Veils

Thousands of websites are blocking visits from Congress’ IP addresses, a creative blackout organized by Fight for the Future to press for the end of mass surveillance as the Patriot Act’s Section 215 bulk collection provision is about to sunset.

On Twitter, users have been mocking doomsday predictions of the end of NSA mass surveillance using the hashtag #IfThePatriotActExpires, Kaveh Waddell reports for National Journal.

Moving in the other direction, newly re-elected U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron is seeking to use his party’s parliamentary majority to expand the powers of Britain’s security services, enabling the tracking of everyone’s web and social media use and increasing bulk interception of the content of communications, the Guardian reports. George Orwell set 1984 in the right country.

Unresolved legal hurdles are keeping the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign from making use of either the “Ready for Hillary” email list or President Obama’s 2012 email list, Anne Gearan reports for the Washington Post.

New research from political scientists Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox finds that American millennials overwhelmingly say they are uninterested in running for office, which is a long-term problem when you consider that there are more than 500,000 elected offices in America. Interviewed by Vox’s Ezra Klein, Lawless argues that today’s media system is intensifying this feeling of alienation:

It’s about heightened exposure to the most egregious examples of political malpractice. We’ve gotten to a point where it takes about five seconds before somebody who wants to find out something about the political system happens across bad news. If you’re a casual consumer of news and you’re just looking at your Facebook feed, chances are you’re not reading a headline about the successes of Obamacare. And if you’re a political junkie and you’re choosing what you want to see, you might see successes from your side, but you also see a lot of outrage from other people. It’s all just disagreement. When we asked kids in these interviews whether they talked politics with their friends, they said, basically, “Why would we want to do that? Then we’d just argue, and I don’t want to argue with my friends.”

Related: In the Los Angeles Times, Evan Halper reports on the burgeoning industry of opposition research and political trackers, noting that “Changes in the way voters consume information, a numbness to the negative politicking that once so offended them and the emergence of new research and data distribution technologies are driving once-shadowy operatives into the sunlight. The prominence of ‘super PACs’ and campaign-oriented nonprofits also plays a role….Never before have there been so many hit jobs peddled to the media, to gadflies, to swing voters—to anyone who might notice—so openly and swiftly.

Halper reminds us that dredging up negative news about opposing candidates used to something that campaigns were ashamed of, but that starting with the creation of Democratic super PAC American Bridge, which was solely devoted to unearthing embarrassing information about Republicans, the veil dropped.

Some political campaigns are starting to use Genius.com’s annotation tool (you insert “genius.it” in front of a url) as part of their “rapid response” efforts, Emma Roller reports for National Journal.

If you give up your privacy and let Google know everything about you, the company’s new array of “gesture-controlled smartwatches, context-based mobile search, facial-recognition-powered photo searching and storage, offline maps with turn-by-turn directions, and lightweight mobile processing for the internet’s ‘next billion’ users in the developing world,” unveiled yesterday at the company’s annual I/O conference, may radically simplify your daily life, Charlie Warzel writes for BuzzFeed.

Related: Hannah Jane Parkinson reports on an extension for the Chrome browser called the Marauders Map that “allows people to pinpoint the precise location, to within a metre, of Facebook Messenger users.”

Josh Nathan-Kazis reports for The Forward/Ha’aretz on Canary Mission, a secretive new website that is “publicizing the identities of pro-Palestinian student activists to prevent them from getting jobs after they graduate from college.”

Change.org is working to better identify its users so politicians will know when petitions are signed by actual constituents, a move that could greatly increase its impact beyond corporate campaigns, where it is now much more effective, Sasha Issenberg reports for Bloomberg.com.

New York City tech companies are upset with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s call for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft to get city approval for upgrades to their user interfaces, Henry Goldman reports for Bloomberg.com.

Cars are rolling computers, and GoFar, a Sydney-based startup, has gamified a driver-feedback device that plugs into your car’s on-board-diagnostics port and teaches you to drive more efficiently, Mark Pesce writes for The Register.