No Pony in Here

Crypto-wars, continued: Curious how Apple CEO Tim Cook came to take such a strong position in favor of privacy and encryption? Read Katie Brenner and Nicole Perlroth’s story in the New York Times.

Asked about the clash between Apple and the FBI during last night’s Democratic town hall session in Nevada, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders refused to take a side, claiming that there was a “middle-ground” to be found in the debate, as Jenna McLaughlin reports for The Intercept. This is known as the “magic pony” solution, she notes.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr (R-NC), is drafting legislation to criminalize a company’s refusal to aid government decryption efforts, Cyrus Farivar of ArsTechnica reports.

Mark Surman, Mozilla Foundation’s executive director, explains why Mozilla is launching an “Encryption Matters” campaign. Their first video in the effort is pretty great.

The Intercept’s Micah Lee explains how ordinary iPhone users can upgrade their phone’s passcode to make it virtually unbreakable.

Building on the Library Freedom Projects work, several New Hampshire state legislators have introduced a bill that would enshrine the right of public libraries in the state to run “cryptographic privacy platforms” like Tor, as Patrick Howell O’Neill reports for The Daily Dot.

Iceland’s Pirate Party continues to top public opinion polls there, and Rohan Smith explains why for News.com.au.

Media matters: A new census of fact-checking and promise-tracking initiatives has found 96 projects in 37 countries, a big jump from just a year ago, Alexios Mantzarlis reports for Poynter.

Jose Antonio Vargas, the co-founder of Define American, has launched a new project: #EmergingUS, a media platform that will emphasize America’s multiethnic present and future. After initially developing it for the Los Angeles Times, he’s taking its assets to his own company with the paper’s approval. The journalism crowdfunding platform is giving $500K in matching funds towards the initial $1 million Vargas is seeking to launch the site, Shan Wang reports for NiemanLab.

Apologies for two errors in yesterday’s First Post: I mistakenly described ActBlue as a for-profit company when it is in fact a nonprofit. And I also erred in transcribed some data from the Pew Research Center about where Americans get their news about the presidential election. While 37 percent of American adults indeed report that Facebook is a source for recent election news, local TV news is the top source (57 percent), cable TV news is second (54 percent), then national nightly network TV news (49 percent), followed by radio (44 percent). In terms of the news sites considered “most helpful” to learning something about the election, cable TV news ranked highest at 24 percent, followed by local TV news (14 percent), radio (11 percent), national nightly network television news (10 percent) and then Facebook (9 percent). Credit to John Kaehny of Reinvent Albany for alerting me to the latter mistake. The post has been updated accordingly.