Happening Here

Tech and politics: “This election, almost all of the candidates’ websites are terrible, the digital equivalents of an NPR pledge drive: boring, longwinded, ultimately off-putting, and indistinguishable from all the others,” writes journalist Jim Saksa for Slate. That is, he says, “Except for Donald Trump’s….It is direct, not bogged down by details, promises everything, and asks for basically nothing—except your vote.”

Writing for Contently, Shane Snow examines the full technology stack used by each of the remaining major-party candidates for president.

The Associated Press has launched “Election Buzz,” a partnership with Google and Twitter that aims to show how interest in the presidential campaign is fluctuating over time and across topics.

Trump watch: Here’s a long and essential essay by Vox’s Amanda Taub on what political science has to say about the rise of authoritarian voters in America.

Comedian John Oliver may have, at least temporarily, punched through Donald Trump’s veneer: his parodic take on Donald Drumpf, making fun of the Republican frontrunner’s original family name, is the second-most-searched-for candidate on Google since Sunday, just behind the real guy and ahead of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Justin Wolfers reports for The Upshot.

Google searches for “How can I move to Canada” also spiked last night, Brian Ries reports for Mashable.

With the #NeverTrump hashtag taking off online, I argue on Civicist that this is a “MoveOn Moment” for Republicans—if they’ll seize it and start organizing the tens of thousands of people using the hashtag.

Crypto-wars, continued: The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing yesterday on encryption, security and privacy, and FBI Director James Comey came in for some tough questioning from representatives on both sides of the aisle, Sarah Jeong reports for Vice’s Motherboard.

Mathbabe (and Civic Hall member) Cathy O’Neill says that instead of rushing to defend Apple in this fight, privacy advocates should be insisting that the government protect our privacy. She writes:

I want to talk about demanding a government that will acknowledge that its duty is to protect privacy while investigating risks. Right now the FBI is falling far short, trivializing the risk to the rest of us when backdoors are created and used at scale. They have made an internal calculation that the trade-offs are well worth the risks, without really having a conversation with the public in which they even measure the risks. And those risks are our risks.

A top Facebook executive in Brazil was arrested yesterday and held for a day in connection with the company’s WhatsApp subsidiary telling federal authorities there that it could not intercept instant messages tied to a drug investigation, Dom Phillips and Ellen Nakashima report for the Washington Post. WhatsApp has 100 million users in Brazil. Its messages are not stored on Facebook servers and are encrypted while in transit.

Internet freedom group Access Now says the arrest “sets a dangerous and disproportionate precedent for corporate liability and could slow the deployment of strong encryption technologies, which are essential to the privacy and safety of all users in Brazil and beyond.”

This is civic tech: The “burgeoning” civic tech community in Toronto gets profiled by Catherine McIntyre in Torontoist. Open data, regular hack nights, snow plows—looks like they have plenty of the right ingredients! (And the city is studying whether to build a Civic Hall modeled on us!)

Our Jessica McKenzie reports for Civicist on Liberation.Network, a new platform developed by the group Movement Netlab, which is aimed at helping decentralized movements coordinate their activities.