Flagged

Presidential candidate Jeb Bush takes to Medium to argue that the Obama administration isn’t taking cyber-security seriously enough. While recent security breaches like the hack of the Office of Personnel Management show this remains a serious problem, this complaint is a bit rich coming from the former Florida governor, who bragged about releasing a trove of emails from his governorship and then later had to scramble to remove tons of personally identifying information of thousands of ordinary citizens he communicated with.

Ed O’Keefe of the Washington Post digs into that email trove and finds that Bush took a fair amount of heat from constituents angry about his decision to take down the state’s Confederate flags and put them in a history museum.

Billionaire start-up founder Stewart Butterfield of productivity tool Slack took to Twitter Sunday night to excoriate the Wall Street Journal for an editorial claiming that the Charleston church massacre “defies explanation” and stating that “institutionalized racism…no longer exists,” Alexander Kaufman reports for the Huffington Post.

A fast-growing MoveOn.org petition calling on South Carolina’s leaders to remove the Confederate flag from all government places currently has nearly 550,000 signatures. Not only is this effort playing an important role in the shift underway in the state—it may also portend a shift by MoveOn into further organizing around the issue of race in America.

FBI director James Comey, a cyber-security hawk who wants backdoors in all communications tools, is estimating the OPM data breach may have exposed the personal information of 18 million current, former, and prospective government employees, CNN’s Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz report.

A unit of Britain’s GCHQ has focused extensively on applying online propaganda and deceit aimed at domestic political groups, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman report for The Intercept, contradicting early official claims that the unit’s work was focused on international targets. As Cory Doctorow comments, “The right way for a state to intervene in political debates ins’t through secret misinformation campaigns.”

In National Journal, Emma Roller profiles Optimizely, the leading software tool for A/B testing by political campaigns.

There’s a quiet war underway inside the Republican party over control of the party’s voter data and campaigns that are using competing versions of voter-targeting systems, writes Adele M. Stan for the American Prospect. One system, i360, is bankrolled by the Koch brothers; the other is the RNC’s Data Center and Beacon platforms.

Related: The RNC has launched @RNCdata, a Twitter handle where they will share updates on the Republican voter file.

Google has launched News Lab, with a mission of collaborating with “journalists and entrepreneurs to help build the future of media,” its director Steve Grove blogs. There are lots of good works here; most interesting for civic tech may be the Lab’s efforts “to ensure that user-generated news content is a positive and game-changing force in media.”

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has asked the FTC to investigate Uber for tracking its users’ location data even when they aren’t using the company’s mobile app, David McCabe reports for The Hill.

BattlefortheNet has found that major U.S. internet providers are slowing data speeds to hundreds of thousands of users, significantly underperforming what people think they are paying for, Sam Thielman reports for The Guardian.

Enigma.io, an open-data start-up that is making money by mining open government information for insights—such as helping the city of New Orleans figure out which homes were most in need of smoke alarms—is expanding thanks to a $28.2 million round of venture funding, Steve Lohr reports for the New York Times. Quoted in the story: Civic Hall member Drew Conway, co-founder of DataKind. He called Enigma “a first version of the potential commercialization of public data.”

In “The Internet That Was (and Still Could Be),” David Weinberger takes to the pixels of The Atlantic to argue that “small pieces, loosely joined” internet that he once celebrated in a memorable book hasn’t been totally “paved over” by the likes of Facebook, and that its open architecture and values still “shine through the layers built on top of it.” He adds:

There is a cadre of young folks, native to the Internet, who Get It. They are infused with a spirit of play, they assume collaboration, they like to push against edges, and they are aware of the challenges the openness of the Internet faces. I do not believe this culture is going to vanish. In fact, it is thriving in some of the most important sites on the web. For example, Reddit at its best not only takes advantage of the freedom the Internet gives us, it takes it as a topic. The Internet’s spirit lives in the hackathons and the engineering culture that has come to dominate the mainstream. It even lives at sites like YouTube where, in a fully corporately-owned space, people make things to delight one another.

Writing for Al Jazeera, Arzak Khan of Pakistan’s Internet Policy Observatory says that the arrival of Facebook’s Internet.org in his country is “set to put freedom of expression at risk” there.

Today and tomorrow, the International Republican Institute is webcasting its conference on “How Smart Conference is Transforming Local Government in the Americas.”