Scalable

Tech and politics: Zack Exley and Becky Bond, two of the digital organizing veterans currently serving as national advisors to the Bernie Sanders campaign, give a long interview in The Nation to some guy named Sifry about their open-source, distributed, “Big Organizing” model. Says Exley: “Our task was to turn massive amounts of enthusiasm into disciplined volunteer teams capable of accomplishing real objectives set forward by the campaign. And we had to do this before a field structure was put in place that was based on the old, less scalable model!….internet-based campaigns tend to fail to achieve their objectives when they can’t leverage the full capacity of all the people who raise their hands and say I want to be involved. It’s one thing to crowd-source funding for movement organizing. It’s another thing to crowd-source the organizing itself and have valuable work get done at scale by tens of thousands of committed volunteers.”

The scale produced so far: 60,000 campaign events run by volunteers, 22,000 phonebanks run by volunteers, 600 “Barnstorms” filled with hundreds of volunteers, hundreds of Slack teams with tens of thousands of members. (One could argue that Slack is actually the breakout tech tool of 2016.)

As of March 13, as Exley and Bond report, the Sanders campaign machine has made 36 million voter contact calls, running at a pace of one million per night for the last few weeks. (In 2012, the Obama campaign said it made 150 million calls and door-knocks over the entire cycle, built on a staff of 4000.)

The other big platform for Sanders organizing is Facebook, where he has about 165 Facebook Pages with 7.3 million likes, and nearly 200 Facebook Groups with more than 358,000 members; Clinton’s numbers are roughly half that.

When progressives complain that NationBuilder lets anyone use its voter engagement toolset and voter files, ask them how they feel about progressive Democrat Tim Canova who is being denied access to the VAN voter file and database because he is running against an incumbent, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. (And he sure isn’t happy about it.)

Raising eyebrows, Chelsea Clinton is headlining a fundraiser for her mother’s campaign at the home of Elizabeth Holmes, the embattled founder of blood-testing startup Theranos, Noah Kulwin reports for Re/Code.

It’s been almost two years since a New York City council member introduced legislation requiring the Board of Elections to build the capacity to send election notifications via text and email, but as our Jessica McKenzie reports for Civicist, it could still take a long while to implement.

Here’s our Christine Cupaiuolo with the latest global debate news plus a close look at how tech companies are involved in political debates here. (To get our biweekly Rethinking Debates newsletter, subscribe here.)

Trump watch: Here are some worrisome signs that Trump supporters are starting to talk about bringing guns to rallies and polling places and taking steps towards forming some kind of Trump militia. If you are trying to follow along in the original German or Italian, once Trump starts embracing a para-military to guard his rallies and spread his movement he will have leveled up to full fascist.

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci went to Trump’s rally in Fayetteville, and she tells Christopher Woolf of PRI, “It’s almost a text-book case of the rise of an authoritarian populist movement.” But, noting a lack of organization at the rally, she adds, “the aftermath of the rally made me think, no, this is so dependent on one person’s charismatic connection with a crowd, there’s no organization behind it. So I don’t think he’s going to win the presidency.”

Brave new world: A 19-year-old British programmer has built a bot that uses algorithms to handle questions about parking-ticket appeals there, generating an appeal letter that users then can mail to the appropriate court, Leanna Garfield reports for Business Insider. Since launching in late 2015, it has successfully appealed $3 million in tickets. (h/t Elizabeth Stewart)

A few days ago, Sean McDonald of Frontline SMS published a paper with the Center for Internet & Society of India called “Ebola: A Big Data Disaster.” Its focus is the unregulated use of call detail records, which were used to perform migration analysis and contact tracing without user consent. The Responsible Data Forum is holding a community call today at 11am ET to discuss the issues raised.

Crypto-wars, continued: Former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke tells NPR’s David Greene that the NSA could have cracked open the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, but the FBI is more interested in setting a legal precedent compelling Apple to do so.

Marcy Wheeler does a close reading of the government’s arguments in the ongoing court battle with Apple and argues that the Department of Justice isn’t just trying to compel Apple to write new code to crack the phone, it is also clearly threatening to go after Apple’s source code.

The British government is pressing forward on its proposed Investigatory Powers bill, which is undergoing its second reading in Parliament now, and Silkie Carlo of Liberty HQ writes that if it passes, “The State will be able to read billions of our communications every day…Our internet history will be stored an open to hundreds of public bodies…” and encryption will be drastically curtailed.