I’m not sure which side is helped more by viral internet politics, but the email circulation of partisan political discourse is certainly becoming a more important part of the campaign.

Three bits I’ve encountered suggest some of the possibilities.

First, consider the Anne Kilkenny letter. Written by an actual Wasilla resident, it documents all the local’s concerns about Palin’s time as Mayor and Governor. Penned just last weekend, it’s already exploded as a much-forwarded email.

Next, the cliche example is YouTube, but consider it as a vehicle for sharing less-visible public appearances by candidates. This rally speech excerpt by Joe Biden, “The Silence is Deafening,” went up on Friday and has already been viewed almost 80,000 times and earned over 1,400 reviews averaging 5 stars. It likely would have been lost in the weekend news cycle to many, if not most, of these viewers, myself included. Emailed links to the video on YouTube kept it alive.

Finally, consider the Daily Show. This week, they have been fiercely criticizing the Republicans during their convention. Even for those who didn’t watch the first time around, the show’s encyclopedic video library allows the sharing of these gems:

Sarah Palin–Vet This! (Start about 5 min in. Best summary of the Giuliani and Palin speeches starts just before the 8 min mark.)

John McCain, Reformed Maverick (Narrated by Ian McShane)

John McCain’s Big Acceptance Speech

I don’t doubt that the right also has a hall of fame of viral emails and videos that are also mobilizing their base. While I’m not going to dig up the source to link to, I’m pretty sure viral internet video is a phenomenon that has much greater resonance among the young–that age and online video consumption are inversely and strongly related.

While the impact may not be necessary or sufficient, I think the Obama/Biden ticket stands to accrue a unique benefit from the widespread adoption of home broadband. This is especially true since young people are by and large sold on Obama but may still need to be mobilized to vote. If every few days, a different friend is passing along a relevant video, young people may be more likely to register and vote than in previous elections.

As a debate champion who spent 12 years in the activity, I am utterly appalled at the repugnant, personal attacks that Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin leveled at Obama and Biden tonight. I would be shocked to see such juvenile antics from a high school freshman.

If I tried to document every ad hominem blow, every sleight-of-hand straw-man attack on policy issues, and every bit of shallow mockery of Obama’s life of service, it would take me all night. Here are a few bits from what I see as particularly low: Read more »

There are already thousands of blog posts about the revelation that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant. This post is not just another addition to the pile; rather, I think the story has a couple lessons about online political communication.

First, the (insert adjective) blogosphere has become a magic talisman in discussions of current affairs; it is whatever a speaker wants it to be. Second, this only accelerates the right’s remarkable ability to shoot the messenger.

As strongly pressed by the Obama team (Obama to media: Back off!), there is little political hay to be made over Bristol’s pregnancy. The Palin pick gives Dems plenty of ammo without touching this story. Even beyond her obvious inexperience, Palin carries very many serious liabilities, and we’re likely still learning more. Her family’s baby count isn’t a wise target. At best, it’s an opportunity to talk about sex ed policy, a position on which Palin is far out of the mainstream.

The crazy part of this story centers on the allegation (which I am not making) that Gov. Sarah Palin faked her fifth pregnancy to cover for Bristol–that the Palins’ youngest son, Trig, is actually their grandson. No political figure or news outlet of any weight will touch this allegation except to treat it as an internet rumor.

While most official news sources credit anonymous bloggers (even Huff Post does it) for their source on this allegation, it is most specifically attributed to dedicated DailyKos diarists–users who do not speak for the site. One user in particular stoked the flames with pictures and details; the original post was deleted in the last few hours in an obvious exercise of the site’s policy against poorly-sourced allegations of conspiracy and the like. Another user’s conspiratorial entry remains up for now.

The surface-level analysis would lead us to view this as an instance of one person getting attention in a way that was just not possible in the offline world. But why did it gain traction?

The few who chimed in on Kos and elsewhere would have remained on the fringe had the right not seized the opportunity to blame “liberal bloggers” and strongly insinuate that the Obama camp had a hand in it. Frankly, this is a crap allegation. Real lefty bloggers have plenty to say about Palin without picking on her daughter. In fact, here’s a mini linkfest summarizing the collective verdict of the actual, established liberal blogosphere:

Lee Stranahan, @ Huff Post: Palin ‘Definitely Pregnant’ With Trig

RJ Eskow, @ Huff: ‘Hey, Pundits, Leave Them Kids Alone‘

Kos: ‘I don’t think the evidence is there to claim Trig is Bristol’s son‘ (headline: ‘So Much For Abstinence-Only Education’, a more-or-less legit policy swipe at Gov. Palin)

Faiz @ ThinkProgress: basic rehash of pregnant daughter story, gratuitous swipes on reproductive policy issues

Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic is the most legitimate source I could find even discussing the allegation as something worth rebutting, and he assumed it was false, urging Palin to release the medical records. “And then we can move on.”

For conservatives in this story, the liberal blogosphere serves as a magical uber-enemy: nameless, faceless, with untold power to spread lies to gullible swing voters. This talismanic quality is often attributed to the blogosphere, both in negative and positive terms. Liberals (Joe Trippi) and conservatives (Hugh Hewitt) alike have long sold partisan books promising that the internet will set “our side” free.

The truth about the internet is subtle, complex, and evolving. Things are different by a nontrivial yet nonrevolutionary degree. We could attribute any and every rumor to the internet, but until the mainstream media picks it up, it still doesn’t exist for most people on most days. I learned of the Palin story from NPR’s All Things Considered, and I study internet politics. In short, concerns about this rumor’s internet life were more theatrical than genuine.

One important difference that rarely gets described in adequate detail is the degree to which the internet allows collaborative, distributed production of knowledge and opinion. Many sources offline and on (including Drudge) explicitly credited DailyKos with the conspiracy theories expressed by unauthorized Kos diarists; this is either a convenient smear (again, Drudge) or a sign of real ignorance. A Kos diarist has almost as much free rein as a Blogger user; we don’t blame Google for the junk they host, but once a blogger hosts a blogging service, people get confused or deliberately muddy the issue.

Both search engines and browsing habits reward sites for getting inlinks. This leads to swarming. If there’s a noteworthy story, the internet collectively decides it is noteworthy by saying, literally, “Go read this.” This can also have the occasional effect of amplifying the visibility of garbage. (Think “girls” and “cup”.) With enough inlinks or the right kind of inlink, the linked-to site gains an authority it did not previously have; if this isn’t the lucky break for somebody who actually produces quality material, that visibility will wane over time.

This all fits quite well with the shoot-the-messenger trick that the right does very well. Whenever one is facing news that can be cast in a bad light, it can sometimes work very well to go on the offensive and blame those who would make hay of such news. Karl Rove should give PhD’s in this strategy.

If nobody’s talking about it because the story hasn’t yet broken, or if you need a newsworthy hook to bring the matter up on your terms, there’s no reason you can’t create the ideal media enemy. Rove did so with Bush’s cocaine bust and, possibly, with the forged Bush military documents leaked to CBS.

Of course, I have no specific evidence to support what I am implying here about the Palin conspiracy theory, but it was awfully convenient that the best-known liberal blog that allows end users to create their own posts just happened to have an incredibly well-documented post on the issue.

I can’t even take credit for this idea; many comments on the original post noted the similarities to earlier Rove tricks (including a joke about typeface) before the offending post was removed. The user had just one post prior to the story breaking out, but the removed post had many more photos and links than one would expect from a total noob.

Before you start making me a tin foil hat (follow the link above; this really has become a pattern), note at least one more piece of pertinent data: Palin’s staff removed an official state website containing a number of family pictures, replacing the site with a raw HTML page that reads as follows:

Object not found!

The requested URL was not found on this server. The link on the referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. Please inform the author of that page about the error.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Error 404

gov.state.ak.us
Tue Sep 2 00:29:26 2008
Apache/2.0.55 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.1.2 mod_ssl/2.0.55 OpenSSL/0.9.8a

Screencap of Sarah Palin photos site

Frankly, this is all just a little too convenient. A total noob at a top liberal blog adds to an infinite pile of diary entries, important people in the other camp notice and get offended, and the entry gets lots of link love–including links from Drudge and the official site of the public official who’s been implicated.

The story just happens to give the public official the perfect opportunity to take a swipe at the other team without actually naming names, all while embarrassing a hated blogger. And when it comes out, it provides an awesome vehicle to dwarf the story-ness of the actual, embarrassing story, making the news story about the messenger rather than the political figure at the center of the message.

If this truly did fall into Palin’s lap, she and her team made Mt. Everest out of a molehill. But excuse me if I’m suspicious of the nameless Kos diarist’s sincerity.

Thankfully, those who are actually important members of the liberal blogosphere did not bite. This could’ve been much worse.

UPDATE: Here’s a better link explaining how the 2004 CBS fiasco went down.

Also, I was somewhat relieved to talk to Tina this morning and get her impression of how the major media outlets are representing this. For those whose media world doesn’t include FReepers or Kos diarists, apparently the story is about how sloppy McCain was to pick Palin without a thorough vetting.

The Times, for instance, has a front page article quoting political figures on and off the record who claim that the vetting was shallow to nonexistent. Here’s my favorite quote:

Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the State House, said the widespread surprise in Alaska when Ms. Palin was named to the ticket made her wonder how intensively the McCain campaign had vetted her.

“I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called,” Ms. Phillips said. “I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven’t found anybody who was asked anything.”

Alaska has a small population and a microscopic group of politically connected folks. If a Republican former House speaker will go on the record that she doesn’t know anybody who got asked, it’s because there was very little if any real vetting.

Incidentally, that’s the second most emailed article right now. Number 1 is a piece by Maureen Dowd mocking the Palin pick as something that would strain credulity in a movie, let alone real life.

Also, ABC notes that the bipartisan state Senate committee investigating the Monegan firing was scheduled to release a final report on October 31. The Democratic state senator in charge of the investigation, Hollis French, alleges that McCain’s team is trying to stall this process to move the release date past the election.

French also echoes Phillips’ take, saying that nobody on the committee was contacted by the McCain team during the vetting process. The Alaska Daily News has a veritable roll-call of everyone who should have been contacted but was not. Neighbors, the recently-fired Walt Monegan, and a bipartisan roll-call of legislators all attest that nobody asked them anything.

I’m not sure McCain will back down, but this pick has at least resurrected the ghost of Tom Eagleton.

I suppose that’s enough partisanship for now…

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, I can’t resist. Check out the TPM post, Palin: A Scandal We Can Believe In!, complete with a YouTube clip of the local CBS affiliate’s coverage of the scandal.

This whole thing is absolutely crazy.

Since I’m often more than happy to diss Microsoft products for being poorly designed, buggy, and otherwise painful to use, I thought it only fair to admit it: judging by NBC’s implementation, the Silverlight web plugin is pretty good.

Like everyone, this is now on my radar because of the Olympics. I finally tried it tonight because it doesn’t run on PPC Macs, and I only got my new MacBook (thanks, Hunter College!) on Tuesday. I’m still a big enough geek that the first major installs were all work related–Office, SPSS, and EndNote. EndNote X1 is MUCH better than 7 but still not great; if paying myself, I would buy Sente–and I still might–but Hunter has a site license for EndNote. But I digress…

Anyway, I’ve had a good day with MS products. The Olympics online look really good. The controls actually work (except during commercials). Neat way to experience the Olympics highlights. Not that it compares to TiVo, which we got just in time to save the (amazing) opening ceremonies. But for a web plugin, Silverlight is damned good.

NBC also invested quite substantially in a high-quality end user experience. The quality of the streaming video really is remarkable–still web video, but getting closer to TV, to say the least. For tonight, at least, I’ve enjoyed the ride toward Zittrain’s Future of the Internet.

To gain an appreciation of how good it looks, check out some of the archival footage from previous olympics. Even compared to 2004, the HD video for this year’s footage looks remarkably better. Even compared to this year’s commercials, it looks really good. The commercials look like they were re-encoded from an analog stream in comparison.

My one complaint is that NBC makes you enter a ZIP code and cable provider in order to honor their (least-exclusive-arrangement-ever) deals with most cable providers not to eat too much of their audience. If your provider/ZIP combination isn’t on their list, you have to Google around to figure out who is. But then, you can just lie, and they don’t care. (Not that I learned this because I live in a building that includes cable and broadband service provided by a niche company… I would never lie to a web interface.) Pretty silly if you ask me.

Speaking of technological satisfaction: Hunter’s IT department is amazing. Super efficient, friendly, and doing it all with what surely must be a small budget relative to the size of the student and faculty population they serve.

I’d just sat down to pound out a post describing Nas’ awesome appearance on the Colbert Report, but Crooks and Liars saved me the trouble. Let’s just say the hip hopper disses the media in general and Fox specifically.

Follow the link for full lyrics, which are on-point. It was the first time I’d heard it, and I was really impressed. Not only is it a great song, Nas’ performance was sharp. He flows so clearly that I could understand him perfectly. This despite the medium–taped “live” TV on a studio stage makes most bands sound terrible (SNL, anyone?)–and the fact that I had the volume turned way down.

P.S. I saw this in the first run last night and again in the rerun ending just now. As if to make the point even clearer for myself just now, I then flipped through the channels briefly, stopping on CNN Headline News long enough to see Glenn Beck and two guests taking shamelessly personal, juvenile shots at Obama. All the while decrying “the mainstream media.” (Uh, Glenn, you’re on CNN.)

As you may have noticed, we at ShoutingLoudly generally don’t discuss our personal lives in our posts, major developments excepted. Well, this is a major developments kind of summer for me, so here are some details.

1. I got a tenure-track job in the Hunter College Department of Film and Media Studies. This has meant getting ready to move to New York, teach courses in the fall, set up my new offices, etc. I’m excited to be moving in with two good friends of mine whom I’ve known for a couple years.

2. I’m also getting ready to move to Somerville, MA, right next to Cambridge. As I mentioned earlier, Tina got a 2 year postdoc at Harvard’s Grad School of Ed.

For a number of reasons, including the fact that the rent prices are much more reasonable there (still high, just not NYC), which means we can afford a 2 bedroom, most of our stuff is going to Mass. (As a not-quite-practicing Catholic, I’ve gotten a small giggle out of that abbreviation as I’ve been packing. “Bill, Mass., Philosophy Books.” I keep picturing my boxes of philosophy books and small electronics standing, kneeling, and saying the Our Father, while a priest with Mayor Quimby’s accent discusses the joys of salvation. Not what David Hume had in mind for his treatises, I’m sure.)

So between Tina and I, we’re getting ready to move into four new abodes–2 apartments, and 2 offices, with about 250 miles separating them. Sadly, this means we’ll generally only see each other on weekends, but happily, I have zero on-campus obligations on Fridays–and a lot of her research is on New York. So we’ll be able to extend the weekends in both directions.

3. My family came to visit for 11 days in June. They’d never been to NYC before, and they loved it. If I dare say so, Tina and I even turned out to be decent tour guides. (After 2 years living in Newark within a 10 minute walk to the train station–and almost all of it without a car–we’ve gone into the city almost every week, and I usually go more than once. I think I know more about New York City than I ever learned about Philly or Newark; it’s crazy what a difference comprehensive public transit makes.)

We loved having them visit. We did lots of the touristy things we’d never do on our own, like visiting the Statue of Liberty (nice, but roughly what you’d expect) and Ellis Island (waaay better than we expected). While they were here, my mom bought me a Nintendo Wii on a whim. I LOVE it. A little too much, actually. (I’ve already made “Pro” on golf and bowled a 233.) It had to be one of the first things I packed so that I would actually get other packing done.

4. I’m still writing my dissertation. It’s going reasonably well, actually, and I still expect to defend this summer, committee’s schedules pending. All the same, I reeeeally wish I was done and could focus on moving and getting ready for the fall. I’m anxious about stopping, moving all my books and a desk to NYC, and finishing there. Writing in a sparsely populated apartment is no big deal, but I need to get the packing and moving done properly. If something goes in the wrong pile, it’ll wind up either in Boston or some Hunter Film and Media Studies storage room.

But really, I can’t complain–okay, I can and did, but it’s wallowing in my own success. Many quality ABDs and recent PhDs are scraping together adjunct work as we speak. My job isn’t even contingent on finishing by the fall. I still expect to defend this summer, but Penn’s summer graduation deadline requires one to hand in a defended, proofread, properly formatted dissertation by August 8, which I will almost certainly not do.

In any case, that’s my life right now. Thanks for caring enough to read. If you know me (even if you just met me once at a conference 3 years ago) and want to say hi because you’ll be in Boston or New York, you can write using Bill D Herman at gee male dawt kom.

One of my enduring research interests is in the development of blogosphere into an organizing space for communities-of-interest. Blogging is generally treated as citizen journalism, with an assumption that the blog serves as a sort of personal megaphone, echoing out into cyberspace to greater or lesser (usually much lesser) effect. That’s an apt analogy for personal and small group blogs like this one, but the analogy falls apart for community blogs with diary structures, recommendation systems, etc. A site like Dailykos or Mydd has more in common with the Sierra Club than with the Washington Post or a talk radio show. Markos Moulitsas is the vocal leader of Dailykos, but the value of that site comes from the active participation of its tens of thousands of diarists and commenters. There is a difference-in-kind between the “kossack” community and a prominent individual blog like those maintained by Glenn Greenwald and Matthew Yglesias.

Okay, with that throat-clearing out of the way (I’ve got a journal article in the pipeline for those interested more generally in the topic. Shoot me an e-mail and I’ll send you a draft copy), on to the topic of this post: if community blogs function as interest groups, how effective are they? One of the easy metrics in the past has been to follow the money. In the 2005-06 campaign cycle, MyDD, SwingStateProject, and Dailykos supported a joint slate of candidates through ActBlue.com. All told, their “netroots candidates” fundraising page bundled $1.5 million for a total of 17 Congressional candidates. To put those numbers in perspective, 7 of the 17 candidates also received funding from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Five of the seven got more money from the blogosphere than they did from the DCCC (see below). Let me say that again: the bloggers provided more money than the Party.

2006 Candidate Name BlueMajority Funding DCCC Funding
Paul Hodes (NH-02) $53,900 $28,785
Larry Kissell (NC-08) $62,250 $46,260
Eric Massa (NY-29) $58,950 $12,500
Patrick Murphy (PA-08) $63,882 $64,152
Darcy Burner (WA-08) $79,906 $149,680
Linda Stender (NJ-07) $48,578 $30,478
Joe Sestak Jr (PA-07) $133,573 $72,775

BlueMajority recently broke up – each of the sites wanted to endorse different slates of candidates. It occurred to me that this creates a sort of natural experiment in comparing community blogs. These are very similar blogs with very similar reader bases. In the past, they’ve pooled funds and we haven’t known what percentage came from where. Yesterday marked the close of Q1 campaign fundraising, so OpenLeft (which broke off from MyDD last summer), Dailykos and MyDD were each conducting their own last-minute donor drives. Each of these organizations is among the top 25 progressive blogs (as of November ’07, Dailykos was #1, MyDD was #9, and OpenLeft was #23, check out my article in IPDI’s PoliTech review for methodology). Each gets substantial traffic, hyperlinks, and comments. Dailykos is the mothership, though, the power-law winner, and their participatory activity puts the rest of the blogosphere to shame. So, point is, what sort of relationship is there between various metrics of blog authority and fundraising numbers? Well let’s see…

We’re currently in a lull for political blogs, the eye of the storm between the crazy-long primary season and the general election. Site visits today thus look a lot like they did pre-primary. According to Sitemeter, Dailykos is averaging 746,482 unique visits/day, MyDD is averaging 36,761, and OpenLeft is averaging 15,896. So Dailykos gets about 20.3 times more traffic than MyDD and MyDD gets about 2.3 times more traffic than OpenLeft. Taking a look at hyperlinks, Dailykos has a Technorati authority score of 10,315 (ranked #12 overall), MyDD’s score is 2,197 (#601 overall), and OpenLeft’s score is 1,821 (#948 overall). Usually I like to track comments/week as a third metric of community strength, but I haven’t automated that function yet and it would take 2 or 3 workdays to count up all the comments on those three sites by hand. Anyway, point is that the three are closer by this metric, with dailykos holding a 5-to-1 advantage and MyDD only about 15% more densely-linked than OpenLeft.

Now, let’s take a look at the three ActBlue pages.

Dailykos originally set a goal of 1,000 contributions. They blew past that mark a few times, eventually bringing in 1,734 individual contributions totaling 170,488. That’s an average donation of $98.32.

MyDD originally set a goal of 60 contributions. They edged past that, eventually collecting $3,300 from 62 individuals. That’s an average donation of $52.23.

OpenLeft originally set a goal of of 50 contributions. They did better than expected, with 63 individual donors giving a total of $5,335. That’s an average donation of $84.68.

Now this isn’t a lot of data, certainly not enough to draw any conclusions. But it is enough exploratory data to start raising hypotheses. So here are a few brief thoughts on what these numbers suggest…

-First off, the ratio of dailykos’s contributor totals to MyDD’s and OpenLeft’s totals was about 27-to-1. That’s bigger than the 20-to-1 sitemeter margin (and some argue that Dailykos’s sitemeter stat is almost doubled thanks to a bug in the sitemeter software). Dollar-for-dollar is even more extreme. Comparing the total dollars generated by the Dailykos community to those of the MyDD community, the Kossacks ponied up 51.7 times more dough than Jerome’s crowd (and just under 32 times more than the OpenLefters). My hunch is that the reason for this comes back to a lesson from the power law infrastructure: “It’s Good To Be the King.” Most readers of MyDD and OpenLeft probably also visit Dailykos. When choosing where to donate money, they may lean towards the biggest site. This would be particularly true if they self-identify as part of the “netroots,” because boosting the largest netroots site makes the blogosphere look more effective. If blogosphere-generated money was all broken up into groups of 50 or 60, it would be easier to say that no blog community is all that important. Readers of all three sites are thus nudged toward donations at the biggest site. (full disclosure: I donated my ten bucks through dailykos, even though I prefer OpenLeft as a source of news and discussion. This hypothesis may just be me trying to rationalize my own actions)

-Second, despite lagging in visits/day and hyperlink authority, OpenLeft is now raising more money for candidates than MyDD. This is a bit of a surprise. Granted, the numbers are small enough that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions too soon, but it suggests that we might want to toy with a research design that includes deeper content analysis of the subject matter on the blogs themselves. MyDD, for instance, has spent months as a hotbed of Clinton supporters, while OpenLeft has provided more dispassionate analysis through its “Race to the Nomination” series and its analysis of competitive Senate seats. Anecdotally, it seems like they’ve been picking up defectors from the OpenLeft community who got tired of the bickering over Clinton and Obama and wanted heightened discourse. The higher level of contributions could indicate that OpenLeft is attracting more serious political adherents (or it could just be noise, or luck).

-Third, lets put the raw numbers themselves in perspective. The Dailykos community has just as an identifiable community put 170K behind their favored candidates, and that’s just through June. That’s far more than the Sierra Club or AFL-CIO can directly contribute to a set of candidates, thanks to the difference between bundling money and PAC donations. It’s already more than most organizations will put into congressional races this cycle. Not to demean the contributions of MyDD or OpenLeft, that’s still serious money they’re raising, but it’s on a manageable scale. $5,000 isn’t enough to elect someone to Congress, particularly since it’s divided between 7 candidates. $170,000 is party-sized contributions, though. It sets Dailykos apart from the rest of the blogosphere, and head-and-shoulders above offline political associations.

That’s all these numbers are saying to me. Like I said, they’re very early numbers, hypothesis-generators more than theory-testers. Anybody have any thoughts on what they mean?

Senator John McCain faces two major political problems surrounding the issue of retroactive immunity for telecommunications firms that complied with the Bush administration’s warrantless (and thus, illegal) wiretapping program. Both point to larger weaknesses in the McCain campaign.

First, McCain has been consistently inconsistent on whether he thinks companies should be let off the hook retroactively. Declan McCullagh has a great post summarizing McCain’s shifting positions on telecom immunity (just the latest of McCain’s flip-flops).

In 2005, McCain wanted the lawsuits to go forward. Now, he’s parroting the Bush administration party line: unconditional immunity.

In a second, related problem for McCain, the EFF has broken the story that the McCain campaign staff includes several prominent telecom lobbyists.

These reveal deeper weaknesses in the campaign. First is McCain’s need to corral the far right wing of his party. At the start of the campaign, the neocons in particular were worried by the senator’s perceived moderate stances on national security issues, including torture.

The telecom immunity switch (much like his switch on torture) shows how McCain now wants to have it both ways. He has ditched a formerly strong principled stand because he dares not cross Bush and create an impression of non-zealotry on national security.

Including lobbyists in his campaign staff–despite having sponsored legislation that would ban exactly that practice–shows him flip-flopping on campaign ethics for another reason: without ignoring campaign laws and legislative proposals, even those bearing his name, McCain cannot compete with Obama’s massive resources.

Thanks to amazing grassroots support from small donors, Obama has raised approximately $593 bazillion dollars to McCain’s $85.07. The senior senator from Arizona thus needs all the free help he can get. (I wonder if he’d take me on as his debate coach.)

McCain has even larger problems on the breaking-the-rules-he-wrote front. With only 2 commissioners serving, the Federal Elections Commission lacks a quorum and is thus technically unable to release him from the public campaign financing system to which he earlier agreed.

With his nomination all but sewn up in February, McCain’s new fundraising power led him to conclude that he could unilaterally change his mind, opting out of the public financing system without FEC approval. Republican FEC Chairman David M. Mason sent McCain a stern letter disabusing him of this notion, a fact that has been underplayed in much of the media reporting on the issue.

Thanks to Senate gridlock, the FEC still has just two commissioners, and McCain is still bound by the $54m spending cap to which he agreed. Nonetheless, FEC data state that he has already spent $66.5m and will almost certainly spend tens of millions more before the Republican convention.

Thus, having telecom lobbyists run his campaign is really part and parcel with McCain’s broader campaign ethics problem. He is violating the campaign laws and proposals that were to be his strongest marker of integrity.

Likewise, his change of heart on telecom immunity is part-and-parcel with his overall rightward dive away from the constitutional rule of law.

P.S. This is probably the most partisan piece in ShoutingLoudly history, but I think it’s still 100% within our blog’s tradition of putting constitutional principles before national-security-flavored scare tactics.

[Modified from earlier version, in which I'd described a "$50m fundraising cap". The limit is $54, and this Washington Post article correctly describes it as a spending limit.]

In a study of copyright holders’ automated tools for generating DMCA takedown notices, University of Washington researchers successfully demonstrate that these automated methods are hardly sound evidence of actual infringement.

For the study, “Tracking the Trackers,” the researchers framed several innocent IP addresses, making it look like they were using BitTorrent to trade copyrighted content.

A more sophisticated investigation on the part of the copyright cops (read: trying to download the files) would have found that there was no infringement on these IP addresses. Yet these spoofs yielded actual takedown notices–threatening letters from industry lawyers to the university-as-ISP.

Several of the takedown notices identified IP addresses used by university printers.

We still know little about actual data collection methods, but the study is a real wake-up call. In the words of Ed Felten (my source), it shows that “takedowns [are] based on inconclusive evidence.” The study’s authors conclude that deliberate, malicious spoofing is not necessary to generate false positives; real people may be hit by this scattershot method of generating accusations.

This is particularly problematic considering the severe effects that sometimes result from just one takedown notice. End users may lose computing privileges and face other disciplinary problems, especially at colleges.

PS The study’s lead author, Michael Piatek, is also involved in some other really interesting projects.

I have a new article up on video game ratings and sales regulation at the International Journal of Communication, titled “Seeking Truth in Video Game Ratings: Content Considerations for Media Regulation.” This follows up and expands upon some of what I’ve been writing about here on Shouting Loudly (see posts here, here, and here).

For some additional notes on the background and thinking behind this article, feel free to hop on over to my solo blog, Geek Studies, where I hope to field comments and criticisms.