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Recovery.gov blocked search engine tracking

Update: As of 8 a.m. PST, within three hours of this story first going live, it appears that President Obama's Web team has (silently) pulled the robots.txt file from the Recovery.gov Web site. The site is now open to Web crawlers of all kinds.

The Obama administration has apparently opted to forbid Google and other search engines from indexing any content on the newly launched Recovery.gov.

Is this even more evidence that the administration's much-publicized commitment to transparency is simply hype?

Recovery.gov, which went live Tuesday, is set to act as a central more

Obama's BlackBerry brings personal safety risks

When the mainstream media first announced Barack Obama's "victory" in keeping his BlackBerry, the focus was on the security of the device, and keeping the U.S. president's e-mail communications private from spies and hackers.

The news coverage and analysis by armchair security experts thus far has failed to focus on the real threat: attacks against President Obama's location privacy, and the potential physical security risks that come with someone knowing the president's real-time physical location.

Serial numbers
Before we dive in, let's take a moment to note that

Activists call for a mashup-friendly Recovery.gov

As President Obama's $825+ billion financial stimulus package works its way through Congress, a number of groups have started to call for increased transparency in the way that data on the proposed spending will be shared with citizens.

Most noteworthy are demands from public-interest groups and academics that the the data be provided in a format conducive to user-generated mashups and remixes.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 passed through the House Appropriations Committee a couple weeks ago, and it is expected to come up for a full House vote in the coming weeks.

In addition to more

White House yanks 'YouTube' from privacy policy

Someone at the White House appears to be listening to those of us in the privacy community.

For the third time in just six days, the Obama administration has modified the White House Web site privacy policy in response to criticism from the blogosphere.

When the site launched on January 20, it exempted YouTube from federal anticookie tracking rules that would have otherwise cast a legal shadow over the use of embedded videos on the White House blog.

Reacting to criticism from the blogosphere, the White House first modified its Web site on Friday to limit the cookie exposure to more

White House exempts YouTube from privacy rules

Update: 12 hours after posting this story, the White House (partially) reversed itself. The rather dubious YouTube-only waiver from federal Web privacy rules has been maintained, but the White House Web site has been updated to limit the exposure of visitors to YouTube's tracking efforts to only those people who actually click the "play" button on a YouTube video. For more details on the new changes, read this blog post.

The new Web site for Obama's White House is already drawing attention from privacy activists and tech bloggers. While the initial focus has been on the site's more

Google censors political-donation transparency ads

Should members of the public be able to pay for Web advertisements detailing which companies have donated to politicians? While this seems like a great way to promote transparency in politics, Google forbids the practice--we are free to name the politicians who take money but cannot name the companies that give it.

With Google's domination of the search engine market, and the eyeballs that go along with it, the company's AdWords text ads have become a key way for activists, politicians, and corporations to reach the general public. However, over the past year, Google's excessively restrictive policies more

Editorial: It's time for a child porn czar

With the recent news of the ham-fisted filtering of Wikipedia for over 95 percent of British Internet users by an unelected and unaccountable industry/government hybrid body, it seems like a good time to turn our attention to the issue of the fight against child pornography here in the U.S., and in particular, the freedoms we are willing to hand over along the way.

In this blog post, I will argue that the the time has come for President-elect Barack Obama to appoint a child pornography czar, whose office can take over the tasks currently performed by the powerful more

Why Obama should ditch YouTube

Update at 9:30 a.m. PST: Video audience figures have been updated.

President-elect Barack Obama has now posted his second weekly address to YouTube, and it has already gotten more than 411,000 views. A week ago, I criticized the use of YouTube by Obama's transition team, calling it a no-bid giveaway to the Google-owned video-sharing site.

The solution I called for then--the adoption of BitTorrent as the official distribution platform for Change.gov--was, admittedly, a pipe dream.

In this post, I'll explain why the government needs to step up and host its own videos and why more

Obama's mixed signals on transparency

How far does President-elect Barack Obama take his commitment to transparency? Is it a serious pledge to shake up Washington, to apply sunlight to the often shadowy depths of the executive branch, or is it merely a very good marketing campaign?

In the past few days, the public has received some seriously mixed signals on the issue--his decision to use YouTube to speak to the American people, and then press reports indicating that he may give up e-mail as president to avoid oversight.

On Saturday morning, Obama's first video address to the people was posted to YouTube. A copy more

Dear Obama: Use BitTorrent for your Fireside podcasts

Calling for the separation of Google and State.

The news that President-elect Barack Obama will be using YouTube to distribute his weekly "radio" address has been met by general fanfare among the digerati.

This might seem like a bold move--and compared with the relatively boring podcast MP3s of Bush's weekly speech hosted at Whitehouse.gov, it is. However, putting President-elect Obama's video podcasts on YouTube is hardly Change We Can Believe In.

By exclusively hosting his videos at YouTube, the Google-owned dominant player in the user-generated video industry, the Obama campaign has effectively issued its first no-bid giveaway more