Monetization

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cindy Cohn and Mark Jaycox explain why they are celebrating the Senate’s passage of the USA Freedom Act, even though EFF wanted it to go much further in strengthening privacy protections. They write, “Passing a bill is far more difficult than simply killing a bad bill, and takes more sustained pressure from the public, a massive publicity campaign around a central issue, deep connections to lawmakers, and the coordination of diverse groups from across the political spectrum.The USA Freedom Act shows that the digital rights community has leveled up. We’ve gone from just killing bad bills to passing bills that protect people’s rights.”

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, is passionate about privacy, as TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino reports. Honored by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Cook said, “I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”

WikiLeaks is seeking to raise $100,000 as a bounty for the leaking of chapters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now reports in an interview with Julian Assange.

Last we heard about Russia’s army of paid internet trolls, they were mainly focused on building support for Vladimir Putin and his intervention in Ukraine. Now, as Adrian Chen describes in a long feature in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, there’s evidence that this force, centered on the so-called “Internet Research Agency” in St. Petersburg, may also be involved in various public safety hoaxes that have floated across American news pages in the last year.

Chen also notes that the pro-Kremlin troll army “has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition….The internet still remains the one medium where the opposition can reliably get its message out. But their message is now surrounded by so much garbage from trolls that readers can become resistant before the message even gets to them.”

Hillary Clinton’s digital director Katie Dowd gets profiled by Nina Easton in Fortune Magazine, covering Dowd’s past work in the State Department on TechCamp, which trained civil society groups around the country in how to use social media and web tools for activism. (See also Easton’s profile of Clinton campaign CTO Stephanie Hannon, which ran last week.)

Next week, MoveOn and Democracy for America will suspend their “Run Warren Run” effort to draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to run for president, Ilya Sheyman and Charles Chamberlain, the groups’ heads, write in Politico. But they argue that they succeeded in embedding Warren’s populist economic themes in the presidential contest and sent a message to other progressive Democrats, showing “that grassroots progressives are ready to lift up candidates who refuse to kiss the rings of those corrupting our political system and rigging our economy.”

A new New York Times/CBS poll shows “deep support among Republicans and Democrats alike for new measures to restrict the influence of wealthy givers, including limiting the amount of money that can be spent by “super PACs” and forcing more public disclosure on organizations now permitted to intervene in elections without disclosing the names of their donors,” report Nicholas Confessore and Megan Thee-Brenan. 39 percent of Americans say they want “fundamental changes” in the ways campaigns are funded, while 46 percent say they want the system completely rebuilt. A majority also say they don’t consider money given to candidates to be a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment.

Comcast senior executive vice president David Cohen and his wife Rhonda are hosting a June 26 fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Nicholas reports, and people are being encouraged to bundle $2,700 donations in order to be named co-hosts or event hosts.

New Republic publisher Chris Hughes and his husband Sean Eldridge are holding a June 30 fundraiser for Clinton, Maggie Haberman reports for the New York Times.

On the front page of the New York Post, Michael Goodwin reports that unnamed “NY Dems friendly to [former Mayor Mike] Bloomberg” are trying to convince him to run as a Democrat for President.

Legislative data analytics start-up Quorum, which I’m tempted to call “the lobbyists’ best friend” except that might end up in their marketing materials, is giving away free accounts to select Congressional interns this summer, Chris Bing reports for DCInno.

Ravi Somaiya of the New York Times reports on the “kind of limbo” that the Huffington Post has fallen into now that it has been bought by Verizon as part of the AOL deal, and its founder Arianna Huffington has not yet renewed her contract.

According to this anonymously written article in Gawker, “Hell is Working at the Huffington Post.”

Internal Chartbeat screenshots obtained by Gawker’s Sam Biddle shows that traffic to Fusion is abysmally low.