Unpredictability

The hashtag #stopIslam is trending because thousands of people are criticizing its use in the wake of the Brussels attacks, Caitlin Dewey reports for the Washington Post.

This is civic tech: 18F’s V. David Zvenyach and Andre Francisco report on progress they are making with Code for America to help California’s Child Welfare System streamline its RFP process for replacing its case management system from 1500 pages to just ten.

The Detroit Water Project, which has helped crowdfund payments for people at risk of having their water cut off, has relaunched as The Human Utility.

Tech and politics: Bundlers rejoice! Former Obama fundraiser Steve Spinner’s company RevUp Software is rolling out an algorithm that optimizes high-dollar fundraising by making it easier for people to mine their relationships and discover new potential donors, as Joshua Green reports for Bloomberg. Investors in the company include Pierre Omidyar, Reid Hoffman, and Sean Parker. Green writes:

After a year of beta testing, RevUp recently launched its data analytics software, into which anyone—candidate, staff, volunteer fundraiser—can upload a list of personal contacts from Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, or other sources, along with the candidate or cause for which he is raising money. The software then spiders through records aggregated from thousands of public and private websites and databases, checking the names against everything from dozens of public-election databases (such as the Federal Election Commission’s), to political groups (the Federalist Society, the Sierra Club), to thousands of charities and nonprofits (Boys & Girls Clubs, the Ms. Foundation for Women), even to colleges and universities. The information this journey yields is rich enough to determine a person’s political leanings and even their past support for specific candidates, thus eliminating the possibility of awkward, friendship-wrecking phone calls. What spits out the other end is one’s contacts ranked by their ability and likelihood to give, whether or not they’ve donated to a campaign before.

Oddly, Spinner thinks that his tool, which sounds like it will indeed make it easier for politicians and bundlers to figure out which people to tap for donations, will reduce the time they spend raising money and allow them to be more “civic-minded.” That’s like thinking that if you widen a highway, there will be less traffic on it. With RevUp, the arms race for money will just get worse. And politicians will be just as money-minded as before.

Longtime digital strategist Peter Dauo, a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton, says he is planning legal action against people who have been defaming him online.

Trump watch: Asked by Bloomberg Politics about using nuclear weapons against ISIS, Donald Trump says, “I’m never going to rule anything out—I wouldn’t want to say. Even if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t want to tell you that because at a minimum, I want them to think maybe we would use them…. We need unpredictability. We don’t know who these people are.”

Last night the mudslinging between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz reached another low point, with Trump threatening to “spill the beans” on Cruz’s wife Heidi in response to an anti-Trump online ad (made by Make America Awesome again, a PAC run by Liz Mair) that includes a nude photo of Trump’s wife Melania that was originally shot for Britsh GQ in 2000, as Brendan O’Connor recounts for Gawker. (The ad is being micro targeted at Mormon women on Instagram, in case you were wondering.)