Gleanings

The U.S. government is saying that Chinese hackers are responsible for breaking into the computer systems of the Office of Personnel Management and stealing security clearance information on up to 4 million current and former federal employees, going back to 1985, Andrea Shalal and Matt Spetalnick report for Reuters.  

According to an internal audit released last year, the OPM didn’t even know where all of its servers were, Andrea Peterson reports for the Washington Post.

Note: The same U.S. government that now stands exposed to severe security breaches as a result of this hack is still arguing that it should have “backdoor” access to the communications of the rest of us, and that it can be trusted to protect those “keys.”

In the New Yorker, John Cassidy argues that it’s time to let Edward Snowden come home.

A single social media post led the Air Force to bomb an ISIS building, Mike Hoffman reports for Defense Tech. “It was a post on social media to bombs on target in less than 24 hours,” Air Force General Hawk Carlisle said. “Incredible work when you think about.” Yes, his first name is Hawk.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, veteran media analyst Michael Massing surveys the current state of digital journalism, smartly parsing the value of Buzzfeed, Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and The Intercept. Looking beyond these efforts, he also notes “on virtually any subject these days, you can find opinionated, informative, provocative sites and blogs.” Though he praises the rise of growth of this digital ecosystem, Massing worries that its fragmentation has also made it harder to “reach a broader audience, enter the political discourse and make a difference.”

The once “golden power couple” of Chris Hughes (Facebook co-founder, Obama online organizer, New Republic owner) and Sean Eldridge (gay rights organizer, failed Congressional candidate) gets the Vanity Fair treatment from Sarah Ellison.

The internet of things came home to PR strategist (and PDM friend) Peter Himler: The home he bought in the Hamptons came with an expensive Crestron app-based heating and cooling system, which at first seemed nifty until the local Crestron dealer used it to rip him off.

From conservative blogger Michelle Malkin to liberal media critic Jay Rosen, lots of people are unhappy about Twitter’s decision to shut down Politwoops, the Sunlight Foundation’s tool for tracking deleted tweets from politicians, Sunlight’s Nicko Margolies reports.

Last Saturday’s National Day of Civic Hacking made it all the way to Myanmar, where the innovation lab Phandeeyar hosted more than 50 people to work on recently released census data, Catherine Trautwein reports for the Myanmar Times.

Some schools in Australia are using software that not only tracks students’ homework progress, it allows them “to track how much parents were likely to donate based on the amount and type of emails they sent, the wealth of the suburb they live in, their volunteering efforts, and community involvement,”reports Eryk Bagshaw for Stuff.co.nz.

Jessica Singleton, the digital director of Bill de Blasio’s mayoral campaign, has been named New York City’s chief digital officer, Eric Alt reports for FastCompany.

Here are some early gleanings from this year’s Personal Democracy Forum. Send yours my way at msifry-at-gmail-dot-com or just tag them #PDF15 on Twitter.

• Alex Howard, the Huffington Post’s senior editor for technology and society, does a bang-up job of summarizing the first day’s talks with “At #PDF15, Hope and Fear About an Increasingly Connected World.”

• Capital New York’s Miranda Neubauer reports on a workshop at PDF led by NYC officials Minerva Tantoco, Jeff Merritt and Jessica Singleton, focused on imagining opportunities for interactive government engagement in 2025.

• Rufus Pollock, the founder of Open Knowledge, has posted the text and slides for his second day talk, “The Long Road to Open Knowledge.” Remember: the internet isn’t his religion, it’s openness.

• Nancy Lublin, the executive director of both DoSomething and CrisisTextLine, tweets, “I got a dozen emails from ppl after my pdf15 remarks about fdtns. All agree but too scared to speak up.” She had ended her talk criticizing major philanthropies for treating nonprofit founders with bold ideas “no better than chewing gum on the bottom of their sneakers.”

• Jean-Noe Landry, the director of strategic initiatives for OpenNorth.ca, shares an annotated list of links to organizations and projects that inspired him at PDF.

• “I am returning from this year’s PDF with a more focused vision of our own mission to empower others to envision and deploy mobile apps which solve real problems and improve the experience of people in their community,” writes Lisa Abeyta, the founder and CEO of APPCityLife.

• First-time PDF attendee Damola Ogundipe, the founder of Civic Eagle, reflects on his experience, saying that what most surprised him about the conference was “how much it felt like family.”