All of my reporting on the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City last weekend.

A full story for PBS MediaShift:

With reports that the National Security Agency is amassing data from Internet and phone companies, jokes abounded at the 10th annual Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) in New York City on June 6 and 7, especially when the list of sponsors for PDF sounded like a tally of NSA’s tech titan collaborators — Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.

But against the backdrop of Silicon Valley and government snooping on citizens, speakers held “big data” in high regard and pointed to a number of technologies that had the potential to amass tons of raw data for analysis and democratization.

A bunch of photos:

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A dispatch on “Mediatwits”

And a reflective essay for the American University Career Center on how I was able to go:

Interning can be expensive. Living, eating, transportation. It makes it hard for people of limited resources to have the opportunity to intern. That’s why a federal judge on June 11 ruled, with potential implications for the intern market, that, in one case, interns should have been paid for doing work.

I’m lucky to be supported financially during my internships. But transportation, especially to conferences, turned out to be the most expensive part for me.