September 2016

With E-mail List, Sen Cruz profited off Trump well before endorsing him

It took Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) four months and three weeks of “careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience” to declare publicly that he would vote for Donald Trump. He made the decision to profit by selling his supporter list to Trump far faster than that. Just six weeks after he dropped out – and more than a month before Sen Cruz would dramatically snub the nominee at the Republican National Convention – the senator quietly began renting his vast donor e-mail file to his former rival, pocketing at least tens of thousands of dollars, and more likely hundreds of thousands, that can be used to bankroll the Texan’s own political future.

Google backs Internet transition plan

Google is throwing its support behind the Obama Administration's controversial plans to hand over management of the Internet domain name system. Google called the Obama Administration’s proposed transition of Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA) from US oversight to an international governing authority an “important step to protect the Internet for generations to come.”

Google offered three arguments for its stance: The transition will put the Internet in the hands of innovators; protect the Internet from "those who want to break it into pieces"; and honor the US government's promise when the Internet was created that it "be governed by everyone with a stake in its continued growth.” Critics, though, have argued that handing off oversight would put the Internet under the control of countries like Russia, China and Iran, which would be represented in the international authority that includes 162 countries and entities. Supporters though say those worries are overblown and say the greater threat is that autocratic countries get fed up with US management and create their own splintered internet nodes.

What President Obama Did for Tech

Change in government is slow. That didn’t stop a lot from happening in government during President Barack Obama’s two terms, including many technology firsts, but that’s to be expected, because the world changed a lot too. Chronicling President Obama’s tech legacy isn’t a matter of tallying everything he did, but isolating what he did differently from what another person in his position might have.

It was the impression left on the federal government’s culture that this president will be remembered for, said Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America’s executive director. “Ten years from now, I think the biggest impact...will be on leadership in government and how they think, more than anything else,” said Pahlka. “One thing that could have absolutely gone differently was the way in which he called on people from the outside to rescue HealthCare.gov. The fact that he so much stood behind that and was willing to back these outsiders, that I think was a turning point, and the fact that he learned the right lesson from it and decided to institutionalize it.” The president led on open data, cybersecurity and the creation of new government roles, but his greatest legacy lies in his constancy, said former Philadelphia Chief Innovation Officer Adel Ebeid. Backing programs he believed in and serving as a template that others could model themselves after, President Obama lived up to his charge as a spiritual leader.