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They can hear you now: AT&T runs a massive program called Project Hemisphere that “searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why”—personal data that it often sells to law enforcement authorities, Kenneth Lipp reports in a blockbuster story for the Daily Beast. Not only that, the company has long insisted that the government keep this service a secret, causing prosecutors to “construct a false investigative narrative to hide how they use Hemisphere if they plan to prosecute anyone,” Lipp writes. Sheriff and police departments pay from $100,000 to $1 million a year or more for access to the service, which they reportedly use without need of a warrant.
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Related, especially because it’s such a great headline, from Karl Bode for TechDirt: “AT&T’s $85 Billion Time Warner Buy Could Be An Anti-Consumer Shit Show Of Monumental Proportions.” As he notes:
This is, after all, a company that in the last four years alone has been fined for ripping off programs designed for low-income households, ripping off programs designed to aid the hearing impaired, actively aiding drug dealing directory assistance scammers, and making bills harder to understand to help crammers. It’s the same company that fought viciously against net neutrality, and is busy using “zero rating” to begin giving its own content an unfair advantage in the market. Yes, what could possibly go wrong with letting AT&T grow immeasurably larger?
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Tech and politics: Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz, a very private person with no known contacts in the mainstream political world, has given a whopping $35 million to anti-Trump get-out-the-vote efforts in recent weeks, and as Gabriel Debenedetti reports for Politico, he is causing salivation and frustration among veteran Democratic operatives who make their livings from milking rich people and don’t know how to hook themselves up to Moskowitz’s wallet.
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Speaking of Silicon Valley and Washington, The New York Times “Room for Debate” section convened six influential voices to answer the question, “What is lost and what is gained as Silicon Valley companies build influence in Washington?” My favorite answer comes from Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute, who raises some good questions about the monopoly power of many tech platforms and the need to “retool public utility models.”
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A new poll of so-called “persuadable voters” in five swing states, commissioned by Google and conducted by the Global Strategy Group and Public Opinion Strategies has found that 40 percent of those voters have basically stopped watching TV, while half have gone online to fact-check things they’ve learned from the news media.
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Yes, it appears that Donald Trump doesn’t understand what it means to “oversample” a group of voters in an internal campaign poll, and he is accusing the Clinton campaign of using that technique to “rig” the election, as TalkingPointsMemo’s Josh Marshall explains.
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Iceland’s Pirate party is on the verge of taking power in elections this Saturday, reports Griff Witte for the Washington Post. Not coincidentally, when the Pirate’s co-founder Birgitta Jonsdottir spoke at Personal Democracy Forum 2015, the title of her talk was “Can the internet Generation Come to Power.”
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This is civic tech: The OPEN-US Kairos Fellowship, now in its second year with an expanded program offering year-long paid training for emerging digital campaigners of color, is now accepting applications.
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Researcher Andrew Schrock is raising money on Kickstarter for a book titled, Civic Tech: Making Technology Work for People.” Judging from his first chapter, he is writing a down-to-earth accessible guide that should be a helpful addition to the literature on the field.
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Technologist Jeff Reifman has launched Twixxr, a service that will help you discover and follow more women on Twitter. He explains, “In light of the recent focus on Trump’s history of abuse of women and the ongoing harassment of women on Twitter, I decided to build a service that made it easier to amplify women’s voices on Twitter.”
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Philadelphia civic tech director Aaron Ogle is leaving city government to go work as director of product for the OpenGov Foundation, GovTech reports.
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The new Civicus Monitor tracks the state of civil society freedoms of all countries, which it calls “civic space,” in real-time, with pretty graphics. The definition: “Civic space is the bedrock of any open and democratic society. When civic space is open, citizens and civil society organisations are able to organise, participate and communicate without hindrance.”
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