The community grew fast, to a reach of over 10 million and between 100,000 and 250,000 users a week. People joined from 23 countries. There was clearly an appetite for this kind of training and the material it produced.

More exciting to me as a journalist was that the quality of information these “ordinary” citizens were generating – once they had taken on board basics such as “what is double sourcing?”, the importance of “who, what where, why and how?” and the role of eyewitness accounts and original documents – rose very high.

My personal beat as a reporter is civil liberties in the U.S., and the death of local newspapers has meant there is little coverage of state-level stories of these issues. That new void of local reporting leaves the federal government and Congress less than accountable on the local level.

But Gerald Rozner, a tech specialist, gave us solid blow-by-blow accounts of the Emergency Managers fight in Michigan, with original documentation such as court rulings; Jennifer Slattery, an activist, got us sound and vivid documentation of the clashes between Occupy and Oakland police, and brought us detailed reports from similar fights around the country; other sources put together a trend by agribusiness interests to criminalize raw milk production and sales state by state. Citizen reports came in from many local sources confirming that Department of Homeland Security money and armaments were flowing into local police forces; they posted city council meeting minutes to back this up. Understandably – since news outlets have had to slash the staff that used to cover these beats – this story and its magnitude was almost overlooked by mainstream news outlets till months later. None of our contributors are paid: They work because they want to make sure that the information they find gets into the public arena.

Encouraged by these developments, a group of partners and I began to think about building a website that would support this kind of journalism and opinion writing, and help citizens strengthen democracy in other ways. DailyCloudt.com, launched three weeks ago, is the result.

This model of training citizens to be reporters and pundits is even more exciting when you take it global. We started on Facebook to get real-time Twitter reports, via Greg Monahan in Ireland, from friends of his on the Gaza-bound illegal flotillas: We knew – before most news outlets did – when activists on board were taken off the boat and transported to Israeli hospitals. Greg connected our feed with Twitter messages, too, from Internet friends and colleagues of his in the human rights world who were reporting live from Gaza during the Israeli bombardment: We watched and heard the bombs falling in real time, in human voices. Another memorable report came when we were discussing and posting news sources about the U.S. drone presence in Pakistan – and a Pakistani dad summarized what it was like for parents in his village to decide whether or not to send their kids to school that day based on local U.S. drone activity.

We live in a world in which gatekeepers and governments try to spin and control the flow of information, and the Internet is thus under continual attack. But democracy is strongest everywhere when nothing can happen anywhere that an army of citizens can’t fully document to a global audience – and then organize around.

Add training for “ordinary” people around the world and here at home to write and source op-eds and news, and you get a powerful new mix. Already we have heard on DailyCloudt.com the kinds of voices you rarely hear in mainstream opinion pages: A stay-at-home mom, Celeste Hayes, rebutted Hilary Rosen’s comments about motherhood; a pro-life feminist challenged her own movement to support contraception – that is, if it really cared about lowering abortion rates; a music teacher, Joseph Ciolino, defended the Second Amendment; a teacher and mother of a special-needs child revealed that the school testing mania is actually a gift to the lobbyists of test administrator Pearson; and a realtor, Christine Mann, explained why Obama’s much-ballyhooed Green Jobs initiative is really a gift to the vinyl industry – with toxic results for us. Autumn Smith of Michigan did some eyewitness reporting and photographing of state legislator Lisa Brown and playwright Eve Ensler’s peformance of The Vagina Monologues on Michigan’s statehouse steps after Brown made her famous comment about anti-abortion legislation. A citizen reporting that made it in turn into the Guardian this week. And Smith helped unearth, in a Q&A with Representative Brown on that site, that legislation has been introduced in Michigan’s statehouse to prevent conflicts of interest allowing legislators to profit personally – but that the bill has not been signed.

All in all, training citizens to shine this kind of light has already made for a better couple of weeks in the effort to strengthen democracy.

We’ve layered on top of all of this some software that kicks up remarkable results every day: Developer Greg Podunovich’s Legislative Search Engine crawls the Internet 24/7, scraping data about upcoming bills and presenting them searchably by issue; I call it the “headline factory.” Most laws are passed in darkness, since bills like the National Defense Authorization Act weigh in at 1,600 pages, and, while lobbyists and their lawyers are looped in, most people are left out of the discussion. But the comment function on the search engine lets organizations and users explain what a bill means in real English – giving voters, organizations, legislators and journalists a way to actually comprehend what is being done on the Hill – before it is too late. Other functions let people start their own political movements, draft and crowdsource their own legislation (24 states have referendums available for citizens to do so) and confront their own legislators’ district offices with their group of (registered, we hope) voters and their own proposed bills in hand. Soon, we will offer grassroots fundraising too.

Is DailyCloudt.com new, rough and a work in progress? Yes. Can it make a dent in the entrenched obstacles to real democracy? In raising new voices, we think we have already begun. Can it potentially help explain bills whose true meaning is now coded in legalese, possibly help people stop bad laws and launch good ones, and help shift the levers of democracy back into the hands of the people? Yes, yes, and that is up to you.

PHOTO: Members of the White House press type on their laptop computers in the dark as U.S.President Barack Obama speaks to supporters at a fundraising reception at the Paramount Theater in Seattle May 10, 2012. REUTERS/Larry Downing

With the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, New York City has abruptly become the scene of two very different official approaches to investigating sex-crime cases, one traditional and one new. The new approach so far appears to be reserved for Strauss-Kahn alone.

Consider the first case: the ongoing trial of two police officers, Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, charged in the rape of a 27-year-old Manhattan woman. She was drunk, and, after helping her to enter her apartment, Moreno and Mata allegedly made a false emergency call so that they could return to her. At that point, the woman says, she woke periodically out of her intoxicated state to find herself being raped, face down, by Moreno, as Mata stood guard.

The alleged rape of a citizen by a police officer — and the alleged collusion of another officer — is surely a serious matter. But the charges and trial have followed an often-seen pattern: the men’s supporters have vociferously defended their innocence (the presumption of which has been scrupulously upheld in the press); the victim’s pink bra has been the subject of salacious speculation, and her intoxication has been used to undermine her credibility. As the wheels of justice grind unglamorously forward, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made no public statement supporting the victim’s side.

Moreover, Moreno and Mata have not been asked to strip naked for “evidence” photos, were not initially denied bail, and were not held in solitary confinement, and are not being strip-searched daily. Their entire case has followed the usual timetable of many months, as evidence was gathered, testimony compiled and arguments made.

Then there is the Strauss-Kahn approach. After a chambermaid reportedly told her supervisor at the elegant Sofitel hotel that she had been sexually assaulted, the suspect was immediately tracked down, escorted off a plane just before its departure, and arrested. High-ranking detectives, not lowly officers, were dispatched to the crime scene. The DNA evidence was sequenced within hours, not the normal eight or nine days. By the end of the day’s news cycle, New York City police spokespeople had made uncharacteristic and shockingly premature statements supporting the credibility of the victim’s narrative — before an investigation was complete.

The accused was handcuffed and escorted before television cameras — a New York tradition known as a “perp walk.” The suspect was photographed naked, which is also unusual, initially denied bail and held in solitary confinement. The Police Commissioner has boasted to the press that Strauss-Kahn is strip-searched now multiple times a day — also unheard-of.

By the end of the second day’s news cycle, senior public officials had weakened the presumption of innocence, a cornerstone of any civilized society’s justice system. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was calling for Strauss-Kahn’s resignation from the IMF, and Bloomberg remarked, in response to objections to Straus-Kahn’s perp walk, “don’t do the crime.” Whatever happened in that hotel room, Strauss-Kahn’s career, and his presumption of innocence, was effectively over — before any legal process had even begun.

If Strauss-Kahn turns out, after a fair trial, to be a violent sex criminal, may his sentence be harsh indeed. But the way in which this case is being processed is profoundly worrisome. In 23 years of covering sex crime — and in a city where domestic workers are raped by the score every month, often by powerful men — I have never seen the New York Police Department snap into action like this on any victim’s behalf.

Harriet Lessel, executive director of the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, agrees that this case has seen “a very quick and targeted response,” and points out that rape is “a grossly underreported crime” in New York. Worse, she says, many victims under other circumstances believe that the criminal justice system is unresponsive to their needs and more oriented toward ensuring that the innocent are not convicted.

While Lessel is quick to add that New York has “some great police officers and prosecutors who really care,” she says that the police do not normally issue public statements supportive of victims’ credibility, let alone early on, as they did with Strauss-Kahn’s accuser. Nor has she ever heard of someone being photographed naked as part of the evidence.

So what is happening here?

We now live in a world in which men like former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who was investigating financial wrongdoing by the insurance giant AIG, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Strauss-Kahn — whose efforts to reform the IMF gained him powerful opponents — can be, and are, kept under constant surveillance. Indeed, Strauss-Kahn, who had been the odds-on favorite to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy in next year’s French presidential election, probably interested more than one intelligence service.

This does not mean that Strauss-Kahn is innocent or that he is guilty. It means that policy outcomes can be advanced nowadays, in a surveillance society, by exploiting or manipulating sex-crime charges, whether real or inflated.

In other words, ours is increasingly an age of geopolitics by blackmail. Why, after all, were U.S. operatives asked to secure the “biometrics” and DNA of subjects abroad, as some of the U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks were revealed?

After Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, a caller to a New York radio talk show, who identified herself as a domestic worker in a New York luxury hotel, reported that “every week” a man in a towel accosts her, seeking sex. Another caller, a hotel manager, confirmed that this is a common way for male hotel guests to solicit sex. The New York Times flagged on its front page a report that hotel domestic workers are often targeted with clients’  requests for sex in exchange for money.

Are these men disgusting predators soliciting desperate, underpaid women? Yes. Is knowing about this economy relevant to the charges against Strauss-Kahn? Maybe.

Unfortunately, such questions may never be investigated, much less answered, for this is not being treated as a typical New York City sex-crime case. The authorities, perhaps with their own agenda, have publicly asserted a foregone conclusion; and that kind of intervention ultimately diminishes the chance of any one of us being able to rely on what used to be real American due process of law.