“The Internet” is being championed for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Italian version of Wired Magazine, according to the BBC and other reports. A record 237 individuals and organizations have been nominated for this year’s prize, which was controversially awarded to President Obama last year.

According to the BBC:

It is unclear who would accept the prize if the internet were to win.

Internet for Peace, set up to help support the nomination of the internet, says the prize would be “a Nobel for each and every one of us”.

When most people visualize a terrorist, a blond-haired female is not the image that pops up. That association (or lack thereof) is exactly what Colleen R. LaRose, who referred to herself as “JihadJane”, was counting on as she made plans to travel to Sweden to kill an artist and wage jihad.

According to this LA Times story:

With blond hair and green eyes, the 46-year-old woman bragged that she could go anywhere undetected, boasting in one e-mail that it was “an honour & great pleasure to die or kill for” jihad, or holy war, the indictment said.
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Did you know Israel developed the most popular varieties of cherry tomatoes? Does that make you view their citizens more favorably?

The Israeli government hopes so. They have launched a campaign that seeks to deputize all Israelis as ambassadors. It’s drawn a lot of attention, not all good. One aspect of the campaign is to teach Israelis about accomplishments of their fellow citizens so they can tell foreigners. According to the LA Times:
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Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, has a guest blog on the Heritage website this week. He talks about some of the challenges of technology, such as when it is used by enemies, and a new House caucus he has set up with Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash.:

Today, we are a world away from the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially when it comes to communication.  This is largely a result of the widespread adoption of cellular technology, the proliferation of broadcast, and the advent of the Internet.  Initiatives that once served U.S. interests abroad may now hinder them.  For example, language in the Smith-Mundt Act ties the hands of U.S. strategic communicators to counter online jihadists.  Some on-air contributors to Radio Farda and Radio Liberty are prone to curious assertions that many Americans may be surprised to hear from taxpayer-funded “pro-American” radio…
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The Pentagon’s selective ban on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites is being lifted for its non-classified network, according to a Reuters article in the Washington Post:

[I]t could mean big changes for large portions of the armed forces, including the Marines, which had selectively banned social media on work computers.

The Department of Defense also had bans in place since 2007 on accessing certain bandwidth-gobbling Web sites like YouTube on its network. . . .
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The New York Times has a story on the State Department’s trip to Moscow, with various social media honchos in tow, along with Twitter King Ashton Kutcher. They’re calling it “geek diplomacy”:

This week, in lieu of the congressmen and capitalists who typically make up delegations to Russia, Washington sent a detachment of Silicon Valley dreamboats: the 33-year-old creator of Twitter; the “chief lizard wrangler” of Mozilla; the chief executive of eBay; and — for good measure — the actor Ashton Kutcher, who has edged out Britney Spears to become the world’s most popular Tweeter.
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TechCrunch has a post on the latest State Department/private sector trip to practice “21st Century Statecraft.”

Prolific tweeter Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) is going, along with Jack Dorsey (@jack), founder of Twitter and the Square, plus a variety of State Department officials — including policy planning staffer Jared Cohen (@JaredCohen) and White House CTO Aneesh Chopra.  Cohen lead a similar trip to Mexico last year.
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Check out this handy Creativity article on how new media is helping the rescue and relief efforts in Haiti. Among the initiatives Tali Krakowsky cites are:

Ushahidi is an open source project which allows users to crowdsource crisis information to be sent via mobile. They have created a Crisis Map of Haiti in collaboration with International Network of Crisis Mappers. The map represents a comprehensive and up-to-date crisis overview for to the humanitarian community.
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Ernest J. Wilson,  dean of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at USC and a university fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, has a thoughtful piece in the Huffington Post on the ramifications of Google’s announcement that it may withdraw from China, and how it may affect not just China but also U.S. foreign policy:

A consequence of the digital economy’s timidity is that the U.S. foreign policy agenda has not changed very much in substance or tone. But now, if other major content producers follow Google into the ring, the strategic and diplomatic gravity of big Silicon Valley firms may finally match their economic weight. Of course, traditional matters like military strategy, state-to-state diplomacy and the like will always remain important elements of a nation’s statecraft. But moving forward we may see a couple of changes that suggest we have reached an inflection point.
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OhMyGov! has a post by Amelia Hassani on the six top government social networking sites: Military.com, Govloop, ExchangesConnect, GovCentral, Our Border and The Federal Contractor Network.
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