Not Targeting

Sidewalk Labs, Google’s new urban tech startup, has announced it will be leading the merger and acquisition of the two companies, Control Group and Titan, behind the New York City’s LinkNYC effort to convert old pay phones into free public wifi hubs, Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired. “The vision really is to make cities connected places where you can walk down any street and have access to free ultra high speed wifi,” says Dan Doctoroff, the former CEO of Bloomberg and one-time deputy mayor of New York City, who heads up Sidewalk Labs. Will such “access” come with personally targeted ads? We’ll be watching.

WikiLeaks has released a new collection of top secret intelligence reports and documents from the NSA detailing surveillance of the last three French presidents along with many other top French officials. Commenting on the release, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said: “The French people have a right to know that their elected government is subject to hostile surveillance from a supposed ally.”

French president Francois Hollande has called an emergency meeting of his defense council in response, Kim Willsher reports for The Guardian. A spokesperson for the National Security Council, Ned Price, issued a statement notable for its use of the present and future tense: “We are not targeting and will not target the communications of President Hollande.”

Patrick Hogan of Fusion is mapping the remaining memorials, monuments, courts and places named after leaders of the Confederacy and asking for readers to pitch in.

Calls to take down Confederate symbols and rename places are spreading rapidly across America, Campbell Robertson, Monica Davey and Julie Bosman report for the New York Times.

According to Google Trends, search interest in the term “confederate” is higher than it has been since 2004.

A citizens group in Ferguson, Missouri, has launched a petition drive seeking to amend the city’s charter to require police officers to wear body cameras while on duty, Aamer Madhani reports for USA Today.

Two top Google executives called on their peers in the advertising industry to fight ISIS’s social media efforts not with censorship but with counter-messages, Mark Sweeney reports for The Guardian. Chief counsel David Drummond said, “Although we take down the worst content from our sites, at Google, given the proliferation of content online we don’t believe that censoring the existence of Isis on Google, YouTube or social media will dampen their impact really. We think there is a better way to combat the hateful rhetoric of Isis, by countering it with reason. Understand it. Standing up to it. Enforced silence is not the answer. Drowning out the harmful ideology with better messages, with reasonable messages, is the better way.”

A new academic study, still under review, suggests that seeing positive or negative tweets in one’s stream may make people tweet slightly more positively or negatively as a result, reports Kristen Brown for Fusion. It’s not clear how the tweets were algorithmically coded for emotional content, however.

Code for America is taking applications for its new Technology Awards, which will recognize outstanding products and implementations of government tech. Apply by July 13.