The White House doesn't support the amended version of CISPA, the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act that would let companies and the feds monitor and share your online communication without a warrant. But while President Obama remains opposed to the bill's latest iteration, he's apparently hedging on whether he'd veto it.

The bill, aimed at data sharing between the public and private sectors, is a security nightmare for its vagueness and privacy oversight. Last year, we heard the same pop shots from Obama, except that back then he promised to veto the law. This year he isn't making any promises, although White House rhetoric suggests that the polarizing bill still comes up short in the area of privacy concerns. 

White House's National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in a statement:

We continue to believe that information sharing improvements are essential to effective legislation, but they must include privacy and civil liberties protections, reinforce the roles of civilian and intelligence agencies, and include targeted liability protections.... We believe the adopted committee amendments reflect a good-faith effort to incorporate some of the Administration's important substantive concerns, but we do not believe these changes have addressed some outstanding fundamental priorities.

These comments came a day after the House Intelligence Committee passed the bill on an 18-2 vote on Wednesday. New amendments to the bill require government agencies to strip away any private information they receive from companies participating in information sharing, prohibit companies from retaliating against alleged hackers or cyberattackers and backed away from a clause that would have allowed the use of threat information sharing arrangements for vague "national security" reasons. These sound like digital freedom wins, but most other privacy protections didn't make the cut. 

It's unclear which way Obama will tilt, but if this year's slew of major government targeted cyber attacks and the President's cyber mandate mean anything, it looks like he may lean (and be forced politically) towards more regulation, even if it's flawed.

Next week, the new version of the bill is expected to head to the House floor for a vote. If you want to help light a fire under the president and legislators, sign this petition from the privacy advocacy group Fight For The Future and check out this video from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian to see why you should also hold tech companies accountable for their support of this poorly written law. 

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President Obama's technical team wants to open source the technology that is credited with helping him win the 2012 election. The Democratic Party, however, has other plans, apparently intending to keep Project Narwhal and the rest of the software secret so as to give it an advantage over cash-rich but tech-poor Republicans. In so doing, the Democratic Party demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of open source and, indeed, how organizations benefit from technology.

Open sourcing Obama's campaign systems is actually in the Democratic Party's self-interest.

Open Is Good For Everybody

Some Democratic politicians like to think technology won them the election. Unfortunately, it's not true. Obama won because he ran a better campaign against a Republican candidate who looked OK on paper but was somewhat wooden in person.

Yes, part of Obama's "better campaign" was a crack team of data scientists who built what appears to be excellent system - dubbed "Narwhal" - "that acted as an interface to a single shared data store for all of the campaign's applications, making it possible to quickly develop new applications and to integrate existing ones into the campaign's system." This enabled the Obama team to divine and respond to voter preferences, among other things.

According to two of the Democratic National Committee's technical team, who want to see the software open sourced, the current plan is to "mothball" the software to conserve resources and protect the Democrats Big Data advantage. This, they argue, would be a mistake:

Right now, only presidential campaigns have the resources to build systems of this sophistication. The data and technology infrastructure from the Obama campaign cost millions of dollars to build, and even the most well-funded senate campaigns couldn't afford anything close to that.

But with some additional work, the data and tech infrastructure from the Obama campaign could be adapted to offer the same functionality to other progressive candidates and groups, giving them the opportunity to use these systems with their own supporters and volunteers. For smaller campaigns that would have no chance of creating these systems on their own, this could be a game-changing step forward.

The problem for the Democratic Party, however, is that even (gasp!) non-progressives could benefit from the technology if it were open sourced, which could lead to (double gasp!) Republicans winning. As The Verge reports, the Democratic Party has blocked efforts to open source the code, believing the software gives it and its candidates an advantage, and the Obama campaign is therefore keeping tight control of all campaign assets, including the software.

History Repeats Itself

For those of you who were around to witness Microsoft and other technology incumbents respond to open source's rise, this will all seem very familiar.

Like these Democratic politicians and bureaucrats, the tech giants resisted open source, arguing that proprietary software was the only way to innovate, and gave them an advantage against competitors. They, too, thought that software was more valuable as individuallyowned property, rather than as a collective effort that brought multiple values and talents to its development. 

They, too, completely missed the genesis of the very Big Data movement, firmly grounded in open-source technology that was developed through the collective efforts of Yahoo!, Google, Facebook and other new-school tech giants. Such companies understand that real competitive advantage derives from savvy business execution on services built from open-source software.

It's not a matter of hoarding ones and zeroes.

If the Democratic Party holds Narwhal and its other software in cold storage, as TechDirt's Mike Masnick argues, it's effectively rendering it useless, as the software will no longer be state of the art when the next election rolls around in four years time. In addition, it's foolish to think that the Obama campaign, however smart, employed the only intelligent engineers on the planet, and is the sole repository of wisdom about how to make the code better. It could benefit from collective efforts to improve it which, in turn, also help it recruit the best and brightest. The best developers want to work with open-source code, in an open source manner.

The days of winning by blocking access to one's software are over. This is true in technology, and it's true in political campaigns. For their own good the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee should open source Narwhal and other related technology. They truly have nothing to lose.

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