The media made Trump: he's the perfect, click-driving mashup of fearmongering and demagoguery, and if it bleeds, it leads.

Veteran technology journalist Dan Gillmor's been using GNU/Linux since 2012, switching away from all the "control freak" services, tools and software that he'd grown used to over decades of computing.

Dan Gillmor has been playing with Google's new Nexus phones, the humungous 6P phablet and the smaller 5X, and he's written a shrewd and thorough review of what these phones do — and more importantly, what they mean.

The Library of Congress is about to get its first new honcho in a generation, and not a day too soon, given that the guy who presided over the past generation's worth of copyright policy in America is a proud technophobe whose favorite technological innovation is the fax machine.

Reporters and press freedom advocates from around the world have signed on to support Netzpolitik and condemn the German government's outrageous investigation.

For Open Education Week, Jonathan Worth convened a conversation about privacy and trust in open education called Speaking Openly in which educators and scholars recorded a series of videos responding to one another's thoughts on the subject.

Dan Gillmor, who was the San Jose Mercury News's leading tech columnist during the dotcom years, and was one of the first reporters to go Mac, has switched over to using all free/open source software: Ubuntu GNU/Linux on a Thinkpad, Cyanogenmod on an Android phone.

Following on the New York Times's decision to continue its critical coverage of China, despite the Chinese government's retaliation against it, Dan Gillmor calls on journalists and news organizations to abandon the pretense of "neutrality" and take a partisan stand for free speech in questions of censorship, surveillance, net neutrality, copyright takedown, and other core issues of speech in the 21st century.

It's practically a civic duty in the age of #Ferguson, #Gezi, #Occupy and more.

The Knight News Foundation is running a challenge called How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation? Over 665 proposals are in current round, where you can offer feedback and votes. The winners will be funded by the Foundation. — Read the rest

Dan Gillmor's got more to say about the news that K-cups are getting coffee DRM and what it means in the wider world: "Just as the police and security agencies are racing deploy all new technologies to spy on everyone – whether the law permits it or not – private industry is racing to retain as much control as possible over the products and services it sells, and thereby control over us."

Dan Gillmor presents a wish-list of programmes that he'd like to see foundations funding to promote the open, independent Web. As he points out, the Internet is almost entirely without a "common" space that is neither controlled by governments, nor by corporations. — Read the rest

In the Guardian, Dan Gillmor ghost-writes a speech for any presidential candidate who wants to enter the 2016 race on a freedom and transparency ticket. It's a stirring air and is an outstanding piece of design fiction that implies a specification for a new American politics of freedom and transparency set against the corrupt cesspit of total surveillance and lies. — Read the rest

The Washington Post today published several big scoops related to the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. The paper's investigations were triggered by documents leaked to them "earlier this summer" by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. He has sought political asylum from a number of nations, and is currently in Moscow. — Read the rest

On Tuesday, Bradley Manning was acquitted of "aiding the enemy" for leaking 700,000 classified government documents, including a video of an American airstrike in Baghdad that killed 12 civilians, among them two Reuters journalists. — Read the rest

"As we Americans watch our parades and fire up our grills this 4 July, the 237th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence – the seminal document of the United States – we should take the time to ask ourselves some related questions: how did we come to this state of mind and behavior? — Read the rest

Dan Gillmor sez, "This is a story about a story about a rumor of an invitation to an announcement of a product launch.

Needless to say, the company involved is Apple."

Update: Twitter has officially apologized for part of its actions in this story.

You've heard by now that Twitter suspended Guy Adams, a journalist from the UK paper The Independent after Adams posted the email address of an NBC exec and urged his followers to send in email complaining about the network's (shamefully bad) handling of its Olympics broadcasts. — Read the rest

Writing in the Guardian, Dan Gillmor argues that SOPA and PIPA aren't foolishly extreme because their proponents don't understand the net; rather, they are extreme because their proponents understand that the net breaks the monopoly of the powerful over communications and organizing. — Read the rest

Dan Gillmor sez, "When we report the 'earnings' of the 1%, the media are often distorting reality. The 99% should demand that we use more neutral — and accurate — words."

To be sure, one of the meanings of "to earn" is "to profit financially" – but it is not the only one.