Homemade

This is civic tech: Say hello to Data USA, a free and open source hub for the visualization of U.S. public data, built and launched yesterday by the MIT Media Lab and Deloitte.

Here’s U.S. Digital Service co-founder Haley Van Dyck’s TED Talk about how she and her colleagues are transforming how the government delivers critical services and saving millions of dollars. (If you attended the 2015 edition of our Personal Democracy Forum, you got to see an equally good version of this talk nine months early at one-twentieth the ticket price. I’m just ‘saying.)

Related (sadly): It looks like the TSA Randomizer app, which causes an iPad to randomly produce a right arrow or a left arrow to direct people in line at airport security, cost the government close to $50,000, which it paid to IBM, according to this FOIA request from Kevin Burke. [Updated. The $1.4 million number previously cited was a larger contract with IBM which included the randomizer app.]

Congrats to Alexander Howard, longtime Personal Democracy Media friend and sometime contributing writer, who is joining the Sunlight Foundation as a senior analyst.

Tech and politics: “Not one of the 2016 presidential candidates stands out when it comes to ensuring that common sense technology and entrepreneurship policy will prevail,” Bradley Tusk (Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 campaign manager) writes in TechCrunch.

Trump watch: An investigation by Politico reporters Kenneth Vogel and Brianna Gurciullo finds that Donald Trump “has assembled a privately funded security and intelligence force with a far wider reach than other campaigns’ private security operations: tracking and rooting out protesters, patrolling campaign events and supplementing [his] Secret Service protection.”

Age of transparency: Pressure is building on Iceland’s Prime Minister to quit, in the wake of stories from the Panama Papers detailing how he and his wife have circumvented laws requiring the disclosure of assets held overseas, as Steven Erlanger reports for the New York Times.

So far, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which is managing the leaked documents, has only been able to identify 211 people with American addresses in the data, but that is only from recent years, not the full 11.5 million files from the leak, Fusion’s investigative unit, one the of the participants in the reporting, explains. It’s worth noting that corporate secrecy in Nevada is even less transparent than the British Virgin Islands, and as longtime Congressional anti-corruption investigator Jack Blum points out, the Panamanian law firm at the center of the leak, “Mossack Fonseca had a subsidiary to create American offshore corporations in Nevada.”

Brave new world: “On May 15th, my house will stop working. My landscape lighting will stop turning on and off, my security lights will stop reacting to motion, and my home made vacation burglar deterrent will stop working. This is a conscious intentional decision by Google/Nest.” That’s Arlo Gilbert, writing on Medium about the pending shutdown of his Revolv home automation device. Nest bought Revolv in 2014. “Imagine if you bought a Dell computer and Dell then informed you that when your warranty ends your computer will power down. Imagine if Apple put out a new policy that not only won’t they replace the device for defects, but they will actually be bricking your phone 12 months after purchase.”