President Obama finally took a sit-down interview on the National Security Agency scandal and we’ve pasted a partial transcript below. Disappointingly, most of it is (very) generic and defensive. But, there is one important takeaway: President Obama couldn’t answer whether oversight courts (FISA) have ever rejected a single NSA spying request. PBS’s Charlie Rose asked, pointedly… → Read More

I just got flashbacks of seeing congressmen debate on C-SPAN whether there were, in fact, any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Only a decade ago, Members of select intelligence committees saw identical pieces of evidence and came to vastly different conclusions. Now, it’s happening again with the National Security Agency: Senator Mark Udall has written, “We have not yet seen any evidence… → Read More

First Amendment pioneer and current Republican U.S. Congressman Peter King thinks that journalists should be punished for publishing the leaked documents about the National Security Agency’s top-secret spying program. Unfazed by Anderson Coopers perfect jaw-line, Representative King said in a CNN interview: “Actually, if they–if they knew that this was classified information–I think… → Read More

[Update: Someone from Google has responded to us (by tweet!) We'll update this post as we get more questions answered] Google made headlines today for a letter to the federal government requesting the right to release more information on compliance with spy orders. The letter claims that if the public knew how many requests for data the National Security Agency demanded, they would dispel rumors… → Read More

Americans deserve answers about the National Security Agency’s spying practices. I urge readers to sign an official WeThePeople White House petition for President Obama to sit down with the journalist who helped unmask the NSA’s controversial programs: Glenn Greenwald. If the president is serious about his commitment to transparency and open dialogue, he should do a one-on-one… → Read More

Despite the conniption fit over the National Security Agency’s Internet snooping, most Americans are perfectly okay with Big Brother spying on them. “A majority of Americans – 56 percent – say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism,” explains a new Pew Report. → Read More

The U.S. manufacturing industry isn’t a lost cause after all: Apple has made good on its promise to make the new line of Mac Pros in America. There were very few details announced during the keynote at Apple’s WWDC today, but we’re guessing they’ll be assembled in Apple’s new Texas plant. The slope of decline in U.S manufacturing has gone from bunny slope in the 1960s… → Read More

The NSA whistleblower who exposed America’s massive spying operation has come out and taken an interview with the leak reporter, The Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald. “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your… → Read More

A 26-year-old farm dweller who helped expose the rape of a teenage girl is facing up to 5x more jail time than the high school football members who publicly assaulted the girl. The Steubenville rape case became a national firestorm after it was revealed that dozens of people had witnessed the assault at a party and then shared pictures and social media updates of the event mocking the girl. → Read More

Love him or hate him, President Obama is no hypocrite: he’s been as fiercely innovative at encouraging citizen input to improve governance as he has been in secretly stealing Americans’ private information. Transparent budget spending, crowdsourcing government waste, unprecedented spending on polls, collecting school performance metrics, and rewarding civic app designers have… → Read More

The Washington Post is reporting a top-secret National Security Administration data-mining program that taps directly into the Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple servers among others. “The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs… → Read More

After it was revealed that the National Security Administration was collecting phone records of every single U.S. call on the Verizon network, even President Obama’s most ardent supporters are losing faith that he would usher in a more transparent government. Loyal Democrat, former Vice President and Internet inventor, Al Gore called the NSA’s massive spying program ”obscenely… → Read More

Turkish authorities have arrested 25 protesters for the high crime of using Twitter. Amid widespread violent clashes, police rounded up netizens on Tuesday night for “spreading untrue information.” Embattled Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has labeled social media “the worst menace to society,” saying of Twitter, “The best example of lies can be found there.”

Social media has been… → Read More

Allowing for the legal ownership of ideas has some silly unintended consequences. “Dumbass patents are crushing small businesses,” Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban once told me. Roughly a third of startups have been threatened with patent violations, often by entities built solely to scare small businesses into settling (so-called “patent troll”). President Obama has decided to go after the… → Read More

Self-driving cars will save roughly 32,000 lives lost every year to auto fatalities, reduce pollution and save us countless hours wasted in traffic. It will also obliterate the taxi industry — like it did the steamboat industry.

Bringing to the masses services, which were once considered luxuries (personal assistants, cutting-edge medicine, and world-class education), means automating some… → Read More

Everyone has an opinion about Google Glass. Some fears are justified, since, as a culture, we don’t have a pristine history of social etiquette always catching up to technology (see: loud-mouth cellphone users). But, as XKCD points out, this doesn’t absolve us of the right to say something intelligent, and offer a reasonable path forward as we inevitably march towards heads-up display technology… → Read More

A new bulletin from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warns that lethal, undetectable 3D-printed firearms may be “impossible” to contain. After a Texas law student designed and released digital blueprints for the world’s first fully printable gun, the files have allegedly been downloaded more than 100,000 times, despite a domestic ban on distributing the files from the U.S. State… → Read More

The U.S. House of Representatives just released its own version of a high-skilled immigration reform bill and is actively seeking input through the collective IQ of the Internet. House Oversight Chairman and one of our Most Innovative People in Democracy, Darrell Issa, has placed the Supplying Knowledge-Based Immigrants And Lifting Levels of STEM (SKILLS) Visas Act on his very own public markup… → Read More

The biggest names in technology have normally been unflinching champions for the rights of same-sex couples. Yet, they were conspicuously silent this week as the Senate rejected the right for American same-sex couples to petition for visas for their foreign-born partners. → Read More