bytes and ballots

Wired has this story about how the anti-spam software Blue Frog is being transformed into a software application for political activism. The vision behind this new tool, Collactive, is discussed in the story:

Now founders Aran Reshef and Amir Hirsh are reincarnating their software to turn armies of internet users into political activists. Their new Collactive platform takes the drudgery out of grass-roots action, letting armchair activists fill out online petitions, file comments in rule-making proceedings, send letters to their representatives in Congress and seed collaborative web forums with sympathetic news items -- all with the push of a button.

The Collactive software is offered as a generic distribution to organizations, who then configure it for a particular political issue and give it to users as a downloadable software package or Firefox plug-in.

Once it's installed, the organizers can send alerts to users or update the software with scripts that know how to take particular actions, such as automatically filling in feedback forms on a politician's website. End users can also forward e-mail alerts to their friends, who have the option of installing the software themselves and joining the network.

Here's a link to Collactive.

According to this LA Times story, investigation by the California Attorney General's office has found that no crime was committed by the Angelides campaign when they obtained audiotapes of Schwarzenegger's conversations from a computer in the Governor's office:

In late August, Angelides campaign aides plucked the audio from the governor's website. Portions of the recording were published by The Times in early September, two months before the election.

The files contained a casual conversation in which Schwarzenegger told aides that Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia (R-Cathedral City) has a "hot" personality, and attributed her temperament to mixed blood.

Several weeks later, with the governor's race still underway, CHP investigators consulted state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's office and were told that proving a crime with the evidence in hand would be impossible.

"You don't break and enter a business by walking in an open door during business hours," said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for the attorney general's office.

The governor's computer system appeared to have been "quasi-open," he said. "That makes it very difficult to put together a prosecutable case."