The Day Before

About that trove of Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop? FBI Director James “Litella” Comey says, never mind.

Retired General Michael Flynn, one of Donald Trump’s military advisors, responded that it was “IMPOSSIBLE” for the FBI to have reviewed the 650,000 emails in just eight days, suggesting that they had to be read individually by hand.

While many observers criticized Flynn for this response, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange jumped to his defense, offering advice in a series of tweets on how many intelligence officers it would take to parse so many emails, claiming it would be around a thousand. Journalist Jeff Jarvis queried Edward Snowden on how the NSA would review such a large data-set, and he replied, “Old laptops could do it in minutes-to-hours.” NBC’s Bradd Jaffy packed the whole exchange into a tweet.

MIT’s Cesar Hidalgo visualized the network illustrated by the Podesta emails leaked by WikiLeaks, and here’s what he found:

What I saw on Clinton’s emails was not surprising to me. It involved a relatively small group of people talking about what language to use when communicating with other people. Also, it involved many unresponded-to emails. Many conversations revolved around what words to use or avoid, and what topics to focus on, or how to avoid some topics, when speaking in public or in meetings. This is not surprising to me because I’ve met many politicians in my life, including a few presidents and dozens of ministers and governors, so I know that what work means to many people in this line of work, on a daily basis, is strategizing what to say and being careful about how to say it….So what I got from reading some of Clinton’s email is another piece of evidence confirming my intuition that political systems scale poorly. The most influential actors on them are spending a substantial fraction of their mental capacity thinking about how to communicate, and do not have the bandwidth needed to deal with many incoming messages (the unresponded-to emails).

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci uses her latest New York Times column to tear apart WikiLeaks, writing that “the release of huge amounts of hacked data, with no apparent oversight or curation…threaten our ability to dissent by destroying privacy and unleashing a glut of questionable information that functions, somewhat unexpectedly, as its own form of censorship, rather than as a way to illuminate the maneuverings of the powerful.”

Life in Facebookistan: Reprising arguments that longtime readers of First Post will find familiar, Vox’s Timothy Lee makes a plea to CEO Mark Zuckerberg to stop running News Feed like a “supermarket tabloid” that drives attention to clickbait. True to form, Lee’s story has a hyperbolic headline: “Facebook is harming our democracy.” Who says irony is dead?

That said, here’s a striking example of the fake news that is flooding Facebook, courtesy of Eric Lubbers of the Denver Post. As he points out, there is no such thing as the “Denver Guardian” and its “story” about an FBI agent tied to the Clinton email links found dead in a murder-suicide is definitely fake.

Many of these fake news sites are being created in a small town in Macedonia, Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander report for BuzzFeed. The young Macedonians making these sites publish sensationalist content catering to Trumpistas because the clicks help them make money off of ads.

“The cure for fake journalism is an overwhelming dose of good journalism,” media columnist Jim Rutenberg opines in the New York Times. Um, maybe a dose of editorial responsibility on the part of Facebook would be even more useful?

Tech and politics: Propublica’s Electionland project is tracking access to the vote, in real-time. You can pitch in with reports of long lines, machine breakdowns, voter intimidation. Or text ELECTIONLAND to 69866 to get started.

Wondering about competitive House races? Check out this map from Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium.

Send a direct message to @gov on Twitter and it will tell you where to vote and who is on your ballot.

More than a million people have joined a two-week-old secret Facebook group called Pantsuit Nation where they are currently exulting over their chance to vote for the first female presidential candidate from a major party, Rebecca Ruiz reports for Mashable. New members can only be added by existing members, and the group’s founder, 33-year-old Libby Chamberlain, has added two dozen moderators to help with the challenge of managing its growth.

We are hearing that Tuesday is going to be National Pantsuit Day.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who doesn’t use a computer, has “rail[ed] against [his] campaign’s expenditure of tens of millions on digital ads, skeptical that spots he never sees could have any effect,” Maggie Habermas, Ashley Parker, Jeremy Peters and Michael Barbaro report for the New York Times.

Remember when politicians weren’t allowed to tweet? Now, here’s President Obama mocking Trump for losing control of his Twitter account, per that same New York Times story.

Lyft and Uber are offering voters in Philadelphia free rides to the polls, courtesy of a crowdfunding campaign organized by MyRidetoVote, a superPac supporting Hillary Clinton. They’ve raised nearly $300,000 so far.

Looking past Election Day, Michael Slaby—a top technologist in both Obama campaigns and the CEO of Timshel—argues that the technocratic and globalist assumptions of his peers aren’t enough. He writes, “we need to invest in and build stronger, more community-centric political parties that elevate the experiences of everyday citizens so that they cannot be ignored by leaders more focused on their own power than serving the people they represent.”

Your moment of zen: X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis predicts that in four years, thanks to technologies like “AI, machine learning, sensors and networks,” political campaigns will get “hyper-personalized.” Here’s his illustration:

Imagine candidate advertisements that are so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. For Example: Imagine I’m walking down the street to my local coffee shop, and a photorealistic avatar of the presidential candidate on the bus stop advertisement I pass turns to me and says: “Hi Peter, I’m running for president. I know you have two 5-year old boys going to kindergarten at XYZ School. Do you know that my policy means that we’ll be cutting tuition in half for you? That means you’ll immediately save $10,000 if you vote for me…” If you pause and listen, the candidate’s avatar may continue: “I also noticed that you care a lot about science, technology, and space exploration – I do too, and I’m planning on increasing NASA’s budget by 20% next year. Let’s go to Mars! I’d really appreciate your vote. Every vote and every dollar counts. Do you mind flicking me a $1 sticker to show your support?”

Let’s file this one away for safekeeping, shall we?