Power Seats

• Tech and politics: Confirming the very old adage about “buy-partisan”-ship in Washington (since both are for sale, some very wealthy donors and interests just cover their bets by maxing out to both), Recode’s Tony Romm reports on how nominally Democratic-leaning tech billionaires like Google’s Eric Schmidt and Tesla’s Elon Musk have been pouring cash into Republican coffers now that they’re the main game in town.

• Romm’s story from earlier this week about Win the Future (WTF), the new effort led by Zynga’s Mark Pincus (with an assist from LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and former Sierra Club director Adam Werbach) to crowdsource new policies for the Democratic party (and then post them on billboards around Washington to supposedly change the debate) has generated a predictable round of critical coverage from the likes of Matt Stoller (in BuzzFeed), Maya Kosoff (in Vanity Fair), and Daniel Marans (in The Huffington Post). While their critiques all have some merit, I hear that WTF, which has a reported budget of just $500,000, is hardly the most important political initiative coming out of Hoffman’s shop.

• Writing for Bloomberg, tech columnist Shira Ovide opines that the problem of sexual harassment and discrimination won’t be solved if it requires “brave women” to keep speaking out. IMHO, while new codes of conduct can only help, as long as there aren’t as many women as men sitting in the power seats at VC firms, lots of men in those seats will keep behaving badly, given the vast imbalance of power between funders and start-up founders.

• Crypto-wars, continued: Under pressure from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Pentagon is finally moving to implement a more secure email encryption standard for its communications, Dell Cameron reports for Gizmodo.

• Senior industrial control engineers, some of whom with broad access to nuclear power plants and other energy facilities in the US, are being targeted by sophisticated hackers trying to gain access to their computers, Nicole Perloth reports for The New York Times, citing a confidential joint report by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

• Privacy International’s Claire Lauterbach reports on how Kenya’s government is monitoring its citizens communications online.

• Abdalaziz Alhamza, one of the co-founders of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, an anti-ISIS news-site rooted in the local resistance inside that embattled Syrian city, writes for The New York Times of his hope that the Internet will help his group win its media war for the truth.

• Trump watch: The Atlantic’s Jim Fallows compares President Trump’s speech in Poland yesterday to the rhetoric of past presidents on similar visits, and hears echoes of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” along with the disappearance of America as an idea that can inspire the world.

• The not-so-veiled threat by White House lawyers to deny Time Warner its sought-after merger with AT&T if it doesn’t reign in CNN’s coverage is “an open confession of corruption” Eric Levitz writes for New York magazine.

• Walter Shaub, the director of the federal government’s ethics office, is resigning his post, and tells CBS News that it appears Trump’s businesses “are profiting from his occupying the presidency.”

• This is civic tech: Civic Hall member Abigail Edgecliffe Johnson, founder of the education startup RaceYa, does an in-depth interview with Alleywatch on the challenges and opportunities that come with being a female entrepreneur in the NYC tech ecosystem.

• Reply: The Obama Foundation’s chief digital officer Glenn Brown is looking for examples of people who model digital citizenship (his pick is our friend Zeynep Tufekci), and asking for people to share practices that help improve our digital health.

• Apply: The deadline for applications to Civic Hall’s new “Organizers-in-Residence” program is closing July 10.

• Attend: The anti-harassment group Hollaback! is offering free bystander intervention training sessions in July in partnership with Civic Hall as well as the NYC chapters of the National Organization for Women and Women, Action and the Media (WAM!). RSVP here.

Know someone who’s not a member of Civic Hall who would benefit from receiving First Post in their inbox every weekday morning? Let them know that they can subscribe and support the work we do here at Civicist.