Dirty Work

NBC News’ William Arkin, Ken Dilanian, and Cynthia McFadden report that Russian president Vladimir Putin was personally involved in directing his country’s covert campaign to interfere in the 2016 election, specifically overseeing how hacked material from Democrats was to be leaked and used. They write: “Putin’s objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a ‘vendetta’ against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to ‘split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn’t depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore,’ the official said.”

In Mother Jones, David Corn asks if Trump used a burner phone when he visited Moscow in November 2013, pointing out that he personally tweeted several times while on the visit. Corn argues that it is likely Trump was spied on while there, as that is standard Russian practice, and possibly had his phone hacked.

Two of many questions that have yet to be answered about the Russian effort: Why did Trump change his anti-Putin stance (well in evidence through early 2014) to a pro-Putin stance? And beyond the Russians dumping of the internal emails of top national Democrats, how did they decide which lower-level Democratic House candidates to target? There are indications that Trump confidant Roger Stone knew about the Russian hacking as early as last summer, and plenty of entanglements between Trump’s businesses and Russian financiers in Putin’s inner circle. Mark my words, soon we will be asking: What did President Trump know about Putin’s designs on disrupting the election, and when did he know it?

Finally, an actual “tech summit” that you can call a “summit.” Here’s a seating chart for Trump’s meeting with many of the country’s top tech executives yesterday, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler.

According to Politico’s Nancy Scola, Twitter wasn’t included in the meeting as retribution for refusing, during the campaign, to allow an emoji version of the hashtag #CrookedHillary. Reportedly, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey “personally intervened to block the Trump operation from deploying the emoji, which would have shown, in various renderings, small bags of money being given away or stolen.”

From the pool report: during his introductory remarks Trump reminded the CEOs that their stock prices were up since his election. “I’m here to help you folks do well. You’re doing well right now and I’m honored by the bounce. They’re all talking about the bounce so everybody in this room has to like me at least a little bit and we’re going to have that bounce continue…”

The Wall Street Journal reported these introductory remarks from the tech CEOs in the room, captured by a pool camera. Among the executives who said they were looking forward to “helping” Trump: Tim Cook of Apple, Safra Catz of Oracle, and Chuck Robbins of Cisco. And Jeff Bezos of Amazon gushed, “I’m super excited about the possibility that this could the innovations administration.” He later issued a statement claiming that the meeting was “very productive,” reports David Streitfeld for the New York Times.

Dave Pell has a very funny take on Amazon’s new 404 page.

And BuzzFeed’s Jessica Misener has curated 13 photos of executives who attended the meeting, capturing the moment when…you’ll understand when you look at them.

Among the people around that table, Stephen Miller, who served as Trump senior policy adviser during the campaign and who will continue in that role in the White House. As Josh Harkinson reports for Mother Jones, Miller’s appointment that White House post was praised by white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. The two men were friends and collaborators while students at Duke University in the late aughts. As a student, Miller accused Maya Angelou (its annual convocation speaker) of “racial paranoia” and said that multiculturalism was “segregation.” He also thinks that “Whether it’s plumbing toilets, cleaning up sewers or picking up garbage, men tend to do all the dirty work in society.” (He should ask his boss about changing diapers, something he’s bragged about never doing.) Go here for a complete review of Miller’s oeuvre, by Scott Bixby in the Guardian last April.

Access Now’s Brett Solomon offers a seven-point agenda that tech CEOs ought to keep in their back pockets for any follow-up meetings they have with President-elect Trump.

Here’s a growing list of technologists who are publicly pledging to refuse to build databases of people based on their religion or to assist in mass deportations, and to also advocate within their organizations to minimize the collection and retention of data that could be used for those purposes. According to Nitasha Tiku of BuzzFeed, the NeverAgain.tech pledge is being organized by Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer at Wave, and Leigh Honeywell, a security engineering manager at Slack.

A little good news: The Trump transition is backing off from a questionnaire it sent to the Energy Department seeking the names of staffers who worked on climate change, Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin report for the Washington Post.

Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn has quietly deleted a controversial tweet he wrote claiming that Hillary Clinton was tied to sex crimes with minors, Andrew Kaczynski reports for CNN

“The Trump family has an enormous financial interest in keeping [President Rodrigo] Duterte [of the Philippines] happy,” writes Kurt Eichenwald for Newsweek. He also points out that under the terms of the family’s deal with Century Properties, which is building Trump Tower there, his children will be paid millions of dollars by Jose E.B. Antonio, the head of said group. “Duterte recently named Antonio the special government envoy to the United States. The conflicts here could not be more troubling or more blatant: President Trump will be discussing U.S. policy in Southeast Asia with one of his (or his children’s) business partners…”

Journalist Eke Temelkuran explains in the Guardian how the truth died in Turkey, as a warning to America:

It started 15 years ago, with a phenomenon that will now be familiar to you, when intellectuals and journalists reacted to a nascent populism with the self-critical question: “Are we out of touch?” To counter that possibility, they widened the parameters of public debate to include those who were said to be representatives of “real people”. We thought our own tool, the ability to question and establish truth, would be adequate to keep the discourse safe. It wasn’t. Soon we were paralysed by the lies of populism, which always sounded more attractive than our boring facts. We found, as you are now finding, that the new truth-building process does not require facts or the underpinning of agreed values. We were confronted – as you are being confronted – by a toxic vocabulary: “elite”, “experts”, “real people” and “alienated intellectuals”. The elite, with experts as mouthpieces of that oppressive elite, were portrayed as people detached from society, willing to suppress the needs, choices and beliefs of “real people”…What is the practical effect of this new truth on everyday life? Well, consider one example. In Turkey today, we are obliged to indulge a debate about whether minors should be married to their rapists. It is predicated on the “real people’s” truth that in rural areas girls get married even when they are just 13, and thus have sexual maturity. It is, we are told, a thoroughly elitist argument to insist that a minor cannot give consent.

Elector Watch: As attention turns to Monday’s vote of the Electoral College, Michael Signer, the mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, reviews in Vox the arguments for why Electors should be free to vote their consciences.

A Michigan Trump elector says he’s been getting death threats from people in blue states. This is not ok.

This in-depth report by Edward Isaac-Dovere in Politico on how the Clinton campaign ignored signs of trouble in the Rust Belt state of Michigan shows one thing loud and clear: too much reliance on data, not enough listening to humans. “They believed they were more experienced, which they were. They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t,” said Donnie Fowler, who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee during the final months of the campaign. “They believed they had better information, which they didn’t.”

This is civic tech: Sam Gustin of Motherboard digs into Free Press’ big new report on the digital divide, which shows how systemic racial discrimination in housing, banking, and other sectors of the economy pose barriers to internet adoption.

Here’s a sterling example of forensic journalism by Nick Waters for Bellingcat, proving the existence of seven-year-old Bana Alabed, a girl who lives in East Aleppo, Syria whose tweets in the last three months have earned her a worldwide following

In TechCrunch, New America’s Hollie Russon Gilman looks at how states, cities and counties are starting to leverage technology to enhance local civic engagement.

Say hello to Civic Hub of Lagos, Nigeria. They just joined Twitter.

Brave new world: Yahoo just admitted that a 2014 security breach of 500 million users was actually preceded by a 2013 breach in which hackers took all the user data for one billion users, as BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow notes.

The California DMV has ordered Uber to take its self-driving cars off the streets the same day that some were caught running red lights, Sam Levin reports for the Guardian. Uber had begun piloting the cars in San Francisco without permits, because Uber.