One of the most interesting aspects of this "new campaign" built and run on new technologies - including social networking - is how they would handle the inevitable people-powered backlash. It came this week in the form of a group organized in the Obama campaign's mybarackobama.com which is a social networking site built within the campaign's overall website. His supporters can sign on to form groups, organize events, raise funds and gives the campaign a flexibility and people-powered base that has never been seen before in politics. Truly a new monster: campaign 2.0.
In response to Obama's announcement about his imminent support of the new FISA bill a group formed on mybarackobama.com called "Senator Obama - Please Vote No on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right" - and it quickly became the biggest on the site. Just this afternoon Barack Obama responded to his supporters (which he would have had to do eventually) with this statement. This is a glimpse of how the web has given a rebirth to democracy. Fascinating.
Oh, and those Fourth Amendment rights... you wont really have those for much longer because the FISA legislation will pass (after the Independence Day recess).
As a side note, check out this decision that a federal judge has just handed down. Apparently YouTube is going to be giving Viacom a list of all of the users who watched videos on their site, and... uh... which videos they watched. (YouTube and Viacom, remember, are in a legal battle right now over the whole Daily Show/Colbert Report, copyrighted materials appearing on YouTube thing).
Enjoy your 4th of July with everybody watching what you do... just don't do anything illegal (or that might be illegal) because they're watching.
Good day.
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