Sarah Granger directed the launch of the “first true weblog to be put up by a politician,” according to Wired News and political analysts, while directing Internet strategy for Senator Gary Hart's 2004 U.S. presidential exploratory organization. She is the Founder and CEO of PublicEdge, a new media consultancy, Director of New Media for WomenCount and a Contributing Editor for techPresident.

Sarah also writes regularly for the San Francisco Chronicle at SFGate.com BlogHer, and MOMocrats and she has written for numerous print and online publications such as Security Focus, IEEE Spectrum magazine and NBC Bay Area. She has edited books on cybersecurity and government 2.0, and she has covered the Democratic National Convention and the White House.

An experienced IT policy advocate, Sarah has worked with a wide range of NGOs, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Emerge California, the Junior Leagues of California State Public Affairs Committee, and Emerge America. She is a long time member of the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery Public Policy Committee (USACM) and she served as a delegate to the World Summit on the Information Society at the U.N.. Her professional background also includes extensive work in web start-ups and cybersecurity for Phoenix Technologies, the California Maritime Academy and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

A frequent media commentator, she has appeared on Good Morning America, CBS, Mtv Japan, ABC and a variety of radio shows. She has been a speaker, advisor and program committee member for numerous national conferences including South by Southwest Interactive, Computers, Freedom and Privacy, the Nonprofit Technology Conference and Netroots Nation. For more information, see SarahGranger.com.

Blog Entries by Sarah Granger

A Sad Day for Californians: Gavin Newsom's Withdrawl from the Race for Governor

6 Comments | Posted October 30, 2009 | 09:51 PM (EST)


I moved to California in 1995. Within a few months, I was versed in some of the problems in the state, such as homelessness in Berkeley, tight budgets in the University of California system, and soaring real estate prices vs. rent control problems.

One day, I was driving across...

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Cybersecurity - A Dark Horse in the National Race for Resources

Posted October 21, 2009 | 02:37 AM (EST)


For a while now, cybersecurity has been a buzzword used in hopes of making national computer network security sound sexy, but there's been little legislative backbone behind measures to support federal departmental efforts. The position touted as Cybersecurity Czar has been fraught with problems in both the recent Bush administration...

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Women in Politics Need Womenomics -- And Much, Much More

Posted July 27, 2009 | 12:38 PM (EST)


I recently read the book Womenomics, by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay, which focuses on how women can take charge in the workplace and negotiate for more intangibles that we need in order to balance our busy lives. I was excited to see what these two seasoned reporters would...

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The White House Council on Women: Lip Service or Real Teeth?

Posted March 12, 2009 | 05:47 PM (EST)


President Obama announced the creation of the White House Council on Women and Girls on Wednesday, to "provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls." It's a great step, recreating an office that existed during the Clinton administration but was dissolved under Bush. But the...

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Code Warriors Debate Whitehouse.gov Robot Commands

Posted January 22, 2009 | 04:50 PM (EST)


As the tech community poured over the new whitehouse.gov site, one of the first subterranean changes noted was that of a file most people would never notice called robots.txt. This file serves as a notice to search robots informing them of what files they should or shouldn't survey....

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The Internet President

Posted November 5, 2008 | 10:40 PM (EST)


Since Howard Dean's unprecedented fundraising success online in 2003, a lot of speculation has gone into how the technology of the Internet might transform politics and when we might have our first "Internet President." Over the course of the 2008 election, we witnessed a phenomenon that could never have occurred...

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Online Assistance Arrives to Combat Voting Hurdles, Glitches and Dirty Tricks

Posted October 30, 2008 | 03:42 PM (EST)


The bottom line: vote early, request a paper ballot, and report any problems immediately. HAVA (the Help America Vote Act) -- well-intentioned legislation meant to prevent the voter problems from 2000 of repeating -- gave too much power to technology, has been poorly applied and the results are mixed....

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Latest from Obama Tech Arsenal: iPhone App & VoteforChange.com

Posted October 3, 2008 | 05:27 PM (EST)


I couldn't have been more geeked to receive a tweet via text to my iPhone yesterday morning from 'BarackObama' announcing the launch of the campaign's official iPhone application, 'Obama '08'. Thanks to the Twitter-SMS combo, five minutes later, I had downloaded the app and begun using it. I was...

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Online Debate Commentary Tools Make Heckling Candidates That Much Easier

Posted September 26, 2008 | 05:02 PM (EST)


Live blogging debates has become commonplace, finely tuned in the stream of primary debates. This week, bloggers are taking it up a notch with social networking and video tools. Virtual debate-watch parties just got easier. Twitter and Current TV are working together to tweet the debates on TV....

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Hackers Post Palin's Private E-Mail Account

Posted September 17, 2008 | 09:59 PM (EST)


The hacker group 'Anonymous' claims it broke into Sarah Palin's private Yahoo! email account and published it on the Web to WikiLeaks early Wednesday. The Wikileaks postings include screen shots that show lists of e-mail subject lines, specific messages, and photographs of Palin's family as evidence of the validity...

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McCain Computer Ignorance Raises New Questions: Can His Injured Hands Type?

Posted September 12, 2008 | 09:18 PM (EST)


In response to an Obama campaign ad that reminded viewers of John McCain's computer illiteracy, bloggers circulated reports that war injuries may prevent the Republican presidential nominee from using a computer keyboard.

On Friday, the Obama campaign's new ad called "Still" criticized McCain for being "out of touch" and...

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Palin's Wikipedia Entry Altered Before Announcement

Posted August 30, 2008 | 07:31 PM (EST)


Internet watch dogs have sniffed out an online snafu in terms of Governor Sarah Palin's biographical credibility. According to a story that broke on NPR Friday, 30 "favorable changes" were made to Palin's Wikipedia biography. The changes, discovered by a Wikipedia editor, and laid out side-by-side on a...

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Dude, Where's My Text Message?

Posted August 23, 2008 | 05:39 AM (EST)


First to know? Not quite. The best new media campaign in history botched their attempt to keep a lid on the VP pick in order to announce it via text messaging. It turned out to be just too difficult to keep quiet. However, although it was - technically speaking...

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Obama: "VP 2 B..."

Posted August 11, 2008 | 04:22 AM (EST)


One day soon, we may wake up, bleary-eyed, before the morning coffee, to a message on our mobile device of choice: "VP 2 B Bayh" or some other similarly terse but meaty digital-era code. It may not pack the power of a rousing speech, but leave it to the Obama...

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Smear 2.0: Attack-Ad Culture Goes Online

Posted August 7, 2008 | 08:02 PM (EST)


"Are You Pumped?" asks Exxon-McCain, a website dedicated to underlining John McCain's relationship with Big Oil, the latest in a series of sites that take aim at the presidential candidates. The DNC released Exxon-McCain Wednesday, posting video and text on the $2 Million in contributions "Exxon & friends" have...

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Voting Machine Debacles Continue As Election Nears

Posted July 30, 2008 | 03:12 AM (EST)


Although hanging chads may be a thing of the past, concerns with voting machines and election processes more generally abound. Analysts say there remain significant problems, like a lack of paper records and audit trails, voting machine "sleepovers," prohibitively long voter wait times, and piecemeal government policies.

In...

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Women Bloggers Want The Real Thing

Posted July 23, 2008 | 11:14 PM (EST)


One thousand women bloggers met in San Francisco this week for the annual BlogHer conference, while Netroots Nation was rocking Austin. The two things attendees most wanted to know were how to be successful in the political blogosphere and whether their candidates are up to the challenge.

Last year,...

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DNCC Blogger Details Still a Puzzle

Posted July 14, 2008 | 10:15 PM (EST)


It's like an LSAT question: if bloggers W, X, Y and Z from publications A, B, C, D, and E apply for passes 1, 2, and 3, the bloggers to receive the three passes must have Technorati stats equal to the circumference of the sun divided by pi times .003...

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Moving Toward Transparent Government

Posted July 1, 2008 | 10:21 PM (EST)


Picture for a moment what the official White House website, would look like with a President Obama at the reins: there would be the usual news, issues, photos, but also perhaps an interactive blog, a policy wiki, video feeds from meetings, a tracking tool to see whether we're on...

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Campaign Internet Strategists Clash At Web Conference

Posted June 25, 2008 | 01:19 AM (EST)


Monday when Mark Soohoo, the Republican Internet strategist for John McCain defended his candidate's legitimacy as someone with a deep understanding of how technology can revolutionize government during the PDF '08 conference, Tracy Russo, formerly of the Edwards campaign, let loose her thoughts, drawing on a post she wrote...

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