[liberationtech] What open government public opinion survey questions would you ask?
I am helping Pew Research's Internet and American Life project gather your ideas on public survey questions about open government: http://bit.ly/pewopengovquestions - Details and comment via this Facebook topic This is a very exciting opportunity to provide input this week. When Pew Research releases survey results, I know of no project which generates as much technology and society media attention. Also, questions asked by Pew Research tend to trickle around the world. So let's help them ask some insightful questions that tell us more about what we really need to know about public support for open government efforts and related issues. Thanks, Steven Clift Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.org Twitter: http://twitter.com/democracy Tel/Text: +1.612.234.7072 ᐧ -- Liberationtech is public archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
Re: [liberationtech] What open government public opinion survey questions would you ask?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 On 7/28/2014 7:05 AM, Steven Clift wrote: I am helping Pew Research's Internet and American Life project gather your ideas on public survey questions about open government: http://bit.ly/pewopengovquestions - Details and comment via this Facebook topic Does this mean that you do not want input from people who are not on Facebook? - - ferg This is a very exciting opportunity to provide input this week. When Pew Research releases survey results, I know of no project which generates as much technology and society media attention. Also, questions asked by Pew Research tend to trickle around the world. So let's help them ask some insightful questions that tell us more about what we really need to know about public support for open government efforts and related issues. Thanks, Steven Clift Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.org Twitter: http://twitter.com/democracy Tel/Text: +1.612.234.7072 ᐧ - -- Paul Ferguson VP Threat Intelligence, IID PGP Public Key ID: 0x54DC85B2 Key fingerprint: 19EC 2945 FEE8 D6C8 58A1 CE53 2896 AC75 54DC 85B2 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iF4EAREIAAYFAlPWYyUACgkQKJasdVTchbKESwD+NqCiJRmUaGlLQ5WSlmOTgX9e dB8lqkvtZ/Nqbu9TxNUA/1dn7nN3W3j8sOBMHrA6fbqev+INkLs5kngDitsnQzeM =LS/L -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- Liberationtech is public archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
Re: [liberationtech] What open government public opinion survey questions would you ask?
If you put it here, I will gladly send it to Pew. Here is the content of the full message on Facebook: When our good friends with the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life project - http://www.pewinternet.org - report their public survey questions, the world takes notice. Now is your chance to provide some input that will matter. They will be watching this Facebook topic! They have asked us for input on what questions would best identify how the public is using information and communication technologies to interact with local, state, and federal government. 1. What great question(s) have you always wanted “to put a number to” in a public survey on the public’s use of ICTs with government? 2. What past Pew (or other) questions do you want to see asked again? (So we can see trends.) For a sense of what was asked before in this niche, note Pew’s “Government Online” related releases:http://www.pewinternet.org/topics/government-online/pages/2/ Additionally, they have a new goal of trying to find out if the general public is aware of various “open government” initiatives of which many of us are a part. So in John Horrigan’s words (who is working with Lee Rainie and Aaron Smith on this), can we ... 3. “See how/whether people have engaged with open government initiatives that have arisen in the past several years. Rather than focus just on e-gov (how people may use the Internet to communicate/transact with government), the idea is to probe whether people have a sense about governments' efforts to use the Internet to be more open and transparent with citizens.” And 4. Can we “get a read on people's awareness of this [open government/open data efforts] and attitudes about it.” So what question ideas do you have for 3 and 4 as well? * Some initial E-Democracy feedback ... For me, it will be interesting to find out whether the mass of people are aware of “open government” initiatives and whether those who are aware of such efforts indicate more or less trust in government. Is the public satisfied with the progress of open government? Can they “see” and “feel” it in how they engage government at *various levels* comparatively? I figure that politicians assume these are not bread and butter issues that sway voters and therefore often make few specific promises about “open government” beyond platitudes. Perhaps the right public survey questions might lead to results that counter my assumption here. We might be able to show that it does hold some relative importance beyond being a “nice” thing to do or something a ruling party feels it needs to do more of legislatively/funding wise in reaction to a scandal. Or as surveys can do, will we confirm that this is niche cause. We hear a lot about government agencies being pushed to identify and release “high value data sets” - so what I wonder, in a world of scarce resources, could a prioritization question be asked that gets at this more deeply? (Meaning if a state legislature was going to spend say $5 million on freeing more open data for public use, which data or resulting services/innovations does the public want first? This is hard because people typically don’t ask for things they haven’t envisioned or considered or the results a nebulous secondary effects (e.g. open data for a commercial transit app) On another track, via Open Twin Cities, E-Democracy helped shape a set of hard questions about open data that didn’t allow candidates to simply support the concept but not express views on the hard choices involved. So the questions linked from here (and copied by a number of cities) may be useful: http://opentwincities.org/2013/09/11/open-data-questionnaire-press-release/ I am also interested in whether the public essentially supports the radical vision (the Estonia model) that all legal to share government data/information should be published online as a default. The Sunlight Foundation calls this public=online. On the flip side of the coin, in Minnesota the political concern has been around privacy and they set up a new legislative commission -http://www.lcc.leg.mn/lcdp/ - to better deal with requests to make specific data private (in MN everything is legally public unless the law specifically says otherwise.) So, again, citing Estonia and the growing mistrust about what government knows about us that we don’t know about, a question that asks “should government provide a secure online means by which you can view and correct private information held by government agencies about you?” would be extremely forward looking. Estonia calls this their X-Road - http://e-estonia.com/component/x-road/ - system and as a reaction to 50 years of communism they understand that not knowing what government knows about YOU and what it is doing with information about you is perhaps the most corrosive enemy of trust in government. Open government can be about an accountability that is hyper individualized when dealing with power relationships and
[liberationtech] Russia offers cash to identify Tor users
Here's something a little unexpected...Wonder what people here may htink. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28526021 28 July 2014 Last updated at 08:15 ET Share this pagePrint ShareFacebookTwitter Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network Edward Snowden Tor has been used by the whistleblower Edward Snowden Continue reading the main story Related Stories NSA 'targets' Tor users and servers ISPs take legal action against GCHQ Germany cancels Verizon contract Russia has offered 3.9m roubles ($110,000; £65,000) in a contest seeking a way to crack the identities of users of the Tor network. Tor hides internet users' locations and identities by sending data on random paths through machines on its network, adding encryption at each stage. The Russian interior ministry made the offer, saying the aim was to ensure the country's defence and security. The contest is only open to Russians and proposals are due by 13 August. Applicants must pay 195,000 roubles to enter the competition, which was posted online on 11 July and later reported by the tech news site Ars Technica. Earlier this month, Russia's lower house of parliament passed a law requiring internet companies to store Russian citizens' personal data inside the country. Russia has the fifth-largest number of Tor users with more than 210,000 people making use of it, according to the Guardian. US-funded network Tor was thrust into the spotlight in the wake of controversy resulting from leaks about the National Security Agency and other cyberspy agencies. Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed the internal memos and who now has asylum in Russia, uses a version of Tor software to communicate. Documents released by Mr Snowden allege that the NSA and the UK's GCHQ had repeatedly tried to crack anonymity on the Tor network. Tor was originally set up by the US Naval Research Laboratory and is used be people who want to send information over the internet without being tracked. It is used by journalists and law enforcement officers, but has also been linked to illegal activity including drug deals and the sale of child abuse images. In its 2013 financial statements, the Tor Project - a group of developers that maintain tools used to access Tor - confirmed that the US Department of Defense remained one its biggest backers. The DoD sent $830,000 (£489,000) to the group through SRI International, which describes itself as an independent non-profit research centre, last year. Other parts of the US government contributed a further $1m. Those amounts are roughly the same as in 2012. -- Liberationtech is public archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
Re: [liberationtech] Russia offers cash to identify Tor users
On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 10:20 PM, fr...@journalistsecurity.net wrote: Here's something a little unexpected...Wonder what people here may think. I answered some questions about this tender for theRunet: http://www.therunet.com/articles/3343-chto-nuzhno-znat-ob-anonimnoy-seti-tor http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28526021 The Russian interior ministry made the offer, saying the aim was to ensure the country's defence and security. False, that quote relates to restriction on proposals by foreigners. The tender (including all documentation) is only open to Russian organizations with clearance. The contest is only open to Russians and proposals are due by 13 August. It is not a contest (incorrect literal translation), but a tender for performing scientific research on “possibility of recovering technical information about users (user equipment) of anonymous Tor network”. The description has been made much more laconic on July 25, apparently in response to media attention. -- Maxim Kammerer Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte -- Liberationtech is public archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
