-
Trump watch: Former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn has told the FBI and the congressional committees investigating the campaign’s ties to Russia that he is willing to be interviewed in exchange for immunity from prosecution, Shane Harris, Carol Lee and Julian Barnes report for The Wall Street Journal.
-
“Lookups for ‘immunity’ are up over 2500% over the hourly average,” tweets the Merriam-Webster dictionary, my new favorite Twitter account. Bonus example.
-
House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes had two sources inside the Trump White House who gave him access to sensitive communications intercepts, The New York Times’s Matthew Rosenberg, Maggie Haberman, and Adam Goldman report. One of those two sources, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was a protege of Flynn’s that current national security adviser H.R. McMaster sought to fire weeks ago, but as Politico’s Kenneth Vogel and Eliana Johnson previously reported, he got the help of Stephen Bannon and Jared Kushner in getting the president to over-rule McMaster. The other source was Michael Ellis, a White House lawyer who previously was counsel to Nunes’ committee.
-
Surveying this most recent series of events, expert national security journalist Barton Gellman argues that Trump’s White House staff may have been using the surveillance assets of the U.S. government to track the FBI investigation from the outside.
-
At least 109 Hillary Clinton staffers were targeted by Russian military hackers last year, according to security expert Thomas Rid’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, as Mother Jones’ A.J. Vicens reports.
-
The big news from yesterday’s testimony: understanding that what the Russians apparently did was combine two longstanding strategies: active measures aimed at destabilizing their adversaries (such as spreading disinformation) plus computers.
-
Privacy, Shmivacy! The ACLU’s Kade Crawford, a longtime privacy advocate, writes in The Baffler that the reason for the late-breaking outrage against Congress’ decision to roll back the FCC’s intended rules to prevent internet service providers from selling their users’ private information is because as a result of Obama-era efforts, people now feel entitled to this kind of protection.
-
Some of Trump’s most obnoxious supporters, the denizens of some Trump sub-reddits, are also not happy about having their privacy sold away, Andy Cush reports for Spin.
-
Verizon has already announced plans to install software on their customers’ Android phones that will allow the company to track what apps people are downloading in order to target ads at them. That’s spyware, write Bill Budington, Jeremy Gillula, and Kate Tummarello of EFF.
-
Writing in Newsweek, Evan Greer of Fight for the Future explains how they are fighting back.
-
Here’s my favorite suggestion for defeating the telcos plans to profit off your browsing data: a plug-in called Noiszy that runs in the background while you browse the web, creating real but meaningless data, chaff, if you will. Its maker, Angela Grammatas, explains why she built it in a guest post on Cathy O’Neil’s Mathbabe blog.
-
Speaking of privacy, Gizmodo’s Ashley Feinberg appears to have done a brilliant job of digital sleuthing to discover FBI director James Comey’s secret Instagram and Twitter accounts.
-
Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci points out that even Comey, who presumably has decent security training, failed to understand how social networks can expose private user data. As she writes, “Feinberg found Comey’s ‘secret’ accounts simply because Instagram’s algorithm helpfully suggested that she follow (undisclosed) member’s of Comey’s family once she put in a request to follow his son—who had otherwise locked down his account.”
-
Opposition watch: Here’s a great in-depth report by Justin Miller for the American Prospect on local organizing by Indivisible and SwingLeft, two of the biggest new efforts converting online anti-Trump attention into offline action.
-
The tech we don’t need: The launch of Resistbot, a cute but stupid idea from Eric Ries (author of The Lean Startup) and Jason Putorti (formerly of Brigade and Votizen), prompted me to write this. It’s well-intentioned but almost entirely all wrong. There’s plenty that techies can do to help the resistance to Trump, as I describe in detail, but first: please ask the people actually doing the organizing work what they need!
-
Code for America founder Jen Pahlka (a dear old friend of Civic Hall) explains how an iterative approach to government rule-making is starting to take hold as a result of policymakers engaging with tech teams from places like 18F and the United States Digital Service.
-
Former New York Observer editor-in-chief Elizabeth Spiers explains, after working for publisher Jared Kushner (who later famously married into the Trump family), why he’s hardly the person to lead a new White House Office of American Innovation. She worries, with good reason, that Kushner admires the form and style of Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism without understanding how any of it really works.
-
Speaking of real government innovation, 18F and the Federal Election Commission teamed up and developed a new website that will save the agency $1.2 million a year, Frank Konkel reports for NextGov.
-
Some Silicon Valley tech workers are starting to talk about unionization drives, Michael Coren reports for Quartz.
-
The Center for Media Justice is looking to hire a deputy director (applications are due today).
-
Your moment of zen.
Know someone who’s not a member of Civic Hall who would enjoy or benefit from receiving First Post in their inbox every weekday morning? Let them know that they can subscribe and support the work we do here at Civicist.