With Angel Quicksey
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The efforts of Russian hackers to disrupt the 2016 election included at least one attempt to alter voter information and the theft of thousands of voter records in Illinois, Massimo Calabresi reports for Time magazine. Congressional investigators are looking into whether any of the stolen data was used by the Trump campaign. The House Intelligence Committee is seeking testimony from Brad Parscale, the campaign’s digital director, CNN reported last week.
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As of August of last year, the CIA had already concluded and told then-President Obama that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered a cyber-campaign to disrupt the presidential race with the goal of defeating or at least damaging Hillary Clinton and helping to elect Donald Trump, the Washington Post reports in a lengthy recapping of the entire story.
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Tech and politics: Summing up the White House’s “tech week,” Michael Grunwald writes in Politico that despite all its rhetoric, the Trump White House is proposing “the deepest cuts in innovation investments that any administration has ever proposed.” And then he gives chapter and verse to prove it.
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Every platform is an opportunity for a political conversation, even Tinder. So write Yara Rodrigues Fowler and Charlotte Goodman in The New York Times, describing how they built a bot to engage people on the dating app to try to sway them to vote Labour in the UK’s recent election.
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Philanthropic intentions: Nathan Schneider on today’s tech moguls and their philanthropy: “We live in a time when economic stagnation and an authoritarian mood have put political democracy on the run around the world. Yet we also have more ways of hearing each other’s voices and making decisions together than ever before. Philanthropy could be a means for diverse, creative, collaborative acts of democracy—just what we need to regain the capacity to trust ourselves again, to remember the essential dignity that is our birthright.” He goes on to describe several promising efforts to use tech to enable new forms of democratic engagement—like Democracy OS and Loomio—that could certainly use an injection of philanthropic support.
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Speaking of philanthropy aimed at strengthening democracy, the Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Rita Allen Foundation rolled out a new round of grant making yesterday, distributing $1 million in new grants of $50,000 each to 20 projects aimed at combating the spread of misinformation online and increasing trust in journalism.
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Opposition watch: New Founders, a resistance group founded by tech entrepreneur Genevieve Thiers and politico Elli Bahrmasel, released its EveryElection app, a free tool designed to inform voters about all the upcoming elections taking place that they can participate in. The app is built on top of the most comprehensive dataset of elections in the United States—nearly 300,000 or about 2/3 of all the offices subject to a vote. Partners on the project include Swingleft, Flippable, Sister District Project, Ballotready, VoteRunLead, Wall-of-Us, SheShouldRun, 5Calls, Runforsomething, DemLabs, and ItStartsToday An Android version is in development.
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Twitter is joining the July 12 “Day of Action” to defend net neutrality, Ali Breland reports for The Hill.
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Life in Facebookistan: The giant social networking platform has updated its mission statement from giving “people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” to “giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Speaking to CNN Tech’s Laurie Segall, company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared, “A lot of what we can do is to help create a more civil and productive debate on some of the bigger issues as well.” He expects Facebook Groups, which have a billion members, including 100 million in what Zuckerberg says are “meaningful” groups, to be the platform for achieving this goal.
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Speaking of Facebook, that’s where former President Barack Obama decided to weigh in on the debate on the just-unveiled Senate Republican health care bill.
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Brave new world: After Philando Castile’s shooting, Minnesota authorities sought his girlfriend’s phone records and access to her Facebook account, imposing gag orders on both requests. As Kate Conger reports for Gizmodo, the phone company Sprint caved while Facebook fought the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in court, ultimately getting the state to drop its demand.
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Related: Body cameras and dash cams won’t solve our police brutality problem, writes Osamudia James for the Washington Post, in the wake of the Castile decision. Despite capturing the incident on camera and the aftermath on Facebook livestream, the officer who shot Castile was acquitted. “Police video will not deliver justice,” James writes. Indeed.
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Of the nearly 400,000 individuals on the Chicago police’s “Strategic Subjects List,” more than 287,000 have scores that the vaunted predictive policing system believes warrants heightened policy scrutiny, Brianna Posadas of Upturn reports. “Many people in the data have no obvious markers traditionally associated with “high risk of criminal activity,” and many of that ostensibly lower-risk group nevertheless have scores above the CPD cutoff: 127,513 individuals on the list have never been arrested or shot, but around 90,000 of them are deemed to be at ‘high risk.’”
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Estonia, one of the world’s most digitally-advanced governments, is opening the world’s first data embassy in Luxembourg, the country announced earlier this month. The agreement between the two countries allows the Estonian government to back itself up in a high-security data server with the same protection and immunity as traditional embassies.
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What sharing economy? More than 1,000 current Uber employees are circulating an internal petition calling for disgraced ex-CEO Travis Kalanick to return to the company’s helm, Johana Bhuiyan reports for Recode.
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