Phone Home

Crypto-wars, continued: Remember when it was absolutely critical for national security that Apple help the FBI break into an iPhone that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters? Now, not so much. As Danny Yadron reports for the Guardian, the government has dropped its court fight after managing to get into the phone without Apple’s help. Which makes Apple’s claims about the security of its products a little shaky.

When people are made aware that they are under surveillance, they are less likely to speak out about nonconformist ideas, a new academic study by Wayne State University professor Elizabeth Stoycheff finds, reports Karen Turner for the Washington Post. People who said they had “nothing to hide” were the most likely to silence their minority opinions, the study found.

Brave new world: Facebook has apologized to its users for accidentally notifying many of them with its “Safety Check” tool after the terrorist attack in Lahore, Pakistan, but as Parker Molloy and Jon Comulada of Upworthy argue, it may have made its users a bit more compassionate as a result.

The MIT Media Lab has started a Bitcoin Development Fund with $900,000 from a group of companies and individuals, in order to support more open-source development, Brian Forde writes on Medium.

Venture capitalists are forcing start-ups to emphasize unrealistic growth projections over any other value, writes Max Rivlin-Nadler for the New Republic, and the backlash is fueling a movement for a “Good Work Code” being catalyzed by leaders like Palak Shah of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (who spoke at Personal Democracy Forum last year, by the way).

Coalition of dozens of public interest organizations led by the Open Technology Institute have written to the FCC expressing opposition to new “zero-rating” plans being promoted by Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and TMobile, arguing that they “undermine the spirit and the text” of the agency’s net neutrality rules.

This is civic tech: The Economist takes a close look at how cities are using sensors and data to score their own service delivery. There’s an important and unresolved tension that the piece nicely encapsulates: will city governments use tech just to be a little “smarter” or will they become more democratic?

Microsoft is looking to hire a civic tech manager to join its team in San Jose/Silicon Valley.

The Democracy Fund has announced a bipartisan national advisory committee that includes two veteran techies, Mindy Finn (the founder and president of Empowered Women) and Ben Rattray (the founder and CEO of Change.org). Full disclosure: our Rethinking Debates project and civic imagination fellowship both receive funding from the Democracy Fund.