The Library of Congress (LOC) and the National Library of Australia (NLA) have, in the past week, reviewed their categorization for WikiLeaks books that were on file. A bottom-up movement of WikiLeaks supporters and writers on Twitter going back and forth on how WikiLeaks books were being categorized led the LOC and NLA to mount this review. And, reviews by the LOC and NLA led to a change in categorization, meaning no longer will WikiLeaks books be categorized under the subject header “Extremist Websites.”

A first-ever presidential Twitter town hall with President Barack Obama kept questions from Twitter users focused to jobs and the economy, avoiding the many questions on the wars, foreign policy and civil liberties issues that have primarily been created because of legislation and policies deemed necessary to prosecute a “war on terrorism.”

Call me evil, but I think that holding innocent kids for months and years without charge (and getting off scot-free for it) is far more of a crime than any Twitter exchange.

So apparently if you are a girl in your early 20s, by no means should you be interested in politics, and certainly don’t engage politicians via social media. If you must do both those things, at least have the grace to be hideous by the standards of conservative attack chihuahuas and mainstream society. And if you should happen to be attractive, for God’s sake don’t take pictures of yourself looking that way! Fug it up a little. Braid your hair. Put on glasses. That always makes hot chicks in movies look ugly and studious.

Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns’ new book, Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution As It Unfolded, provides us all with an important first hand view of this movement as it blossomed in Egypt from January 25th through February 12. Using – with permission –running accounts from twitter, the authors are able to trace the movement in the streets in the words of key activists who were there, organizing, strategizing, being surprised by successes and beaten by Mubarak’s thugs.

In a 21-page opinion, US Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan of the Eastern District of Virginia District Court has just granted the United States Department of Justice subpoena demand for records in the WikiLeaks investigation.

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.

Washington’s response to the massacre and uprising in Libya is to add new twitter feeds. Activists in Libya have apparently taken over Benghazi and are not in the streets of Tripoli.

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.

In the end, if Obama truly wants to install Suleiman, he probably can. He’ll engineer one of those “make me do it” moments, where he just has to accept that the thing his administration has been working tirelessly to achieve is the best thing for Egypt. But the minute that happens, and the stories start leaking out about young demonstrators being “disappeared” by Suleiman’s thugs, he’ll have to explain to the social media generation how it was all worth it for “stability in the region.”

And this time, he won’t be able to blame it on the need for “60 votes.”