Berkman Buzz: August 30, 2013

Computer network hackers calling themselves the Syrian Electronic Army earlier this week disrupted The New York Times’ website for nearly a day and electronic publishing on the Twitter social network for several hours. Also targeted were the Huffington Post and other media outlets.

If there's any confirmation that the U.S. government has commandeered the Internet for worldwide surveillance, it is what happened with Lavabit earlier this month.

Lavabit is -- well, was -- an e-mail service that offered more privacy than the typical large-Internet-corporation services that most of us use. It was a small company, owned and operated by Ladar Levison, and it was popular among the tech-savvy. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden among its half-million users.

MT @perryhewitt Harvard students interested in digital? Join @mpiskorski, @stat110 @zmh in @berkmancenter pilot http://buff.ly/14ERIRP
—Berkman Center (@berkmancenter)

As the 2016 presidential election comes slowly into focus, my most fervent wish is for a prominent candidate to give the following speech, or one like it:

Thank you for taking a few minutes out of your busy schedules to listen to me. I want you to do more than listen, though; I want you to hear me because nothing I talk about in this campaign is more important than what I'm going to discuss today.

The topic is liberty.

The @DPLA is now hiring for an intern / research assistant: http://dp.la/info/2013/08/29/internship-research-assistant/
—John Palfrey (@jpalfrey)

Safecast is a remarkable project born out of a desire to understand the health and safety implications of the release of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the wake of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Unsatisfied with limited and questionable information about radiation released by the Japanese government, Joi Ito, Peter, Sean and others worked to design, build and deploy GPS-enabled geiger counters which could be used by concerned citizens throughout Japan to monitor alpha, beta and gamma radiation and understand what parts of Japan have been most effected by the Fukushima disaster.

As Liberia marks the 10th anniversary of the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the 14-year civil war, nearly 25,000 school-leavers failed this year's admission test to the University of Liberia. It is the first time that not a single candidate passed the admission test.