(Photo: Living Indefinitely)

The federal government spends money to fix the country's infrastructure, help senior citizens get affordable access to health care and beef up national security, but did you know that it also pays for stuff like workshops on Star Trek musings?

The Washington Times reports that Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn has brought to light some of the Pentagon's non-security focused spending, which--as a small-government Republican--he naturally wants cut. Buried among the list of things the Pentagon supposedly spent money on, including a new form of rolled-up beef jerky, is this little gem:

$100,000 for a 2011 workshop on interstellar space travel that included a session entitled "Did Jesus die for Klingons too?" The session probed how Christian theology would apply in the event of the discovery of aliens.

We're unsure how a workshop focusing on the hypothetical mixture of Star Trek and Christian doctrine cost $100,000, unless they actually hosted it in space, but perhaps that new rolled-up beef jerky is expensive to cater.

This isn't the first time Klingons and Jesus have been thrown into the same mix. There's actually a website called Klingons for Jesus, which satirically claims, "Jesus is the messiah the Klingons have been waiting for all along."

Sadly, it appears the $100,000 question was never actually answered.

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Saying it seeks to help politicians "become better listeners" and make techies effective citizens, TechCrunch today announced the launch of CrunchGov.

In an introductory post, CrunchGov creator Greg Ferenstein explained that the new site will include a political leaderboard grading politicians on how they vote on tech and a "legislative database of technology policy." That database will contain bills under congressional review and names of both the politicians who clearly understand the intersection of technology and policy and those who don't have a clue.

CrunchGov's tech-related report cards for politicos will rank legislators with "transparent criteria" that merge the political and the technical.

For example, members of congress who have excellent records of passing legislation in support of crowdfunding or opposing something like SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) may receive grades as high as a B or an A.

Texas representative Lamar Smith, the Republican behind SOPA, would naturally receive a failing grade.

TechCrunch recently renewed working relationships with founder Michael Arrington and writer MG Siegler. It looks like CrunchGov is the latest effort by the AOL-owned tech blog to expand the property's profile and drive it into a leading position.

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The august and proper BBC News has taken a look at a new and lurking scourge found in thickly settled neighborhoods throughout the world: passive-aggressive wifi names.

Many wifi users stick with something simple, like "Home" or the name of their router ("NETGEAR01"), but wifi networks in some neighborhoods reveal a world of what the BBC aptly terms "bite-sized self-expression."

The BBC reports that these expressions may be used to embarrass or complain about the neighbors:

"'We can hear you having sex' apparently appears with a degree of regularity across Britain and Ireland, according to OpenSignalMaps."

However, wifi names are also being used to express political affiliation.

OpenSignalMaps has a large database of wifi names and has also found that many wifi users choose names that act as digital bumper stickers broadcasting political opinions, particularly opinions about President Barack Obama. Some examples include: "BARAKobama," "DEFEND_AMERICA-FIGHT_OBAMA," "Al-Qaeda HQ. Obamas an Idiot."

OpenSignalMaps surveyed these sentiments and discovered that in the United States, 401 Obama-related wifi names revealed positive feelings about the president and 355 appeared to show a negative opinion.

Based on wifi-name selection abroad, the president is apparently very popular overseas, with 100 percent wifi popularity in countries like India and Brazil.

Obama's wifi popularity abroad won't be much help come November 6th, but at least no one has found a wifi signal near the White House that says something like "We can hear the Obamas having sex."

Political power? Purrfect. (Photo: Facebook)

Social media has played an increasingly important role in elections over the years--just ask the Obama campaign for confirmation on that. But there's one frisky feline who's using the platform to drum up support for a Halixfax mayoral campaign. Meet Tuxedo Stan the cat: He's running for mayor in Canada, because why the fuck not?

Mr. Stan began his campaign back in June when he founded the Tuxedo Party, hoping to raise awareness about improving "the welfare of felines 'because neglect isn't working.'" So far, he's amassed close to 1,000 Facebook fans and has established an entire political machine surrounding his platform. There's tons of campaign swag, including buttons, signs and tshirts. Mr. Stan even has an international outfit over in the Netherlands. And he did it all with the help of an active Facebook page.

In addition to addressing the stray cat problem in Halifax, Mr. Stan has also adopted a firm formal wear platform: "Tuxedos will be mandatory at city hall when I'm elected mayor," he wrote on his Facebook page. "We need to improve our image."

When reached for comment, Mr. Stan said, "Meow."

Canvassing means no AC. (Photo: flickr.com/labor2008

Now, what does this sound like to you?

One recent morning, 14 job candidates filed into his fourth-floor office in Alexandria, Virginia, where a wiffle ball net is stowed in the lobby and a pirate flag hangs in the conference room. How many might he hire? “Fourteen, if we like them all,” he said.

If you guessed "a venture-backed consumer Internet startup," you are incorrect. (Thanks for playing; better luck next time.)

That sentence was written by Bloomberg regarding Targeted Victory, which is not, as you might expect from that name, a maker of drones but rather a tech startup / political consulting firm, working to help elect Mitt Romney president.

And it looks like that company sure has stumbled onto a lucrative niche:

Federal candidates and super-PACs have spent more than $46 million so far this election cycle for the services of just three firms -- Targeted Victory and the two major Democratic tech operations, Blue State Digital and Bully Pulpit Interactive, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of Federal Election Commission reports conducted for Bloomberg News.

And what are the various political campaigns getting in exchange for all that cash? Glad you asked. Companies help with things like, oh, online advertising and digital databases and social media and such. You know, your basic product peddling:

“Every online technique used by Fortune 500 companies will be in the hands of politicians in the next four to eight years.”

We should probably be very concerned about the more Orwellian implications of this. But mostly we're wondering whether this means Mitt Romney's face is about to start following us around the Internet like that Lands' End dress we looked at last week.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. (Getty)

A famous poet once stated that April is the cruelest month, but he probably didn't even know that April is "National Child Abuse Prevention Month." It's kind of terrible that we as the human species need an entire month to remind each other not to hurt kids. But luckily, the Manhattan D.A. is coming to the rescue.

In order to fight against the proliferation of  violent and sexual crimes against children on the Internet, the Department of Justice has assembled a task force that will work to combat these crimes; today, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office announced that it will be joining the thousands of law enforcement officials on the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program.

According to the press release:

“We are proud to work with the NYPD and become members of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, whose resources will enhance this Office’s ability to fight for justice for innocent victims,” said District Attorney Vance... New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said: “The Internet is an incredible resource, but it also can serve as a conduit for crime, none more vile than those crimes that target children. That’s why this task force is so important.”

Godspeed, all-- you will probably need it if you have any intention of extending your crime search to the Deep Web.

Those little lights are the last shred of human dignity SOPA plans to extinguish. Metaphorically speaking.

You know that whole Stop Online Privacy Act that threatens to give our government control to basically turn off whatever part of the internet they want? It's really scary. And cable news networks don't really care about it enough to cover it. Or they're simply afraid to poke at their corporate overlords because of it. Or they're part of a vast conspiracy theory to help it pass.

Via Media Matters, as Michael Jackson once sang, they don't really care about us:

....Most major television news outlets -- MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have ignored the bill during their evening broadcasts. One network, CNN, devoted a single evening segment to it. (The data on lack of coverage is based on a search of the Lexis-Nexis database since October 1, 2011. The Nexis database does not include comprehensive daytime coverage, and also does not include Shep Smith's 7pm nightly Fox News program, so both are excluded from the study.)

It doesn't help matters that Hollywood is fighting for SOPA with lots of money, to a factor of nearly four times as much as Silicon Valley's putting into the fight. What does this have to do with news networks not covering SOPA, you ask? Well, many of these news networks are owned by media conglomerates who have an interest in SOPA passing. For example:

• CNN is owned by Time-Warner, as in, Warner Bros.
• MSNBC, CNBC, and NBC News are owned by NBC-Universal, as in, NBC, Universal Pictures, and Universal Television.
• Fox News and Fox Business News are owned by News Corp, which owns Fox, the television station and film studio.
• ABC News is owned by Disney, as in, the Disney that owns production studios, television stations, etc.

 
And so on. These guys also own a decent chunk of the music business, too, but you probably already guessed that by this point. So if you're the conspiratorial type, well, you could probably get pretty conspiratorial here. If you're especially crazy, you could surmise that news networks are in a position to give negative coverage to politicians who don't support SOPA, but that's a little too slippery-slope, especially when all you need as evidence of any kind of collusion—latent or otherwise—is the simple, basic fact that SOPA is a frightening threat on our citizenry from our government's unchecked powers, and news networks aren't covering it. If that doesn't freak you out, we can't help you here.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Our friendly neighbor to the south, Cuba, is pissed off at Twitter for letting a rumor of leader Fiedel Castro's demise—the same rumor that appears regularly and causes a huge ruckus in Miami among Cuban immigrants and exiles every couple of years—go unchecked.

Via CNN, Cuba's state-run media incorrectly identified the guy who started the rumor, and then, just kind of raged in a really silly way:

An expose published on the state-run Cuba Debate website claimed to track down the origin of the rumor that the leader of the Cuban revolution had died. It's investigation led to Fernandez's Twitter page, where he goes by the handle @naroh.

Of course, the guy wasn't the one who Tweeted it first. That didn't stop them from raging, anyway:

The hashtag #FidelCastro, used to identify the topic of a tweet, on that day became one of the most popular tags, known as a Trending Topic. According to Cuba Debate, the "frustration" of Cuba's enemies to assassinate Castro "has led some to try (to kill him) in the virtual world with the hope of accomplishing what more than half a century of criminal attempts have failed to do."

Maybe if Fidel Castro simply got on Twitter, this wouldn't be a problem. Hey, you either join the machine, or end up getting killed by it. Just ask Rupert Murdoch! He's hip to the game, now.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The great SOPA scrub: lobbying money!

SOPA, short for the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a bill making its way through Congress, fueled by Hollywood's lobbying dollars. Essentially, it would give the American government the opportunity to hit the kill switch on any domain accused of hosting violations of copyright, sight-unseen and without due process. That would be bad. The Internet knows this, Important People On The Internet know this, and they seem to be working very hard to make people aware of it.

Unfortunately, their efforts—at least as far as money is concerned—might not be enough to match the power of Hollywood's lobbying cash.

Check out just how lucrative it is to support SOPA if you're in Congress. Via Maplight.org, who did all the wonderful math on this matter:

Since the beginning of the 2010 election cycle, the 32 sponsors of the bill have received almost 4 times as much in campaign contributions from the movie, music, and TV entertainment industries ($1,983,596), which support the bill, as they have received from the software and Internet industries ($524,977), which believe the language goes too far.

Regardless of who you think has the money, it would appear only one of these two groups in opposition to one another know how to spend it.

And it's not the geniuses with all the great numbers-driven algorithms.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

DAVID KARP DOESN'T SEEM LIKELY FOR POLITICS. When the Tumblr founder and CEO explains what happened over the weekend, he speaks about it in his typically blazing conversational speed, a full paragraph at a time, with the intensity of someone who's been sequestered on a coding project for the last three days:

"Basically," he blasts off, "we had this gathering of the internet in our office, we had seventy people and a bunch of politicians on the phone"—and then pulls back to divest himself of credit—"though we didn’t organize the effort, it was the Demand Progress guys. We just put them up in our office, where we had forty-plus people around. We were in here all day on Saturday. We basically showed up to just say, 'hey, anything we can develop we’ll help develop, in direct communication with dozens of people,' and basically all of these founders and people in tech companies are standing by following all this,'" and by 'this,' Mr. Karp is referring to a piece of legislation going through Congress—"developing, working to figure out how they can seed it in their communities—propagate it—and get it out there. We literally just finished the copy, we had our team of engineers help build it."

And yesterday morning, these efforts went live, the center of which was a quirky, live collage of user-submitted photos from those with jobs in the tech/online platform entitled I Work For The Internet that provoked the call to Mr. Karp. That was at the beginning of the day.

Less than 24 hours into its existence, the site has already provoked a decent amount of curiosity, amusement, and—like anything else on the Internet—some criticism and meta-enabling, like a Gawker post lampooning the message, and a VICE post about how Gawker fell for their trolling prank on the site.

It also happens to be the product of some of the most deeply-ingrained footsoilders of Silicon Alley, who came together in all-weekend marathon thinktank and coding session for what might be one of the most bracing and cohesive American policy problems Silicon Alley has faced as an industry, and their first step towards fighting one together, too. The startups of New York City don't usually find themselves embroiled in politics, unless, of course, it's in a (bipartisan) manner with which the ingenious of their own platforms can be further brought to light. Yet, to say that they have some skin in the SOPA fight is a massive understatement. 

Tumblr's New York City offices—where the weekend-long, late-night session was held—is quite the fitting setting. After all, if Silicon Alley loses this fight, the entirety of Tumblr could be shut down for hosting anything from a beloved music blog like SexMusic to a beloved Ryan Gosling blog like Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, a bipartisan effort powered by the packed wallets of Hollywood lobbyists, is an effort to curb illegal distribution of their product by way of an Internet Kill Switch: If a website is accused of hosting pirated content, it can be shut down, sight-unseen, without due process. Orwellian and fantastically dreamed as it may sound, it's actually being debated in Congress for a vote over the next week.

The implications of this legislation being passed are what the thinktank-yielded website—or trifecta of sites (I Work For The Internet, Trust Nerds, and Fight For The Future)— aims to explain. By distilling the result of SOPA's passage into simple voting issues and a user-friendly way to act on them, those helping fight SOPA hope to give it the kind of viral, accessible resonance that might yield political action.

Mr. Karp takes another breath, but this time, and slightly slower, he speaks emphatically: "We really working to understand the process and the legislation right now. We were really just discussing what we could do to get behind this." With words like that, maybe his political future isn't so cloudy after all.

"TURNOUT WAS REALLY GOOD. You know, like, New York Tech Company people, for the most part." Six days into his new job, Tumblr's new Vice President, Andrew McLaughlin—a former White House staffer who was President Obama's deputy chief technology officer, which followed a four-year stint as Google's global policy wonk—is already talking politics. He's rattling off (albeit, with some struggle) the names of all of those who were in attendance over the weekend, when the aforementioned Silicon Alley heavy hitters came up with the concept, design, and execution of an attempt at activism-by-meme, as a stance against the highly-controversial sum-of-all-fears legislation that is SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, currently being pushed through Congress this week.

"Brad Burnham and Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures were there, um," he continues, "people from Etsy, Kickstarter, Reddit, Foursquare..people from some of the Betaworks companies, so like, Chartbeat, I think Beatworks itself, Social Flow. We didn't actually pass around an attendance sheet, and this was actually the first time I met them, so I'm sort of shitty on the names, but," he finishes, "it was a real slice of the startup crowd in New York City."

Awareness of the legislation has rocketed over the last few weeks, but even when Tumblr previously took action to put their foot in the ground on SOPA, the primary focus was the threat of censorship, a looming political threat most Americans don't fret over conspiratorially. After all, it is protected by the first—and not, say, the nineteenth—amendment. SOPA advocates needed something stronger, and the legislation more than gives them that fight.

"We didn’t want to repeat what we did last time," Tumblr editorial director Mark Coatney explains, recalling Tumblr's 'blackout' initiative, "but at the same time, everything that we’ve heard from the feedback from that is that the only thing congressional staffers respond to are the phone calls to their office. After that it was: 'How can we hit the other aspects of the bill?'"

Hence, the newest efforts. For example, on the jobs front, Mr. McLaughlin suggests that the United States—ever-proficient in creating platform companies like eBay, Amazon, Google, Dropbox, and say, Tumblr—could have job-creation threatened by an act that places liability for these platforms' content on the platforms instead of the users, as they traditionally have. "The rules up until now have been very straightforward. So long as you’re not the one who’s not the author, as long as you act quickly to take things down when they’re infringing copyright, let’s say, then you’re not liable for what users did."

The threat SOPA presents is that domains like Tumblr would be responsible for what its users do. "Let’s say Canada and the European Union maintain the principle of intermediary liability. We think there’s a real danger that increased compliance costs on U.S. businesses will make us less competitive, and people in other parts of the world will be more competitive. If you make it much more expensive to be an American internet company, then that’s going to be to the benefit of other countries."

Silicon Alley hits the political presses, snazzy logos and all.

This potential for this to go wrong in other ways, it should be noted, could hit Mr. McLaughlin's new home especially hard. "[SOPA] has real implications for, let’s say, Tumblr, where we’ve got 35 million blogs, every single one of them has a unique third-level URL under Tumblr.com. Under the bill as it’s written, the threat is that one bad apple means they could get cancellation of Tumblr.com the domain name, killing everyone’s blog. We don’t think that’s what people intend, we don’t think that’s what they want the result to be, but we look at the language of the bill…and the use of this very clumsy tool of domain cancellation, that’s what we see as a possibility."

But why shouldn't domains be responsible for their content? After all, Hollywood and what it produces is, over the last century, one of America's most consistent exports. Mr. McLaughlin volleys this back without thinking: "[Domains] aren't engaged in the infringement. They’re not doing it. They’re not the criminals. If two people plan a crime using the telephone system, you don’t indict the phone company for connecting the call. If you want these platforms to thrive, you can’t impose liability for every one of the literally billions of transactions that runs over their system every day," he takes a breath, and then drives again:

"The second point is this justice point, which is just simply: They’re not doing the infringement. When you put those two together, it just so happens, the traditional techniques of law enforcement are what we should be using. The number of kind of like commercial scale copyright infringement mills is—by Hollywood’s own estimate—somewhere in the low tens. To inflict an entirely new liability regime and to break secure DNS to go after a couple of dozens of sites is crazy!"

The other two sites—Trust Nerds, which advocates against the dismantling of DNS upgrades that would be waylaid by any stripe of Internet Kill Switch and attempt to circumvent it, and American Censorship, which advocates against the potential for SOPA to be abused by redaction-happy corporate or bureaucratic forces lacking the best intentions—make up the remainder of the political tech power push. "When it became clear that those were the three narratives to hit," Mr. Karp concludes, "we decided to go with 'Fight for the Future,' which was the original SOPA setup, and then decided to make that the hub for all the stuff we now use to host that call to action."

And on Monday, it was done...With exception to a few coding errors, of course, the likes of which received personal adjustment from Mr. Karp after reading about them on Hacker News boards. For a first foray into political activism by Silicon Alley at-large, it's undeniably coherent and impressive, regardless of what some may think of the message (it certainly stands in stark opposition to that other viral political movement, Occupy Wall Street, whose criticisms of 'But what does it stand for?' have all but been totally answered herein, and then some).

Yet, if strong national opposition to the face-value injustices of Wall Street banks experiences news-cycle setbacks in the simple dismantling of sit-in protests, are the lofty ambitions of fighting SOPA realistic? In other words: If you can barely get someone to call their representative for that, is all this effort be for naught?

"We’re not under any illusions. I’ve been around D.C. long enough," Mr. McLaughlin says, sounding like someone who has, in fact, been around D.C. long enough. "We’re not under any illusions that this isn’t some magical counter to decades of investment and relationships and political campaigns and lobbyists and so forth that pro-SOPA people have made. It’s not like this is, you know, a Mr. Smith Goes To Washington-moment where lots of calls come in and suddenly everyone drops what they’re doing and we magically win the debate. We’re not that grandiose as to think this is going to work like that." He concludes that this is the kind of fight those with dogs in it—and those who want to help—we need to get used to, and now is as good a time as any to start:

"For this battle and for future battles down the road, people who care about the Internet need to get in the habit of letting their representatives know they care about the Internet. The Internet isn’t just a force of nature that happens, it’s something that’s built. It’s built by humans and regulated by governments, and the people who care about it need to be sufficiently vocal."

"Maybe," he says, "some good will come out of it.”

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek