The Web on the Candidates

• The Get FISA Right movement we've been covering it this space has launched a last-ditch effort to raise heck around today's Senate debate of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with a Night of Facebook Action to organize a virtual viewing of the congressional action. The group's wiki had this to say about this latest action: "it's worth a try" -- and that's an apt summary of how the anti-FISA group has approached its work over the last two weeks. They organized the biggest group ever on MyBarackObama.com, started up a Twitter channel, populated the wiki with ideas and action items, and are now turning to Facebook (though running into some of the roadblocks that face Facebook activists, including being tagged as spammers). This is a group for whom skill in using the Internet to advance an agenda goes down to the bone; says group's strategy notes on how to get attention on some of the web's most popular hubs, "Don't forget to mention it's on a wiki; Slashdotters loooove wikis." When the dust settles, Get FISA Right will be a fantastic case study on how digital activists built a ship while sailing, creating a vibrant movement at next-to-no cost, with no real home, and tied to no one medium. For now, focus turns to the Senate's final consideration of FISA and related amendments today and, perhaps, tomorrow. (Ars Technica's Timothy B. Lee has a useful reminder that this is a bill and debate that goes beyond telecom immunity.)

The Candidates on the Web

• Has John McCain really failed to define his technology policy, or does it just not take a lot of ink to say "the market will provide"? Jonathan Stein dives into that question for Mother Jones. For his part, McCain has Carly Fiorina out on the trail defending his tech cred. Her approach perhaps isn't all that surprising for a former Hewlett-Packard head honcho; she ties together McCain's takes on both broadband access and net neutrality with the explanation that "business won't get it done unless they see sufficient return on their investment." PdF contributor Brian Reich makes an important point in that MoJo piece: one reason McCain hasn't unleashed a robust tech plan might be as much a matter of politics as policy -- Silicon Valley is inclined to support Obama, and Mac isn't as interested in courting their support by spending time on tech.

TechCongress and Beyond

• The somewhat frantic Tweet came in yesterday morning from @johnculberson: "They want to require prior approval of all posts to any public social media/internet/www site by any member of Congress!!!" And with that, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) unleashed a storm of interest in a dry in-House letter from Franking Commission chief Rep. Mike Capuano (D-MA) on the use of third-party web services by members of Congress. Now, Capuano is the type of elected to describe the web as "a necessary evil," but some deep breaths are in order here. The House is an insular and somewhat archaic institution creaking towards modernity, and when it comes to the web the institution seems to run about five years behind the rest of us. But these online rules -- notoriously fuzzy and convoluted -- are an area where congressional staffers regularly engage in disobedience. Under current guidance, House sites are required to post an exit notice when visitors click on external links, and that, um, never happens. (There's a reason they call wrangling your congressional colleagues "herding cats.") We've been over the Capuano letter (pdf) with a fine-toothed comb, and it takes a great deal of extrapolation to see it as an assault on members' use of tools like Twitter and Qik. See TechDirt's Mike Masnick for a balanced look at the issue. Other perspectives come from TechRepublican's David All and the Open House Project's John Wonderlich. You know what? All this makes great question fodder for John, who will be sitting down with PdF's Dave Witzel for an online chat at 2 p.m. EST tomorrow.

• Daily Kos's georgia10 offers a thoughtful critique of Sally Kohn's recent Christian Science Monitor piece that called for millennials to make their activism more face-to-face.

• Lieberman Must Go is an online effort pressing the Senate Democratic Steering Committee to relieve Joe Lieberman of his gavel as the head of the chamber's Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee.

  Tags: Facebook activism | FISA | John Culberson | MyBarackObama.com | the Open House Project | Twitter | wikis
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