Going Backwards

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump talked foreign policy with Maggie Haberman and David Sanger of The New York Times, and here is what he had to say about America’s capabilities in cyber-warfare, verbatim:

First off, we’re so obsolete in cyber. We’re the ones that sort of were very much involved with the creation, but we’re so obsolete, we just seem to be toyed with by so many different countries, already. And we don’t know who’s doing what. We don’t know who’s got the power, who’s got that capability, some people say it’s China, some people say it’s Russia. But certainly cyber has to be a, you know, certainly cyber has to be in our thought process, very strongly in our thought process. Inconceivable that, inconceivable the power of cyber. But as you say, you can take out, you can take out, you can make countries nonfunctioning with a strong use of cyber. I don’t think we’re there. I don’t think we’re as advanced as other countries are, and I think you probably would agree with that. I don’t think we’re advanced, I think we’re going backwards in so many different ways. I think we’re going backwards with our military. I certainly don’t think we are, we move forward with cyber, but other countries are moving forward at a much more rapid pace. We are frankly not being led very well in terms of the protection of this country.

Questions about the security of Hillary Clinton’s private email server appear to be at the heart of the FBI’s ongoing investigation, reports Robert O’Harrow Jr. for the Washington Post. When Clinton became Secretary of State, she insisted on continuing to use her private Blackberry, even as State Department security officials struggled to find a way to secure it, he reports. But they were never told about her private server and took no steps to protect it against intrusion. In addition to determining what classified material flowed through it, the FBI is also trying to determine if it was hacked. A total of 147 agents “have been deployed to run down leads,” O’Harrow reports.

This is civic tech: Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is behind an animated civics education game called “Win the White House,” and as Natasha Singer reports for the New York Times, it was played by 250,000 middle school students in March alone. O’Connor founded iCivics, the maker of 19 such free online games, in 2009.

Brave new world: Longtime tech nerd (and Civic Hall friend) Andrew McLaughlin of Medium offers a smart way for Facebook to reboot its floundering “Free Basics” program: stop picking what content can make it to users and stop running the traffic to the service through its servers.

Deep in this fascinating profile of new Google CEO Sundar Pichai by Mat Honan, you’ll find that the company is taking a very different approach to bringing the Internet to places like India: it’s paying for free Wi-Fi at railway stations and figuring out how to make Android phones work with little or no data. It’s also rolling out support for non-Hindi speakers, who make up the bulk of India’s population.

If you are a millennial who has to work with lots of baby boomers, this op-ed by Ann Friedman in the Los Angeles Times is filled with many great tips on how to manage that complex situation. “If you do find yourself demonstrating how to use a new digital tool,” she writes, “NEVER say, ‘This is so easy.’ Recognize that baby boomers have a lot of fear and anger about technology, and tread gently.”