Media

This week a group from the Open Technology Institute (OTI) will join the thousands of media makers and journalists, activists, advocates, policymakers, and technologists convening in Denver at the National Conference on Media Reform.

More than 11 years after the attacks of 9/11 and nearly a decade since the rise of popular online jihadi Internet forums, there is strikingly little empirical research on the manner in which jihadi activists use the Web to propagate their cause. Whereas researchers and policy analysts have systematically collected and analyzed the primary source material produced by al-Qaeda and its allies, very little work has been done on the conduits through which that information is distributed—and even to what extent anyone is accessing that propaganda other than counterterrorism analysts.

Every so often in human history, something new comes along that warrants a celebration, and that deserves its own holiday. That’s why I propose we celebrate “Internet Freedom Day” later this month.

Robert Wright weighs in on whether the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School will spur a gun control policy change. Kayla Pope and Hank Greely, who we recorded after an October New America event, discuss the developing field of using brain science in the courtroom. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

Last March, responding to news of a killing, I found myself walking in the darkness at a crime scene in Quila, a small community outside Culiacán in Sinaloa, the state that is ground zero in Mexico’s drug war. I could hear helicopters overhead complimented by the sound of crickets on the ground as my feet made crunching noises on the gravel road. There was an orange glow from the flames of a bullet-riddled vehicle. There were no bodies immediately visible, until I ventured into the woods, following a police forensics team to encounter the body of a man killed by the Mexican military.

Louie Palu gives a photojournalist's perspective on the controversial NY Post cover photo and Lorelei Kelly explains how budget cuts in the 90s gave us the partisan Congress we have now. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

In September 2012, the trailer for the film The Innocence of Muslims shot to infamy after spending the summer as a mercifully obscure video in one of YouTube’s more putrid backwaters.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is little known, but it wields a tremendous amount of power: It controls all of the Web’s top-level domains (those letters after the “dot,” like .com and .org). Currently, ICANN is in the midst of creating hundreds (and possibly thousands) of new, generic top-level domains (gTLDs) that span a host of different ideas, from .web to .cars to .anything_else_you_can_imagine. These new gTLDs have the potential to dramatically affect the future of Internet browsing, and they’re already stirring up some serious discussion.

Never has a hurricane been more aptly, if tragically, named than Sandy, the superstorm that flooded New York City and battered much of the East Coast. At press time, the storm had killed at least forty-three people and caused an estimated $32 billion in damages to buildings and infrastructure—figures expected to increase in the coming days as emergency personnel pick through the wreckage—and left 8 million homes without electricity.

With the last of the three debates completed and the presidential election just around the corner, the New America Foundation has pulled together this video with people from our various policy teams to ask the candidates a few final questions about how they plan to govern. Check us out, tell us what you think, and if you seeeither candidate answering any of the questions, let us know--tweet to us at @NewHealthDialog and @NewAmerica!