Archipelagos

This is civic tech: Jose Casal reports on the city of San Jose, California’s weekend of participatory budgeting.

Suzanne Bearne reports for The Guardian on how techies in different parts of Europe are mobilizing to help incoming refugees.

James Fallows never mentions civic tech in his cover essay for The Atlantic about “How America is Putting Itself Back Together,” but in my humble opinion you can’t read his story about the economic turnarounds under way in dozens of mid-sized cities around the country and not sense the role of people using tech for the public good. As he writes, “America thinks of itself as having a few islands of tech creativity; I now see it as an archipelago of start-ups and reinventions.”

Boston is looking to hire a Chief Data Officer.

Crypto-wars, continued: As the clash between the U.S. government and Apple heats up, Fight for the Future is organizing rallies at Apple stores around the country for this Tuesday at 5:30pm under the slogan “Don’t Break Our Phones.“

FBI Director James Comey releases a statement Sunday night: “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land.”

Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA), whose district includes Apple’s home base, writes in support of the company.

Tech and politics: TargetSmart, the voter targeting company, pulled the voter information on 7 million Spotify users to create two sets of Top 20 lists for “blue,” “red,” and “purple” (unaffiliated) voters, on behalf of Bloomberg Business. Rihanna and Justin Bieber top all three lists.

Black Lives Matter Twitter activist DeRay Mckesson, who is now running for mayor of Baltimore, wouldn’t be where he is today without a lot of quiet support from Teach for America, Drew Franklin writes for Alternet.

Culture drives politics: Longtime defense correspondent Fred Kaplan explains how the movie War Games led then-President Ronald Reagan to push the military to review the issue of cyber-security.