Blocked

Today’s unfortunately necessary civic tech must-read: Our good friend Deanna Zandt has written a detailed primer on Medium on what to do if you are getting harassed online. Complete with easy instructions on how to use BlockTogether.com, how to protect yourself on Facebook and Instagram, and how to deal with being doxxed.

Breaking: Longtime digital rights activist and New America fellow Rebecca MacKinnon is launching the Ranking Digital Rights project this morning at 10am ET with an event at Civic Hall (that I’m moderating) which you can watch live. Writing for The Guardian, Sam Thielman previews the report, which scrutinizes the practices of eight top internet companies and eight top telecommunications companies. “If this was a test, nearly everyone failed,” MacKinnon says. “No company clearly explains whether users can control what the company itself collects and shares about users,” the report’s executive summary notes. “Furthermore, half of the companies do not explain whether users can access the information the company holds on them, and seven companies do not provide detail on how long they hold user information.”

Endgame: Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig has suspended his quixotic bid for the White House, blaming an arbitrary rules change by the Democratic National Committee that now requires candidates to be at least at one percent in at least three national polls six weeks prior to the next debate. Lessig blogs, “I was eager and happy to ask for support for the campaign when there was a prospect of getting into the debates. When there wasn’t, I couldn’t in good faith make that ask. When that’s true, a campaign must end. ” No word on whether his campaign has any money left to refund to its donors.

On the more hopeful side: Seattle is voting today on Initiative 122, known as the “Honest Elections” initiative, which would tighten campaign finance and lobbying rules and also set up a new system of “democracy vouchers” giving local citizens the ability to direct up to $100 in public funds to candidates of their choosing, Jack Horowiz reports for Mic.com. If enacted, the system would incentivize candidates to spend more time wooing ordinary voters, even poor ones.

Related: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the Citizens United decision that let corporations spend unlimited amounts on elections, now admits that his expectation that internet-powered disclosure would deter corruption is “not working the way it should,” the Huffington Post’s Paul Blumenthal reports. As Blumenthal archly noted, Kennedy “should have known that his imagined disclosure regime was not working before the decision, either.”

New on Civicist: Our Jessica McKenzie reports on Maplight’s plans to expand its “Voter’s Edge” voter guide from California to New York and Illinois in 2016.

No more open-washing? Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, writes that the Open Government Partnership—a signature initiative of the Obama Administration—should make press freedom “a sine qua non” for participation, not an aspirational goal. Amen to that.