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What Government Can and Should Learn from Hacker Culture
South by Southwest isn’t generally associated with the federal government. But this year, between panels on “10 Things Your Band Can Do To Not Get Sued” and “Austin Breakfast Tacos: The food, people & history,” the festival will host “It’s Not About Tech: Hack the Bureaucracy.” The pitch: “Bringing geeks into government won’t make a difference if they can’t crack the code on bureaucracies.” Steering the panel is veteran government code-cracker Richard Boly, former head of the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy.*
That the State Department embraces technology should not come as news. The department’s “21st Century Statecraft” initiatives have been well covered in the press, and officials from the secretary down to the interns use social media. But the SXSW panel focuses on a far thornier issue than getting ambassadors on Twitter: how to foster a culture of innovation and openness in a bureaucracy built to resist change.
The term “bureaucracy” has few positive connotations. It’s been called the “death of all sound work,” (Einstein), the “giant power wielded by pygmies” (Balzac), the “slime” left behind when revolutions fade (Kafka), and a “symbol of hell” (C.S. Lewis). Though it isn’t America’s only bureaucracy, the federal government is probably its most infamous one. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press shows only 28 percent of Americans viewed the federal government favorably in 2012, its lowest rating since the poll began in 1997. The study didn’t delve into why, but perhaps part of the answer is the perception of federal agencies as bloated, ineffective bureaucracies that stifle creativity.
But there’s hope government can change this.
Read more. [Image: Edward Dodwell]
HUGE NEWS: Democrats in Congress have introduced new legislation that would restore Net Neutrality!
Tell Congress: Keep the Internet WEIRD — and SAVE NET NEUTRALITY
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and other journalists are being punished for covering the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Local authorities recently issued an arrest warrant for Goodman and arrested at least two independent reporters — and this crackdown on press freedom will continue if we don’t speak up now.
How Facebook plans to take over the world
“Disrupting Facebook would be like trying to disrupt telephone calls, it’s so ubiquitous,” says Paul Adams, former Facebook staffer.
If live video is Facebook’s phase four, then artificial intelligence and virtual reality look like being big parts of phase five. Both of these fit its strategy of monetizing as many of our social interactions as possible.
Lawyers Speak Out About Massive Hack of Prisoners’ Phone Records:
The mass recording of inmate calls is itself a fairly recent practice, sold by private telecommunications companies, like Securus, to jails and prisons as a security measure — a way to thwart violent uprisings, for example, or curb the introduction of contraband into a facility. This bulk surveillance — the recording and long-term storage of millions and millions of routine communications — raises serious concerns about the privacy rights of incarcerated persons and their loved ones, says David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
Verizon just launched FreeBee, its plan for ‘sponsored data’:
It’s a growing trend in the wireless space as companies look for ever more ways to hook data-hungry mobile users. But the practice has drawn scrutiny from net neutrality advocates who argue that sponsored data or “zero rating” lets rich, powerful companies pay to win, tilting the playing field against entrepreneurs and start-ups who can’t afford to pay the new fees.
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