From Russia, With Love

Tech and politics: “I love WikiLeaks,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump declared at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania yesterday. He added, “It’s amazing how nothing is secret today when you talk about the internet.”

A false story about Benghazi, drawn from Wikileaks’ latest dump of DNC emails that briefly appeared only on Sputnik, a Russian-controlled news agency, was cited yesterday by Trump. He claimed that WikiLeaks had revealed an email from Sidney Blumenthal, a noted Clinton confidant, that “admitted they could have done something about Benghazi.” That led Kurt Eichenwald, a Newsweek reporter whose words (from a long cover story about Benghazi) were sloppily turned into the words of Blumenthal to write:

This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin? The Russians have been obtaining American emails and now are presenting complete misrepresentations of them—falsifying them—in hopes of setting off a cascade of events that might change the outcome of the presidential election.

Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo thinks he knows how this fake story ended up in Trump’s speech:

It happens that we know the Trump world is awash in the alt-right/neo-Nazi web. After all, that’s where all the retweeting of #WhiteGenocide accounts and the like comes from. So anything is possible. Perhaps there’s a more complex explanation. But the simplest one is that it’s organic. Russian propaganda stories from outlets like RT, Sputniknews and other similar sites spread freely on the alt-right/white supremacist web. And that’s where the Trump camp lives. So it’s entirely plausible that that’s why material that appears only on these Russian propaganda sites shows up so frequently in Trump’s speeches.

A counter-movement arises: By yesterday afternoon, 27 million people had responded to or visited author Kelly Oxford’s Twitter page, responding to her call for them to share their first experience of sexual assault. As Jonathan Mahler reports for the New York Times, “A social media movement was born as multitudes of women came forward to share their stories. The result has been a kind of collective, nationwide purge of painful, often long-buried memories.”

This is civic tech: Alex Howard of the Sunlight Foundation offers ten takeaways from the 2016 International Open Government Data Conference, nearly ten years into the whole “open data” trend.

If you’re anywhere near Malibu this Friday, check out Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy “Election 2.016 Technology and Civic Engagement Conference.”

Brigade (the app, not the Code for America network) has just launched what it calls “the most comprehensive social ballot guide ever built.” (If you are an actual user of Brigade, I’d love to hear from you.)

Crypto-wars, continued: After credible accusations of sexual assault by longtime privacy cyber-activist Jacob Applebaum were published online, the Tor community that he helped build got ripped apart, Anna Catherin Loll reports for The Guardian.