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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
In 2003, Howard Dean scored big with the Web, while India took advantage of online communications to grab thousands of white-collar jobs from the West. The Net, it turns out, still matters.
Dec 24, 2003 | Howard Dean's online machine
One year ago, Howard Dean was a little-known Northeastern governor with an angry stage presence and some firmly held ideas about the impending war in Iraq. To hear the experts tell it, he was too unknown, too Northeastern, too angry, and his ideas were too firmly held to propel him very far on the national stage. But Dean and his team knew about the Web. Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, is a longtime fan of political blogs, and he saw that one of the best ways to get the political chattering classes chattering about Dean would be to get key political bloggers blogging about Dean.
Trippi cultivated relationships with these bloggers (some even joined the campaign to work on Dean's official blog,) and he radically democratized his organization, allowing the readers and writers of blogs to suggest campaigning ideas to the candidate. One of the ideas suggested by bloggers was Meetup, the Web-based tool to organize local gatherings. Trippi, in perhaps his best move of the campaign, embraced Meetup, encouraging Web-based supporters to sign up for the local gatherings to see what the candidate was all about. For many Dean fans, this first Meetup -- where supporters got to see videos of the candidate and, more important, to meet others just like themselves -- had all the fervency of a first hit of cocaine. After one meeting, the supporters knew they had to get more Dean; and the candidate suddenly had an unrivaled grassroots campaign working for his victory.
The rest of the story will surely go down in the annals of political history, even if Dean doesn't get to the White House. Dean's following on the Web propelled him to first place in the MoveOn primary in June. In July, he surprised experts by trouncing all of his rivals in the fundraising race, a victory made possible largely with money raised online. And now, of course, he stands as the Democratic front-runner.
It remains unclear whether Dean's online success was something of a fluke -- was it made possible by the particular appeal of the candidate and the particular political moment, or does it really foretell a new wave in politics? Nobody knows, either, how important Dean's Web machine will be in the general election (if he gets there). And what can an online campaign do about the digital divide? But this much is known: After what Howard Dean did on the Web, candidates are now taking the Web very seriously.
Electronic voting in the crosshairs
Electronic touch-screen voting machines seem like a fabulous idea. They're easy to use. They prevent voters from choosing too many (or too few) candidates. Ballots can be programmed in multiple languages, and the machines can accommodate blind people, who in the past always required the assistance of another person to cast their votes. The electronic machines also count ballots quickly and, according to their manufacturers, are completely secure from tampering. The only problem is, the machines don't produce any physical proof (a so-called paper trail) of an accurate election result. Because electronic voting machines record, store and count ballots in a computer, it's impossible to ensure that the results spit out by the machine match the collective will of the voters.
Computer scientists have long warned of this problem, but in 2003, a host of activists began to bring these concerns to the mainstream. David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford, recruited thousands of his fellow computer experts to demand that election equipment vendors manufacture, and election officials require, electronic machines that produce a paper trail. Meanwhile, Bev Harris, a literary publicist who began investigating voting firms after the 2002 midterm election, found several questionable practices at Diebold, one of the leading voting equipment firms. In February, Harris discovered that the company had left its voting software available on a public FTP site -- and when computer scientists from Johns Hopkins and Rice University looked at the code in the summer, they declared it profoundly vulnerable to attack. (Diebold criticizes the study.) Harris has also found flaws in the vote-counting software that allow anyone with access to the machine to alter election results.
Fortunately, there's some sign that lawmakers are beginning to worry about paperless machines. The secretaries of state in California and Nevada recently announced that they will require all the machines in their states to produce a paper trail, and many members of Congress are pondering a national law requiring auditable systems.
SPAM SPAM SPAM
Condolences to anyone trying to have a serious discussion via e-mail about erectile dysfunction this year: 2003 was the year that spam filters ruled the Net, becoming ubiquitous on corporate e-mail accounts and commercial Internet services alike. And while filters have cut down some of the hassle of dealing with the daily onslaught of crude solicitations, they also mean that a new reign of "false positives" has begun. E-mailers now struggle not only with spam itself, but with spam filters gone bad.
This year the sheer volume of spam became so unrelenting that even some Internet pioneers wondered if e-mail -- the killer app itself! -- can be saved. Will a federal spam law really help, or just prove another trivial hurdle for crafty rogue spammers to navigate?
Stay tuned: In the footsteps of the summer crackdown on telemarketing spam with the institution of the national do-not-call list, Bush signed the first federal anti-spam act into law in mid-December, which Congress had overwhelmingly approved. The law goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2004, but many technologists are skeptical that it will stem the flood of spam.
