Sign-offs

Crypto-wars, continued: A federal judge in New York has given Apple a major legal victory, ruling against the government’s request in a drug case that it be forced to help extract data from a locked iPhone, Glenn Greenwald and Jenna McLaughlin report for The Intercept. The ruling suggests the government is over-reaching in its demand that Apple unlock the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters.

The ACLU’s chief technologist, Chris Soghoian, explains in the Washington Post why the FBI’s insistence on forcing Apple to write software to crack open a terrorist’s iPhone imperils the cybersecurity regime that now protects most of our software.

Birth of a movement: Academics Deen Freelon, Charlton Mcilwaine and Meredith Clark have published an incredibly detailed in-depth study of the Black Lives Matter online movement, derived from examining more than 40 million tweets using hashtags related to the movement, 100,000 related web links and interviews with top BLM activists and allies. One fascinating finding: while the term “Black Lives Matter” was first used in July 2013 after the George Zimmerman verdict in the Trayvon Martin killing, and it was used again in the wake of the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown the following summer, it first penetrated beyond activist circles around the announcement that the St. Louis grand jury would not indict police officer Darren Wilson. That day, use of the hashtag soared to more than 103,000. The report breaks the rise of #BlackLivesMatter into several distinct episodic sections, each one with its own social network diagram describing the involvement and connections between grouping like black celebrities, mainstream news, the mostly white left, the multiracial left, Anonymous, and conservatives opposed to the movement.

Related: Black Lives Matter Twitter activist DeRay Mckesson has hired Revolution Messaging, the same digital firm working for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, to handle his online fundraising, Darren Sands reports for BuzzFeed.

Tech and politics: Bernie Sanders is a “micromanager,” Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetti report for Politico. “For most of the campaign, there wasn’t an email, mailer or anything bigger than a tweet that went out without his sign-off.” Their story on Sanders’ chaotic rise makes clear that his team is set on going all the way to the Democratic convention.

Trump watch: Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle asked online for lifelong Republicans to write her if they were joining the #NeverTrump movement and the hundreds of responses she got are quite amazing. (Someone should start a Tumblr for these kinds of statements: “Donald Trump Scares Me So Much, I’m Voting for a Democrat for President.” And since McArdle posted the entire trove of emails she received, anonymized, maybe someone will do that.)

On the other hand, close to 20,000 registered Democrats in Massachusetts have switched their party registration to Republican since the beginning of January, Matt Stout reports for the Boston Herald, a trend that Secretary of State William Galvin is most likely connected to the “Trump phenomenon.”

Media matters: Medium is trying something new: a two-week long community-wide conversation on the topic of criminal justice reform, followed by a live-blogged town hall on March 9-10. Weber Shandwick’s Mike Connery offers some commentary on the initiative, suggesting that it could be valuable if it somehow punctures the filter bubble around crime issues.

Lila Tretikov, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, resigned from that position on Thursday, Joe Mullin reports for ArsTechnica. The foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has been rocked with controversy recently over internal conflicts and community complaints about a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to create a “knowledge engine” to improve how the site handles search.