Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

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GENTRIFIED

GENTRIFIED

Paint with Donald Trump; why we open data; NH library may or may not support Tor; and more.

  • Everyone knows that Silicon Valley has made over San Francisco in its techno-utopian image, but Brett Scott writes in aeon that another victim of gentrification is the intangible thing one might called the ‘hacker ethos’:

    The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx into the scene of successive waves of ever less disaffected individuals results in a growing emphasis on the unthreatening elements of hacking over the subversive ones.

    Although he focuses mostly on the debasement of hacker values for profit, it’s impossible not to also think of the state or business-sponsored “hackathon,” which focuses the techno-activist’s energy on sanctioned solutions to society’s problems. However, hacker culture—unlike the physical spaces we normally think of when we say gentrification—is not a zero-sum game. While the language of the hacker might have been co-opted for profit, the “true” hacker spirit (whatever that may be) is still out there. As Scott writes:

    It’s in the emergent forms of peer production and DIY culture, in maker-spaces and urban farms. We see it in the expansion of ‘open’ scenes, from open hardware to open biotech, and in the intrigue around 3D printers as a way to extend open-source designs into the realm of manufacture.

  • Related: In Kernel, an interview by Jesse Hicks with one of the authors of The Misfit Economy, Alexa Clay. Clay describes the book as “basically a manifesto for people to really embrace their own inner misfit, their rogue or their counter-cultural personality.” Hacking is featured prominently. Although she sings the praises of whistleblowers like Snowden or hacker collectives like UX in Paris, that operate outside of market forces, she concludes, “I don’t think the misfit economy is a blueprint for a new economy…but I think it’s really a set of skills for an economy in transition, which is where we’re at right now.”

  • More dispatches from Silicon Valley: Dylan Matthews went to the Effective Altruism Global conference and wrote about it for Vox, finding that attendees were pretty uninterested in addressing the problems we have here and now, like global poverty, in favor of talking about distant and indistinct threats like artificial intelligence.

  • In this behind-the-scenes style video by Brent McDonald and John Woo for the New York Times, activists from the Movement for Black Lives read aloud tweets from the past year. Two of the three activists featured, DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie, were arrested during a sit-in outside the U.S. attorney’s office in St. Louis yesterday, Ryan J. Reilly and Julia Craven report for the Huffington Post.

  • We wish we were kidding: Alabama State Senator Paul Sanford created a GoFundMe campaign to close the state’s budget shortfall, since raising taxes is out of the question. The campaign specifies that you can earmark your donation for a particular government function, prompting one donor to say, “From the Gay Confederate Flag Burning Society of Alabama! Please earmark for rainbow flags atop all government buildings,” and another to write, “Please use this money for cab fare to your local library and check out any economics text book by Friedrich Hayek.”

  • Nancy Scola reports for Politico that Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig is exploring a bid for the presidency.

  • GovTech: 18F has released a beta deck of Design Methods, “a collection of research and design practices that we use to better understand and serve the users of our products.”

  • Yesterday, Wikimedia passed the 2.5 billion edits marker.

  • Opportunities: The MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative has announced $75,000 in scholarships for 50 young women and underrepresented people of color to attend the CoinDesk Consensus 2015 digital currency conference in NY on September 10th. Apply here.

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END GAMES

END GAMES

Paint with Donald Trump; why we open data; NH library may or may not support Tor; and more.

  • We remember: If you read one thing about the anniversary of 9/11 today, may I humbly suggest Jeff Jarvis’ recounting on Twitter (helpfully Storified by Mary Bjorneby) of what it was like for him to survive that day.

  • This is civic tech: Civic Tech USC, a project of the Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Society, has released a findings reports on “Empowering the Public Through Open Data” focused on Los Angeles County’s 88 cities. Among their findings:

    • Since 2013, 18 cities within the county have launched some form of open data initiative.

    • Lack of funding remains a “major barrier” to many cities’ involvement in launching open data portals, along with a need for more expertise and buy-in from city departments.

    • “There should be mechanisms for regularly tracking and publicizing stories of how open data is creating value, which can both increase public engagement with city data and help to make a case for meaningful ROI.”

  • Related: Mark Headd responds to Technical.ly Philly’s report on the liberation of the city’s property database, arguing that the end goal of open data programs should be more than just producing more open data. He writes: “The end game on open data has always been about something larger than simply filling up an open data catalog—open data is a pathway to creating a new way of operating in government.”

  • The Center for Technology, Society & Policy at Stanford is launching a new blog called Citizen Technologist, and in its inaugural post, the center’s co-directors Nick Doty and Galen Panger offer several definitions of what a citizen technologist might be, including:

    …a software engineer who considers ethical principles in building her new app; a designer who volunteers his services to improve the user experience of a local non-profit or government agency website; a legislator who works closely with the technical community to design laws and regulations affecting the Internet; a researcher who studies the effects of new communication technologies on employment, inequality or happiness; a citizen who participates in technical projects to map their neighborhood or advocate for their community.

  • Matt Mahan, co-founder and CEO of Brigade, talks to TechCrunch’s Andrew Keen about his startup’s ongoing efforts to give the public a more meaningful way to engage on the issues they care about. About halfway into the video, Mahan admits Brigade has no sure idea how it will make money, but suggests native advertising or selling information to political recruiters.

  • Inside Philanthropy’s Kiersten Marek reports on how Ruth Ann Harnisch (a Civic Hall member) and her foundation are tackling gender equality. She notes that Harnisch is “a big believer in the power of social media and technology to bring together women into powerful giving networks.”

  • In Slate, Civic Hall member Dan Gillmor makes the case for Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, as the next Librarian of Congress.

  • Faced with pressure from the Department of Homeland Security and local police, a public library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, has decided to at least temporarily stop supporting the Tor anonymous web surfing service, Julia Angwin reports for ProPublica. The library’s board of trustees will vote next Tuesday on whether to turn it back on. The Library Freedom Project, working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and local ACLU chapters, has released a letter of support urging the library to do so.

  • A growing coalition of international human rights and open government groups are joining Access Now’s call on Twitter to reverse its decision to close down Politwoops and similar uses of the company’s API to track the tweets of politicians.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Showing that his communications team are indeed the rulers of all social media, President Obama answered questions about the Iran deal on Quora yesterday.

  • Arun Chaudhary, Bernie Sanders digital creative director (and former Obama videographer), shares a gallery of photos documenting the first 100 days of the Sanders campaign on Medium.

  • Some dude named Sifry tries to explain the confounding rise of Trump and Sanders inside the Republican and Democratic parties as the bubbling up of the “shadow parties” inside each, and ponders whether instead of a two-party system we could have a four- or five-party system, including the folks in the civic arena who work on the stuff that matters as the “Getting-it-done” Party.

  • Work futures: The city of San Francisco is looking to hire an open data services engineer.

  • Congrats to longtime PDM friend Jacob Soboroff, the founder of “Why Tuesday?“, who has been hired by MSNBC as a correspondent. (Do you know why we vote on Tuesdays?)

  • Got a job you are looking to fill at the intersection of tech and politics/government/civic life? Email me at micah-at-civichall-dot-org with a link.

  • For your weekend amusement: PaintWithDonaldTrump.com.

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MILESTONES

MILESTONES

Protester Progress; Brigade adds voter verification badges; and more.

  • Yesterday was the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri. In an op-ed for The Guardian, activist and organizer DeRay McKesson recalls the importance of Twitter and Instagram to the Movement for Black Lives:

    If not for Twitter and Instagram, Missouri officials would have convinced you, one year ago, that we simply did not exist. Or that we were the aggressors, rather than the victims. That we, and not they, were the violent ones.

     But social media was our weapon against erasure. It is how many of us first became aware of the protests and how we learned where to go, or what to do when teargassed, or who to trust. We were able to both counter the narrative being spun by officials while connecting with each other in unprecedented ways. Many of us became friends digitally, first. And then we, the protestors, met in person.

  • After a day of protests, an 18-year-old man named Tyrone Harris was shot by police in Ferguson and is now in critical condition, Lisa Brown and Tim Bryant report for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. An activist and protestor named Tony Rice, who filmed the aftermath of the shooting, was arrested shortly after for refusing to move back, Jon Swaine reports for The Guardian.

  • Data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe built this “Protester Progress” timeline of events and milestones in the Movement for Black Lives since Michael Brown’s death last year.

  • Sinyangwe also tweeted “980 protests have happened since August 9th. There were 240 in 1965.” With his sources.

  • Brigade has released a new version of their app that includes voter verification badges. As Alex Howard observes on Twitter, “Voter verification is something politicians care about; keep an eye on this.” 

  • Natasha Singer articulates for the New York Times what rubs her (and many others) the wrong way about the “sharing” economy. “Ditto the peer economy, the people economy and the collaborative economy.”

  • Meanwhile, in California, Sarah Jeong reports for Motherboard that Uber’s defense for an employment lawsuit is that they actually empower their contractors.

  • “I describe this office as the smallest state agency that actually does anything and leave the rest to people’s imagination,” Robert Freeman, the executive director of the New York Committee on Open Government, says in an interview with ProPublica (transcript and audio).

  • Here is a browser extension that replaces “political correctness” with “treating people with respect.”

  • Civic Hall co-founder Micah Sifry is one of many thanked by Tom Steinberg in his last post at mySociety.

 
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SHAMS

SHAMS

How the Facebook debate was different from the YouTube debates of 2008; the videos BuzzFeed makes for the GOP; and more.

  • Although co-hosted by Facebook, last night’s Republican debate was not easy to watch online last night unless you have a cable subscription, as Matt Novak outlined for Gizmodo. I, for example, briefly watched some guy on Meerkat watch the debate, holding up a whiteboard scorecard when one of the candidates scored a point.

  • Jennifer Stromer-Galley opines for Newsweek that the solicitation of audience participation in the debate via Facebook is “sham democracy”:

    Tonight, Facebook and Fox News will again let the public pose questions to the presidential hopefuls. As in the 2008 YouTube debates, the public can post a video question to the Fox News Facebook page. Unlike in 2008, if the public visits the page, they can’t view the questions submitted—they simply go into a black box.

  • Alex Howard tweeted that the integration with Facebook was “often awkwardly phrased.”

  • Last night, interest in Carly Fiorina, one of the Republicans left out of the mainstage debate, spiked, at least on Google search, surpassing Donald Trump.

  • BuzzFeed is producing slick and goofy videos for GOP presidential candidates, Brendan James reports for International Business Times. The question is, why? “But by producing videos with candidates,” James writes, “all of them hungry for access to the younger audience roaming the internet, is BuzzFeed blurring the line between covering politics and dabbling in them?”

  • Edward T. Walker comes out strongly against the “Uber-ization” of Activism in a opinion piece in the New York Times, arguing that Uber, among other companies, is “weaponizing their apps” for political gains. He concludes: 

    Technology may be neutral, but grass roots should mean bottom up, not top down. The #blacklivesmatter movement is a genuine grass-roots civil rights campaign, mobilized through social media. So is the environmentalist Bill McKibben’s 350.org, with its blend of online organizing, social media strategy and in-person campaigning around climate change. But Uber’s corporate populism is not. We should learn to recognize the difference.

  • At the digital inclusion summit held at Civic Hall on Wednesday, New York City City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and the Mozilla Foundation announced a joint program to increase digital literacy and civic engagement through technology initiatives, reports Gloria Pazmino for Capital New York.

  • The headline says it all in this piece for Vice by Virgil Texas: “How I Infiltrated a White Pride Facebook Group and Turned It into ‘LGBT Southerners for Michelle Obama’”

  • Scott Burns, the CEO and co-founder of GovDelivery, gives an overview of the three major investments his company has made in civic tech projects this year. He writes that the key to working with government is to “think small” for “big impact.”

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PARTNERSHIPS

PARTNERSHIPS

ProPublica and Yelp announce partnership; protecting our digital papers and effects; and more.

  • ProPublica has always partnered with larger news organizations to get their public interest stories in front of as many eyes as possible, but yesterday they announced a partnership with Yelp. “Scott Klein, ProPublica’s assistant managing editor, said millions of Yelp users will also have access to the news organization’s data,” Lena H. Sun reports for the Washington Post. “In return, the news organization will have bulk access to all of Yelp’s health-care reviews to use in research for news stories.”

  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock have put out a call to the crowd for suggestions on where to investigate the collection of mobile biometric data by the police, part of their Street-Level Surveillance Project.

  • Mathbabe Cathy O’Neil has a simple but hilarious and brilliant idea for how Uber drivers can game the system by creating artificial surge pricing.

  • Jenna McLaughlin reports for The Intercept that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found that warrantless tracking by cell phone violates citizens’ fourth amendment rights. The court split 2-1 and a Supreme Court hearing is likely, McLaughlin adds.

  • For more on what protections our “papers and effects” deserve in the digital age under the fourth amendment, see this article by Laura Moy and Matt Baker for the Open Technology Institute.

  • Inspired in part by the Code for All summit at Civic Hall last week, which featured a panel about gauging success, the Sunlight Foundation is soliciting stories of civic tech failures.

  • At the first White House Demo Day, Phone2Action announced a $250,000 fund for educating D.C. youth about civic technology, Lalita Clozel reports for Technical.ly.

  • After posing for an ad campaign for her employer, OneLogin, Isis Wenger unwittingly became a center of attention in the bay for daring to be a female engineer. She sparked an anti-sexism campaign online under the hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer, which Bill Chappell reports for NPR has seen an avalanche of response. (h/t Andrew Slack)

  • Reddit has updated its content policy and banned some of the most offensive subreddits on the site. But as Noah Kulwin points out for ReCode, Reddit is trying to have it both ways: to free themselves from content that offends “both advertisers and common decency” without trampling their “free speech” ideals.

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POLICY-LITE

POLICY-LITE

Half of the GOP candidates don’t have an “issues” page on their website; smart teddy bears; and more.

  • Tech and the presidentials: A Politico review of the 17 GOP candidates’ websites found almost half lacked an “issue” page, where they can outline their stances on things Americans care about, including Donald Trump, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. “For the rest of the pack,” Darren Samuelsohn writes, “the policy pages of their websites are largely afterthoughts, light on significant detail.”

  • The New York Times’ Ashley Parker has this glimpse into the Republicans’ social media-centered war rooms, writing that, “in the battle for public opinion, the presidential debates will be won or lost on social media, possibly before the 10 Republican hopefuls have even answered the last question.”

  • Shane Goldmacher tackles the same subject for National Journal, zeroing in on how campaigns will target political journalists on Twitter specifically.

  • Congress has cut funding for the U.S. Digital Services, Jason Shueh reports for GovTech, raising questions about its future.

  • Speaking of tech in the White House, yesterday the New York Tech Meetup participated in the first White House Demo Day. A full description of the participants and their creations, from space robots to smart teddy bears, is here.

  • Our contributing editor An Xiao Mina has co-written a piece for Civicist with Julia Ticona on thinking past the digital divide. They find that thinking about internet access as a binary—you have it or you don’t—misses many of the ways Americans get online. That limited view could prevent the government from investing in short-term, inexpensive solutions that could be as or more impactful than simply expanding broadband access.

  • In the spring, I wrote about an experiment in participatory democracy in Provo, Utah, run entirely on Loomio and NationBuilder. Well, the results are in and although participation was low, the process concluded successfully with three specific policy recommendations, generated and agreed upon by Provo residents, that were then submitted to the City Council. A second round will run again in September. Read more in my report for Civicist.

  • For the Australian Financial Times, Claire Stewart profiles Pia Waugh, open government advocate and the director of Gov 2.0 in the Department of Finance.

  • Mark Bergen reports for ReCode that Facebook has begun advocating for its Internet.org campaign in India, where the initiative has faced backlash for breaking the principles of net neutrality. On Facebook, obviously.

  • In the Boston Business Journal, Sara Castellanos writes that a Dynamite Labs app lets users create anonymous videos by masking their face and altering their voice, freeing them to tell stories of bullying or racism. Dynamite Labs (co-founder Larry Lieberman is a Civic Hall member) has recently announced seed funding that will allow them to release a public beta version.

  • Apply: Blue Ridge Labs@Robin Hood has just launched Catalyst, a six-month incubation program for social entrepreneurs who are building technology-enabled solutions to help low-income New Yorkers. Selected teams receive mentorship support as well as a cash stipend.

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WINNING

WINNING

Mike Bracken to step down; Civic Hall hiring a writer/researcher for Rethinking Debates project; and more.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Here’s Donald Trump’s self-referential question to his fellow Republican presidential contenders, as posted in response to Facebook’s call for questions for the candidates appearing in the first GOP debate this Thursday. If you look closely, you’ll see that the article he has printed out on his desk for reading is headlined, “Donald Trump Winning Facebook by a Landslide.”

  • This headline has more cliches per word than most: “Exclusive: Republicans Launch Game-Changing Data Center That Will Forever Change Politics.” The story, by Mark Fidelman in Forbes.com, isn’t a scoop since people have been reporting on the GOP’s Data Center for years. But it does share some new data about what’s in Data Center, including the number of people in the national voter file that they’ve matched with email addresses (22 million) and the number of “micro targeting data points” they’ve amassed (7.7 billion).

  • Cryptowars, continued: Longtime British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, author of much of the best reporting on Britain’s secret surveillance programs going back decades, reflects in The Intercept on how Edward Snowden’s disclosures have not only affirmed his earlier work, but also how the debate over rampant government eavesdropping has finally shifted.

  • While the German authorities have backed off their threat to investigate two journalists who write for Netzpolitik.org, the country’s leading political and digital rights blog, people there are still angry that they were threatened with a treason charge for publishing reports on domestic surveillance, Melissa Eddy reports for the New York Times.

  • Government opening: Mike Bracken, the pathbreaking director of digital for the U.K. government’s Cabinet Office, has announced that he’s stepping down after five years in that position.

  • As Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka blogs, Bracken’s impact on digital government was transformative. Not only did he lead a massive overhaul of service delivery in the U.K., his work inspired her and other counterparts in the United States and led directly to the launch of the U.S. Digital Service. As Pahlka writes, “Now, a pilgrimage to the GDS that Mike and his team have built has become a rite of passage (and a shot of energy and inspiration) for every serious digital government reformer in city, state, and federal government in the U.S. and around the world. Each of us is hoping to learn from and borrow Mike’s model and capture even a fraction of the team’s success.”

  • Everything Pahlka says about Bracken’s influence is true (and this great talk by him at PDF 2014 showcases his thinking). I’d like to add one more personal comment, about his courage. When the gifted young coder and democracy activist Aaron Swartz took his life in January 2013, suffering under intense pressure from an over-zealous government prosecutor who thought his copying of academic journal articles was some kind of horrific crime, Bracken posted an eloquent tribute to Swartz (and an equally skilled British hacker, Chris Lightfoot, who was a pioneer of e-democracy at mySociety), titled “Standing on the shoulders of giants,” on Government Digital Service’s official blog. To my knowledge, not a single one of Bracken’s counterparts in the U.S. federal branch who work on open government did anything equivalent to mourn Swartz’s untimely death.

  • Hidden pleasures: Melody Kramer has pulled together an impressive list of “every hidden journalism-related social media group I could find.”

  • The Datadrive.com is a crazy, funny satire of Facebook, made by Daniel Kolitz. Its premise: “The year is 2016. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has absconded to parts unknown, making off with the data of Facebook’s millions of users. Texas mattress mogul Buck Calhoun has purchased the gutted social network in a fire sale and has now launched a data drive to replenish its depleted stores of valuable personal information.” Check it out during your lunch break.

  • Job opening at Civic Hall: We’re looking to hire a researcher/writer for our new Rethinking Debates project. Please help spread the word!

  • And with that, I’m off for some vacation—my able colleague Jessica McKenzie will be holding down the fort here at First Post while I’m away.

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DISRUPTIONS

DISRUPTIONS

Mob justice and Cecil the Lion; a popular chatbot that can ask how you’re doing post-breakup; and more.

  • Governmental disruption: Steven Levy reports for Medium’s Backchannel on the rise of the U.S. Digital Service. Since USDS is already delivering measurable results for government IT development, here’s the money quote, from its deputy director Haley van Dyck: “Our institutional innovation strategy is, if we can prove our value over the next 18 months, we believe it will be asinine for the next administration to not continue to invest in this resource.” She also adds, speaking of the service’s recruits from high-tech companies: “about 66 percent of the people that came out for three months ended up going home, quitting their job and coming back full time. And it’s on the rise. I think it’s over 80 percent now.”

  • Presidential disruption: Political scientist Lee Drutman of New America has a nifty suggestion for how to test presidential contenders worthiness for the White House. Instead of holding debates, have them handle a simulated crisis, like a terrorist attack or a bank failure. He writes, for the Washington Post, “Film crews could record the entire simulation, then television producers could turn it into a reality-TV special. Make all the footage public, and journalists could comb through it and analyze who handled the situation best and why. Candidates could critique each other’s responses. We’d also learn about the quality of advice the candidates get.”

  • Speaking of quality advisers, the Donald Trump campaign has fired a political consultant, Sam Nunberg, whose racist statements on Facebook were first uncovered by Hunter Walker of Business Insider.

  • Social disruption: Writing for Vox, Max Fisher takes note of the recent online campaign against American dentist Walter Palmer, who killed a beloved lion named Cecil, and argues that “mob justice is not justice.” Indeed, it looks like the “human flesh search engines” of China are now here.

  • Writing for the Atlantic, Rose Eveleth asks a really good question: “Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?”

  • Speaking of the future, in China millions of young people are hooked on a realistic chatbot named Xiaoice, made by Microsoft, that has mined the Chinese internet for human conversations, John Markoff and Paul Mozur report for the New York Times. The program “remembers details from previous exchanges with users, such as a breakup with a girlfriend or boyfriend, and asks in later conversations how the user is feeling.”

  • Uber disruption? Cory Doctorow tweets from FOO Camp: “Building a co-op Uber alternative that returned Uber’s share of the $$ to riders/drivers is ‘as hard as making Linux…” and adds, “Therefore, the existence of GNU/Linux proves that building a co-op, open alternative to Uber is eminently do-able.”

  • One of Uber’s top New York political consultants, Bradley Tusk, Mike Bloomberg’s former campaign manager, is starting Tusk Ventures, “a political consulting firm geared toward helping start-ups work with—and in some cases, beat back—government regulators,” reports Dino Grandoni for the New York Times.

  • Ideological disruption: If you’ve ever wondered what exactly is so grating about the “Aspen Ideas Festival” and all the other happy chatter that warbles down from places like the Aspen Institute all summer long, read the text of a speech author Anand Giridharadas gave at the Aspen Institute’s Action Forum last week. A tidbit:

    The Aspen Consensus, in a nutshell, is this: the winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm. The Aspen Consensus holds that capitalism’s rough edges must be sanded and its surplus fruit shared, but the underlying system must never be questioned. The Aspen Consensus says, “Give back,” which is of course a compassionate and noble thing. But, amid the $20 million second homes and $4,000 parkas of Aspen, it is gauche to observe that giving back is also a Band-Aid that winners stick onto the system that has privileged them, in the conscious or subconscious hope that it will forestall major surgery to that system—surgery that might threaten their privileges.

  • Civic disruption: Chicago has announced a new system using public data to prioritize inspections restaurants most likely to have health code problems, “helping them resolve any issues as quickly as possible and prevent foodborne illnesses before they ever begin,” according to a press release from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office. The system was created as party of a $1 million grant to Chicago from the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge.

  • The NYC City Council Speaker’s Office is hosting this week’s Civic Hacknight here Wednesday at Civic Hall with BetaNYC, with a focus on participatory budgeting and civic engagement.

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REACHING

REACHING

Sanders streaming into a house party near you; there were no privacy advocates in House subcommittee meeting on the Internet of Things; and more.

  • Cryptowars, continued: A coalition of privacy, civil liberties, and internet freedom groups have generated more than 6.1 million faxes to Members of Congress from internet users opposed to the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), Fight for the Future announced yesterday. (The faxes are being sent electronically, so no trees are being harmed in the process, FFTF says.)

  • On Medium, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) explains why CISA won’t protect anyone from hackers.

  • Kate Kaye of AdAge reports on a House subcommittee hearing earlier this week on the Internet of Things that “consisted entirely of representatives from industry groups,” without even one privacy advocate. “it comes as no surprise,” she writes, “that the general consensus among witnesses was that innovators should be free to innovate without the threat of overreaching privacy legislation getting in the way.”

  • Tech and the presidentials: Classified emails on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server had information from five U.S. intelligence agencies, Marisa Taylor, Greg Gordon, and Anita Kumar report for McClatchy DC.

  • The Clinton campaign is pretty upset at the New York Times for how it bungled its coverage of the non-“criminal referral” story last week, as this letter from its communications director Jennifer Palmieri to Times executive editor Dean Baquet shows.

  • Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign says more than 100,000 supporters attended more than 3,500 house parties Wednesday night, all listening to the candidate via a video live-stream, Nick Corasaniti reports for the New York Times. “Attendees at the house parties were asked to text a number to opt in and show interest,” he notes.

  • Money talks: Former President Jimmy Carter tells talk radio host Thom Hartman that thanks to unlimited money in politics, America is “just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congressmembers.”

  • GenderAvengers: Ainsley O’Connell reports for Fast Company on Quibb founder Sandi MacPherson’s 50-50 pledge effort to get conference organizers to commit to equalize their numbers of male and female speakers.

  • Government opening: Boston Mayor Martin Walsh announced his city’s new “Open and Protected Data Policy,” opening more city data to the public including parking meter usage info, firearm recovery data, wifi usage data, recycling info and library user counts.

  • This is civic tech: Happy Birthday to Crisis Text Line, which turns two tomorrow. It now processes more than 20,000 messages per day.

  • The city of Palo Alto, California, is starting to use a new digital commenting tool built by Peak Democracy to further engage residents in helping update its comprehensive plan, Susan Schena reports for Patch.

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SOCIAL ORDERS

SOCIAL ORDERS

Uber’s promise to maintain social order; easier targeting of voters on Facebook; and more.

  • Cryptowars, continued: Implicitly rebuking their current colleagues, three former top American national security officials, Mike McConnell, Michael Chertoff and William Lynn, write in the Washington Post in support of “ubiquitous encryption at the device, server and enterprise level without building in means for government monitoring,” saying this most serves “the greater public good.”

  • Annals of disruptive tech: In the Washington Post, the Fletcher School’s Bhaskar Chakravorti explains how Uber is navigating the challenge of winning the Chinese market. This paragraph is key: “no prescription for success in the Chinese market can be complete without a plan for managing the true source of political power: the Chinese government. As protests by taxi drivers erupted in multiple cities across China, Uber recently acknowledged its commitment to ‘maintain social order’ by using its GPS data to track drivers and their locations near protests and canceling their Uber contracts if they were near such protests—a strong signal to the government that its cache of data could be used for the ‘social order maintaining’ objectives of the state.”

  • Alex Rosenblat of the Data & Society Institute has a fascinating piece up on Motherboard detailing some of oddities of Uber’s ecosystem, including phantom cars that a user often sees when they open the app (to entice them to think drivers are close by?), and the strategies drivers and passengers alike use to take advantage of (or avoid) surge pricing.

  • Baby you can drive my car: Andy Greenberg of Wired has another scoop on a security researcher who has figured out how to perform a “man in the middle” attack on GM’s OnStar RemoteLink system, enabling him to track a target car, unlock it, trigger the horn and alarm and even start its engine. GM confirmed to Greenberg that it is working on a fix.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Ashley Parker reports for the New York Times on how Facebook “has been working to expand its digital domination in the political realm.” One critical innovation sure to be useful in 2016 “allows a campaign to upload its voter file—a list of those they hope will turn out to vote or can be persuaded to do so—directly to Facebook, where it can target those users.”

  • Government opening: The Library of Congress has added several useful new features to Congress.gov, including a tool that reads a bill summary out loud to a user and the ability to search within member profile and committee pages, librarian Robert Brammer blogs.

  • Open government groups in South Africa are challenging their country’s role in the international Open Government Partnership. In October, South Africa will become chair of the OGP, but civil society groups are facing “increasing surveillance, intimidation and censorship of activists and the media,” several leading organizations argue in an open letter.

  • Activistas: GenderAvenger is out with a new video (and mobile app) aimed at combating the all too frequent excuses conference and panel organizers give for failing to include meaningful numbers of women in their events. Here’s a recent example of GenderAvenger engaging Launch Festival founder Jason Calacanis for only have 24 percent women at his March event. And here’s a more promising interchange with John Koetsier of MobileBeat, who tells GenderAvenger “Thanks for the eyes on it. We’re trying, and yes, we still suck.”

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