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The smartphone's rise in overseas markets is a "key development" that the State Department is watching over the next year, an adviser said Tuesday, signaling the agency's interest in using mobile technology to advance foreign policy goals.

The deployment of 3G and 4G mobile networks will enable more people to connect to the Internet at the same time and "up the stakes politically," said Ben Scott, Policy Advisor for Innovation at the Office of the Secretary of State. Mobile broadband penetration in the Middle East and Africa has lagged behind basic cellphone use. How international networks grow over the next 12 to 18 months will be monitored closely, said Scott. With that expansion, "there is going to be a whole lot more money on the table for pushing policies for attracting investment," he said.

Scott spoke at a panel discussion on the flow of Internet information hosted by Media Access Project, a Washington-based public interest law firm. His statement is the latest indication of State's push to leverage mobile technology to influence the political message in unsettled regions.

Using smartphones, activists can access Twitter and transmit photographs to the Internet. "Anyone with a smartphone can become a citizen reporter," he said.

State is also looking to use mobile channels to spread messages to stabilize regions. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, will fund programs that can "develop SMS messaging and other cell phone initiatives" for "countering extremist voices," it indicated in a grant document in November 2011.

It was reported last year that the State Department and Pentagon had spent at least $50 million on building an independent cellphone network inside Afghanistan. The network, created with towers on military bases, was set up to keep the Internet up even if official services were disabled.

State also has quietly supported the development of a phone app in which protesters can trigger a "panic button" that will delete all their contacts and transmit alerts to activists.

In just over the last three years, State would have spent about $70 million to promote free access to the Internet.

"The Internet is politically agnostic. It allows people to realize their desires whatever they may be," said Scott, "To me, that's the bedrock of Internet freedom -- and why it poses both vulnerabilities and opportunities for every government in the world, including ours."

The State Department announced Friday that a computer error had forced it to invalidate the results of this year's visa lottery.

Under the lottery program, up to 55,000 visas are awarded annually based on a random drawing from entries over a month-long period by people from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States. The results of this year's lottery were posted last week, but David Donahue, deputy assistant secretary of state for visa services, said in a video posted on the State Department's website that they were not valid because a computer glitch had resulted in a selection of names that was not random.

"Although we received large number of entries every day during the 30-day registration period, the computer programming error caused more than 90 percent of the selectees to come from the first two days of the registration period," Donahue said.

The State Department's official statement on the error said, "We have no evidence that this problem was caused by any intentional act. No unauthorized party accessed data related" to the visa program.

The department will conduct a new selection process based on all of the names originally submitted, and expects to post results on about July 15.

Here's Donahue's video message:

(Hat tip: Ed O'Keefe, Washington Post)

The White House is releasing the software code for a website it uses to track the performance of big computing projects, as a way to fix program glitches and share the tool with other government bodies, according to the federal chief information officer.

The so-called IT Dashboard monitors the budget, schedule and functionality of systems under development that cost the federal government about $80 billion annually. But critics and federal auditors say ratings on the site do not always accurately represent the current status of projects.

Still, federal CIO Vivek Kundra says the dashboard has helped reduce IT costs by more than $3 billion and he wants "to tap into the collective talents and ingenuity of the American people, to enhance functionality, improve the code and address existing challenges," according to a post on the White House blog. "Software developers will be able to collaborate, identify errors, develop enhancements and recommend improvements to the dashboard, and find new uses for it that we have not even imagined."

CIOs throughout the nation and the world, such as Maarten Hillenaar of the Netherlands, Kyle Schafer in West Virginia and Jason DeHaan in the City of Chicago, are interested in deploying the accountability software in their respective governments, he writes.

The code underpinning the dashboard is freely available, through a format referred to as open source.

In addition, the Obama administration is publishing instructions on how to conduct "TechStat" sessions, which are in-person meetings Kundra typically holds with agency CIOs to decide what to do with systems at risk of failing.

He writes, "The TechStat toolkit provides a comprehensive guide for organizations to establish their own TechStats to improve line-of-sight between project teams and senior executives, increase the precision of ongoing measurement of IT program health, and boost the quality and timing of interventions to keep projects on track."

At George Washington University Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a major policy speech to announce support for Internet freedom across the world. The diplomatic agency will provide $25 million to help promote online activism worldwide, she said. Clinton cited freedoms and cyberfreedoms, such as "expression, assembly and association" in the speech.

"The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere," Clinton said, "And we have called on other nations to do the same."

Citing American "commitment to protecting civil liberties and human rights," Clinton praised the Internet as a foundation for free expression, calling it the world's "town square, classroom, marketplace, coffee house and nightclub." In addition to the funding, Clinton said the State Department will continue daily work monitoring Internet freedom worldwide, and will launch Twitter feeds in Chinese, Russian and Hindi. The department started an Arabic twitter feed earlier this month and already has Spanish, French and Farsi feeds.

Clinton's remarks come as Internet- and social media-based protests and revolutions are generating global attention. The recent protests in Egypt, as well as the 2009 Iranian elections, have been cited as key points in the evolution of the Internet and social media. Clinton noted that in Egypt, the attempt by the former government of outsted dictator Hosni Mubarak to shut down the country's international Internet connections was ultimately unsuccessful in silencing the protesters.

The Transportation Security Administration came under fire from Internet users on Nov. 17 for being too slow to moderate and post readers' comments onto its blog, a sign the site is being read closely.

An impatient reader, noticing that comments weren't coming through, posted to Reddit on Tuesday, "The TSA is censoring all comments on their blog. Do you think we hurt their feelings?"

Forbes' Andy Greenberg rode on readers' anger on Wednesday morning:

The fact that the TSA blog has seemingly blocked all comments on its best venue for defusing immense public anger over these new security measures seems especially disingenuous given that it's long had a "Delete-O-Meter" on the bottom right of the blog site. As a transparency measure, that plug-in is meant to offer a count of comments deleted by the site's administrator. It hasn't moved in the last twelve hours-it seems Blogger Bob is simply not approving new comments, rather than flat-out deleting anything.

That nudge just might have prodded the site's Blogger Bob into action. A flood of comments -- mostly rabid rants -- went up late Wednesday afternoon.

The site has become a vibrant roasting platform for the agency, which has come under scrutiny for its security screening procedures and full-body scanners. The traffic and chatter climaxed with the surge of media interest around the TSA oversight hearing on Wednesday.

A post that went up as a forum for readers to "comment on things that are way off topic with the current post" amassed more than 605 responses in a day. Blogger Bob's patient explanation of why "opting-out of advanced imaging technology and the pat-down doesn't fly" prompted more than 350 comments in two days.

Not content with just the official blog, readers have found other creative ways to satisfy their anger. Rogue TSA Twitter accounts have mushroomed online, including "Agent Smith" of the handle @TSAgov, who tweeted today,

Russia is saying do svidaniya, or goodbye, to Microsoft as its operating system. The government has said it is spending 150 million rubles, about US$4.5 million, to develop a "national" operating system, based on the open source Linux OS, the Christian Science Monitor reported.

The goal from the switch, ordered by Russia's Ministry of Communications, is to rid state computers of Microsoft's Windows OS with the goals of saving money, improving security and reducing dependence on foreign software giants, the Monitor reported.

The switch, first ordered three years ago, largely went unnoticed by the public and media, and is supposed to be finished by the end of this year.

Yet Viktor Tsygankov, an analyst with the Russian branch of the International Data Corp., an IT consulting firm, told the newspaper that current existing Linux systems would have been just fine and "this is just unnecessary, in my personal opinion."

The backlash against Google Street View in Germany and the Czech Republic has spread to Italy, Canada and even the United States.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday it has ended its investigation of Google Street View cars' collection of Internet users' personal communications, The New York Times reported.

FTC was satisfied with the steps Google took to prevent a recurrence of a problem that had arisen from its cars, which take pictures of buildings along city streets, according to the Times story. The cars had collected passwords, e-mail messages, and Web addresses of users on unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. Google stopped driving its cars in May and restarted in the summer, without collecting the Wi-Fi information.

In Canada, Google wasn't so lucky. Bloomberg reported that Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said Google Street View violated the country's privacy laws by accessing the personal information. The matter will be closed if the company makes recommended changes by Feb. 1, Bloomberg reported.

And in Italy, the privacy backlash continued. Italy's privacy regulator told Google that it will have to make sure its street view cars are clearly marked and their itinerary publicized, Reuters said, quoting a local newspaper. Reuters reported that a Google spokeswoman would not confirm the details of the decision.

Also in Italy, Rome prosecutors are investigating if the mapping service violated privacy laws, Reuters reported.

Need to know what SAEDA stands for? Enter "McGruff the Crime Dog-style cartoon sergeant to talk to your soldiers like Third Graders about information security," Gawker writes. (By the way, SAEDA is "Subversion and Espionage Directed Against the Army," shame on you.)

This guy in camo will dish out quizzes, make you memorize acronyms, terrorize and knock you down with a tank if you think you can fudge your way through his session. Watch a video of the interactive training here, or, better still, if you are in the mood to be traumatized, take it yourself.

77,000 documents on the Afghan conflict were posted on Oct. 22 onto the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. The Pentagon wasn't pleased.

"We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world, including our enemies," Geoff Morrell, the Defense Department press secretary, said in a statement to the New York Times.

With camo cartoon commando breathing down your neck, there might be good reason to be afraid, be very afraid.

What the ongoing furor over the Wikileaks phenomenon has revealed, writes Peter Ludlow, author of Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, "is that the media and government agencies believe there is a single protagonist to be concerned with -- something of a James Bond villain, if you will."

The affinity to put all responsibility on a point person -- whether it is Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, or whistleblowers like Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning -- is a natural reaction within the federal government, whose own movement towards transparency has proved a top-down directive. But while the General Service Administration, under the orders of the White House, has had to deal with the task of powering the "Open Government Directive,"

Wikileaks is not the one-off creation of a solitary genius; it is the product of decades of collaborative work by people engaged in applying computer hacking to political causes, in particular, to the principle that information-hoarding is evil -- and, as Stewart Brand said in 1984, "Information wants to be free."

While agencies have had to be instructed, audited and for some, shamed into compliance, there is no central protagonist behind the Wikileaks, "an informal network of revolutionary individuals bound by a shared ethic and culture," argues Ludlow.

It's widely rumored that if Assange were to be detained or decimated -- a threat that is becoming more real after he was suspected of rape -- a password to all of the whistleblower website's encrypted files would be released to the public. On the other hand, if the administration changed hands, there's a very real chance that the open government movement might lose momentum.

The movement may have engaged advocates, developers, academics, companies, but it's not met its grandiose vision of empowering the public. USAspending.gov, after three redesigns, is "pretty impressive looking, but its data is almost completely useless," Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation's co-founder said at Gov 2.0 Summit. If open government continues to take place within a blackbox, Wikileaks will have to increasingly take on the mantle of disclosure and transparency.

State Department officials, following the United Nations' lead, now are accepting donations via text message to help support recovery and reconstruction in Pakistan where floods have displaced about 20 million people and spread deadly waterborne diseases.

Punching the word "FLOOD" to 27722 will automatically donate $10 to the U.S. government's new Pakistan relief fund.

Earlier in the month, the UN Refugee Agency partnered with mGive, a mobile donations provider, to allow Americans to make $10 mobile contributions by texting "SWAT" to 50555. State began promoting the effort on Aug. 2 and then created its own mobile-enabled charity late last week.

mGive processed more than $37 million for Haiti during three weeks earlier this year, after the State Department requested help in aiding the earthquake-devastated country.