Category: Drafts

After a dramatic debate on the floor, the Washington House voted to send improved versions of two key bills back to the Senate.  Now, the lobbying will get even more intense, as the tech industry and law enfocement try to convince legislators to return to the really bad versions of the bills the Senate passed…

Draft!  Feedback welcome! Please do not forward! Washington votes on March 10, along with six other states.  Meanwhile, the Washington State Legislature is on the verge of passing a pair of bills, literally written by an Amazon lobbyist and a Microsoft employee, that sell out our privacy and our rights to exploitative tech companies. It’s…

Draft!  Feedback welcome! Please do not forward! This may be split into multiple posts before publishing. We’re living in the golden age of income inequality … and we’re also living in the golden age of corruption.   These two forces are very scary together. As legislators, what are you doing to protect Washington residents from…

Here’s some links, mostly short articles by AI researchers and lawyers, that I’ve found very helpful in thinking about facial recognition.  I’ve included excerpts, but if you’ve got the time it’s really worth reading the full article. A couple of them are paywalled so I’ve included PDFs as well.  At the end, I’ve also included…

SB 6281 did not fare well in the Washington House ITED Committee hearing

DRAFT!  Please do not forward! The initial section has been revised and turned into a separate, much shorter, post. I’m leaving this here for people who want to see the fuller report. State lawmakers in Washington want the state to be the gold standard for regulating companies and governments that collect people’s digital data or…

DRAFT!  FEEDBACK WELCOME! Please do not forward yet! Shireen Mitchell, discussing disinformation, at CUNY. See the 15-minute video here, via Kim Crayton. We have to face the fact that disinformation and suppression is now a permanent part of a single continuum of actions that becomes digital voter suppression. — Shireen Mitchell, Report On Ongoing Threat…

DRAFT!   Feedback welcome! Revised version will be published on the Get FISA Right blog When the Patriot Act was passed in 2001, and again when the FISA Amendment Act was passed in 2008, several key surveillance powers were supposed to “sunset” in a few years unless Congress voted to reauthorize them.   Which Congress has, repeatedly,…

DRAFT!  Feedback welcome! Please do not share broadly yet! A couple of years ago, in my Open Source Bridge presentation Grassroots Activism is Hard. Can Open Source Help?, I talked about “the Facebook dilemma”.  On the one hand, it’s very easy to set up Facebook groups and events for activism, and that’s where a lot…

Learning from My Disability Matters

Here’s the references and notes for my TechInclusion Seattle talk on Diversity-friendly software and strategy.  After the talk, I’ll update this with the slides. Techniques for diversity-friendly software From a software engineering perspective, the most interesting part of the talk is the part that’s not easy to fit into a ten minute talk: the best…

Lots of press for the Indivisible movement! Here’s a quick roundup …