So, as our country decides torture is ok so long as we called it “aggressve questioning,” where the hell are the Dems? [Thanks, Mathew Gross, for the link!]

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Zack Exley was one of the leaders of MoveOn.org, and was in charge of the Net side of Kerry’s presidential campaign. But in what he’s just posted about the nature of grassroots leadership he draws primarily on what he learned as a union organizer during most of the ’90s. His Organizers’ Guide to Trusting People works on several levels: It’s a pragmatic guide, it’s an exhortation to trust the people, it’s an indictment of progressives’ arrogance, it points to a grand strategy, and it’s rooted in Zack’s hands-on experience as a real-world organizer on one side and in progressive principles on the other.

There’s too much to quote, but here’s one snippet:

…we’ve just got to open our minds to the possibility that the people are just as radical as they were when millions took part in sit-down strikes and the Unemployed Councils. We’ve got to recognize the possibility that the wisest, boldest leaders have been consciously refusing to participate in our campaigns because our goals have been too modest and our strategies shaky as hell.

This is an important piece. And it’s a hopeful piece.

[Tags: politics zack_exley democracy progressive]

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I just got back from 1.5 days of meetings with members of the CIA’s intelligence analysis community who are interested in what social software can do for them. There were six of us “experts” and about 50 CIA folks. These are the people who put together analyses and “estimates” about what’s going on in the world so that our leaders can ignore them and do what will get them re-elected (or, in some particularly Oedipal cases, do what will make Mommy love them more than Mommy loves Daddy). In short, these folks are among the few representatives of the Reality Principle in our government. I would like them to be able to do their job ever better.

We weren’t given any confidential information (well, except that Mrs. Wanda Appleton of 123 Elm St. better stop what she’s been doing…you know what I’m talking about, Wanda), but we agreed to blog only generalities so that discussion could be frank. Here are my generalities:

This was a totally fascinating set of sessions. The CIA folks there included visionaries (e.g., Calvin Andrus), internal bloggers, the people behind Intellipedia (an in-house wikipedia), folks from the daily in-house newspaper, and some managers not yet sold on the idea of blogs and wikis and tags.

It sounds like there’s a fairly vibrant blogging community already, including some senior people. But, there’s cultural tension over, for example, whether a blog that contains any personal information means that a government employee has been misusing tax payers’ computers. It is a culture in transition, as you can imagine.

It began with an informal presentation by one of the analysts (first-name only, no email address) who took us through a typical day. He gets evaluated on the basis of the written reports he produces. There is some collegiality — more than I encountered as an academic — but the back-and-forth of commentary isn’t captured. It all comes down to the finished written document. (No document is ever finished, the panel said.)

The panel overall stressed that the issues were social, not technical. Also, we pushed for building memory by capturing more of the work-in-process and by linking linking linking. I personally would like to see the Agency get past the cult of expertise, moving instead to a view of knowledge as social. That means showing work in progress and capturing the discussion during and after publication. But that also means changing how analysts are evaluated and promoted. One of the participants said that already one’s “corridor reputation” affects one’s career. There should also be — and will also be — an e-corridor reputation that helps advance you because you’re a great commenter, a frequent contributor to the wiki, or have a blog that’s getting read.

The people we met with are serious about understanding the opportunities, experimenting, piloting, and evangelizing. I liked them. I would like them to get better and better not only at understanding what’s happening in the world but also at not being “spun.” [Tags: cia blogs ]

Keep in mind that we met with the report-writing analyst side of the Agency. As for that other side where they engage in “operations” — unrepresented at this meeting — I sure would like them to stop torturing people. But, hey, I’m just a crazed Boston liberal.

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Here’s a Google Map mashup of Tunisian prisons…

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I’m at a snack table in the back of the exhibit hall at the Scottish Learning Festival checking my email, so I learned about Deval Patrick’s huge win — in the Democratic primary for governor of Massachusetts — from email from Freedom to Marry, an anti-discrimination-in-marriage group. Patrick won big. That’s fantastic news.

By the way, this is also a win for Internet politics. Patrick ran a grassroots campaign that’s making smart use of the Net. Plus, he’s been more direct and more human than candidates often are, which, right or not, I take as being part of the Net ethos. Patrick is going to stir up some powerful enthusiasm in this state.

Also by the way, the size of his win accords with what the polls predicted, which is noteworthy only because I’m told that poll numbers for African-American and women candidates typically are higher than their actual votes because people lie to pollsters not to expose their racial and gender biases. Not this time, though.

Go Deval! [Tags: deval_patrick politics massachusetts]

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Tony Judt in the London Review of Books excoriates American liberals for acquiescing in Bush’s foreign policy.

Some of it will be familiar to Americans. And he ignores liberals who have been against the Iraq war from the beginning, focusing on traditional liberals who supported it. Plus, the article suffers (imo) from the predictable, one-sided criticism of Israel and a lack of any suggestion of what contemporary liberalism consists of beyond fighting Bushism. Nevertheless, there’s lots in it that I found illuminating, including:

…the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

And I think Judt is right in his fundamental observation that we don’t have the set of outspoken, respected, liberal thinkers and politicians that we had during the Vietnam war or during the cold-hearted Reagan years. To a large degree, I think this is because we haven’t gotten past the anger stage of grieving for the death of our childhood on 9/11. We’re still not willing to hear that terrorism is not an enemy that can be defeated (because it’s a tactic), that we are never going to be as safe as we once imagined ourselves to be, that the world shrugs off simple answers, that working to connect the world will make us safer than our power can (they brought down the World Trade Center with boxcutters, after all), that the best way to foil terrorists is to shut up about what you’re doing, that crime is a more apt metaphor than war for the struggle we’re in, that peace makes us safer than war and peace requires connection and fairness. If these are things that cannot be heard, then the speakers—and there are plenty of them around—have to be marginalized for psychological if not political reasons. [Tags: liberalism tony_judt politics terrorism]

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This 9.5-minute video from Princeton shows that a Diebold touchscreen voting machine can be hacked. In this case, the hack was inserted by writing it onto a machine’s memory card. (The machine’s lock is highly pickable. Or you can simply unscrew the cover. Yikes.) It took them less than a minute to insert malicious code. Worse, it can be written as a virus so that it spreads from machine to machine via memory cards.

The Diebold model they hacked produces a paper trail. But the hack causes the intended vote to print out while recording the vote the hacker wants recorded.

(Thanks to Jock Gill for the link.) [Tags: elections diebold]

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I spent an hour and a half last night with a handful of other Brookliners calling our neighbors on behalf of Deval Patrick, reminding them that the primary is this Tuesday. I’ve done phone banking (which is not the same as banking by phone, by the way) before, but I’ve never met such solid support among the people I called.

Of course, if the unabashedly liberal, Clinton-appointed, grass-rooted, African-American Patrick can’t sweep Brookline, he’s not going to sweep anywhere. Still, it was more than a little fun.

Don’t forget to vote on Tuesday, especially if you live in Massachusetts. [Tags: politics deval_patrick]

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Global Voices is running a Chinese protest video that the Chinese government doesn’t want you to see.

Digital Rights Ireland has started legal action against the Eueopean data retention laws. [Tags: digital_rights china global_voices ireland]

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This Congress has spent less time in session than any Congress since 1948. So, the Sunlight Foundation is offering citizens $1,000 for each member of Congress that can persuade to sign the Punch Clock Agreement to put their daily schedules on the Internet. Cheesy video here. [Tags: congress sunlight punch_clock]

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