since 1986. They form a ubiquitous, always-on fabric of our lives now. Fortunately, Google isn't any happier with the status quo than privacy-aware users are. It's among a number of major Web companies pushing for better laws. And Google and other data-mining companies take their roles in public policy seriously. Both Google and Facebook's lobbying efforts broke records this year.

Do you think Google is doing a good job on transparency? Sound off in the comments.

The Personal Data Protection and Breach Accountability Act, sponsored by Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, would enable the Justice Department to fine businesses with more than 10,000 customers $5,000 per violation per day, with a maximum of $20 million per violation, according to The Hill.

It seems that the core of the legislation is designed to counter the sort of recent high-profile attacks on online sites that held significant consumer data. The bill would fight delays in informing the public when their data has been compromised and eradicate filters to transparency, which would allow the public to know more about how their data is being used and what threats have recently threatened it.

"The amount of time should be measured in hours, not days, at most in days, not weeks," Blumenthal told The Hill.

Photo by WildFire Effects

The lockers, which come in several sizes, are located on a wall in a 7-11 convenience store in Seattle surrounding an ATM-like device that allows a customer to key in a PIN and pick up their Amazon package.

We don't have Amazon's confirmation, but it is quite possible that by installing these boxes in convenience stores, Amazon will allow customers to pick up anything that Amazon sells, including books or food.

Amazon is the latest online company to offer services usually offered by shrinking government institutions and to create solutions, a trend spotted in the United States and elsewhere.

Email has for years clawed away at real world mail delivered by carriers dressed in blue uniforms. Now, Amazon is jumping into the increasingly large gaps opening in a U.S. Postal Service whose effectiveness continues to be compromised by increased costs and declining tax revenue.

In fact, it is at the brink of default; it is likely the Post Office will miss a payment of $5.5 billion to the U.S. government on Sept. 30, and the Postmaster General has threatened that the service will need to close 3,700 local offices and fire 120,000 employees.

We have put in a request for more information about the locker system in Seattle and what it will mean for the company as a whole. We will update when we know more.

You answered and we culled your responses on Facebook and Twitter and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

While this month's AWS outage wasn't nearly as long or severe as the one we saw in April, such disturbances are a potential cause for concern. If you think having Reddit or Tumblr go down for an hour can cause a panic, imagine having mission-critical systems at the Pentagon grind to a halt.

The biggest advantage cloud computing offers governments is the areas efficiency and affordability. In his 25-point proposal (PDF) to reform federal IT, outgoing U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra identified cost savings as one of the main justifications for adopting the "cloud first" approach to federal IT he advocates.

In the report, Kundra cites the 50% cost reduction seen over five years by the General Services Administration when they switched to Google Apps for email. That was a savings of about $15 million, which is just a fraction what would stand to be gained if other federal agencies followed Kundra's recommendation of migrating three "must move" services to the cloud. By migrating more data and services into the cloud, the U.S. government could stand to save as much as $3 billion.

In addition to financial savings, employing cloud-based IT solutions generally makes it easier and quicker to deploy solutions and scale in the face of rapid growth in demand on resources.

Downtime and Security Issues Cause Concern

While some government agencies have jumped on board with the cloud migration idea, some are more hesistant, a fact explored in a recent story in the New York Times.

According to the Times:

Surveys of chief information officers of federal agencies, conducted by various research companies, show an elevated degree of concern about security when asked about cloud computing. But the agencies must comply with Mr. Kundra's "Cloud First" policy, which encourages the use of cloud services for new projects and requires them to move at least three existing projects to the cloud by next summer.

Of course, solutions like AWS GovCloud are designed with the strict and specific security needs of government agencies in mind. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has outlined the federal government's standards when it comes to information security risk management, and those guidelines are met by GovCloud.

As far as concerns about downtime, government agencies would be well advised to borrow a page from Netflix's playbook. Even during the worst of this April's AWS outage, the movie streaming service stayed up and running, thanks to an approach to engineering that aims to avoid the side effects of exactly that type of outage.

DHS has teamed with security and technology experts at the SANS Institute and Mitre to create a list of the top 25 programming errors that lead to the most serious hacks, according to The New York Times. The idea is to educate companies and organizations about the channels that criminal hackers use to gain access to confidential information and servers. These are often common software errors that can lead to "zero day" exploits.

The guidance framework will include "vignettes" for various industry verticals, like banking and manufacturing, and will highlight which vulnerabilities are most frequent in the types of software is used.

Not Always A Tech Issue

While groups like Anonymous and LulzSec (which reportedly is disbanding) use sophisticated hacking methods (like SQL-injections), the greatest threat to security within the government and large corporations does not come from programming vulnerabilities.

It is their employees.

Bloomberg published an in-depth article June 27 titled "Human Errors, Idiocy Fuel Hacking." That may seem like an outrageous accusation but remember that one of the biggest security leaks in recent history - WikiLeaks - was the result of one person with physical storage (a CD) and access to confidential files. All Bradley Manning allegedly needed to do was put the disc into a computer and start downloading.

Bloomberg reports that DHS staff secretly dropped CDs and USB drives into the parking lot of government buildings to see if they were picked up and put into a computer. The ones that were picked up were plugged in 60% of the time and ones with official logos 90% of the time.

It is one thing for an average citizen to pick up a USB drive marked "DHS" and put it into a computer but another entirely for government workers supposedly trained on security risks to do so. It is reminiscent of the movie "Burn After Reading" where Brad Pitt finds a CD filled with another character's bank records and thinks it is top-secret information.

Bloomberg also notes that social engineering attacks are growing more sophisticated and are on the rise. According to security company Symantec's State of Spam and Phishing monthly report, phishing attempts rose 6.7% between June 2010 and May 2011. Phishing has become more targeted with "spear phishing" aimed at specific groups of individuals and "whale phishing" aimed at C-level executives.

"Rule No. 1 is, don't open suspicious links," Mark Rasch of Computer Sciences Corporation told Bloomberg. "Rule No. 2 is, see Rule No. 1. Rule No. 3 is, see Rules 1 and 2."

Once a phishing target clicks on a malicious link, it is likely that one of the top 25 software errors listed in the DHS guidance are being exploited. When it comes to security, the fact of the matter is that an organizations' own people are the biggest threat, not some esoteric group of hackers living in the Internet ether.

Correction: The original version of this post referred to the Wikileaks suspect as Ryan Manning. The post has been updated to reflect his actual name, Bradley Manning. 6/28/11 - 9:40 a.m. EST.

Vivek Kundra, the man behind Data.gov, the government IT Dashboard and the federal initiative to reduce data centers and move to the cloud, will leave his post in August, according to Politico. He is reported to be going to Harvard to join the Kennedy School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, according to Federal News Radio. President Obama had tapped Kundra to be the first federal CIO in 2009 after he had been the chief technology officer of Washington, D.C.

While the personal moves may be on the verge of becoming a trend, there is no doubt that the part of the reason behind them stems from the lack of innovation and technological adoption in government. The best way to think of the federal government is that it is a large enterprise operation that is perpetually three to five years behind the times. On aggregate, that is true, though there are a few examples of agencies that operate with present or cutting edge technology, such as NASA, many of the armed forces (which is much more device driven than IT infrastructure driven) and executive level agencies like the State Department and Internal Revenue Service (that is not an oxymoron, the IRS spends nearly $14 billion dollars on IT infrastructure and tax systems ... yet, the Treasury Department as a whole is not incredibly innovative).

Kundra was part of the first technology team ever to work as a C-suite at the executive level within the Office of Management and Budget. Aneesh Chopra is the first federal CTO and Jeffrey Zients the first chief performance officer.

Kundra most lasting legacy on the federal government will probably be his "25 Point Plan" [PDF] outlining how the government can streamline the IT infrastructure, grow to be more technologically forward and cut wasteful IT spending.

[Picture: Wikipedia]

Apparently there is no omerta between hackers. The Guardian says that the FBI has so thoroughly infiltrated the hacker community "that it is now riddle with paranoia and mistrust." Arrested hackers often turn into moles for the FBI, acting on behalf of the agency as informants in underground chat rooms and forums to sniff out other hackers susceptible to arrest. Hackers of the world: how likely are you to become a snitch for the U.S. government if you are arrested?

"The good of the many outweighed the good of the one. There were no winners here. I had two options and I took the one that was less wrong," Lamo said of turning in Manning. He said he was sad to see his friend Manning behind bars but viewed him as "any of his friends that has done something reprehensible."

According to The Guardian, Lamo's attitude is probably not shared by the rest of the hacker community. The Guardian interviewed Eric Corley, publisher of hacker publication 2600 who said that, "owing to the harsh penalties involved and the relative inexperience with the law that many hackers have, they are rather susceptible to intimidation." So, unlike Lamo, they are not acting out of some altruistic sense of obligation but rather for fear of hard time. It is the same tactic that local law enforcement has used with petty drug dealers for years in order to climb the ladder to major traffickers.

Next On The Hit List: Hacker Communities

Individual hackers are one type of problem, infiltrating and picking apart hacker collectives like Anonymous or the newly arisen Lulz Security (if it is indeed a separate group of hackers) is another. To a certain extent, there is safety and anonymity in numbers. The way that hacker groups function is not like some normal type of organized crime group either. Anonymous is a global network of hackers working together, many of which (rightfully so) do not trust each other. The way to break up an amorphous collective is to break it into its constituent parts, isolate them and work up the chain of command. Given the distrust already within the hacker community, that may not be as hard as it seems.

Proposed by Sen. Ellen Corbett, the bill would force social networks to institute default settings upon registration of what users share on the services. Users can opt to share more information than the default, which would only list the users' city of residence. Tech companies are fighting on the basis that the bill is Draconian and unintuitive and that, as an industry, technology can do better than the California legislature.

"Social Networking Privacy Act would establish a barrier between an existing California user of a social networking site and her ability to continue speaking as desired," the coalition wrote. "By hiding from view of all existing usersʼ information until they made a contrary choice, the State of California would be significantly limiting those users ability to "freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects."

The coalition calls the proposals in SB 242 "privacy shrink wrap." The companies contend that the bill would "force users to make decisions about privacy and visibility of all their information well before they have ever used the service." They say that users would quickly click through the registration privacy options without giving it critical thought. A better way, the coalition thinks, is "contextual" privacy where users decide what can be shared on a case-by-case basis and cites the Federal Trade Commission as calling it a best practice in social sharing. Hence, privacy for users would, in theory, decrease under SB 242.

Unnecessary & Unwanted?

The coalition cites research by Pew Internet and American Life Project that says that most social network users who care about privacy are active in controlling their settings, either for more or less visibility. The bill also proposes a $10,000 fine to Internet companies who do not take down personally identifiable information of users within 48 hours if requested. The coalition says that only 8% of social networking users have ever asked for personal information to be taken down.

The letter closes by saying the discussion of online privacy is an important one, but the California law is inadequate and potentially harmful to the state.

"Rather than establishing a floor for online privacy which social networking sites must meet or exceed, SB 242 would establish a ceiling, undermining meaningful consumer choice while incentivizing this growing industry to expand their operations anywhere but California," the coalition wrote.

The argument between the state and the tech industry reminiscent of anti-logging campaigns in Northern U.S. states. Lawmakers are stuck between what could be construed as an altruistic move (saving the environment, or in this case, users' privacy) and an important industry that is the lifeblood of the local economy. In such cases there are no easy answers and the arguments become more bitter as the debate continues on.

Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va) will introduce a "Do Not Track" bill that would allow consumers to opt-out of online tracking and block websites and marketers from tracing their Internet activities. The "Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011" would build on recommendations by the Federal Trade Commission which would govern enforcement of the act, according to the Washington Post.

According to the Post, the bill would require online companies to honor the choice of a user not to be tracked. Web companies would have to destroy or make anonymous user information when it was no longer useful (read: profitable).

The California legislature has proposed a do-not-track law and search giant Google has joined a lobby to oppose it. That makes it all but certain that Google would oppose a federal do-not track law as well.

Of the major browsers, Apple's Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 have built-in do-not-track functionality. Google has released a browser extension for do-not-track but the Chrome browser itself does not have it built in.

Also introduced today from members of the House of Representatives is a bill that would prevent children from being tracked online. The bill would create guidelines for how marketers can track and target teenagers on the Internet. The bill would also protect teenagers from location tracking. This bill is pertinent considering the Sony PlayStation Network that was hacked with information of up to 70 million users, many of them adolescents, exposed.

OpenCourt is a project by WBUR, the Boston University affiliate of National Public Radio, funded by the Knight Foundation to increase knowledge and interaction of the legal process by placing a streaming cameras in courtrooms. A couple of MacBooks Pros, a Canon HD camcorder and Livestream and you have your very own reality television.

"It's a pilot," said John Davidow to Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab. "It's now a reality and off the white board. More and more issues will come forward."

It is more than the equivalent of traffic camera in a courtroom though. Judges have access to the stream from their benches and certain topics, like restraining orders, will not be lived streamed.

The use case is straightforward. Educate the community in the court process, keep people informed of what is happening in their area, increase awareness of how courts work and provide an open and transparent look into the machinations of an important government entity.

It could also be used as a tool for journalists. It was designed by journalists (WBUR is associated with the College of Communications at BU) and the Knight Foundation is a non-profit group with the aim of advancing journalism in the digital era. Live streaming cameras in local courtrooms can help newsrooms stretched thin of reporters. For instance, the Quincy Patriot-Ledger embedded an OpenCourt stream in an article the day after the service launched.

"I'd argue that nothing compares to actually being there and seeing with your own eyes," Davidow said to Ellis. "At the same time, maybe some news organizations would find efficiency in that setup."

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) will be a department within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that will work with the private sector to give Internet users a secure identity. The idea is to create an "Identity Ecosystem" - "an online environment where individuals and organizations will be able to trust each other because they follow agreed upon standards to obtain and authenticate their digital identities," according to the report.

The plan outlines the strategy for the Identity Ecosystem, which it says will be completely voluntary. Neither the federal government nor corporations can mandate that users sign up for the Identity Ecosystem; it is designed to ensure anonymity on the Web, especially for users that could be harmed if their true identity was known.

"The government will neither mandate that individuals obtain an Identity Ecosystem credential nor that companies require Identity Ecosystem credentials from consumers as the only means to interact with them," the report says.

That stipulation comes as a big sigh of relief for some advocates and pundits who feared a Big Brother approach that would be mandated by the federal government. NSTIC is designed to allow the private sector to carve out the parameters Identity Ecosystem.

"Only the private sector has the ability to build and operate the complete Identity Ecosystem, and the final success of the Strategy depends upon private-sector leadership and innovation," the report says.

That is a different approach from other countries, like Spain, where Bob Blakely, VP, distinguished analyst, and agenda manager for IT1 Identity and Privacy Strategies Service at Gartner, spent time earlier this year and noticed the complete opposite approach.

"The thing that really stood out for me was how American the NSTIC proposal is," Blakley said. "Spain has, since 2006, has had an electronic identity card for all citizens. A number of the conversations I had with businesses and government entities is to how to get businesses to accept an identity credential that was produced by the government. NSTIC frames the problem exactly in the opposite way."

There are a number of ways the Identity Ecosystem could manifest itself. From a "smart card" - digital identity - that houses your trusted identity, to smart grid authentication, to the ability to have bankcards or university ID cards validated as Identity Ecosystem-approved credentials.

The implementation of NSTIC could force some companies, like Facebook, to change the way it does business. Overall NSTIC is an ambitious agenda set out to create a more secure Web. For the idea to come to fruition it will take the cooperation of all the primary stakeholders involved, from the federal government to the tech companies and most importantly, the user.

"NSTIC paints a utopian picture of a user-centric identity management system in a business environment that does not commoditize on identity," said Aaron Titus, the privacy director of the Liberty Coalition in a conference call April 18. "Of course, we support that vision but success is far from assured."