Portside

• What Today's Facebook Supreme Court Case Means For Free Speech Online - Ashley Feinberg (Gizmodo)
• Gop Officials Deny Knowing About Coded Twitter Accounts - Chris Moody (Cnn)
• Cisco’s Disastrous Quarter Shows How Nsa Spying Could Freeze Us Companies Out Of A Trillion-Dollar Opportunity - Christopher Mims (Quartz)
• When The Forces Of Media Disruption Hit Home - David Carr (New York Times)
• Reports From Inside First Look Media Suggest That Maybe Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Manage Journalists - Chris Lehmann (In These Times)
• Protesters Using Tech to Run Rings Around Cops

What Today's Facebook Supreme Court Case Means For Free Speech Online

By Ashley Feinberg
December 1, 2014
Gizmodo

How Carefully Do You Think About The Things You Post On Facebook? Depending On The Outcome Of Today's Supreme Court Hearing, That Answer Could Soon Be Way More Carefully Than You Ever Have Before.
Today (Monday), The Nine Justices Will Be Hearing Elonis V. United States, The Very First Supreme Court Case To Directly Deal With Our Freedom Of Speech Rights On Social Media. In Other Words, Whatever The Court Ends Up Deciding Will Seriously Impact What We Can And Can't Say On The Internet—And Just How Far First Amendment Protection Can Stretch.

Gop Officials Deny Knowing About Coded Twitter Accounts

By Chris Moody
November 18, 2014
CNN

Top Officials At The Campaign Committee For House Republicans Said Tuesday They Weren't Aware Of Anonymous Twitter Accounts That Were Used Ahead Of The Midterms To Share Internal Polling Data With Outside Groups, Potentially Violating Campaign Finance Laws.
Cnn Reported Monday That Nrcc And At Least Two Outside Groups -- American Crossroads And American Action Network -- Masked Their Identities Through Anonymous Twitter Accounts To Share Information About House Races. Campaign Finance Experts Said That Pushed The Limits Of Election Laws That Bar Coordination Between Campaigns And Outside Groups, Such As Super Pacs And Nonprofits.

Cisco’s Disastrous Quarter Shows How NSA Spying Could Freeze Us Companies Out Of A Trillion-Dollar Opportunity

By Christopher Mims
November 14, 2014
Quartz

Cisco Announced Two Important Things In Today’s Earnings Report: The First Is That The Company Is Aggressively Moving Into The Internet Of Things—The Effort To Connect Just About Every Object On Earth To The Internet—By Rolling Out New Technologies. The Second Is That Cisco Has Seen A Huge Drop-Off In Demand For Its Hardware In Emerging Markets, Which The Company Blames On Fears About The Nsa Using American Hardware To Spy On The Rest Of The World.

When The Forces Of Media Disruption Hit Home

By David Carr
November 30, 2014
New York Times

I Work In An Industry That Has Been Profoundly Disrupted. The Shift Of News And Information To The Internet Meant That The Heavy Investment In Trucks And Presses That Once Served As A Barrier To Entry Disappeared. Insurgents Flooded In With New Approaches That Eliminated Much Of The Inefficiency And Created Whole New Streams Of Content. Again, Great For Consumers, Not So Great For The Traditional News Industry, Because Those Inefficiencies Were Also Profits By Another Name.
Right Now, The New York Times Is In The Middle Of A Round Of Buyouts In An Effort To Cut 100 Positions, To Stretch Existing Revenue Over A Smaller Cost Base. It’s Hard To Put A Price On What Those Hard-Won Skills Are Worth.  We Need To Adapt Quickly To New Protocols, But We Can’t Lose The Core, The Journalism That Makes The Times The Times.

Reports From Inside First Look Media Suggest That Maybe Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Manage Journalists

By Chris Lehmann
November 25, 2014
In These Times

First Look Media, The Fervidly Hyped Web Publishing Empire Funded By Silicon Valley Billionaire Pierre Omidyar, Is A Case Study In How Not To Launch A Progressive Media Enterprise.
For All The Feverish Speculation Surrounding First Look‘S Troubles, The Most Obvious Culprit Is Hiding In Plain Sight: The Reliance On Truckloads Of Money From Silicon Valley.
There’s A Reason That The Term “Burn Rate” Was Coined To Describe The Brief Half-Lives Of Tech Start-Ups—These Frenetically Overmanaged Operations Function More As Monuments To The Hubris Of The Innovation Economy Than As Proven Models Of Productivity. Compounding This, The First Look Fiasco Clearly Shows That A Tech Industry Conditioned For So Long To Scorn The Outmoded Folkways Of “Print Culture” And “Legacy Media” (As The Argot Of Silicon Valley Has It) Is Largely Clueless About Supervising The Basic Work Of Journalism.

(Yes, We Know)
Protesters Using Tech To Run Rings Around Cops

By Philip Messing, Jamie Schram And Bruce Golding
December 1, 2014
New York Post

Tech-Savvy Anarchists Ran Rings Around The Nypd During Last Week’s Ferguson-Related Protests — And Cops Are Now On Edge Over What The Renegades May Be Able To Pull Off After A Ruling In The Eric Garner Case.
The Nypd Is “Very Concerned, More Because Of Recent Events,” A Law Enforcement Source Said.
Last Week, Activists Armed With Untraceable “Burner Phones” Used Social Media And Online Bulletin Boards To Stay One Step Ahead Of City Cops And Create Mayhem After A Grand Jury Cleared Officer Darren Wilson In The Fatal Shooting Of Michael Brown In Ferguson, Missouri.
The Anarchists Clearly Won The Game Of “Whac-A-Mole’’ — Shutting Down Major Roads Including The Fdr Drive, Lincoln Tunnel And West Side Highway And Frustrating The Nypd, Sources Said.