O’Reilly writer Andy Oram makes the case that the assertion President-elect Barack Obama’s victory is in large part due to his campaign’s effective use of the internet is an overstatement, to say the least.  Oram counters that when all is said and done, the mainstream media is what had the most significant impact on the elections.

I feel I have to temper the hype over how the Internet has changed elections. There’s no doubt that the Internet provides enormous potential, and that people have been using it in burgeoning numbers over the past four years to search for information, share ideas with friends, and form online coalitions. But several key observations show that the tipping point hasn’t arrived.

He goes on to give three points that illustrate why he feels this is the case:

1. Fund-raising proves the primacy of the mainstream media
2. Viral videos also prove the primacy of the mainstream media
3. Elections themselves have no Internet component

Fleshing out his points he states:

No one denies that Obama’s victory was driven by his astonishing ability to raise money (final tally: $650 million from 3 million donors, according to a Bloomberg story this morning). There’s nothing wrong with Noah Gift’s tribute to the Internet, just published on the same site where I’m typing out this blog. But let’s be honest: much of Obama’s famed online campaign–the social networking, the viral messaging, the constant emailing–was directed toward raising that money.

And it’s TV and radio that create the need for most of that money. Lots of us have built grassroots campaigns for various causes over the Internet, and we know we can do it practically cost-free. Certainly, fielding a team on the field in a fifty-state strategy takes money. But it’s really those thirty-second ads (or in Obama’s case, thirty-minute ads) on the incredibly expensive TV and radio stations that eat up the bucks.

Point 2:

Much has also been made in recent elections of the role of YouTube–a shorthand for the success by networks of determined individuals in raising items buried by the mainstream media to a newsworthy level. It looks like–at least when an embarrassing event such as George Allen’s macaca moment happens to get entangled with a sensitive issue–grassroots action can really shift the discourse.

But once again, these shifts in discourse don’t really make a difference until the mainstream media pick them up.

In his third point Oram simply illustrates that the physical requirement of actually going to a polling in person to vote removes the internet completely from the equation.  And that “elections have not been fundamentally changed by the Internet.” These points are well taken and puts the hype into perspective.  However, with Obama’s win and Ron Paul’s ascendance as a movement unto himself, I am still rather convinced of the power of web 2.0 to influence the political process.

On the high-technology front, president-elect Obama has indicated he’d appoint a Chief Technology Officer. The role seems federal-government-focused: The tech “czar” would manage government technology policy with respect to matters like cybersecurity, privacy and Internet policies–basically securing governement networks and keeping government agencies on the cutting edge of communications technology.

The role as described seems limited to “bringing government into the 21st century.” But would the role remain circumscribed? “Czars,” like commissions of various sorts, are tempting for politicians, and can end up as barriers and stumbling blocks to non-political solutions to normal problems and challenges. A drug czar wages a hugely expensive war on drugs; An education czar ends up supporting funding of education programs from Washington, D.C.

Industries–and mere concepts like “technology”–do not need czars in Washington. Such enterprise needs to operate apart from this city. Indeed, even supposedly “deregulatory” Republicans were not reluctant to regulate the Internet. Bush favored federal privacy regulation, but never pushed it. His adminstration was also happy to target porn and “spam.” Legislation favored by the Republicans ran the gamut from gambling to cable regulation to media ownership. Right now, many firms in Washington are poised to push for federal privacy legislation to, as they say, pre-empt the states and get rid of the “patchwork” of privacy legislation with which they must deal. But the risk is merely trading 50 regulators for 51.

Given the constant pressures for meddling in technology by both parties, a “czar” can easily becomes a central figure in the drive to regulate someone, somewhere, rather than simply tend to government modernization knitting.

A government tech czar would likely grow in stature and as a focus of lobbying. It’s one thing to form a commission (such as the military base closure commssion) when we already have big government and are looking for ways to reduce it by fast-track means. But a technology officer seems too easily a mechanism for establishing government authority over our most vulnerable, frontier technologies and sciences. Leaving technology “officer-ship” to the private sector seems a better approach, and one more apt to ensure competition among the states as far as any regulatory policy goes.

So as far as a Chief Technology Officer is concerned, America is not any worse off without it, and could be a lot worse off with it. Hearings on the idea are in order at the very least, but best would be for the idea to simply fade.

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I’m skeptical of how big a deal this is from a national security standpoint. Many businesses that have neglected security may face real problems. But I think most have done a decent job. On the whole, however, things that are really important (say, the electric grid, nuclear missile launches) are probably less vulnerable to outside attack than they were before computer systems. Although traditional espionage could always do in these systems (infiltrate the agency, steal codes, bribe employees), nearly everything really critical simply can’t be accessed from outside of certain secure facilities. Particularly post-9/11, even systems that probably aren’t truly mission critical have been physically firewalled in just this way. For example one well-known security related government agency I’ve worked for requires biometric identification of its own supervisors to manage its scheduling systems. The systems, furthermore, simply can’t be accessed over the public Internet.

I also don’t see a physical way to bring it down without physically destroying each node. Sure, cyber-attack is possible. But I don’t believe it’s a major national security threat.