-
Tracking NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as he does one virtual appearance to another, from Princeton and Stanford to the Swedish Parliament, the New York Times Scott Shanes reports that he’s neither a public outcast nor fully accepted by security officials in his home country.
-
A federal judge is giving the State Department one week to schedule the “rolling” disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s emails after a challenge by news organizations unwilling to wait till next January for their release, Matthew Weaver and Ben Jacobs report for the Guardian.
-
Taking questions in Iowa from reporters, Clinton said of her emails, “Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do,” Josh Gerstein and Gabriel Debenedetti report for Politico.
-
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) does a Reddit AMA.
-
Longtime reporter Elizabeth Drew takes to the New York Review of Books to catalog the ways that “dark money” from billionaires and other wealthy donors now dominate American politics, in the process taking a sideswipe at self-styled campaign finance reformer Lawrence Lessig, whose activities and proposals she calls “unhelpful.”
-
President Obama’s @POTUS Twitter account, launched yesterday, quickly attracted many vitriolic racist comments, David Badash reports for the New Civil Rights Movement.
-
In Civicist, our Jessica McKenzie follows up with some of the organizers of the People’s Climate March to see what happened to the platform they built to support decentralized network organizing. She reports that critical support for the platform has been withdrawn, in spite of the fact that it could have been useful for building out the climate movement that the People’s Climate March was supposed to fuel.
- Last weekend, Nathan Freitas, the founder of the Guardian Project, asked a group of “tool developers, designers, user advocates, security experts, tinkerers and curious humans” to spend two days at Harvard’s Berkman Center to wrestle with this question: “If there was suddenly no internet, what would we do?” The answers, which included using F-Droid and App Swap to transfer apps between phones, using Commotion to build a five-hop mesh network across the campus, and using the Gilga app to send messages between phones using only Bluetooth and WifiDirect, were mind-blowing. Can someone please give Freitas a genius grant?
-
The Farmers Business Network, which helps American farmers share data directly with each other and benchmark best practices, outsmarting big agriculture conglomerates in the process, is taking $15 million in funding led by Google Ventures, Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired.
-
NuCivic, the open-source solution provider for governments and nonprofits in need of help managing their open data, app store and hacking platforms, is looking to hire a project manager.
May 20, 2015