CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - Tea Party activists hit the Hill, arrested outside Pelosi’s office « - Blogs from CNN.com

There is something immeasurably insidious about a government that spies on its citizens. And if there is one universal truth, it is that no country has a monopoly on such activities. Whenever a ruling class, from whatever region, begins to feel threatened by the unforeseen, emerging independence of the underclass, one of the next steps taken is to monitor conversations, document strategies and invade privacies. It's an inevitable impulse that bears witness to the fierce determination of Struggle. So, it should surprise no one that In-Q-Tel, "the investment arm of the CIA," is enlisting the services of Visible Technologies, a software firm notorious for monitoring social networking activities. Noah Shachtman, contributing editor to Wired magazine, reported this new discovery last week. He described the process in great detail: Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon.... Then Visible "scores" each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is.

If technology has transformed warfare into a spectacle of shock and awe, its contribution to the cause of dissent has been no less remarkable. It has enabled solidarities across borders and facilitated networks and forums dedicated to impartial communication of ground realities beyond the sanitized projection of mainstream news. True, technological advances have not brought an end to either occupation, but it has certainly helped alternative voices and views to be heard. During the Vietnam War, over 100 underground newspapers, run by soldiers themselves, sprouted across the United States. The modern version of this has taken root within the Internet, largely in the form of blogs. Many American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been confounded by the wall of censorship they confront, jointly constructed by the military and the corporate media. The Internet offered them a convenient and powerful channel through which to get their stories out to the public. Constrained by slow military mail service from Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention overt attempts by superiors to curtail their interaction with journalists, soldiers have long since taken to blogging, posting photographs and uploading videos online, all related to their experience of the occupations.

Over the years we have seen a massive concentration of corporations and media synergy has been on the rise as a marketing tool.Even the lefts' most trusted corporate owned news sources are almost always, to a degree, caught up in some conflicts of interests because of Media conglomerates that can be damaging to the public good. Eventually the truth leaks out At times we get glimpses of honesty from even the supposed papers of record or television sources we are given by decoding buzz words and/or pulling out facts that, in retrospect on their part and in their own self interests, those news sources would probably like to be able to go back and kill before the more analytical readers out there in the New Media and Blogosphere got their hands on it. We need to build on our own and already existing New Media Conglomerate.

Jon Stewart's act of rational objectivity has turned him from Conservative Public Enemy #1 into the Patron Saint of Media Responsibility, quite literally, overnight. After Stewart's dis-assembly of the media over the ACORN story, praise reigned down on Jon Stewart from every corner of the right-wing blogosphere. Here's a sampling of that praise... Oh wait... I forgot one thing. With each link to right-wing praise for Jon Stewart, I juxtaposed a link to a sample of what each particular website thought of him before Monday night. Enjoy the hypocrisy.

Washington, DC: During the school year, Kate Cummings is a graduate student at Tufts University in Boston. For three months this summer, she will be helping women in Kenya to campaign against rape and human trafficking. Gretchen Murphy, from American University in Washington DC, will spend her summer working with survivors of landmine accidents in Vietnam. Rebecca Gerome, from the University Sciences Po in Paris, will travel to Colombia to help build an international network against armed domestic violence. The three students are among 45 who will volunteer this summer for community-based partners of The Advocacy Project (AP) in 26 different countries. Several features of this year's fellowship program reflect the growing appeal of AP's model of international service, which seeks to help marginalized communities campaign for social change.

There's a dustup in progress between liberal bloggers and liberal organizations. Here's the skinny: it seems that the big dog liberal blogs — you know, the folks who draw the rock star like traffic — are feeling unloved, or at least unnourished, by liberal organizations such as Americans United for Change (which has apparently now given in). They're also a little peeved at official Democratic Party committees.

Several major blogs were in jeopardy after a Tuesday hack of their software provider had its owner ready to throw in the towel...

Last week search engine #2 (Yahoo) said it would reduce its retention period for search user log data by ten months - from thirteen months to three months. Instantly the call went out for Google and Microsoft to step up and shrink the time they store users’ search queries, IP addresses and cookies.

Bill Donohue wants the Democratic National Convention to nix some of the bloggers who will be covering the event. He’s welcome to offer an opposing view…but he has no standing to demand that those with adversarial views be silenced. This is America…not the Vatican.

Political analysis comes in many forms, but "a pile of words"? A relatively new Internet phenomenon referred to as "word clouds" gives blog viewers a visual representation of what words appear most frequently on a given page or site. And the word use is dramatically different for Obama's blog vs. McCain's blog.

Because of the complexity of issues surrounding civil liberties, however, it can often be difficult to find the information, news, and civil liberties commentary you're looking for. To bring you the best in online resources relating to civil liberties legislation and news, we've compiled this list of 100 top civil liberties advocacy blogs

The Washington Times published an article on how McCain is allowing bloggers on his conference calls. And not just conservative ones, but non-political bloggers and even liberal bloggers. This has caused a certain stir amongst liberal bloggers, because Obama doesn't invite us to his calls, and never has. Clinton does, but she certainly doesn't invite conservative bloggers. So, let's lay this out simply and get past the "participation" BS. (Ian Welsh)

"I am energized by politics and often have to blow my top," Lady Bunny said as she noted her blog is often the place where she eventually has to find the lid on her wig. "Americans are so dumbed down and gossip orientated."

A review of monthly traffic on 5 major progressive blogs (2 pro-Obama, one neutral, 2 pro-Clinton) reveals some interesting statistics. Beyond mere stats, though, lies a story - are the blogs that lean strongly toward one candidate or the other hurting themselves - and in the process, Democratic Party chances in November?

"(T)he journalist and altermondialist militant Naomi Klein explains that blogs are complementary to investigative journalism. ... 'This is what makes blogs so exciting: they put information by definition anti-narrative, into context. What citizen journalism manages so well is to take facts and turn them into stories.'"

Blogs work for search because, without initial intent, they're the essence of what a search engine wants to point to. Why? Because they're the essence of what people want to visit, and search engines make their living by giving people what they want on the web. (Natasha Chart)