One of Those Moments

Tech and politics: Using a Facebook event page, Google Docs, and WhatsApp, students at the University of Illinois at Chicago mobilized in less than a week to protest Donald Trump’s planned appearance on their campus Friday, as Keith O’Brien details for Politico. MoveOn.org and Black Lives Matter also helped organize support, as Kate Linthicum and Kurtis Lee report for the Los Angeles Times. An online petition against the Trump rally started by a UIC graduate student garnered more than 51,000 signatures.

Here’s something I didn’t know, per Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times: “The Trump campaign registers people to attend its rallies on Eventbrite.com and asks only for routine information—name, address and cell number.” (More background here.)

Sasha Issenberg digs into the details of the Republican delegate selection process and discovers all kinds of machinations under way that could undermine Donald Trump’s campaign. For example, in many states the actual delegates aren’t picked by the candidate that they are supposedly pledged to, they’re picked by state conventions or executive committees. Issenberg reports that at Ted Cruz’s Houston headquarters, “a six-person team overseen by political operatives, lawyers, and data analysts is effectively re-enacting the primary calendar, often with the aim of placing double agents in Trump slates.”

Paul Hilder reports on Bernie Sanders’ burgeoning volunteer-powered field organizing for The Guardian.

The Free Press Action Fund has been scouring the presidential candidates’ statements to grade them on their tech policies, and as Sam Thielman reports for The Guardian, Bernie Sanders scores best and Donald Trump scores worst.

Two years into New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, the pieces of his tech policy are still coming together, reports Miranda Neubauer for Capital New York. Among the local lights quoted: city CTO Minerva Tantoco, Noel Hidalgo of BetaNYC, city councilors Ben Kallos and Helen Rosenthal, and Erik Grimmelman of the New York Technology Council.

Crypto-wars, continued: Compared to the debate set off by Edward Snowden about phone metadata, the current fight over unlocking iPhone encryption is hitting home, report Michael Shear, David Sanger and Katie Benner for the New York Times. Among the privacy activists interviewed: Emi Kane, Cindy Cohn, Tiffiniy Cheng and Malkia Cyril, who gets the last and best word: “This is one of those moments that defines what’s next. Will technology companies protect the privacy of their users or will they do work for the U.S. government? You can’t do both.”

Facebook, Google, and Snapchat are all working on increased privacy technology for their services, Danny Yadron reports for The Guardian.

President Obama went to SXSW to talk about tech and civic engagement, but it was his remarks about the encryption debate, taking the side of law enforcement, that got the attention of the press.

Here’s the core message the President wanted to deliver on the engagement front, via Mikey Dickerson of the U.S. Digital Service: We still need more techies to go work for government.

Brave new world: A man who reportedly just wanted peace and quiet on his commute has been arrested for using a handheld jamming device to block other people’s mobile service on the Chicago subway, David Kravets reports for Ars Technica.