Faults

Social responsibility: Tech veteran Anil Dash (who will be gracing the Personal Democracy Forum stage in just ten days) explodes eight key myths about online abuse. His bottom line message to tech makers is great: “If your website (or app!) is full of assholes, it’s your fault.”

Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) has introduced the U.S. Digital Service Act, aiming to authorize the U.S. Digital Service for the next ten years, Billy Mitchell reports for FedScoop.

Tech and politics: Nearly three million people subscribe to The Young Turks YouTube Channel compared to 1.4 million for CNN; in the Washington Post David Weigel explains the synergy between Cenk Uygur’s independent progressive news channel and the Bernie Sanders’ campaign.

The Sunlight Foundation’s Alex Howard offers a dispassionate take on the Hillary Clinton email mess:

Regardless of what the FBI finds, we now know more about how a major federal agency failed to prevent an ongoing shadow system for communication from its head. As Clinton has acknowledged, she and her staff should never have set up this system nor should the agency have tolerated the arrangement. Conducting public business on a private server that was not properly secured, without ongoing testing, and proactive archiving with department staff was at best a bad decision. At worst, it represented a deliberate choice that avoided transparency and risked the security of sensitive materials.

Trump watch: Alec Ross, Hillary Clinton’s innovation advisor when she was U.S. Secretary of State, says that Donald Trump is a “vulgar, demented, pig-demon” who only appeals to “emasculated” middle-aged men, reports Sarah Knapton for The Telegraph. Ross (a longtime friend of Personal Democracy Media) was speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales.

Crypto-wars, continued: Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “actually performed a public service by raising the debate,” but still thinks “he harmed American interests,” Matthew Jaffe reports for CNN.

Brave new world: Nicole Perlroth reports for the New York Times on how governments like the United Arab Emirates are using commercial spyware to go after political dissidents.

Journalists in Finland that take aim at Russia’s internet troll army have become its targets, Andrew Higgins reports for the New York Times.

Iran is giving foreign messaging apps a year to move their servers inside the country, raising concerns about privacy and security from users there, Reuters reports.