Lessons from the World's Most Tech-Savvy Government

Estonia may not show up on Americans’ radar too often. It is a tiny country in northeastern Europe, just next to Finland. It has the territory of the Netherlands, but 13 times less people—its 1.3 million inhabitants is comparable to Hawaii’s population. As a friend from India recently quipped, “What is there to govern?”

What makes this tiny country interesting in terms of governance is not just that the people can elect their parliament online or get tax overpayments back within two days of filing their returns. It is also that this level of service for citizens is not the result of the government building a few websites. Instead, Estonians started by redesigning their entire information infrastructure from the ground up with openness, privacy, security, and ‘future-proofing’ in mind.

The first building block of e-government is telling citizens apart. This sounds blatantly obvious, but alternating between referring to a person by his social security number, taxpayer number, and other identifiers doesn’t cut it. Estonia uses a simple, unique ID methodology across all systems, from paper passports to bank records to government offices and hospitals. A citizen with the personal ID code 37501011234 is a male born in the 20th century (3) in year ’75 on January 1 as the 123rd baby of that day. The number ends with a computational checksum to easily detect typos.

For these identified citizens to transact with each other, Estonia passed the Digital Signatures Act in 2000. The state standardized a national Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which binds citizen identities to their cryptographic keys, and now doesn’t care if any Tiit and Toivo (to use common Estonian names) sign a contract in electronic form with certificates or plain ink on paper. A signature is a signature in the eyes of the law.

As a quirky side effect, this foundational law also forced all decentralized government systems to become digital “by market demand.” No part of the Estonian government can turn down a citizen’s digitally signed document and demand a paper copy instead. As citizens opt for convenience, bureaucrats see a higher inflow of digital forms and are self-motivated to invest in systems that will help them manage the process. Yet a social worker in a small village can still provide the same service with no big investment by handling the small number of digitally signed email attachments the office receives.

Read More at the entire article in the link below..
http://www.eesti.ca/lessons-from-the-worlds-most-tech-savvy-government/article41332

What Was Edward Snowden Doing in India?

 (Source:Shane Harris, Foreign Policy)

Nearly three years before he revealed himself as the source of leaked documents about NSA surveillance, Edward Snowden traveled to New Delhi, India. There, he spent six days taking courses in computer hacking and programming at a local professional school, according to school officials and people familiar with Snowden's trip.

Working with a private instructor, Snowden, who was then a contractor for the spy agency, took a course in "ethical hacking," where he learned advanced techniques for breaking into computer systems and exploiting flaws in software. The class's ostensible purpose is to train students to protect computers and their contents from thieves and spies. But in order to do that, they learn how to break into computers and steal information. Snowden also inquired about...

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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/01/12/what_was_edward_snowden_doing_in_india

World’s First Vertical Forest Gets Introduced in Italy

World’s First Vertical Forest Gets Introduced in Italy (via greenliving4live.com)

See on Scoop.it – Green Living The Bosco Verticale is a system that optimizes, recuperates, and produces energy. Covered in plant life, the building aids in balancing the microclimate and in filtering the dust particles contained in the urban environment…

 

Ariel Sharon Park, A Revolution In Waste Management & Urban Planning

Ariel Sharon Park, A Revolution In Waste Management & Urban Planning (via Planetsave)

What do you do if you have a lot of trash, limited landfill space, problematic floodplains, and a growing population? It’s a common problem across the world, as the trends of population growth, wasteful consumption and an increasingly plastic, throwaway…

 

Cicada 3301: The internet mystery that has the world baffled

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala, Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an Internet forum.

The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

“Hello,” it said. “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”

The message was signed: “3301.”

A self-confessed IT security “freak” and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson was interested immediately.

This was, he knew, an example of digital steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file, most often seen in conjunction with image files.

A recipient who can work out the code — for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel — can retrieve an entirely different image from the randomized background “noise.”

It’s a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing child pornography. In 2002 it was suggested that al-Qaida operatives had planned the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks via the auction site eBay, by encrypting messages inside digital photographs.


Read more in the original article at the link below..
The internet mystery that has the world baffled

Why Socialist Kshama Sawant's Campaign Matters To Seattle

Kshama Sawant didn’t have to identify as a socialist.

Seattle City Council races are nonpartisan, after all, and her views aren’t particularly revolutionary, as far as Seattle goes: She supports a $15 minimum wage (as do both mayoral candidates), unions for low-wage workers and rent control.

But branding herself as a socialist – still a dirty word in many corners of American politics – may have helped her rake in 35 percent of the primary vote with little money. (She had raised about $110,000 as of Monday night.)

Councilmember Nick Licata, who has been on the council for 16 years, said Sawant’s message resonates because a section of voters are tired of risk-averse Democrats and Republicans. Sawant, he said, has managed to make socialist ideas appeal to voters.

“We don’t have a mature socialist political movement in the country, and probably the last time we did was literally 80 years ago,” Licata said. “To Sawant’s credit, she has been able to craft a message that is understandable, simple and eschews most of the rhetoric.”

Sawant ran against Richard Conlin, 64, a darling of the Democratic party with left-leaning views. Conlin appeared to be winning on Tuesday night with 54 percent of the vote when King County released its first results. Sawant received about 46 percent of the vote.

Sawant stayed on message throughout her campaign, using dry, academic language to discuss the issues she wants addressed. The roots of homelessness are within the roots of our capitalist society itself, she said at the October debate.

Later, on the social media site Reddit, she addressed rent control:

What rent control would do is provide housing security for tenants, who are at present continually forced to move due to rent increases demanded by price-gouging real estate companies. It would also address the serious income and race segregation in Seattle housing and enable low-income people, people of color, and immigrant communities to not be red-lined out of the city.

It appears that Sawant, 41, won support on the strength of her message alone. She is a Mumbai-educated economics professor who rarely strays from her platform and who avoids discussing her private life – although she has grudgingly admitted that she is separated from her husband. She doesn’t wear pantsuits or coiffe her hair, and she rarely points to her past experiences or to endorsements.

Sawant’s political campaign director, Philip Locker, an organizer for the Socialist Alternative party, said that by running for office, Sawant pushed neglected issues into the spotlight.

“We’ve gotten an enormous response – we’ve even forced both Mayor Mike McGinn and Sen. Ed Murray to discuss the $15 minimum wage,” Locker said of the mayoral candidates. “That’s powerful.”

When Sawant speaks, her supporters cheer. The Stranger has endorsed her enthusiastically, and The Nation magazine, based in Washington, D.C., wrote about her this week in equally glowing terms.

The Nation noted that Eugene V. Debs, the socialist candidate for president in 1912, received more than 10 percent of the vote in the Western states, including Washington.

Sawant’s campaign in Seattle speaks to a similar sense of disgruntlement with the two-party system, The Nation wrote, saying that a “bold rejection of austerity has significant popular appeal.”

But even a century ago, when Debs won more than one million votes nationwide, no socialist was this close to winning a city council position in Seattle, Scott Cline, the city’s archivist said.

City council elections have been nonpartisan since 1910, Cline said, but “I have never seen any records that indicate a city council member has self-identified as a socialist or belonged to a socialist party.”

Cline said that before 1910, a number of socialist candidates ran, but none seem to have made it out of the primary elections.

“It is certainly possible that after 1910 there might have been a serious socialist challenge,” Cline said in an email to KUOW. “However, no name from general elections stands out as a strong socialist candidate; certainly not on par with Kshama Sawant.”

Cline searched through the available voters’ pamphlets dating back to 1983 and found there has been just one other socialist candidate for Seattle City Council who did well – Yolanda Alaniz. Alaniz came in second among four candidates in 1991. She lost to Sue Donaldson, 131,872 to 27,991.

“Nevertheless, nearly 28,000 votes is quite amazing for a socialist candidate,” Cline said.
Licata said he believes that Sawant won’t be an anomaly and that more fringe candidates — on the left and the right — will run for office in coming years.

“My hope is that she doesn’t disappear after the election if she loses,” Licata said on Monday, before Tuesday night's results. “She represents the poor, the immigrants, the refugees – the folks who are not in our City Council offices lobbying us.”

On Tuesday night, Sawant told her supporters that she's not going anywhere. She hinted that she might run against Conlin again if she loses. And she said that she views the passing of the $15 minimum wage in SeaTac as evidence of the left rising up.

Isolde Raftery @ kuow.org
Original article: http://kuow.org/post/why-socialist-kshama-sawants-campaign-matters-win-or-lose

Meal Sharing: A new social-networking site that connects you with a home-cooked meal wherever you are

While home cooked meals may not have been easy to come, they are now. Meal Sharing is a new social-networking site founded by Chicagoan Jay Savsani that aims to hook travelers up with hosts for home-cooked meals.

Their mission is to allow travelers to experience further. Meal Sharing wants to “make it possible for people, who otherwise would probably never meet, to get together and have a good time over food…to make that experience safe and enriching for everyone involved.”

It’s relatively easy. Here’s how it works:
You log onto the site, select your current location, and request a meal prepared by a particular host on a particular date. After a nearby host family has accepted your request, the two parties can message back and forth to detail the particulars (possible dietary restrictions, allergies, etc), and just like that, the meal is set. “To build trust and safety for the site” users log back onto the site following the meal, and write a review of their experience.

Here is the link to their site: www.mealsharing.com

Venezuela Opens Deputy Ministry For The Supreme Social Happiness To Keep Track Of Social Programs

President Nicolás Maduro announced on Friday the creation of the Viceministerio para la Suprema Felicidad Social – a deputy ministry for the supreme social happiness. The institution will take care of complaints and applications to the services, and will monitor who is receiving what program and how it is being carried out.

The new institution will supervise the social programs the country has initiated since 2003, called Misiones. Such programs give free health care to the poorest citizens, help to the elderly and disabled, and access to education. When they launched, the Misiones gave Chávez’s presidency a much needed boost. Read the entire article here...
Venezuela Opens Deputy Ministry For The Supreme Social Happiness To Keep Track Of Social Programs