This Eduardo Saverin story is just the kind of link-bait in which Chuck Schumer specializes. He would make a good search engine optimization chief at a website. But there is a larger point, and not just bad Facebook puns, to be made in the controversy over Facebook co-founder Saverin’s renunciation of citizenship to avoid tax liability derived from the social network’s upcoming IPO.

Gil Scott Heron said it best; we cannot rely on so called journalists in the Mainstream Media to share our stories. Fortunately we don’t have to rely on the Media, because blogging and social media have given the individual the power to create his/her own media. Blogging allows for the instant publication of your story according to you, and with social media you can spread that information to millions of people instantaneously. Tonight’s panel can help you do that. Sign up here.

Yet another reason to be careful about what you put on Foursquare and Facebook.

Wingnuts have been circulating this photo, claiming it’s from Occupy Wall Street. One woman who claims to work/have worked at the New York Stock Exchange posted it on her Facebook page and where it was shared over 1000 times wrote this as the caption: This is the NO-CLASS Wall Street occupiers. They are rutting in [...]

Academy Award winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s play 8 covering the Proposition 8 hearings starring Morgan Freeman, Anthony Edwards, Cheyenne Jackson, Christine Lahti, Rob Reiner, Yeardley Smith and Marisa Tomei hits Broadway on September 19 in a one-time staged reading at the Eugene O’Neil Theater to benefit the American Foundation for Equal Rights. Tickets start at $500.

Anonymous’ #opBART dox dump of user names, emails and passwords presaged Larry Flynt’s Huffington Post blog today in which the free speech advocate wrote:

“Any information you put out into cyberspace could come back to bite you in the ass.”

We can’t sit by and wait for 2012 to roll around and hope that voters remember what happened during the budget negotiations in 2011. We need to act right now and get as many voters as possible onboard with our pledge to never vote for anyone who cuts social safety net benefits.

Can you please chip in $10 to our online ad campaign to tell voters not to support any politician who cuts social safety net benefits – including President Obama?

Austrailian journalist Ben Grubb, the Deputy Technolgy Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, was arrested for writing an article about a presentation on Facebook security vulnerabilities made at an IT conference in Queensland.

Micah Sifry’s been out in front of the new developments in transparency and media for quite a while. His work with the Personal Democracy Forum and his writing at techPresident continue to chronicle the ways technology leads to major changes in American democracy.

Now Micah has written a fascinating book, Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency. Particularly timely as we watch both Bradley Manning’s prosecution and the immense changes in North Africa and the Middle East, Sifry not only talks about Manning, Assange and the release of both the Collateral Murder video and the state department cables – but tells the bigger story of old closed hierarchical systems being overtaken by open, lateral relationships.

I do wonder whether there’s a correlation between those telecommunication companies that try to buy political favors and those that offer federal law enforcement favors in return.