Pickups

Tech and politics: White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon thinks Facebook and Google should be regulated like utilities, Ryan Grim reports for The Intercept. No details yet on what that could actually mean.

Bruce Kushnick takes a close look at FCC appointee Brendan Carr, who spent years lawyering for Verizon, AT&T, and telco lobby groups before joining the agency’s staff.

Experts have been warning for years that many of the voting machines used in American elections were vulnerable to hacking, and on Friday at the annual DEF CON conference hundreds of cybersecurity experts demonstrated how easy it is to break into their systems, Kevin Collier reports for Politico.

Writing for TechCrunch, Steven Renderos and Jacinta Gonzalez of the Center for Media Justice explain how federal authorities are using cutting-edge surveillance tools in ways that threaten civil liberties and what Congress needs to do about it.

FiveThirtyEight’s Clare Malone has found the county that has the worst broadband in America.

Privacy, shmivacy: Bowing to China, Apple has removed several VPN apps from its app store, Paul Mozur reports for The New York Times.

Tech journalist Kashmir Hill shares her pregnancy experience on Jezebel, complete with apps that failed to accurately forecast when she was fertile, privacy failures that could allow third-parties to know intimate details, privacy policies that weren’t even read by app company lawyers, and massive abuse of her email address by third-party advertisers alerted to her condition by apps she used.

Media matters: Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective is buying a majority stake in The Atlantic, another sign that new tech moguls are investing in legacy media, Erik Wemple reports for The Washington Post.

Trump watch: Police chiefs across the country have denounced the President’s call on Friday to stop being “too nice” to arrested suspects, Cleve Wootson Jr. and Mark Berman report for The Washington Post.

News coverage focused on that aspect of Trump’s Long Island speech, but the transcript shows he went on at great length praising cops and the notion of them getting rougher. For example, he bragged about his administration supposedly rushing military equipment to local police: “You know, when you wanted to take over and you used military equipment—and they were saying you couldn’t do it—you know what I said? That was my first day: You can do it. (Laughter.) In fact, that stuff is disappearing so fast we have none left. (Laughter.) You guys know—you really knew how to get that. But that’s my honor. And I tell you what—it’s being put to good use.”

National Review’s Kevin Williamson writes that “Trump is the political version of a pickup artist, and Republicans—and America—went to bed with him convinced that he was something other than what he is.”

Opposition watch: The Republican health care bill failed last week because of “a massive grassroots protest movement against any major cuts to health coverage that was organized mostly by and for women,” Charlotte Alter reports for Time magazine. “Thousands of new activists all across the country have spent the last seven months staging protests, visiting offices, writing postcards and making phone calls to urge their Senators to oppose the GOP health care plan. According to organizers, the vast majority of them were women.”

Factoid for thought: For the first time, Millennials and Gen Xers outnumbered Baby Boomers and older voters in the 2016 election, Pew Research Center’s Richard Fry reports.

This is civic tech: Nigeria’s BudgIt has just launched Civic Hive, a new space dedicated to accelerating “anyone who has a passion and a plan to create a solution to social problem around them.” Sound familiar?

Eric Mugendi reports on how the Hacks/Hackers community in Nairobi is trying to tackle the problem of fake news in Kenya.

Gartner’s Danny Buerkli and Farva Kaukab unpack the hype around “government innovation” and such hot trends as “policy labs,” Blockchain, artificial intelligence and design thinking, and find that it’s still early days for any of these approaches demonstrating real results.

Open data company Socrata is being sued by Munetrix, a Michigan analytics startup, for allegedly using internal proprietary information to undercut a joint bid that the two companies had partnered on, Jason Shueh reports for Statescoop.

Daniel Castro, Joshua New and John Wu report on the best states for data innovation, using factors like the extent to which key datasets are available, the availability of key digital infrastructure, and the number of open-data companies in the state, and the size of the data professional community. On top? Massachusetts.