Politics and Law

Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is expected to officially declare her candidacy for governor of California on Tuesday.

Whitman, who has never served an elected public office, will announce her bid for the Republican nomination in 2010 during a speech in Fullerton, Calif. She will reportedly campaign on a platform of cutting state spending by $15 billion and reducing the state's workforce by 17 percent.

Whitman, 53, will become a leading Republican candidate to succeed outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who will retire because of term limits.

Whitman stepped down as CEO of eBay in March 2008, a decade after she transformed the company from a tiny auction site to an Internet icon. During her tenure, the company's split-adjusted share price leaped from just over $1 to a 2004 peak of almost $60, before plummeting to a recent price of under $14.

In the past year, the billionaire Internet executive has taken a more high-profile role in the Republican Party. Whitman served as an adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and endorsed him during a speech at the party's convention in St. Paul, Minn., last year.

Possible primary rivals include State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a former Silicon Valley exec who founded SnapTrack, a cell phone locating company, and sold it to Qualcomm for $1 billion in January 2000. Another GOP rival is expected to be Tom Campbell, a former U.S. congressman and dean of the business school at University of California at Berkeley.

Likely contenders for the Democratic nomination include Attorney General Jerry Brown, who was already governor 30 years ago, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

The Pirate Party UK, which is dedicated to technology and copyright-law reform, has become an official political party.

The party was registered by the Electoral Commission this week, the party's leader Andrew Robinson told ZDNet UK.

"We're still in the early stages of forming the party," Robinson said Thursday. "We're still very small."

The U.K. organization has around 250 active members, Robinson said.

Electoral Commission registration allows the party to raise funds and list Pirate Party UK candidates at the next general election, which must take place before June 2010. Similar parties elsewhere have won election victories: the Swedish Pirate Party gained a seat in the European parliament in May, while the German Pirate Party has an elected MP.

The Pirate Party UK intends to campaign before the next general election on issues such as patent and copyright reform, and freedom from excessive electronic surveillance.

It is proposing an exemption from copyright law for noncommercial file-sharing, which is essentially an extension of fair use. Under U.K. copyright law, fair use allows organizations such as schools and news agencies to use parts of a copyrighted work.

In May, government advisers estimated there were 7 million file-sharers in the UK. The government's Digital Britain report, released in June, put forward a statutory maximum fine of 50,000 pounds ($83,000) for copyright infringement.

"The government is saying that there are 7 million people that share files in Britain, and that file-sharers should be punished with a maximum fine of 50,000 pounds," said Robinson. "The fact that the government has threatened to bankrupt up to 10 percent of the population shows the need for a party that understands technology."

The party will press for the length of the copyright on works to be reduced from the life of the owner plus 70 years to a shorter term, said Robinson. Its membership has not yet voted on what the shorter copyright term should be.

One major campaign platform will be the reform of patent law to prevent one company building up significant market power in products such as medicines. "Monopolies maintained by companies producing life-saving drugs mean people are dying, as they can't afford (treatment)," said Robinson.

The party will also campaign to reform electronic surveillance laws, which will include defining which types of deep packet inspection and surveillance are allowed. Robinson offered Google Street View and behavioral ad-monitoring company Phorm as examples of technology not covered by U.K. law.

"Current law isn't taking into account advances in technology such as Street View," said Robinson. "There's no law to say it's OK to take pictures of streets, but not the inside of houses. Phorm is too much like surveillance. We're saying there needs to be a set of laws to handle technology such as Phorm and Street View."

Surveillance by government agencies, including the proposed Interception Modernisation Programme, must be made as transparent as possible, according to the Pirate Party UK. "We would like to expand the Freedom of Information Act so government information is published by default, unless there are security issues," said Robinson.

At the moment, the Pirate Party UK is recruiting members and seeking donations, and it aims to field as many candidates as it can at the next general election, Robinson said. The party leader intends to stand for election in either the Worcester or West Worcestershire constituencies.

The Pirate Party UK has no formal connection with similar parties around the world. "There are very informal links--we talk to each other," said Robinson. "We are structurally and financially independent."

There are 24 Pirate Party organizations around the world.

Tom Espiner ZDNet UK reported from London.

California's gubernatorial primary is still 10 months away, but the multimillion-dollar race for campaign cash has already picked up a quick pace, with former eBay CEO Meg Whitman at the front of the pack.

It's no surprise that the billionaire Internet exec, who has never held elected office, has lots of money in the bank to spend on her campaign. According to a tally Saturday, she has some $19 million in cash available--and that's after spending $6.1 million to get her campaign operations up and running. It's also after she contributed first $4 million, then $15 million of her own money to the race.

But for the first half of the year, Whitman, a GOP candidate, also raised $6.7 million in individual campaign contributions, according to press accounts on campaign finance reports posted Friday. Coming in second for individual contributions was Democratic rival Attorney General Jerry Brown, who reportedly raised $3.4 million in individual contributions during the same period.

According to Whitman's campaign, her recent $15 million contribution to the campaign was part of a 3-to-1 match on the first $5 million donated by supporters. Of the $6.7 million she received from individuals, some noteworthy donations include, according to the San Jose Mercury News, $52,000 from Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy and his wife, and $26,000 from former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang (who also, incidentally, donated the same amount to Democratic candidate and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom).

Whitman's numbers far outpace those of another Silicon Valley exec in the GOP gubernatorial race, state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner. Poizner reportedly raised $900,000 in private contributions during the filing period and, after contributing some $3.5 million of his on money to the campaign, has about $3.7 million in cash on hand.

GOP congressman and gubernatorial candidate Tom Campbell reportedly raised $305,017 in individual contributions during the first half of the year. Newsom raised $1.6 million.

Of course, having a hefty campaign war chest is important in a state as big and expensive as California, a state facing an unprecedented budget crisis and for which Moody's just gave the country's lowest general obligation debt rating.

Twitter made its case this week that it's up to the task of being a player in geopolitical journalism.

The Iranian government, which is attempting to control the flow of information among protesters of the supposed results of that nation's presidential election, is having difficulty stopping citizens from using technology to report what's happening, express outrage, and get people out to opposition rallies.

Because the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Iran, information gathered on the Web is crucial to its understanding of the post-election unrest that has led to mass protests and fatal clashes with police. Twitter, where users have been filtering relevant information with the hashtag #iranelection, has been a crucial hot spot for raw news.

Twitter even rescheduled some planned downtime in order to stay accessible for Iranian users in the midst of political upheaval at the request of the U.S. Department of State. The diplomacy agency is working with multiple social-networking and communication services to ensure that conversation and information channels stay active.

One technique being employed to get around the government's online blockades is the electronic equivalent of a detour, which involves using something known as a proxy server.

Normally, a Web browser makes a connection directly to a Web site's Internet address. But that address can be easily discovered and added to the government's blacklist. The trick is to redirect Web browsing through a proxy, which could be a permanent commercial service, or someone volunteering his or her computer temporarily.

Worried that the Iranian government might seek out and punish any Twitter users who were employing the microblogging site for potentially subversive purposes, Twitterers are encouraging others to change their stated country of origin. Certainly, the Iranian government knows how to use Twitter and how to find people in that country using the microblogging service as a way to spread news about the protests.

The easiest way the Iranian government could discover which tweets were from Iranians is to look at whose accounts are registered to people who identify themselves as being from that country. A new thread that spread quickly across Twitter urged people around the world to change those settings in order to make themselves appear to be in Tehran.
•  With Iran crisis, Twitter's youth is over
•  State Department comments on 'talks' with Twitter
•  '#CNNFail': Twitterverse slams network's Iran absence
•  Google, Facebook rush Iranian language support

More headlines

iPhone 3G S debuts

It doesn't offer quite the same leap that the iPhone 3G offered over the first model, but the latest Apple handset still is a compelling upgrade for some users.
•  iPhone 3G S begins shipping to customers
•  Analyst expects 500,000 iPhones sold this weekend
•  AT&T loosens its iPhone 3G S upgrade policy
•  Microsoft: No iPhone reimbursements for workers
• Full coverage: Apple iPhone
• iPhone OS 3.0 now available

Scattered reports of iPhone OS 3.0 update problems

Most iPhone and iPod Touch users say they've had success in updating their devices with the new operating system, but a smattering have hit roadblocks.
•  Some apps have age restriction warnings in iPhone OS 3.0
•  iPhone 3.0 a cut-and-paste win for Twitter

The day after the DTV transition

The DTV transition has come and gone, and the world did not end. But FCC officials say their work will continue to make sure that no one is left behind.
•  Good-bye, rabbit ears? Not so fast

Google's digital-book future hangs in the balance

Google Book Search has the potential to unlock the musty archives of the world's libraries. But will it overcome antitrust obstacles and other opposition?
•  Bezos: We've got issues with Google Book Search
•  Google Book Search gets a face-lift

Apple warns about unsupported players' iTunes integration

A support article appeared on Apple's site Tuesday warning about unsupported third-party digital-media players.
•  Palm responds to Apple's warning

Will new browsers really upgrade the Web?

The latest browsers sport many hot new features. But the avant-garde must reckon with inconsistent standards, lagging IE, and slow adoption.
•  Firefox 3.5 'Web upgrade' planned for end of June
•  Mozilla pushes Firefox 3.5 RC to beta testers
•  Google: We want Chrome to grow the Web
•  Opera tries to Unite users across browsers

Also of note
•  AMD, Congo, and the perils of code names
•  Microsoft gives up YouTube chase
•  Court orders Jammie Thomas to pay RIAA $1.92 million

A State Department press briefing gives some insight into why the U.S. government requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled downtime during a crucial period in the post-election upheaval in Iran.

"I think, as I was following this, these developments over the weekend...I began to recognize the importance of new social media as a vital tool for citizens' empowerment and as a way for people to get their messages out," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Tuesday, according to a transcript of the department's daily press briefing (which was not held specifically to address the Twitter question). "And it was very clear to me that these kinds of social media played a very important role in democracy, spreading the word about what was going on."

CNN reported Tuesday that the State Department had been behind the decision by Twitter and its hosting provider to reschedule the downtime for an hour when it would be the middle of the night in the Iranian capital of Tehran.

Kelly was then asked to comment on "discussions that (the State Department is) having with networking sites about maintaining the technology, about how the State Department as an institution is monitoring these type of sites to gain information about what's going on."

His response: "We're monitoring many different media, including some of these sites. And we've had, of course, talks with Twitter as well...I don't want to go into the detail of the nature of those talks right now."

Another reporter then pointed out that "by not providing any information on the nature of the talks, it indicates that you have some role in kind of providing messages to Twitter, messages to Iranians."

Kelly denied this. He said he was not sure who exactly within the State Department had been in touch with Twitter and added that "we use a number of social media outlets, and we're in constant contact with them. And as I said before, we were, of course, monitoring the situation through a number of different media, including social media networks like Facebook and Twitter...this is about the Iranian people. This is about giving their voices a chance to be heard. One of the ways that their voices are heard are through new media."

With the Iranian government clamping down on foreign journalists, Kelly has a point: access to Twitter and ilk are crucial sources of information.

Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook have already emerged as sources of raw news in disasters and political crises before--from the Hudson River emergency plane landing to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. But this is the first time they've been highlighted as vital information channels in Iran--both for protesters trying to spread information and for government authorities trying to gather it.

Sweden's Pirate Party has won entry to the European Parliament in Brussels in elections held Sunday.

The Pirate Party gained 7 percent of the Swedish votes and secured at least one of the 18 seats that Sweden holds in the parliament.

"Citizens have understood that it's time to pull the fist out of the pocket and that you can make a difference," Rick Falkvinge, leader and founder of the party, told the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, after the result of the elections were revealed. "We don't accept to be bugged by the government. People start to understand that the government is not always good."

The Pirate Party is focused on three main goals: "to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected."

The party was founded in 2006, and that year gained only 0.63 percent of the votes in Swedish parliamentary elections. But since then it has attracted members during the debate on several controversial laws that authorize monitoring of electronic communications and that make it easier to police file sharing on the Internet.

It is now Sweden's third biggest party by membership. Its ranks swelled when four men were sentenced to prison in the high-profile Pirate Bay case in April. People use Web sites like The Pirate Bay to transfer movies and music, a practice that has drawn the ire--and the lawyers--of Hollywood studios and the recording industry.

The Pirate Party is not formally connected with The Pirate Bay, but has officially expressed support for the Web site.

The party wants all noncommercial copying to be free and file sharing to be encouraged. The copyright system, it argues, is out of whack--rather than encouraging the spread of culture, the system now imposes severe restrictions.

The European elections attracted 43.8 percent of the Swedish voters, which is on par with the European average.

Apart from the Pirate Party, which became the fifth biggest party in the elections in Sweden, the Greens were the big winners gaining 10.9 percent resulting in a fourth position and two seats in the parliament.

This was originally published at CBSNews.com.

President Obama on Friday confirmed that his presidential campaign suffered a cyber intrusion in which hackers gained access to a range of files.

In a speech in which he unveiled a plan for a comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy, the president said he understands what it is like to be a victim of a cyberattack because "it has happened to me and the people around me."

Between the months of August and October, Obama said, hackers accessed files including policy papers and travel plans. Files pertaining to fundraising information were left untouched, he assured his supporters in a joking manner.

Obama noted that his campaign's vulnerabilities reflected those of the rest of the world in the digital era.

"It's no secret my presidential campaign harnessed the Internet" to communicate with a wide swath of supporters, he said. However, the hacking was "a powerful reminder...one of your greatest strengths, our ability to communicate...could also be one of your greatest vulnerabilities."

The campaign worked with federal agents and hired security consultants to address the breach, Obama said. Newsweek reported in November that federal agents were investigating cyberbreaches of both the Obama and McCain campaigns.

In a move that some Silicon Valley insiders had anticipated might happen, Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly has announced his exploratory bid for the elected post as attorney general of California.

He has set up the Web site www.kelly2010.com as his online campaign headquarters. Kelly also has an official Facebook fan page for his campaign.

"Over the past year, many people I respect have asked me to run for California Attorney General in 2010. Today, after much consideration, I am announcing that I've launched a committee to further explore the race," Kelly, who is a Democrat, said in a statement. "As the next Attorney General of California, I would utilize my experience to protect California consumers, maintain an open and accountable government, and guarantee an effective legal system."

Kelly's background is in politics. In a video on his Web site, he explains that he got his start as a staffer on Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign and then at the White House, where he focused on establishing public service programs like AmeriCorps. Rumors that he was looking into a run for attorney general began to swirl late last year.

In his campaign, Kelly has indicated that he will run on a platform of high-tech innovation and accountability, particularly in the wake of economic decline and uncertainty.

"(At Facebook) I have dealt first-hand with the complex legal challenges and privacy issues that effect California businesses and consumers," Kelly explained in the video. "We need a strong consumer protection advocate as California's chief law enforcement officer, defending people against unfair practices and schemes. As California faces a budget deficit of more than $41 billion, rising home foreclosure rates, and an uncertain economic future, it is imperative that we prevent consumer fraud and protect California residents from scam artists offering once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for home ownership, phony foreclosure avoidance scams, and any financial fraud."

Among the other issues he mentioned were online safety and privacy for both adults and children, and tech-savvy improvements to law enforcement and border patrol.

Facebook said in a statement that Kelly is not leaving his post to run for attorney general, at least not yet.

"Chris Kelly is a valued member of the Facebook Team and has been for the past several years," the statement read. "Chris is currently exploring a possible run for California Attorney General on his own time and in compliance with all applicable Facebook policies. If, over the next few months, Chris decides to devote himself full-time to campaign, he's indicated that he will take time off or a leave of absence to do so."

As an executive at a social network with over 200 million members that has become a Silicon Valley success stories, Kelly has credibility as a digital-age candidate. Yet under Kelly's watch, Facebook went through a number of embarrassing privacy flubs, most notably the launch of its Beacon advertising program--which some critics charged as intrusive.

Facebook was also at the center of a legal back-and-forth with several states' lawmakers about whether it was doing enough to keep its members safe from known sex offenders. That, however, appears to have ended in agreement and cooperation.

Kelly won't be the only Silicon Valley type running for statewide office. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, a Republican, is running for governor. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who has appealed to the Valley set with green-tech initiatives and "Second Life" interviews, has also launched an exploratory bid for governor. The state's elections are next fall.

California's current attorney general is Edmund G. Brown, Jr.

This post was expanded at 1:35 p.m. PT.

This was originally posted on CBSNews.com.

A White House "virtual town hall" that Barack Obama hosted last month was intended to be an exercise in open-microphone democracy that would allow the president to interact with average Americans.

Aides billed it as permitting members of the public to "pose a question or vote for a particular question" using the Google Moderator utility. A new area of the WhiteHouse.gov Web site was titled Open For Questions, and nearly 1.8 million votes were cast.

That was the plan. After voting began, though, a committed group of mischievous activists (and their friends) deluged WhiteHouse.gov with their votes--and questions advocating the legalization of marijuana soon topped the site's "green jobs," "financial stability," "jobs," and "budget" categories. Obama eventually told the live audience that he doesn't think pot legalization is "a good strategy to grow our economy."

The White House's experience with reefer madness reflects the challenges that Obama faces when living up to his campaign pledge to create a "new level of transparency" through "cutting-edge technologies."

At 100 days into the Obama administration, Washington observers said that the president has made some significant steps toward using technology and the Internet to honor that campaign promise. In other ways, they said, Obama has not yet lived up to it.

"In general, we've been very optimistic," said Ari Schwartz, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Compared to his predecessors, Obama is an unusually wired chief executive. Bill Clinton sent only two e-mail messages as president and has yet to pick up the habit. George W. Bush ceased using e-mail in January 2001 and said toward the end of his presidency that he's looking forward to e-mailing "my buddies" after leaving the nation's capital.

But Obama, whose campaign made aggressive use of the Internet, is an inveterate e-mailer, saying "I'm still clinging to my BlackBerry" before taking office. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters after the inauguration that, thanks to a "compromise," his boss could keep a security-enhanced BlackBerry for e-mail.

Schwartz and others suggested that it's unfair to judge Obama's record on technology and openness after 100 days, especially when the president himself set a 120-day deadline for an internal review.

One of Obama's first acts as president was to sign a directive ordering his chief information officer to devise ways to make the administration more Internet-friendly within that time period. (The memorandum says agencies must "harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.")

In early March, Obama named Vivek Kundra, Washington, D.C.'s chief technology officer, to the position of federal CIO. Kundra said that he wants "to ensure the public has access to information, and to rethink the way the public interacts with the government in an information economy."

One of his office's projects is the not-launched-yet Data.gov Web site, which is intended to be a warehouse of government data for public consumption. (For the District of Columbia, Kundra's office created the D.C. Digital Public Square Web site, which provides data feeds and even ways to follow government activities through Twitter and Facebook.)

The White House also faces the challenge of upgrading a clunky and out-of-date computer system to allow them to do things like send SMS text messages and mass e-mail updates.

"They're putting out a report," said Schwartz, referring to the 120-day review. "We've had some conversations with the open government people and they seem to be looking at a lot of the issues we think are important."

The Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group that advocates for open government, has created a Web site allowing voting on what's most important to see in the 120-day review. The winner so far: formal data standards, which would allow programmers to extract government databases to be incorporated in their own applications--in much the same way as Google's announcement this week does. (Sunlight also was the sponsor of a so-called Transparency Camp in Washington recently.)

Another area that's attracted more attention under Obama's administration than it did under that of George W. Bush is blogging. The White House has a blog (with comments disabled and no actual posts by the president so far). White House Budget Director Peter Orszag has a blog; so does the State Department and Homeland Security (with comments permitted).

What he hasn't done
Overall, though, the Obama administration has been "more talk than action, that's for sure," said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

It's true, Harper said, "that it takes longer to do a lot of the things the president has promised. However, there are things he promised and things he could have done starting on day one that he didn't do."

One of those is adhering to what seems like a simple, unambiguous promise: Obama pledged that he would "not sign any nonemergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for five days."

That hasn't happened. Obama signed a slew of nonemergency bills without posting them for comment. A chart shows that Obama posted only one of 14 bills for the required five days.

In addition, before taking office, Obama promised new openness in the presidential transition, saying "you can track these meetings" his transition staff had with groups seeking to influence policy. A "Your Seat At The Table" memo said: "This scope is a floor, not a ceiling, and all staff are strongly encouraged to include additional materials."

That didn't happen. Although Obama did disclose documents submitted to the transition staff, his Web site never provided a list of meetings with the names of groups and identities of participants.

Instead, only a list of documents submitted was made public--meaning that if a meeting took place between the transition team and outside groups and no documents were exchanged, it remained secret. And even though meetings with White House staff are generally more important than meetings with transition staff, no similar disclosure policy has been adopted.

This and the WhiteHouse.gov five-day period could be easily fixed, Harper argues. "It's totally within the purview of the president to say what should happen," he said. "And it's not something he said should happen.