Server Time

Tech and politics: The State Department’s inspector general has issued an 83-page report that is very critical of Hillary Clinton‘s email practices while secretary of state, Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger report for The Washington Post.

Politico’s Josh Gerstein, who has done the best sustained reporting on the Clinton email mess, points out that the official report “flatly rejects one of her core defenses in the controversy—that she was playing by the rules.”

Three-quarters of the federal government’s $80 billion tech budget is spent maintaining “museum-ready computer systems,” the AP’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports, citing a new GAO report to Congress.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post points out that there’s a connection between Clinton’s private email server and the government’s out-of-date technology. Which is true, but not an excuse for her decision to skirt the State Department’s systems, he notes.

Damn you, auto-complete! Politico’s Kenneth Vogel and Marc Caputo report that the Donald Trump campaign is seeking the help of the Republican National Committee to “work up information on HRC/Whitewater as soon as possible.” How do they know? Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks accidentally copied Caputo on the correspondence (she meant to be replying to a Trump campaign adviser named Michael Caputo).

Helaine Olen explains in Slate why robocalls are out of control, a dozen years after the launch of the federal Do Not Call Registry. The reason, she says, isn’t that the government program isn’t being enforced; it’s that the telcos aren’t giving their customers free and easy access to technology that would block the annoying calls. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) has a bill called the Repeated Objectionable Bothering of Consumers on Phones Act (the RoboCop Act) that would fix that problem.

Anti-abortion groups are using mobile geo-fencing to micro-target messages at women visiting abortion clinics, Sharon Coutts reports for Rewire. The groups can also use the same method to obtain the names and addresses seeking care at those clinics.

This is civic tech: CivicMakers Lawrence Grodeska has a nice write-up on a day-long training session for participants in San Francisco’s Start-up in Residence program, which is working to embed innovative start-ups with city departments.

Civic Lab Barcelona says it’s fighting against political apathy and alienation.

Writing for Broken Toilets, Paulina Bustos and Adriana Elizondo of Civica Digital of Mexico report on how civic hackers across Latin America are trying to build solutions to public problems using open data.

Life in Facebookistan: Felix Salmon warns in Fusion that Peter Thiel‘s deep-pocketed campaign against Gawker may “pervert” philanthropy going forward, specifically noting Thiel’s influence on Facebook’s millionaire Mark Zuckerberg. (Thief is a Facebook board member.)