The DoJ presentation describes Facebook as much more co-operative with law enforcement requests for user information than Twitter and MySpace are. Update: Facebook's Barry Schnitt contests this interpretation of the document, says the company is resistant to illegitimate government requests for user information and offers one example of that resistance in a comment posted below. The document also explains to officers what the advantages of going undercover on social networking sites are. The EFF posted IRS training documents for using various internet tools as well, including Google Street View, but those were much tamer than the Justice file.

Highlights from the deck include:

• On "getting info from Facebook" - options include photos, contact info, group contact info and IP logs. "HOWEVER, Facebook has other data available." The deck notes that Facebook is "often cooperative with emergency requests."


• MySpace and Twitter, on the other hand, are described differently. MySpace "requires a search warrant for private messages/bulletins less than 181 days old." Twitter "will not preserve data without legal process," has a "stated policy of producing data only in response to legal process" and has no Law Enforcement Guide (or spying manual, as some parties call such documents). Wouldn't you like your social network to say no before it says yes and require a warrant before handing over information to law enforcement? We reached out to Facebook this evening about the government claim that it was unusually co-operative but have not yet received a response. Update: Facebook has responded in comments below and says that the company is in fact resistant to any requests for user information that it does not believe are an emergency and even then hands over a minimal amount of user data.


• Funny: As social networks go, LinkedIn's "use for criminal communications appears limited" the document says. You don't say. LinkedIn can be useful in finding expert witnesses, however.


• "Why go undercover on Facebook, MySpace, etc?" the document asks. Three reasons are offered: 1. Communicate with suspects/targets. 2. Gain access to non-public info. 3. Map social relationships/networks.


• "If agents violate terms of service," the document asks, "is that 'otherwise illegal activity'?" No answer is offered in the text.


• "Many witnesses have social-networking pages," the presentation notes. Those pages can be a "valuable source of info on defense witnesses" and "potential pitfalls for government witnesses."


• Also funny: DoJ prosectors are urged to "use caution in 'friending' judges, defense counsel."

We expect the Electronic Frontier Foundation to offer further analysis in coming days. You can download a PDF of the document yourself here. For further discussion of these documents, see blog posts clustered on Techmeme.

This handy little government 2.0 app will let you make that wheel squeak even louder, all while informing you of your rights. And for the true civic participant on the go, you can even petition to run for office without interrupting your day.

The app is divided into four primary categories: Rights & Laws, Representatives, Take Action and Public Forum. Each of the first three are separated into the various levels of government, whether local, state or federal.

The "Rights & Laws" section is a pocket reference to laws concerning all sorts of handy things, like due process or search and seizure. The app not only quotes the law directly, but offers a layman's interpretation. Of course, this is accompanied by a standard caveat that the information is for education only, but they seem to do a decent job of explaining "how it's generally applied in real life." In many ways, it's like having a pocket constitution, but broken down for easy access.

"Representatives" offers a full listing of government officials, from Barack Obama to your local alderman, and each with contact information such as phone number, email address and website.

The "Public Forums" are just that and, while we imagine the types of people that use this app to be the vocal sorts, we're not so sure a message forum is quite tailored to the iPhone. That said, the forums are also available on the web, but we question their true utility in this instance.

Moving on, the final section, "Take Action", is the one that really caught our attention. We reviewed an app yesterday called GoRequest, that offered similar capabilities, but this one seems to take it a step further. DIY Democracy brings the various levels and offices of government to you with pre-formatted, well-written letters for the on-the-go complaint. Whether you want to run for office, contest the validity of a law, or simply report a pothole or road hazard, DIY Democracy is set to connect you with the proper authorities.

It does all of this, of course, with your exact location in mind, so when you report that pothole, or dangerously dangling tree limb, the local department of public works will get exact GPS coordinates in addition to whatever other description you offer.

In addition to GPS coordinates and pre-formatted letter templates, you can of course directly attach both photos and video, making options like "Contact Mayor" seem a little less silly. If an issue is urgent enough, get the evidence and send it off to the officials.

We can only hope to see this app come out for more locations than California. While it's nifty that it goes all the way to the top, we find that being able to directly interact with your local government and report issues as seen on the ground is probably the more likely use for this app.

DIY Democracy is available for download in the App Store.

The new policy puts the responsibility for restricting access to certain projects in the hands of project administrators.

Under the site's new policy, the most restrictive settings will be set as default, leaving the impetus to change who can access a project, and from where, up to the project administrator.

"Our action provoked a strong, angry reaction from those it affected and from the community at large," reads the blog post. "We recognize that, for some people, the recent site changes called into question whether your support of us is justified. The changes that we deployed today are intended to empower our projects and reward your continued trust."

It will now be up to the administrator to determine that their project can be exported and how access might be restricted according to "the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security," which SourceForge identified in its original decision.

While this opens the doors back up to users in a number of countries, we can only wonder what type of problems project administrators might run into now. Is this an admirable move or is it like a news organization not backing up its reporters? Instead of making a statement about US laws and how they might apply to the open-source movement, SourceForge is instead saying it will go with the flow and leave any stance-taking up to its users.

Right now, all projects remain restricted by default, so we'll have to wait and see if the open-source community rallies behind their stated outrage and opens up the projects en masse, or if it cowers behind uncertainty over US export laws.

The open-source movement has always been community based, working outside of standard boundaries and borders, and some see SourceForge's move as going against those basic tenets.

"Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list."

The site began using automatic IP blocking last week and users from a number of countries, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, are now unable to access the site.

While some are calling foul and declaring that this is the death of the open-source movement, we have to assume that the technologically savvy users accessing the site would know how to get around a simple IP-based filter. Whether using a tool like Tor, or a proxy service like HotSpot Shield, it can't be all that difficult to access the site.

The SourceForge blog post reminds that "in addition to participating in the open source community, we also live in the real world, and are governed by the laws of the country in which we are located."

Sounds like a great day for Internet democracy, right? We wonder if crowdsourcing is the way to get the hard-hitting, journalistic questions delivered to the president's doorstep or if it will turn into yet another Internet meme. And even if the right questions get asked, will the format result in just another rehearsed, prepackaged answer?

The president will answer the top-voted questions in a live broadcast on a yet-unannounced date. That isn't to say that the White House press team won't be closely monitoring those questions over the days leading up to the live broadcast and carefully preparing answers. So while it sounds like a great idea, we would warn against getting too excited that Joe and Jane Citizen are finally going to have their day in the press box.

Internet Voting and the Digg/Reddit/4chan Effect

The last time the public was given the ability to ask President Obama some questions, NORML stormed the polls and put marijuana legalization at the front and center of the debate. Even then, however, Obama managed to just laugh off the question before moving on.

In the end, we're glad to see the Internet being used to create dialogue between the president and the public, but it isn't as if the State of the Union was hard to miss. Every major television network will be carrying the speech. The YouTube blog compares the opportunity for citizens to ask questions to Calvin Coolidge making history with the first publicly broadcast State of the Union. For our money, we'd much rather see the Prop 8 trial in California broadcast live on YouTube, as we were promised before the Supreme Court stepped in and blocked an earlier decision to show the trial.

Yesterday the UK government released its new data site, data.gov.uk, to rave reviews (including ours). The new Guardian search engine searches across the UK, US, New Zealand and Australian governments' data sites. The company also offered up a gallery of the 10 best visualizations and mash-ups built on top of government data like this.

Following an era when the quantity of data available online increased in orders of magnitude, thanks largely to easy publishing tools for end-users like blogging and social networks, many people expect the next era of development online to focus on strategic moves to make the most valuable data available in standardized formats that facilitate innovation by 3rd parties independent of the original sources of the data.

If large, standardized data sets are a new language, then it's time for a new period of literature to be written.

The documentary was shot by Delib founder Chris Quigley over two months last year, both on location in Washington DC and via Skype.

Quigley's interviewees ended up ranging from the White House's head of the Open Gov initiative, Beth Noveck, to Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media.

To learn more about the interviews and process, check out Delib's page on the film.

Check out these posts from ReadWriteWeb's Government archives.

And here we thought grandpa joining Facebook was really the death of its coolness.

The one stat we found most interesting in the above graphic was that only 23% use some sort of chat or communication tool, something we here at ReadWriteWeb couldn't function without. A majority of social networking use, the report points out, consists of existing sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The report also found a significant difference in social network adoption between federal and local governments, with federal agencies much more likely to use the tools, noting that this is likely a result in differences in funding from state to state.

Currently, security concerns appear to be the number one reason for government workplaces hold off on using social networking, although we have another concern - how will they be held accountable under public record laws, which are meant to keep government open and transparent to the public? We have to hope that instant messages and Facebook chats between government employees will be recorded the same as government emails so that when something goes wrong, as it inevitably does, we have a trail to look back on.

The EFF is working with the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law on this lawsuit. The clinic filed the original FOIA requests on EFF's behalf and later filed the suit when government agencies refused to respond. 

Named in suit are the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Treasury, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Justice, which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, among others.

The filing mentions several recent media articles where criminals have been apprehended due to government surveillance of social networking sites, including the case of Maxi Sopo, whose Facebook status updates led to his arrest on bank fraud charges. Another example involved programmer Aaron Swartz, who helped an open-government activist with the collection of millions of public and free court records. His activities led to a full-scale FBI investigation, as detailed here in this Wired article. Twitter's name also came up when, as mentioned above, the service was used to notify G-20 summit protesters of police movements.

Although this suit may lead some to believe the EFF is against the practice of utilizing social networking sites for investigative purposes, that is not the case. The filing notes that government use is "often for laudable reasons" - they just want the scope clarified so as to prevent abuse.

Social Media Investigations are the New Wiretap

No longer solely used by tech-savvy individuals, social networks have seen explosive growth over recent years. Sites which at one time catered only to the young - such as Facebook which began as college-only network - now include demographic groups that range from pre-teens all the way up to grandparents. As more mainstream users join sites such as these, there is a growing need for privacy awareness. Specifically, internet users have the right to know who can access their data as well as when and how it can be used.

Initiatives like Facebook's recent privacy updates are intended to help users maintain some control over that data, but that may not be enough. As graduate student Christopher Soghoian recently revealed on his blog, government agencies routinely request information from the operators of social networks when investigating criminal activities in order to access data users have hidden from public view. In fact, most companies even have documented policies regarding the procedures for requesting this data. For example, Facebook's Subpoena and Search Warrant Guide is here, and MySpace's Law Enforcement Guide is here.

In this new technological age we live in, using social media to gather data and track criminals is commonplace. It's the new wiretap. And while groups like EFF acknowledge that social network surveillance is often used for commendable purposes, people deserve to know what their rights are in this area. Hopefully, this suit will shed some light on that.

Why Do We Need Net Neutrality?

In his speech, Genachowski lists three reasons for why we need to be concerned about the future of the Internet:

• limited competition among service providers
• broadband providers, who generally sell phone service and cable TV subscriptions, and whose "rational bottom-line interests may diverge from the broad interests of consumers in competition and choice"
• as the Internet has grown, technologies for managing networks have become more sophisticated, but these tools "cannot by themselves determine the right answers to difficult policy questions -- and they raise their own set of new questions"

Back in 2004, then-Chairman Michael Powell proposed a set of four principles (PDF) based on the idea that ISPs should not be allowed to prevent users from accessing any lawful part of the Internet or from attaching "non-harmful" devices to the network. Today, Julius Genachowski proposed to add two more principles to this list.

Principle of Non-Discrimination

The fifth principle is one of non-discrimination -- stating that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications.

This means that ISPs would not be allowed to block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks or favor some content or applications over others. An ISP could not, for example, give its subscribers faster access to its own streaming video site, but slow down similar content from another site that is owned by a competitor.

Principle of Transparency

The sixth principle is a transparency principle -- stating that providers of broadband Internet access must be transparent about their network management practices.

Today, we often have to wonder if our ISP is actually shaping traffic and purposely slowing our torrent downloads. Google even got so worried about this topic that it released a number of tools that allow consumers to check if their ISPs are engaged in traffic shaping. If adopted, this would mean that broadband providers will have to disclose what kind of protocols they are blocking and how they are managing traffic on their networks.

According to Genachowski, the FCC has "an obligation to ensure that the Internet is an enduring engine for U.S. economic growth, and a foundation for democracy in the 21st century. We have an obligation to ensure that the Internet remains a vast landscape of innovation and opportunity." While he acknowledges that some parties would argue that innovation and investment are exactly the reasons why the government shouldn't adopt open Internet rules, Genachowski argues that an open Internet will ultimately benefit both consumers and businesses and that an open Internet "is the best thing we can do to promote investment and innovation."

As Kevin C. Tofel notes on jkOnTheRun, it is important to note that all of these principles will apply to platforms that have access to the Internet - including mobile devices. This could have major ramifications for mobile ISPs. For more about this, see Tofel's blog post which focuses on exactly what these rules could mean for mobile service providers and consumers.

Join the Discussion

If you want to join the discussion, the new OpenInternet.gov site allows for (moderated) comments. What's your point of view? Should the government take a more active role in keeping the Internet free and open, or is this an oxymoron and we should just let the market regulate itself?

Second Place: Gov Pulse: This application allows users to browse the Federal Register and create feeds on the most important proposals and information. Users can browse the latest government-related notices, respond to regulatory amendments and comment on everything from endangered species to homeland security.

Third Place: This We Know: This application gives you government-related info based on your zip code. It offers information on the number of factories within a 7 mile radius, the number of pounds of pollutants released, violent crime rates, cancer rates and related bills in Congress. This would actually be a great tool for environmental health advocates looking to make the connection between cancer hot spots and chemical pollutants.

Best Data Visualization: Quakespotter: This site creates a 3d visualization of earthquakes and matches it to data taken from those areas on Twitter.

For a complete list of entries visit the Sunlight Labs contest page.

That's right - someday soon you'll be able to log in to the websites of the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Insititute of Health and other government agencies with your accounts from Google, Yahoo and similar services. Below we discuss the privacy protection steps being taken, the usability issues and the ultimate significance of this announcement.

Participating companies include Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems. On the government side is the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and "related agencies."

Conversation about whether and how best to implement a system of Federated Identity across government websites has been underway for at least the last 6 months. We wrote about the first public rumblings this summer. Kaliya Hamlin explains the state of the conversation in detail on her blog.

The two biggest questions will be protection of privacy and user experience.

Privacy Protections

OpenID board member and Facebook employee David Recordon explained to us tonight that participating government sites are not allowed to pass personal information about users from one site to another, even though we'll be logging in with the same accounts. Instead, when we authenticate ourselves with Google, Yahoo, Verisign or whoever our Identity Provider of choice is, that website will pass a different, unique URL to the government site we're logging in to.

The identity providers will keep track of all the unique URLs used to identify us to different government sites and we'll just need to remember one log-in. That means you'll need to trust your identity provider to keep your private information separated between agencies - it won't be up to the government sites themselves to do so.

User Experience

User experience has been one of the biggest issues around systems of federated identity since they began to proliferate. No decisions have been made yet about exactly how users will log in to these government sites, but we will be given a limited number of choices between providers that have been government approved. (If you own a domain that's an OpenID provider, you won't be able to use that.)

Most likely users will be presented with an array of logos to click on, launching a new window to communicate just with the identity provider. Once a user proves who they are to the identity provider, that company will then vouch for the user to the government site.

Why Is This Important?

This is a significant move for three reasons. First, it could make securely accessing government websites much easier for users. That would increase use of government services online and could kick off a virtuous circle of increased web-savvy service in response to increased citizen interest.

Second, federated identity provides not just easy "single sign-on" but also offers the opportunity for users to carry personal information with them from one website to another. This "payload" of information can help new websites we use quickly personalize our experience and deliver more intelligent service. That's likely to be complicated when it comes to privacy-centric areas like health, but there's a lot of potential there. If Google knows you've made plans to travel to another country soon, and if you're willing to expose that information to a government website, then the site could offer health-specific information about the country you plan on visiting for example. That's a long ways off, but it's part of the big vision of data portability.

Finally, when any large institution puts its weight behind an open standard then that creates more incentive for other institutions to get on board with the standard as well. Federated Identity systems like OpenID and Info Cards have seen growing amounts of support from different companies, but as that support grows then the information available to innovate on top of grows, the number of opportunities for users to access innovative services built on top of standards grows and the incentive for still more companies to get on board with open data, innovative technology and data portability grows as well.

To draw the standard railroad analogy, if one large railroad network adopts the new standard of rail sizes then trains that run on standard rails can travel further, the passengers can go new places and other networks have more interest in adopting the standard as well. On the information super-highway, the network of government websites are a very big railroad (if you will).

The pilot program will remain a discussion for some time. The OpenID and Information Card Foundations are good places to visit if you'd like to participate in the conversations that will inform later implementation.

Another Sunlight Foundation project is Get Represented. In a nutshell, Get Represented uses the GetSatisfaction model of public corporate discourse and applies it to Congress. Student Kyle Powers worked on this project for the Summer of Code in order to create a public feedback mechanism for government decision-making. Members of Congress have their own GetRepresented page and voters can comment, vote up articles and have public conversations with their representatives. While the final product is not yet available to the public, you can check for updates on the Sunlight Labs blog.

To view more Summer of Code projects visit the Google Open Source Programs page.

A number of UK government officials and departments already use Twitter, including the Foreign Office and the Communities and Local Government Department. With Andrew Stott, the UK Cabinet Office also has its own "director of digital engagement."

As the AP points out, most governments in Europe have only had moderate success on Twitter, though quite a few UK government accounts have a large number of followers and the Prime Minister's account has over 1 million followers.

A couple of interesting points from the guide:

• Whitehall staff should not follow users uninvited in order to avoid being accused of "Big Brother" style behavior - they can follow users back who follow them first, though
• tweets should be written in a human style ("informal spoken English") and go beyond links to press releases and announcements
• tweets should be frequent, timely, and credible
• tweets should include exclusive content, including insights from ministers
• all posts have to be cleared by staff at the Information Officer grade and above

Provide Thought Leadership, Monitor Twitter

A section about the government's objectives states that officials should use Twitter to provide thought leadership and give citizens a low-barrier method for interacting with government departments.

Williams also advises officials to monitor Twitter for mentions of "our brand, our Ministers and flagship policy initiatives, engaging with our critics and key influencers."

Twitter Policy

Interestingly, Williams also advices departments to post a Twitter Policy on their websites and link to it from their Twitter profiles. This policy includes information about what followers can expect (2-10 tweets a day, type of contents, etc.), as well as a notice that being followed back by a department "does not imply endorsement of any kind." The policy also states that staff will only respond during office hours, Monday to Friday (which might be a bit limiting given that social media doesn't exactly take a break on the weekend).

Overall, within the boundaries of what governments can do within social media without hitting the limits of what would be seen as acceptable and without breaking the governments' own rules, this guide seems extremely level-headed and contains numerous useful pieces of advice for individuals and businesses who are just discovering Twitter.

Said Open Source for America's David Thomas, "Technologies enabled by software freedoms can help make government IT deployment more secure, more cost-effective, faster to deploy, with greater privacy and the ability to help eliminate vendor lock-in."

Nevertheless, lobbying will be no easy feat as smaller open source companies will have to jockey for position against Microsoft during requests for proposals. Furthermore, in the past government officials have expressed security concerns with open source code. Critics argue that exposed source code can be examined by attackers and therefore poses a risk. Nevertheless, another argument for exposed code can be made in ensuring security. By moving away from proprietary software models and giving free access to a system's source code, governments are no longer dependent on a select few contractors for their defense. Instead, an entire programming community can be deployed to defend against attacks.

One of the government's key open source projects is actually with the National Security Agency. The agency already employs open source technologies to address multi-level security on government machines through SELinux. SELinux was first released as a modified version of the Linux operating system and has since taken on a life of its own as the NSA works with open source contractors to continue to tweak security. While Linux users were at first suspicious that the NSA might be using the code base to spy on their machines, no back doors were detected in the software. Today, thousands of government employees and Linux users protect their machines using SELinux.

Another successful open source government project is Sunlight Labs' Apps for America. In its first year, the project proved a resounding success in displaying how open source government efforts increases accountability and collective solutions. Apps for America yielded a number of great user-generated projects including call Congress Firefox plug-in and a site that tracks filibustering. Director of Sunlight Labs Clay Johnson was celebrated amongst other open source innovators at yesterday's Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards.

Tim O'Reilly said, "An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started." As new security risks take shape and new data sets become vital, governments need to consider open source solutions in their quest to provide better citizen-facing services.

If you'd like to contribute to government open source projects, check out Apps for America 2 and Open Source for America.