Voting Fears

Tech and politics: U.S. intelligence agencies are worried that Russia is using cyber-tools to hack systems used in the American political process, Dana Priest, Ellen Nakashima, and Tom Hamburger report for the Washington Post. A confidential “flash” alert sent by the FBI to state election officials said that investigators had found attempts to penetrate election systems in several states, they report.

Speaking to reporters on her campaign plane yesterday, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said, “I’m really concerned about the credible reports about Russian government interference in our elections,” Politico’s Annie Karni reports.

Here’s CNN’s Brain Stelter zeroing in on rightwing websites spreading lies about voter fraud.

And here’s DefenseOne’s Patrick Tucker with five steps to make U.S. elections less hackable.

Media habits: As more Americans shift their digital consumption habits from desktop to mobile, Harvard Shorenstein Center fellow Johanna Dunaway cogently argues in a new report that this is very bad news:

The move to mobile … raises challenges for democracy. Mobile has been shown to curb news seeking, attention, and engagement, adding to the concern that today’s fragmented media environment is eroding the public’s level of information and engagement. That concern is multiplied by the fact that citizens who are turning to mobile are already among those who are the politically least informed and interested. There is literally nothing in the mobile experience that is likely to convert the less interested and a lot of reason to think that mobile will aggravate the information and engagement problem. It may be correct to conclude, as some already have, that we are entering an era of second-class digital citizenship led by a mobile-only digital underclass.

Related: The Washington Post’s David Weigel goes after voters who keep complaining that they don’t know what the candidates stand for, considering that most of them have some kind of online access: “It is generally as easy to learn where the candidates stand on all but the most obscure issues as it is to find, say, a recipe for low-calorie overnight oats. It’s also easy to ignore the negative, “mudslinging” aspects of a campaign, for the same reason so many people find it easy to cut their TV plans and watch streaming services.”

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan pushes back against the rising trend of news organizations eliminating online comments from their websites.

Launching today: Not Who We Are, a new anti-Trump PAC co-founded by Purpose CEO Jeremy Heimans, headed by Purpose CTO Josh Hendler and stacked with former Bernie Sanders digital staffers, Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reports.

Also launching today: Douglas Rushkoff’s new weekly podcast, Team Human. If you believe that tech should serve humanity, rather than the other way around, then you’re probably on team human, too.

This is civic tech: The White House is soliciting nominees for “South by South Lawn: A Festival of Ideas, Art and Action” that it will host on October 3. In the interactive component, “Panel discussions throughout the day will explore topics like how to make change stick with organizers who are having an impact, as well as a discussion with influencers who are using their platforms to bring about positive change. Interactive booths will encourage attendees to engage with and learn about new technologies and innovations.” No word from the White House about who the audience for this “celebration” is supposed to be: presumably it’s self-evident.

Change Politics is shutting down, Nick Troiano shares on his Facebook page, part of a larger shift underway at Change.org.