Public Opinion

Remember how the Internet community stopped SOPA?

Come on out to Irish Whiskey this Thursday at 8pm for the official launch of the Internet Defense League (IDL), a network of people and organizations committed to defending the open Internet. The goal of IDL is to sound the alarm quickly to millions of users whenever the Internet is in peril.

“we show love in our communities to stop violence by coming together, throwing away ignorance, lifting up one another, gardening...” -- @D_FY tweet

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (“SNAP”) has become a major target this election cycle, largely because of persistent accusations of waste and fraud in its administration. However, it is well documented that SNAP fraud is minimal; furthermore, there is a logical disconnect between the problems defined and the expensive solutions proposed in the name of “efficiency."

The Economic Research Service of the USDA just released a new publication on its website documenting the reasons that participation in SNAP has risen so significantly over the past few years. Unsurprisingly, high rates of unemployment since the recession began are largely to blame; ERS research has shown that since 1980, a 1-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate is associated with about 1 to 3 million additional SNAP participants. Another factor is that some of the most burdensome policies put in place by welfare reform—which caused the SNAP caseload to decline 47% between 1996 and 2000—have been lifted or eased over the past decade. Additionally, though participation is up, the average SNAP benefit remains low, even with the Recovery Act boost. In 2010, the average 2.2-person SNAP household had a monthly gross income of $731, net income of $336, and a SNAP benefit of $287.

On July 28, 1932, at the command of President Herbert Hoover, police and soldiers led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur attacked and destroyed the camp of the Bonus Army, a group of thousands of World War I veterans and their families and allies who had spent the spring and summer protesting the unemployment created by the Great Depression. The violence, in which two veterans were killed and dozens of people were injured, shocked the American public and helped to ensure the victory of Franklin D. Roosevelt over Hoover in that fall’s presidential election.

Last June, Khaled Said, a twenty-eight-year-old Alexandrian, suffered a vicious public beating at the hands of Egyptian police. Several witnesses documented the assault with cell phone cameras. Said apparently died from his wounds, but the police claimed he had choked to death on illegal drugs. Outraged Egyptians posted contrary evidence on Facebook pages and on YouTube.

On Sept. 6, 1791, a government worker named Robert Johnson rode his horse through a Pennsylvania forest. An unlucky man, Johnson. He was assigned to collect the first domestic tax ever imposed by the U.S. government--a whiskey tax designed to help pay down the nation's mounting debt.

Irrespective of your personal feelings about WikiLeaks, the model it pioneered has challenged traditional journalism models and serves as a harbinger of change for 2011. WikiLeaks-esque tools supporting a new generation of whistleblowers are facilitating fundamental changes in the relationships among sources and journalists. These tools can disseminate exceedingly large amounts of information within remarkably short time frames and challenge journalists, who necessarily must utilize new technologies to vet, manage, source, and expose the needles in the haystack.

When Sarah Palin used the term “blood libel” to describe purported attacks on her and the Tea Party movement in the wake of Saturday’s tragic shooting in Tucson, some were left wondering why the former governor would use a phrase historically associated with anti-Semitism.

Judging by the last two weeks, being an enemy of Julian Assange is only marginally less stressful than being Julian Assange. Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa, which all moved to cut ties with Assange's WikiLeaks after the site's release of diplomatic cables, have been the targets of distributed denial-of-service attacks from a group that calls itself "Anonymous." There is nothing fancy going on here. DDoS attacks simply aim to send more traffic to a target site than it can handle, slowing it down or making it temporarily unavailable.