Friction

With the Patriot Act reauthorization vote stymied in the Senate, security analyst Bruce Schneier points to critical commentary by the ACLU’s chief technologist Chris Soghoian noting that the failure to extend Section 215 of the act will not end other forms of bulk surveillance, including bulk orders to calling card companies, Skype and BOIP companies.

Related: Philip Zimmerman, the inventor of the email encryption system Pretty Good Privacy, explains to Juliette Garside of the Guardian why he has moved his company Silent Circle to Switzerland: “Every dystopian society has excessive surveillance, but now we see even western democracies like the U.S. and England moving that way,” he warns. “We have to roll this back. People who are not suspected of committing crimes should not have information collected and stored in a database. We don’t want to become like North Korea.” (Must interesting nugget from this story: Among Silent Circle’s backers is one Ross Perot Jr., son of the 1992 U.S. presidential candidate.)

Bonus quote from Zimmerman: “A certain amount of elbow grease has to be expended when the police do their work. If it becomes too frictionless, you can slide more easily into a police state. I think we should restore a little bit of that friction.”

Mark Harris goes deep for Medium’s Backchannel into the story of a local hacker who ended up helping the Seattle Police Department figure out how to make its officers’ body-cam footage available for public viewing—which is required under the state’s sweeping freedom of information law—without sharing private or sensitive information.

In yet another version of the kind of repressive tolerance familiar to China-watchers, young people in Saudi Arabia are experiencing a zone of quasi-freedom using apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat to flirt and Twitter to debate, Ben Hubbard reports for the New York Times.

Twitter’s VP for Asia Pacific, Shailesh Rao, made a strong pitch at the inaugural CES Asia in Shanghai for Chinese advertisers to start using the network to reach global audiences, reports James Giffiths for the South China Morning Post. Notably, Rao “ignored restrictions placed on the service in China,” a sign that the company may be angling to get back in China’s good graces after being blocked there in 2009.

Ad blocking is on the rise, especially in Europe, where up to 40 percent of German internet users are using them, reports Frederick Filloux. Their spread threatens the current internet economic system.

Activists Nicole Thomas and Justin Bibb take to the webpage of the Cleveland Plain Dealer to explain the birth of Hack Cleveland, which, they write, “was born in response to the death of Tamir Rice when a group of community leaders in business, technology, community development, and education recognized that Cleveland’s future depends on adopting a new playbook for change. Our goal is to use the power of technology to magnify and implement the work of local activists and social justice advocates.” They’re holding a civic hackathon called Fix 216 this weekend.

Code for America consultant Becky Boone is in hot water with the city of Boulder, Colorado after using the F-word several times during an Ignite talk two weeks ago, Erica Meltzer reports for the Denver Post. Boone was trying to get techies more engaged in local government, but her words have provoked a backlash from anti-growth local activists as well as a pro-lash defending her.

Slowly, the open data movement is spreading to smaller cities in the U.S.: to wit, here’s Open Wichita, started by local developer Seth Etter, which is having a hackathon June 6 as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. In a nice touch, the reporter for the Wichita Eagle, Kelsey Ryan, lets Etter reassure local readers that he’s not one of those dangerous hacker types. She writes, “While the word ‘hacking’ tends to have a negative connotation, Etter said that it’s more about being able to come up with creative solutions and, in this case, using technology. ‘We’re not doing anything illegal, by any means,’ he said.”

Twitter troll Charles Johnson has had his account suspended after he posted a call to raise money for “taking out” civic rights activist DeRay McKesson, reports Kurt Wagner for Re/Code.