Politics and Law

WASHINGTON--Barack Obama was sworn in as president Tuesday in what many spectators viewed as the nation's most interactive inauguration ceremony so far.

Andrea Williams takes a picture of herself in Washington on Tuesday to send to her family.

(Credit: Stephanie Condon/ CNET News)

As millions of people in Washington and around the globe watched a weekend of festivities, culminating with Tuesday's ceremony, they gave their instant feedback online and through text messages and other means to family, friends, and anyone else listening. At the same time, event organizers were able to give spectators live updates about the state of affairs in the nation's chilly, crowded capital.

Most people who watched the inauguration did it through traditional television broadcasts, a medium that hasn't changed significantly in half a century. But it was also possible to tune in online; our sister site CBSNews.com, for instance, streamed the inauguration live over the Internet. And people learned about the inaugural action from pictures uploaded by friends, comments on Twitter and other social media, and direct text messages from event organizers.

"I think we're more connected with the experience, the overall process from the primaries to today," because of technology, said Ghajiibah Campbell, who came from Baltimore with her family to watch the inauguration. "It made you not only more connected, but willing to be connected--it wasn't an inconvenience."

Campbell used her cell phone to send pictures and text messages to her sister in Florida, her brother-in-law in New Jersey, and her brother in Virginia.

"It allows us to share the experience with everybody live, as opposed to getting home and saying, 'Guys, you should've been there, you should've seen it,'" she said.

Countless others also used their handheld devices to share the historical moment with loved ones.

Dawn Chandler from New York said she was sending text messages to her relatives throughout the ceremonies describing "how cold it was, how long we were waiting--it was worth the wait--and the speech."

The desire to share the experience led to more organized communications as well. Inauguration-watchers from Oregon to Massachusetts sent anonymous comments to Januarythe20th.com, describing the scene around them as the swearing-in took place. Participants of the "mass observation" sent comments to Januarythe20th either via e-mail or Twitter.

"CNN airs," says one post from a deli in Washington. "A small sitting room is packed with diners eating out of Styrofoam containers. Three limo drivers beside a salad bar talk rapidly in an eastern language."

The inaugural balls this year have a new emphasis on interactivity as well.

The Huffington Post pre-inaugural ball Monday night featured text messages from guests displayed on a giant computer.

(Credit: Stephanie Condon/ CNET News)

New media received top billing at the pre-inaugural ball held Monday night by the news aggregation and commentary site Huffington Post. Even as stars like Ben Affleck, Dustin Hoffman, and Michael J. Fox milled around the lowly lit, sleekly designed Newseum in downtown Washington, they were overshadowed by a giant computer displaying text messages sent in from lesser-known guests at the party.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee's Web site will host a live blog of the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball Tuesday night, which is open to Washington residents. The committee is encouraging people to host their own inaugural balls across the country and text in photos or video of their events, some of which will be aired on ABC's broadcast coverage of the Washington inaugural balls.

The committee made use of more practical interactive features as well, offering text alerts for event scheduling updates, public transportation news, weather reports, and more.

Regular citizens will also be able to contribute to the Official Barack Obama Inaugural Book by uploading their pictures to Photobucket.

Itzhak Perlman? Isabel Toledo? Simple Gifts? Huh?

During Tuesday's inauguration of President Barack Obama, people curious about unfamiliar references used Google to supply the footnotes for the ceremony. The phenomenon was visible on Google Trends, a service that shows which search terms are rapidly rising in use.

Inauguration-related searches were hot on Tuesday, according to Google Trends.

(Credit: Google)

According to the U.S. results, Toledo, who designed First Lady Michelle Obama's dress, bubbled up to fifth place on the list earlier in the day. Once the ceremony began, up came violinist Perlman (ninth place), cellist Yo-Yo Ma (12th place), composer John Williams (26th place), and the variation on the Simple Gifts melody (14th place) that he wrote and the musicians played. Aretha Franklin rose up to third place for a time, too, and even "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" ranked 21st at one point.

People were curious about politicians, too--Sen. Dianne Feinstein made it as high as eighth place, and "Dick Cheney wheelchair" was 91st place.

More interesting, perhaps, is that in aggregate, every single one of the top 100 Google Trends searches were related to the inauguration on Tuesday. Many had to do with people's evident desire to find news about it or a place to watch a streaming video.

Update 7:39 a.m. PST January 21: See this Google blog post for some more details about the phenomenon. For instance, there was a lull in regular search in the United States while people watched the inauguration, and 12 percent of inauguration-related search queries came from outside the country.

All of the top 100 searches on Google Trends were related to the inauguration. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Google)

Caption: The most prominent feature of President Obama's new Whitehouse.gov site: a promise that change has come to America, and an oversize photo of Obama. On left, the outgoing Bush administration's site as of Tuesday morning.

As President-elect Barack Obama began his inaugural address at noon on Tuesday, his aides were busy switching over Whitehouse.gov.

Until 11:59 am EST, the Web site featured a photograph of former president George W. Bush leaving the White House for the last time. The relaunched site's most prominent feature is an oversize photo of the new president next to the slogan: "Change has come to America."

Because the presidential Web site launched under Bill Clinton's tenure, this is only the second time that Whitehouse.gov has changed hands. The Clinton-Bush handover was not without problems: The site on January 20, 2001, briefly sported the line "Insert Something Meaningful Here," and suffered from some broken links and 404 errors.

Obama's new site, too, has its bugs. The site administrators posted an entry saying Obama "was sworn in" before that happened; another post titled "Read the Inaugural Address" was blank an hour after Obama finished giving it; some photo captions were incorrect; and the search option didn't work reliably.

If you're interested in reading the inaugural address, our CBSNews.com sister site has posted the full text.

The White House also now has what it calls a blog, something that Bush didn't have, except for occasional features like his "Trip Notes" during an overseas visit. Macon Phillips, the White House's director of new media and one of the blog contributors, said in a post that "Whitehouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration's efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement" in making this the most "open and transparent" administration in history. Phillips also asks for comments from the public through a Web form.

At least in its initial incarnation, the White House blog seems to be more a collection of press releases (a proclamation of a day of reconciliation) and Obama statements (remarks at a speech on Monday, and Tuesday's inaugural address). There is no opportunity to comment, the person posting the item is not automatically identified, and it doesn't include "trackbacks," meaning ways to identify who else is talking about the entry.

On technology policy, the new administration promises to support Net neutrality, encourage the development of Internet-filtering technologies for parents "while preserving the First Amendment," and "strengthen privacy protections for the Digital Age." In an echo of Obama's campaign Web site, it says intellectual-property owners should be "fairly treated," while copyright and patent laws should be updated.

The White House lists names of appointees for Cabinet positions, including well-known ones like Hillary Clinton for secretary of state and lesser-known ones like Robert Nabors for deputy budget director. But it missed the opportunity to post photos and even brief biographies of each of the nominees.

It does feature a reasonably flattering official biography of the outgoing President Bush, saying he worked "to create an ownership society and build a future of security, prosperity, and opportunity for all Americans. He signed into law tax relief that helped workers keep more of their hard-earned money" and took steps "to protect our homeland and create a world free from terror."

Elsewhere, though, another Web page lambastes Bush's "unconscionable ineptitude" in responding to Hurricane Katrina and promises that such a "catastrophic failure" will never happen again.

By Declan McCullagh and Stephanie Condon

Before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, President Bush focused more on technology. In this photograph from less than two weeks before September 11, 2001, he was announcing a relaunch of Whitehouse.gov.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh)

news analysis Months after being sworn in as president, George W. Bush sat down with reporters and his wife, Laura, for a technology-themed event: a relaunch of the Whitehouse.gov Web site, which previously had been rather dilapidated.

Bush and his aides proudly demonstrated the new features, including photo essays, better access for the disabled, and a kids' area with details about the First Pets. The president said the Web site would let Washington become "more accessible" and let Americans "participate in the process."

Less than two weeks later, the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked, the White House shifted to a wartime footing, and Bush never looked back. Instead of a presidency that might have become known for its technology policies--Bush was, remember, a businessman in Texas--he leaves Washington this week amid controversies involving the Iraq war, torture, wiretapping, an economic crisis and bailouts, and a doubled federal debt.

The 43rd president leaves behind a technology legacy characterized less by intent than by casual neglect. Bush and (especially) Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were adamant in their defense of warrantless wiretapping, and made it a priority of their administration. "The president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander-in-chief, to engage in this kind of activity," Gonzales said in 2005 after details became public.

Yet wiretapping and its cousins such as monitoring financial transactions were the exception, not the rule. On more routine, humdrum topics, the White House seemed happy to defer to Congress or to its appointees in various federal agencies, rather than use the authority of the president to focus attention in certain tech topics--something President Bill Clinton regularly did to applause from Silicon Valley firms, whose executives would rarely turn town an invitation to the White House.

That apparent neglect occasionally led to embarrassing results, such as the Bush administration acknowledging last month that it opposed a spectrum plan backed by Kevin Martin, Bush's own appointee who heads the Federal Communications Commission. Bush's Federal Trade Commission warned that Net neutrality regulations would be dangerous, as did the Justice Department; but the FCC went ahead anyway and now is trying to defend its actions in court.

For his part, Bush has stressed that September 11, 2001, was what changed his priorities and his views.

"This evening, my thoughts return to the first night I addressed you from this house--September the 11, 2001," Bush said in his farewell address to the nation last week. "As the years passed, most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did."

(It may be a little too facile to attribute a near-complete policy shift to that date. There is some evidence that the National Security Agency's wiretapping program began immediately after Bush took office in 2001; a lawsuit filed by Qwest Communications' former chief executive says that he was approached by the NSA at that time, and another lawsuit makes similar allegations involving AT&T.)

The administration's broad claims of expansive executive power and an Iraq occupation that's lasted longer than World War II--coupled with massive deficits and a ballooning federal bureaucracy--eventually estranged some Silicon Valley Republicans who once were Bush loyalists. Venture capitalist Tim Draper chaired three Bush fundraisers circa 2000; last year he gave the legal maximum to President-elect Barack Obama.

"It's good to have a fresh face," Draper said in a recent interview. "At least from the press, we've seen about six years of fear. I'd like to see six years of opportunity and what that could do for our country, and I think that might happen with Obama."

What could, perhaps, have been a Reaganesque technology agenda founded on free market principles with an emphasis on free trade and immigration reform shifted focus to security and surveillance, especially with the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in November 2002.

"The Bush administration was largely AWOL on technology policy," said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a technology trade association that supports antitrust regulation and counts Oracle, RedHat, and Sun Microsystems as members. "It was always an afterthought."

The Bush White House got off to a strong start by revamping Whitehouse.gov and launching the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in 2001.

Yet even with the new White House Council, the lack of technology expertise within the administration was apparent from the beginning, said Black, who is listed as giving money to Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, but no Republicans.

"There were only a handful of people who by and large were the administration's technology people," he said. "In some cases, while they were fine people, they lacked the clout to make a big difference."

In many ways, a laissez-faire approach
On the other hand, the Bush administration's relatively laissez-faire approach when it came to Internet regulation turned out to be good for business. Bush opposed Internet taxes, though he spent little political capital on the topic. He expended more when supporting immigration reform, even when it put him at odds with conservative members of his own political party.

"Generally, the technology industry has flourished under the Bush administration," said Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, the organization that stages the annual Consumer Electronics Show. "It's a legacy of those who came before as well that the U.S. has managed to attract virtually every major company based around the Internet. All of these companies have been in the United States because of U.S. policy and creativity."

One early flashpoint came after a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled that U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's attempt to break up Microsoft could not stand. Jackson had, in violation of judicial ethics rules, invited favored reporters into his chambers for private chats about the perfidy of Microsoft executives--typically likening them to gangland killers and stubborn mules who should be walloped with a 2-by-4.

The appeals court's ruling overruled Jackson, tossed out his breakup order, and concluded that Microsoft had not illegally "tied" the browser or tried to monopolize the browser market to the detriment of Netscape Navigator. That left the new Bush administration with less antitrust ammunition, and it settled the case a few months later.

Liberal critics of the administration, however, blamed the settlement on a political philosophy hostile to expansive antitrust claims. They found even more to complain in a series of FCC-approved telecommunications mergers that took place during the Bush administration, including the merger between AT&T and BellSouth, Verizon and MCI, and SBC Communications and AT&T. (For its part, the White House characterizes itself as having "pro-growth telecommunications policies.")

The free market principles of the Bush administration were extended globally, and "the focus on free trade has been the most principled and lasting legacy" of the Bush administration, Shapiro said.

Bush can claim as victories the Central American Free Trade Agreement and a trade deal with Peru. He managed to ink deals with Colombia and South Korea, but Congress did not ratify them. Although there was more emphasis on bilateral agreements than multilateral trade deals, Bush's push for free trade was significant for an industry that is thoroughly international, Shapiro said, and especially laudable given the growing anti-trade sentiment in the country, particularly in Democratic and union circles.

Stronger protections for intellectual property were put in place with the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act. Copyright law tends to be relatively bipartisan: there's no reason to believe that a Democratic administration would have been any different. President Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which was overwhelmingly approved by a bipartisan congressional majority) into law, and Obama has chosen the recording industry's favorite lawyer for a senior administration position.

"There's a gradual increasing respect in the developing world for IP, and I suspect that's a trend that will continue," Shapiro said.

Immigration policy in the Bush years, however, is largely seen as a disappointment from the tech perspective.

"National security concerns and a loss of focus on visas was disappointing for us," Shapiro said. "In terms of attracting the best people around the world, we know we're losing people to countries with less rigorous security processes."

While it was negotiating international agreements, the Bush administration could have done more to create an Internet climate optimal for Internet companies by supporting policies and legislation such as the Global Online Freedom Act, Black said.

"Increasingly, we've seen country after country use the power of the government to block sites and to make companies liable for doing those things," Black said. "The Internet was created by the U.S., and for the U.S. not to have been a forceful advocate of U.S. principals of openness was squandering an opportunity."

The administration's silence on the issue may have been influenced by its defense of warrantless wiretapping, which may have caused it to be reticent on this topic.

"We didn't do any work on (privacy policy) in the last eight years, and the work we did do nobody wants to keep, like the warrantless surveillance program," said James Lewis, a director and senior fellow at the hawkish Center for Strategic and International Studies. "9-11 knocked the privacy balance askew. There were things we needed to do (to ensure national security), but we never tackled them in a way that doesn't weaken privacy."

While the Bush team was collecting information on its own, it did little to stop the private sector from its own questionable data collection, said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, a liberal group that advocates more federal regulation.

The Federal Trade Commission essentially ignored "the greatest threat to privacy we've ever experienced," he said.

The ramifications of commercial data collection is evident in the financial meltdown of the past year, Chester said, given that many people fell prey to online targeting of questionable financial services.

On the other hand, the Justice Department did mount an aggressive challenge to Google's planned advertising deal with Yahoo, even going so far as to hire a well-known litigator for the job. Google walked away from the deal in November, citing antitrust concerns.

Cybersecurity
Homeland Security was supposed to mastermind the government's cybersecurity efforts, combining what had previously been the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, the Defense Department's National Communications System, the Commerce Department's Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, an Energy Department analysis center and the Federal Computer Incident Response Center. But six years later, the agency proved to be anything but efficient at that task, prompting calls to move the responsibility to the White House or the National Security Agency.

Homeland Security managed to pour $400 million into cybersecurity without coming up with a coherent "cybercrisis" plan. And in 2004, the Homeland Security Department was given a discretionary reserve fund of $5.6 billion for Project BioShield, part of the president's war on terror.

"You had this idea you could apply the tech-heavy solutions we used on the DOD side to fix what were seen on problems on the homeland security side," said Lewis, who chaired CSIS's Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency. "The tendency in the U.S. is to spend a lot to reduce risk. We've been doing that since the 1950s, so this might have been the reaction (to September 11, 2001) no matter who was in office."

The tech industry can be grateful for one important Bush administration decision. It never resumed the legal assault on encryption software, including PGP and Web browsers, which the Clinton administration had escalated in the 1990s. Even after the September 11, 2001, attacks, when some Republican senators and think tanks were calling for domestic restrictions on encryption without backdoors for government surveillance, the White House never followed suit.

The White House points out that President Bush signed into law the largest federal R&D budget in history and funded programs like the $1.9 billion Networking and Information Technology Research and Development initiative.

Kei Koizumi, director of the R&D budget and policy program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted that the Bush administration's support for R&D was strong in the first term but cut back substantially in the second term because of overall budget deficits. Large investments in war and a stated desire to cut domestic federal spending drained fund that could have gone to support the American Competitiveness Initiative, which was created to strengthen math, science, and foreign language education in the U.S.

"When you talk about a Bush legacy for science funding you have to talk about legacy for the federal budget," Koizumi said, "and by most accounts that's not great because of debt."

Bush's vision for NASA to carry out human exploration of the moon and Mars has also created a quandary for the agency, which lacks the funding for all of its goals.

"The unwritten legacy is NASA will have to squeeze, juggle, and cut its portfolio to keep doing nonhuman exploration, climate research, and work on the space shuttle," Koizumi said.

More than 2 million Americans lost their jobs last year, the stock market fell by almost 45 percent from its peak, and comparisons with the Great Depression are becoming disturbingly commonplace. But that isn't stopping Washington from throwing a $160 million party, the most lavish ever, for Barack Obama's presidential inauguration on Tuesday.

Technology companies are joining the festivities by hosting a number of inaugural parties, and a collection of news and other Web sites are aiming to let anyone who can't be in the nation's capital--or who doesn't want to brave probably-freezing temperatures--follow along online.

Here's a partial list:

•  The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, which is in charge of all the inaugural activities at the Capitol, will stream the entire event at its Web site, complete with closed captioning. The site has a wealth of information about what happens on Inauguration Day, including a handful of inaugural videos dating back to President Dwight Eisenhower's 1957 swearing-in ceremony, as well as videos of presidential luncheons dating back to the inauguration of John Kennedy. (It also reveals, for those interested, the recipe for Obama's luncheon meal, which features a main course of pheasant and duck served with sour cherry chutney.)

•  Our sister site CBS News will have day-long live coverage January 20 on TV and the Web, starting at 7 a.m. EDT. Katie Couric will also host a special Webcast that night with reporters and punditry, for which viewers can submit questions.

•  CBS streaming coverage will also be Webcast on Joost's Everything Obama page, which also features interviews, campaign highlights, and satire clips.

•  MSNBC will be live streaming the event on its home page and politics section, and visitors can embed the video into their own sites. Its inauguration page also features videos of inaugurations from decades past.

•  If a computer screen seems too small for such a momentous moment, there's always the option of heading to a move theater--or a Starbucks. At MSNBCEvents.com, the cable network is distributing free tickets to screenings of the inauguration in movie theaters in 21 cities. MSNBC is also partnering with Starbucks to simulcast the its coverage in 650 coffee shops in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle.

•  Fox News will provide live streaming coverage via Hulu beginning at noon for about two hours. After the live stream, Hulu will provide on-demand access to the ceremony. The live stream is embeddable, as is an inauguration countdown from Hulu. The video site's Obama Presidency page also features related content like speeches, commentary, satire, and past inaugural speeches.

•  C-SPAN will debut its Inauguration Hub on January 20, featuring an online "control room"--a multichannel grid designed by Mogulus with Webcasts of inauguration activities. Visitors will be able to choose from one of four live feeds featuring events like the swearing in at the Capitol, the parade, and a number of inaugural balls.

•  CNN is partnering with Facebook to provide live streaming of the swearing in and Obama's speech. Viewers can "RSVP" for the event on Facebook, and as they watch, they will be able to provide status updates with their thoughts on the events. A Facebook window on the CNN.com Live channel will show viewers their friends' relevant status updates.

•  Current TV and Twitter are teaming up, as they did during the election, to add real-time tweets to Current's broadcast and Webcast of the swearing in, which starts at 11:30 a.m. EDT and will be replayed throughout the day.

•  The New York Times, the AP's online video network, the Online NewsHour, and ABCNews.com will also live stream inauguration coverage.

•  For a global perspective of the day's events, Livestation, the peer-to-peer Internet video site, is featuring coverage from news outlets such as Al Jazeera English, BBC World News, Euronews, and France 24. Viewers will not only be able to skip through the different channels on the Livestation desktop player, but also chat with other viewers and program producers.

•  The Washington Post has a comprehensive online Inauguration guide that is particularly useful for Washington residents trying to keep track of everything happening in the city now through January 20. Visitors to the site will find some interactive features such as a video discussion on the question of "How historic is Obama's inauguration?"

Once Obama is sworn in, he'll be party hopping through Washington that night. The Presidential Inauguration Committee has promised to Webcast some of the official inaugural balls--though there are plenty of unofficial parties, including some hosted by tech companies.

The Recording Industry Association of America is hosting a charity ball featuring the recording artist Rihanna and the actors David Arquette and Courteney Cox. The ball benefits the nonprofit Feeding America and is co-sponsored by Yahoo, Comcast, Oracle, AT&T, SoundExchange, Time Warner, News Corp., and a number of other companies.

Google is partnering with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights to host "a break from traditional inaugural balls." Guests are encouraged to make donations--which Google will match--to organizations including the LCCR Education Fund, One Economy, the Sunlight Foundation, D.C. Central Kitchen, and Green For All.

The Huffington Post, the news aggregation and commentary site, is hosting a pre-inaugural ball Monday night with the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Musk Foundation, which supports research on renewable energy, human space exploration, and pediatrics. The event is also receiving sponsorship from MySpace, Comcast, the wind power company Vestas, and the nonprofit Global Green USA, among others.

The party, they say, is "to celebrate change in Washington, the rise of new media, and a renewed commitment to service and the environment," and features a performance by Will.i.am. Laptops will be hanging from the ceiling for guests to blog on.

Plenty of other parties will be celebrating a renewed commitment to the environment, including the Green Inaugural Ball, chaired by Al Gore and hosted by a number of organizations like the American Council on Renewable Energy, the Energy Action Coalition, and the Vote Solar Initiative.