It’s time to ‘Reset the Net’

It is clear that there are rumblings of great discontent around the world about how the internet is being hijacked by government spying agencies and I suggested that it may lead to some kind of organized revolt. As usual, I am behind the times because reader John Horstman informs me that there is already a project in the works known as Reset the Net that calls upon everyone to do their bit to reclaim the promise of the internet as a free and open space
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The inevitable has arrived: The Adelson primary

In the US there have been two inexorable trends that have long threatened to doom even the pretense of being a democracy. One is the fact that election days are cemented into the calendar, which means that politicians can plan and execute their campaigns well in advance, though a thin façade of decorum requires them to demur from having such ambitions until somewhat closer to the date. This long gestation period necessarily results in campaigns becoming more expensive. This is true for all elections but most pronounced in contests for the presidency. In the 2012 election, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent on the order of one billion dollars each, an obscene amount.
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End of the road near for the electoral college?

As close followers of US politics know, the US does not elect its president by direct popular vote. Instead it has an institution called the Electoral College whose members vote for the president. The electoral college consist of 538 votes apportioned among the states corresponding exactly to the total of their members of the House of Representatives (that varies with the population) and comes to 435 total plus two each for the Senate, that gives 100 more. The extra three votes consist of two for Puerto Rico and one are for Washington DC. This means that the winner has to get 270 electoral college votes.
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Knowledge is power

In a speech given to the SXSW meeting, Julian Assange makes the point of how information is used to accrue wealth.

Assange also described what he sees as an “unprecedented theft of wealth from the majority of the population to those people who already have a lot of power … doing that in part by stealing information from all of us. Knowledge is power, and as a result they’re getting more power.”
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Obama’s hypocrisy and petulance on display again

The Ukraine situation has once again shown that when president Obama is faced with an international situation where the sheer brute force of the US cannot be used to get his way, he resorts to childish language and taunts. This happened last year when Edward Snowden took refuge in Russia to escape from the clutches of the US security apparatus and president Putin ignored US calls to hand him over. Then Obama gave a press conference where he made the extraordinary comment that Putin looked like “he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom”, hardly the way to speak about a foreign leader.
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