OK, so we're going to have a quick change of speakers. Would the next panel please just come up? We just have to do some quick mic-ing. So don't go anywhere. And I'm actually in the interest of economizing on time as our next panel comes forward with their mics. So I'm just going to say a little bit about what we're doing in this next panel. I want to make clear to everybody this panel is, in terms of the political actors in this election, we're really blessed that we have people from four of the major presidential efforts in 2016. And I've told all of them that we are not going to relitigate the election. I've told everybody that we are not going to try and relitigate the election in this panel. But we are going to try and hear from the people inside the campaigns who had major responsibilities for using technology, data, and blending that in with strategy to figure out how to get their voters. The joke, if you read my daily first post, was this was supposed to be the Meerkat election. Does anybody remember Meerkat? There are always these, every four years, ever since technology became a factor in our election process. People would say, is it going to be the Facebook election? Is it going to be the Twitter election? And I think it was two years ago that Dan Pfeiffer, the outgoing communications director at the White House, discovered Meerkat and said, it's going to be the Meerkat election. Well, that didn't happen. But I do hope that what we get into with this panel is, what was the role of tech? And in particular, what were its most innovative and encouraging uses that we can use not just in campaigns, but in other arenas where we seek to engage people and involve them in the process? So it's really a chance to hear from four top digital campaigners. One who, in the case of Mindy Finn, was a digital strategist for the RNC until she decided, as part of her never-Trump advocacy, to become the vice presidential candidate of Evan McMullen's independent campaign. So we now actually have a candidate who even knows digital in her bones, who will be on the panel with us. So give us a second.  Almost. OK. It's the lavaliers. So give us one minute. Get your thoughts and your questions ready. And we'll be starting. People who are sitting all the way in the back, by the way, there are lots of seats up front, chatterboxes back there. So I urge you to come up front. It's always nice for the speakers when they can see your reactions and in real time gauge how they're doing. Of course, that's where the coffee is. Come on up. So as with before, I'm going to leave the work of introducing and managing our panel to our excellent moderator, Nancy Skola. I just have to say that it is always a treat for me to welcome Nancy back here to her home stomping grounds. Nancy was with me, one of the founding editors at Tech President. And for many years wrote what you still get, our first post. She left us to greener pastures in Washington and has written for a number of top political publications, including the Atlantic. But right now, you know her for her byline in Politico. So Nancy, take it away. Excellent. Thank you, Mika. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. As Mika mentioned, my name is Nancy Skola for Politico. Thank you for coming today. I think we have a fascinating, timely topic on the role of technology in the campaign. You might have noticed we recently had an election. And we have a terrific lineup of panelists to discuss the topic. It's sort of the perfect group of people to dig into this area. So to my left, we have Becky Bond. Becky was a senior advisor on the Sanders campaign, working on offline online organizing, bridging the gap between online and offline organizing. To Becky's left is Jess Morales-Rochetto. She was the director of digital organizing for the Clinton campaign. And then we have, yep, to Jess's left we have Molly Schweikert. Molly is the head of digital at a firm called Cambridge Analytica that did work on the successful Trump campaign. And to Molly's left, we have Mindy Finn. Mindy is a veteran of Republican politics, who was herself a vice presidential candidate this time around on an independent ticket. So I think, as Mika mentioned, we're going to have some opening remarks. And then we're going to take moderator's prerogative, ask a couple of questions. And then I'd love to turn it over to you all. So if you can be thinking about things you might want to ask our panelists, talk about with our panelists, that would be great. So we are going to get started with Becky. Thanks, Nancy. So I'm Becky Bond, and I was a senior advisor for organizing on the Bernie Sanders campaign. There I was part of the distributed organizing team. A lot of campaigns called this digital organizing, but we called it distributed organizing, because digital is just something that we used to organize people. It really wasn't what we were organizing people to do. And so when I joined the Sanders campaign back in the late summer of 2015, the campaign had put mostly almost all of its resources rightly into a traditional field operation in the first four contexts. So what do you do with the other 46 states? And I think that's the right slide. What do you do with the other 46 states? Well, that was in the territories in Washington City. That was our territory for a very small team of people without a whole lot of resources. So we were an outpost on the fringe of the Bernie Sanders campaign, but we were a vast outpost, as you can see by the map. Our turf changed over time as the campaign calendar went on, but we always had literally hundreds of thousands of people that we had to organize with just a few staff and mostly consumer software. I'll go back. All right, so we had to do something different because we had so much territory to cover and so many people to organize, and we had not a lot of resources besides a travel budget and a lot of consumer software mostly and some really dedicated staff that were digitally native but really cared about organizing people in person. So we developed a model that had never been used at scale before in a presidential primary campaign before and the model that emerged was something that we call big organizing. And Zach Exley and I, we wrote a quick book about this called Rules for Revolutionaries, How Big Organizing Can Change Everything because we wanted to share this model with others. Now of course we lost the primary, but we did take a candidate with 3% name recognition to win 46% of the delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Now how we did that was in part on the distributed organizing campaign, the team, was that we harnessed a volunteer movement of hundreds of thousands of people to a low cost, large scale voter contact machine that was run mostly with consumer software and volunteers as managers. That's how we made a big change. Now what is necessary to make this big organizing model work where you can harness the power and the work of all these volunteers? Well at the heart of big organizing is this idea that I deeply believe in is that there's a huge but largely untapped capacity in the grassroots and they're ready to work for change if people can plug them into a strategic plan to win a significant victory. And these volunteers, they can't just be given low level or manual tasks, but they need to be given, some of them need to be given real responsibility and included at high levels of management. And so big organizing is big in more than one way. It's big because there's a really big goal and that's what we need to motivate people to participate. People have to feel like winning is really gonna be worth their time. It's big because we get as many people as possible engaged in the work because that's what it's gonna take to win a big change. And so big organizing, it has mass participation by the people at its heart. And it's also big because we ask people to do big things, to step up and take big responsibility and play a big role. Now, in the current climate, we really do have people that are more willing to do something big, to win something big, than wanna do something small to win something small. And mass participation campaigns, I'm not saying that this is new to the Bernie Sanders campaign and it wasn't something that we invented but and of course, most social movements that win big things succeed because of mass participation. But on the Bernie campaign with the distributed organizing team which uses a lot of digital tools, we learned how to harness this untapped capacity in the grassroots by combining mostly consumer technology, Slack, Google Apps, Facebook, with in-person organizing meetings. So we really brought online digital tools and people doing things in real life together in a pretty seamless way. And along the way, we developed a system of tactics and values that I think it's not just for campaigns but civil society groups and social justice movements, can adopt a fight for big change at every level from the local level to the state level to the federal level to the international level. Okay, so I'm gonna talk about this, where the intersection between this digital organizing technology and this in-person meetings led to this ability to harness hundreds of thousands of volunteers. It was called the Barnstorm. This is just a picture of a meeting. This was probably the greatest innovation the digital staff had on the entire campaign and it was an in-person meeting. It was one that we designed and we iterated to create volunteer teams on the spot and put strangers to work together immediately with other people from their community. These teams would take on what we call rinse and repeat tasks that they could do on a recurring weekly or even daily basis during the campaign. So once we put them in motion, there was a very high payoff because they would do a lot of voter contact over time. So we called this the Barnstorm meeting and the vast majority of voter contact events on the campaign had their genesis in a meeting that was just like this. Now the Barnstorm meeting, which started in a digital email that went out, incorporated many of the rules that we learned over the course of the campaign, that people are just waiting to be asked to do something big to win something big, the converse of which is you don't get a revolution if you don't ask for one. Don't ask who wants to lead, ask who wants to get to work. We had to learn to fight the tyranny of the annoying and we also learned that our movement isn't just bottom up, it's really peer to peer. It's really people working together as peers to do things. So here's how the Barnstorm works. We would send out an email, that's the digital part, to everyone within 60 miles of a city where we wanted to hold the meeting and get people to work. And we'd just say a staffer or a super volunteer was gonna come to that town and meet with people about how they could get to work to help burn you in, you could insert any other big goal. And in the meeting, and this is very reductive, we would just briefly lay out the principles behind the national field plan. We would explain the mechanics and impact of volunteer voter contact and then we would ask for 10 to 20% of the people in the room to stand up and volunteer to hold an event. Okay, so you have a room full of people. Some of these meetings had 400 people, some of these meetings had 40 people, they averaged 75 to 100 people. All right, so people would come up to the front of the room and we would make them right then fill out a form saying when they would hold the event and where it would be. This took about five minutes because we'd have a bunch of volunteers and went to clipboard so everybody could grab a clipboard and commit. Okay, then we would turn to the audience and then we would say, okay, now you have to sign up for these events, right? So 18 to 19 of the people that were sitting down, they would have to sign up for one of these events that was being pitched by one of these people that's standing like a deer in the spotlight at the front of the room. Okay, and so what happened was that when we asked these people to sign up for these people who stood up, right? Then we had individuals that were committed to each other, not just the campaign.  Or the people who signed up, they've met the person that they're gonna be, the stranger that they're gonna be standing up if they don't go to the house, right? So then what we did was we would take all this information that you see on the screen and we would upload it to a day, launch your data entry bank and then they would basically plug it into the website just as if someone had signed up online. Now this may seem old fashioned and it was in many ways but it was also integrated into our digital user flow. We treated the paper form just like a landing page on the website and we iterated it to increase conversion rates. It was probably the piece of technology that we argued about most in the distributed organizing department on the campaign was where things were on this paper form. What we were essentially doing was replacing a user flow where we would send an email with a link to a person. They would click on that link and they would fill out a form on the web to either agree to host something or to agree to show up at something, right? But then we replaced that with an email asking someone to an in-person meeting and then we would ask them in-person in front of their peers to either host or to show up at something and then we would have them sign up and then we would push it back into our CRM program. In the process we literally created tens of thousands of volunteer led voter contact events far, far more than we had been able to do when we were relying on email and the web alone. Now there's tons of logistical support that it took to run this to pull this off. Nearly all of it was run by volunteer teams that were doing massive amounts of data entry that were calling hosts and reminding them, there were Google live streams to train them to follow up after these events. There was texting to remind people to show up. We had to get it into the web where we could email people to then fill in those voter contact events. But over the course of the campaign using this technique of going from the web to in-person and then back to the web into our text program, we held more than 1,000 of these in-person meetings. The first 350 were led by staff. The next 650 were led by volunteers. Of these 1,000 meetings, again, the vast majority of our voter phone banks, which we called over 75 million voters, and we recruited people for peer-to-peer texting where we sent 8 million individually sent text messages, came out of this. So I'm gonna stop there, but I'm gonna close by saying that we've heard a lot of interesting things today, starting from the morning session when Sally Busby talked about we need more diversity in journalists about who trusts institutions and who does not, different levels of that. And then we also heard from Eli Pariser and from others about how we need to, and from Tony Marks from the New York New Republic Library, about how we actually need to trust people, right, to come forward. And I think that we as digital people, we really have to move towards trust because if we're going to change things as they are today, it's gonna take a lot of us together to do it. And to make a big enough movement to actually win some of the fights that we're facing today is gonna take a lot more people exponentially more than are involved today. And so I think with a series of values and tactics combined with a much more radical trust in allowing people to participate in and lead our campaigns that we could see a really new way of doing politics. Excellent, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. As Molly gets that up, I do have one quick question. You mentioned the tyranny of the annoying. Can you give us 10 seconds on what the heck? Yeah, so, you know, okay, as digital people, the fact that we spent most of the campaign flying around meeting in person with volunteers is crazy, right? So, but that's what it took to actually get these volunteer voter contact events going. But a lot of people who go to digital, it's because they don't want to deal with the messiness of people in real life, right?  No matter how well-intentioned and they dominate it, the event, and they drive everybody else away. And it also makes staff not want to involve regular people in the things that they're doing. And this is something that we feel like we have to face up to and we have to overcome it as opposed to letting it drive us away from involving the people in our work. Okay, excellent, thank you. Thanks. Thank you and thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I'm Molly and the head of digital Cambridge Analytica. We're a global communications agency and most recently had the privilege of working for the Trump campaign. Wanted to take this time to view some tactics that were used and some learnings from them. I have been, having been involved in the 2008 and 2012 election, I'm very aware of what it's like to be on the other side of winning as well. And, you know, the old kind of saying if you happen to lose, you did everything wrong. And if you won, you did everything right. So, want to definitely approach this with the understanding that there was a fantastic use of technology this year and what can we learn from that and what can we look at? So, we worked with the Trump campaign in a few key ways. One was polling and research, one was data science and one was digital marketing. And as we started with the campaign, one underlying principle that I want to look at is one, the value of predictive analytics but as it relates to understanding humans. We are not a pile of data points sitting here, we're humans with emotions and feelings. And when used well, predictive analytics can actually help us understand those people better. The process we undertook to work through this was first going into the field on a weekly basis to collect large amounts of direct hard ID responses. This looked like thousands of responses coming in from battleground states through which we were able to score individuals on a few key things. One was their candidate preference, as you can see on the axis here. The particular issues they cared about if it was the economy, jobs, et cetera and then also their likelihood to turn out. Even more important than possibly who they cared about was if they actually intended to vote, if they did not, then that's a problem we needed to tackle as well. So through the end of the process, we then had every voter in each battleground state scored on these particular things that then helped us, one, understand how to talk to them based on where they were in terms of if they would turn out, what issues were important to them, but also helped on the prediction side so that it could give us the ability to understand, you know, we're seeing a trend in this particular area. Some people are very concerned about particular issues. We're going to advise the candidates to actually travel there. And when he's there, these are the issues that are on people's hearts and mind and this is what he should be speaking about. This was activated in terms of kind of technology and delivering on the digital advertising side through a process here, sort of this life cycle that you see in the circle here. One, in the beginning, while the researchers were out in the field collecting these data points, they then give it back to our data scientists who created algorithms to extrapolate out models based on these training sets collected from the hard IDs, which would then be segmented into various universes for digital contact. We would then take the learnings from the briefings that they gave us to one, go to the content team and say these are the particular issues we're going to be talking to people about this week, overlaid with information about them. So the issue here we're talking about is jobs, but it's particularly young women. So we want to put this subject in that context. We would then go to our digital media partners as well. We executed a very cross-platform campaign, essentially any way you could be online consuming content we were there to meet you. And we'd put together a strategic media plan to activate on both who we knew we needed to talk to, as well as what to talk to them about. And then also throughout this continual process, we were always holding some controls to do measurement, to understand if this was actually working. And if it was, how could we make it better and who was particularly responding to this? And we collaborated very closely with a number of the platforms, Facebook, Google, being some of them, to ensure that we were really understanding who we were talking to to be able to better measure that. Another aspect is that people are, in our daily lives, we're interacting with technology and online platforms in so many ways. We're not just looking at TV commercials. We are looking at to find out what our friends are doing, to get ideas on what to do this weekend. And we have, in some ways, we can do people a disservice by just trying to blast them with 30-second TV ads. So one extraordinary way that we were able to take advantage of those platforms to really widen the tent and increase participation was looking at other ways that we could be engaging with people. One of these being crowd-building for events. Obviously, political schedules are very volatile. We only had, often, a few days to fill up an arena. So we would go into the area and talk to our supporters through online platforms. This was a relatively small use of manpower resources, but an incredibly large reach. So we were able to then find these people. There were our supporters that might be interested in an event. Also things such as app installation. The Trump campaign had an app called the America First App through which you could do a number of different things, including shopping online, sharing with your friends, encouraging that peer-to-peer contact. That was a very valuable tool for the campaign that needed to increase its active users. And so we invested some resources into increasing the usage of that. Also, absentee valley, absentee voting, early voting, and get out the vote. Through Google Civics API, we had a website that was that we directed people to, wherein you could put in your address, find your particular polling location, or request an absentee ballot. A tremendous amount of resources were dedicated towards bringing people to that site. And through the studies and measurement we held, we were able to increase people's likelihood to show up to vote or send in their absentee ballot by about 2%. So a tremendous increase in using the tools available to increase participation in the civic process. Also other aspects of ways to reach people online. We found a very interesting use of things such as Snapchat. Not just necessarily a way for people to see a video, but in this instance, we had an ad type where people could swipe up in the bottom as a call to action. Brought you to a mobile optimized webpage where you could submit your name to get more information to stay involved with the campaign. We had thousands of responses through this. Clearly young people that were very interested to hear more from Mr. Trump and be involved in a different way. And then also some examples of the different ways of facilitating voter participation through directing people to their polling locations. Finally, the true goal of technology here is to amplify a message, right? Technology on its own is dead. It can't necessarily produce a message. It can't produce a movement. It's only as powerful as what it's producing. And this election showed us that by kind of breaking some of the standard operational rules by creating your own blueprint for what works for resonating with your supporters, technology can then become an extremely powerful means. But it's only in collaboration with understanding the human behavior, understanding individuals we're talking to, and then figuring out how we can best use technology to facilitate that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Mindy? I think you're next. Yeah. Molly, I do have a follow-up question for you. If you mentioned some of the tools you used to fill a stadium in some part of the country with a couple days' notice.  So I'm going to say Facebook because there was such a large audience there. Yeah. One, I'm Mindy. Thanks for having me here. I really appreciate Mika and Andrew inviting me. I first met them 12 years ago when they came to meet with me at the Republican National Committee to implore us to get involved in the Personal Democracy Forum. And they're just true visionaries in this field. I've been proud to be part of this community since then. This is also exciting to be here because I gave a lot more speeches this past year than I really anticipated. But most of them were not on digital politics. So it's exciting to get back to this topic and hone in on specificity. I will say, though, because I've been a candidate, I'm no longer conditioned to talk about anything really in deep detail or how to talk about exactly how it works. And in TED, I'll largely give you aspirational and lofty ideas about how we move forward. But I hope to do a little bit of both today. So just a bit of a background because I think it's important for what I'm going to say. I came to digital politics accidentally the same way I came to run for Vice President. And after some early work as a journalist and Capitol Hill staffer, whereas a function of my age and the fact that I was a basic level coder, I took on the new media duties in the office. And that led to joining the Bush 2004 e-campaign and to lead digital programs at the RNC, the Romney presidential campaign in 2008, to work at Twitter, to run a consultancy, and work with dozens of campaigns. And actually to be back at the RNC last, well, not last year, in 2015 in an acting role to lay the foundation for the infrastructure and data architecture that would power the 2016 campaign. So what excited me the most about tech and politics in this field was the opportunity to open up the process of politics and governing and to engage more people in the process. Ultimately, I'm driven by a passion to give a voice to more Americans in our political process. And the idea that we could meet voters where they are and engage them and through their volunteer time and financial contributions and direct communications that would have infinite possibilities for changing politics for the better. So after 15 years now in this field coming at it from the media side and the politics side, the technology side, and most recently as a candidate, I've been part of and observed the iterative transformation from politics by the few to politics by the many. And I have a few reflections and that's kind of what I wanna talk to you today, largely focused on specific examples from this most recent campaign. So the first is we have a tendency to over-learn lessons. Molly referred to this when she talked about what we, the kind of idea that whoever wins did everything right and whoever lost did everything wrong. I hope that after this last cycle we can take a different approach to that because I don't think it's serving the industry or politics at large. For example, we're too quick to assign credit and blame tools and not enough to credit the product being sold. So we'll look at the factor that created a marginal difference and the losing party will double down on the program to catch up to their opponent. In 2008 it was the organizing and social media power of the Obama campaign that Republicans sought to emulate and they did fairly quickly on the back of the Tea Party movement. In 2012 it was big data and modeling to drive schedule and media decisions. We've been moving forward but instead certain things have been left behind. So what I would suggest here is that we look for nuance not absolutes in terms of what works. And because I'm not currently a vendor I can tell you that while we love vendors and platforms they're highly motivated to tell you that they are the killer app, which by the way I feel stink is email in many regards. They offer really valuable information but it's important to consider what they have to say in the proper context. If you have to point to one factor that makes a victory or not in a high exposure campaign it's the candidate. This is why, and again Molly referred to this, playbooks offer lessons and guidance but are not transferable from one campaign to the other. They're not a blueprint, they're a guide. In 2014 I ran a program for the National Republican Senatorial Committee which set digital and data standards for the committee's targeted Senate campaigns. It raised the bar for underperforming campaigns in terms of their use of technology. A couple didn't even believe, believe it or not that online fundraising really could have value or matter and have a impact on the final result. It did, yet we recognized that standards were simply guides. I saw firsthand in the most recent campaign I was part of, the McMullen for President campaign where we set records for the number of voters we gained in a short time that the candidate really did matter. Like most upstart movement driven campaigns we relied heavily on technology. It was really the very first time that running a digital first and technology driven campaign was not something to contemplate but was just a given and a necessity. But it was really the candidate's talent and message that inspired people that we never personally touched to download and print their own materials and self organize canvassing days. Our Facebook groups were self sustaining and without ever sitting foot in certain states we inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to write us in. We would often say that the key to our success and again we didn't win and didn't necessarily have an impact on the final outcome but about 22% in a single state in a three month campaign starting with no name ID and nearly a million votes nationwide that it was our selfie lines at the end of the campaign that drove our success. What that was was at the end of every speech we would allow people to line up and as many as we could get through we would take pictures with every single person we would say to them personally post it on Facebook, make sure you tweet this and that's how it spread. It was a picture of our supporters with the candidates something that they wouldn't get too often or that easily with the presidential campaign.  That is a debate that often happens within this community and industry. Both are insufficient and we saw that within this campaign. Living by gut, the Trump campaign was much stronger once it put a data architecture behind its decision-making and living and dying by data was something that I think the Hillary campaign and this is it to pot shots this is kind of what you read in the media so it's not a bold new idea but living and die by the data leads us to make not necessarily the savviest of decisions. Big data makes us better informed and not necessarily smarter. Again for example when I was we're putting together the architecture for the data that would power the 2016 campaign at the RNC we had solved for a robust method to determine who a voter was and what may potentially motivate them but where we needed to fill in and where I believe there's more work to do is how, when and where to reach them and that critical point of the last week in a campaign particularly where there's so many undecided voters of what's going to influence their decision at that time. People know what they want, listen to them this requires both better quantitative analysis unmoored from our personal biases as well as user feedback on how and through which channels we communicate. When building products, recognize that most often the best opportunities are often those that are thrust upon you you do not create them. So what this means is that breaking news or current events are often what allows you to raise the most money and engage more people, catch lightning in a bottle, you're building tools to prepare for those moments. A big moment on our campaign for example and unfortunate one was in the Access Hollywood tapes came out which happened to be a day after I joined the ticket was a big opportunity for new voters to take a look at us and to engage them for fundraising and volunteering. A few things I think we're getting short on time but there's no set standards for clear standards to how to engage on social. When I worked at Twitter, we wrote the playbook for how politicians and advocacy orgs should engage on Twitter. As culture norms are shattered, we may not expect that there's social media norms. That said, we are each part of the culture and shape it. Personally, my use of Twitter as a citizen, a strategist and an analyst shifted from one more prone to biting critique to one more lofty policy focus and inspirational as a candidate or at least that was my intent. We're not single story individuals and while voters see more of the whole candidate today, they only see what and who we show to them. So I will say that I've gone through a lot of pondering in the last couple of year in particular whether digital democracy has been good or bad for America and the world and I always come back to the same idea that technology is not good or bad, it's a tool. It can be used for good or evil. It's a little bit of both. Technology without policies that assign values and principles to it will be abused. From the community of technologists who came together around the idea that technology would fix politics, the imperative going forward, at least for me, is how we fix the technology to strengthen our democracy. Now, those whose only goal is winning in the immediate term are not necessarily incentivized to tackle this problem, but for the rest of us and for anyone who wants to see America thrive in the future, it's a critical mission. Thank you. Excellent, thank you very much.   Excellent, thank you. Jess, do you want to sit or? I'm not really a podium gal, so I'm hoping that those of you in the cheat seats can see me. I thought I'd start by introducing myself because I found myself being introduced to new people here, so I suspect I may be a new name for many of you. I'm Jess Rales-Rocchetto and I'm the former Digital Organizing Director at Hillary for America, but although I did, I think, spring from the womb fully formed in loving Hillary Clinton, I didn't just start there. My career has spanned a bunch of different lanes, but in particular, I spent a lot of time at the AFL-CIO helping build kind of a state-of-the-art digital team there was one of the folks who, one of the first 30 employees on Obama 2012's re-election campaign and also worked at a little outfit called Rebuild the Dream, which was an economic inequality group headed by Van Jones and before that, I was a professional dancer, so I have a sort of lengthy lane here that's a little bit untraditional from a normal organizer. But my resume is like an extremely small part of who I am, so I thought I'd tell you a little story about how I came to work for Hillary Clinton. When I was eight or nine years old, I told my mom that I was gonna be the first woman president in the United States except if Hillary Clinton was the first woman president, and then I was gonna be the second woman president and I was gonna work for Hillary Clinton, so I have wanted to work for her and specifically once I got old enough to think about what my dream job would be was to be the digital organizing director for Hillary Clinton. I truly believe in the power of digital organizing and think that what we'll see in future cycles is not digital organizing but actual organizing. We've been saying that for like a decade. I think it'll actually happen in the next 10 years. So I was the honor and privilege of my life to walk into our headquarters in Brooklyn every day. I used to like legitimately pinch myself. And I had three goals when I went to do that job. One, I wanted Hillary Clinton to say Black Lives Matter. Two, I wanted to register millions of black and brown people to vote. And three, I wanted to build lasting technology that we could give to the party afterwards so that down ballot candidates could use it. The Democratic Party just for clarity's sake. And the reason that I wanted to do that was because I had worked on some of the technology on the Obama 2012 campaign. And I felt like such a travesty because right after the campaign, it went on the shelf and it stayed there until 2016 when people were sort of like, hey, do you wanna take a look at this four year old code? No, we didn't because at that point it was pretty outdated. And that felt like so much time and resources and energy and exciting ideas that didn't get used. So I was always looking towards after win or lose because I'm really interested in, I'm team unsexy, team infrastructure. I wanna do everything I can to build up the kind of things that don't get written up in articles but actually contribute to winning. I think that's a choice that we have right now in this moment. Obviously we lost in the Hillary Clinton campaign. I don't know if you've heard. But I do think that many of the ideas that we were trying to put forward as a digital organizing team are ideas that are absolutely still relevant. And I'll talk a little bit about those and then about sort of where I think the vision is longer because the Hillary Clinton campaign is over but the challenges that we face are only beginning. My overarching philosophy as a digital organizing director was actually to go as small as possible. I wanted to have as many one-to-one conversations to be as intimate and personal as we possibly can and a lot of that frankly was inspired by our candidate. If Barack Obama was the guy who could make you feel like in a million people, he was the only one talking to you. Hillary Clinton was really only talking to the person right there. And some of her best moments were behind the scenes on the rope line or backstage when she would have these incredible heartfelt policy-laden conversations of people who would say things like, I really need to talk about Alzheimer research because my son has, sorry, my grandfather has Alzheimer's and we have a host of challenges related to that and here's like a policy that matters. So part of that we wanted to extend all the way into what we were doing and I think that's also really critical to thinking about the internet now. Digital media and particularly the way people engage on social media is incredibly narcissistic. It's all about them. It's selfies. It's like an echo chamber of people within their network and so I think that what we're seeing is that people care more and more about the individual and it's up to us as political and technology folks to think about how that translates into civic life. You know, the great Robert Pettenham needs to talk about bullying alone. I think we're like into a whole other place where like you never actually go to bowl, you just like stage the bowl for your Instagram selfie. So I think it's really critical to understand that we operate in this incredibly large internet context where we're fighting with that sort of really intimate personal stuff and I'll talk about kind of three moments where I feel like that really worked. One was in the primary. We won the Northern Mariana Islands primary. I think there's one primary vote but I like have never been so proud of a win and it's because we won it mostly through digital organizing and it wasn't super sophisticated. It definitely didn't have any big data because much of the data about Northern Mariana Islands voters is not reliable because there isn't a huge investment in the Northern Mariana Island primary as you can imagine, which is unfortunate. So then, so we found every shred of data that there possibly existed in the voter file in the Northern Mariana primary on our email list on the Northern Mariana primary and anyone that we could figure out related to any other history we had about them that they might be connected to the Northern Mariana primary. One of my favorite things that we did is we sold store shirts in our store that were for all 50 states in the territories, including one for NMI. So we went and looked at everyone who had bought a T-shirt that was the Northern Mariana Islands T-shirt. There were 13 people. My staff personally called all 13 of those people and had a conversation with them about voting in the Northern Mariana primary. They did. We don't have complete data, but we're pretty sure that like 75% of them went and voted because of that phone call. 13 votes makes a big difference in the primary in Northern Mariana Island. And we also, we were pretty sure that most of those folks were people who no longer lived on the island but had family on the island. So we organized them to talk to their friends and family who still lived on the island. And then we went and found the private Facebook groups of people who live in the Northern Mariana Island. There are some. And we posted, including one from our NMI caucus director. And then we asked people to share. And then we found that a person on the Northern Mariana Island had made a video. It was like a supporter video. So all of our staff started sharing that supporter video. And then we, the people that we had the emails for, we sent them that video and we won the Northern Mariana primary. And that's when we sort of started seeing that like some of this very legwork, elbow grease, kind of difficult stuff could work. Another one is in, we did a first of its kind digital voter assistance. So taking our cue from like Delta, we did a, you could just tweet at Hillary Clinton or the Democrats or some of our kind of internal accounts that we had at Hillary for America, which was like our super fan account. And we would answer your questions. You could tweet, you could Facebook post. You could, we did one to one emails. And then also you could text. And we answered millions of voter's questions through that. These were individual questions. This included on the last day of early voting in North Carolina, we were answering questions from people who were actually being turned away from the polls and helping them in real time navigate their problems. And then the last thing I'll talk about is a peace technology I'm really in love with called Megaphone. And Megaphone was our internal organizing technology. At the very beginning of the campaign, I said that I wanted to solve a problem that we have in a life cycle of volunteer. So what happens when you sign up at hillaryclin.com slash volunteer? And sometimes people would say, I never heard from anybody. So we wanted to solve that problem. How do we make sure that every single person who signs up finds someone and able to talk to them? So we built a, the technology team who was an incredible, amazing team built a peer-to-peer messaging program that allowed you to every organizer to download a Chrome extension that was built on top of the voter activation network, the voter file van. And then you could go into van, put it up. It would immediately publish to our website, which is, believe it or not, a problem we've been trying to solve for multiple cycles. Then you would be able to message people via email, only the people who are CP or people in your organizer's turf. And then you were also able to send them a peer-to-peer text message. So one-to-one text message. The organizer, Jessica, would email Becky, or sorry, text message Becky and say, hey, Becky, we're having an event on Friday at three o'clock. Can you come? And we were able to go through the entire life cycle hearing from an actual human being, the organizer, who's making the decisions about the messages that we could send, when we could send them, and who we could send them to. And that's the kind of technology that I hope we're gonna be building as we move forward in campaigns, because that's the kind of technology that really gets at the people that we're trying to engage. Excellent, thank you. So what are the, I'm sorry. If you'd like to clap, feel free. Thank you very much. So you talked about transferring one of the challenges on the Democratic side of the ticket, the Republican side too, in the past has been transferring technology that a lot of money and time has been invested in during the campaign cycle back to the party. What are the megaphone? Where does that go from here? Yeah, it's a question we're definitely still figuring out. One thing that succeeded my wildest expectations was that we actually were able to do some of that technology for the party and for down ballot races during the election. So we partnered with Tessa Simon's amazing digital director at the DNC, and worked with her to actually use megaphone in down ballot races, which was, you know, I actually cannot believe we were able to do that level of coordination. Okay, excellent. So I'm sure you all have some questions. If you can be thinking about them, I'm gonna ask one quick question myself. And then I think we're gonna pass a microphone around. So I think I am gonna ask one question first, and then we'll go to the audience. If you trace the rise of data-driven digital-enabled technology back to the dean campaign, which I think is sort of a natural starting point, we're about a dozen years into this era. Is it better to be an American voter now than it was 12 years ago or worse? Does that make sense? Who's up? Molly? Sure, so I think it relates to the overall experience of consuming information, and in the same way that much advertising has become more targeted, the whole goal of that is making your internet experience more relevant. And so I think that also relates to the political sphere in that the information you're exposed to and are consuming are becoming more relevant to you, which makes it then ideally, you're better equipped to make your decisions about the election. I think it's better to be a white voter. Say more.  And I think that that is also what skews what we think of as best practice or turn up models, because if the data never included you, it's difficult to understand how to engage. So my hope is that as we move forward, we'll put a renewed emphasis on black, brown, queer, poor and working class voters. I think it's a mixed bag, but on balance, it's better. One of the reasons that I agreed to run when I did is for the people who were not planning to vote, because they felt dissatisfied with the options in the process and what was so inspiring all along throughout the campaign in the last month that I was, the candidate was the number of people that we would hear from that would say, this is the first time that I've engaged as a volunteer. This is the first time I've really gotten involved in a campaign. I know it happened for other campaigns, my personal experience that because, and it was so accessible, the ability for them to do that is accessible in a way that would not have been obviously before the internet. And they could get involved instantaneously and they were meeting in the candidate and they were volunteering. So I think on balance, it's better from that perspective. And there are some people again, who I would hear that this was the first time they had ever, they hadn't even voted and they were going to vote. So I think we forget about that. We look at communities that didn't vote or didn't turn out because they're dissatisfied. At the same time, there's others who are inspired and able to engage and get the information they need and get skin in the game. And this is all still going to be worked out. I'm very optimistic that we all could be able to continue to say it's better as the years come as even though it looks a little messy right now. Well, I think it's a terrible time to be a voter. I mean, we've gutted the National Voting Rights Act and we've just seen a couple of decades of serious, systematic disenfranchisement of poor people, low income people, people of color, seniors and other things. I think it's a technology that's made it a good time to be a volunteer and a staffer because there's so much consumer and good technology that helps people work together over across space and time and there's internet on airplanes, so. That's a good thing, I'm not sold on that. Excellent, okay, so I'm sure we have some questions. Who's got a question? And if you could identify yourself if it's relevant anyway. Shekhar Pradhan, DocuneXus. So I'm a great fan of technology and campaigns. I develop it myself. But I worry about hackers taking over the technology and turning it against the candidate and that could have immediate damage. How much of a concern was it to you guys? Did anybody come close to hacking one of your tools and using it against the candidate? And I'm not talking about Russians and so on, I'm talking about, apart from that. So people are actually messing with technology. They're sending a message that is damaging, for instance, in your peer-to-peer communication, for instance. Okay. It's a tremendous concern and actually the CTO of the RNC who is also very involved with the campaign, his background was from Silicon Valley protecting companies against that type of cybersecurity. So tremendous opportunity for danger there that has to be faced just like a multi-billion dollar company would face it. If you've been doing this work for a while, has there been more investment in that sort of protection than there has been in the past? I mean, were people worrying about that in 2008, 2012 in the same way? I would say they were worrying about it but to the same extent that the threat has gotten greater, people are also, it used to be two-step authentication was a big deal. Now we know we need to get a lot farther than that. Hackers have gotten more sophisticated so you come up with patches and cybersecurity measures and they've gotten more sophisticated but it's long been a concern. I mean, going back to, I don't know, it's weird to feel like that I'm like the historian of digital politics now but anyway, going back to 2000, getting really old, going back to 2004, we had a serious attack that brought down our entire system and website and the presidential campaign and we had to engage several additional servers across the country and balance out our infrastructure that way so that that attack couldn't happen again and then now that wouldn't be sufficient because hackers would figure out how to get through that and we go to two-step authentication and platform. So it's a continuous challenge but it's long been a challenge. 2004 was the Bush campaign? I mean, I think we have to focus way more on getting people in and keeping people out. I think it's a concern but I think we have a much greater challenge with having systems that let lots of people in to be part of campaigns as opposed to sort of focusing on security measures to keep people out and that comes from campaigns that are, that allow volunteers to do the work of contacting the voters and getting access to the data and that sort of thing. We really sort of decided that we would default to trusting people because we needed to let people in and the more we worried about security beyond a certain level, the more it limited the scale that we could get to. So we just, we really focused on getting to a mass participation campaign and we had to take some risks on the security side to do that. Yeah, and I wouldn't even, I would say plus one to Becky and I wouldn't even think about it as a risk as much. Like there's really valuable data in knowing if somebody, so let's, our call tool is a really good example. You can make calls from anywhere using your computer and a phone. We did have people who would call and enter in false data. So we built in checks who would, were you making calls too fast? Were you doing like no 100 times in a row?  But part of that was also like, you have to make an account, like log in, verify your account, read our script, log the data.  That's a valuable thing to know about you as much as it's valuable to know when people who are extremely motivated, positive actors. You've all talked about building or using internally facing tech when you're doing an internal R&D build. What are your top priorities? Can you please say the question just for those of us who are, not at this point? Well, that's like, yeah. So, when you're doing your internal research and development, when building in-house technology tools, what are your concerns? And for us, I would say it's time. Campaign has an expiration date. So a really good example, when we did our roadmap, we did it in early 2016 for all the way through the rest of the campaign and we set hard deadlines for when we would not roll out new technology because at that point, there just wasn't real benefits in rolling out technology out. Actually, you probably heard us. So I would say that like most decisions get decided by the amount of time it either is going to take to hire the engineers because you're still hiring engineers or the time it's gonna take to do the user research or the time it's gonna take to actually do the coding. I always think like, what would it be like if a campaign was 10 years long? Like we would solve basically every civic problem. So I agree with that. I'd also say usability and that we're in this interesting time where the parties have recognized you can't wait, if you're in a primary, you can't wait to the general election. So the parties have done a lot of work to build the architecture and the infrastructure to plug into a presidential campaign. And in doing so, our calculation is a lot around, okay, you have, well, look at the Republican field, there were 17 candidates. How do we build something that we can ensure can plug into anything that they're using? Well, how old did that work? I know it's a great question. So along those lines of scalability, it has to go from zero to 100 in this instance about six months because of the drawn out primary process. So you have to be practical, your point about time, understanding and ensuring that it's something that can be done on time and to be used at the volume to be beneficial for this type of operation. Yeah. I mean, our bias was always just use consumer software and connect it with custom coding because consumer software, it already has hundreds of millions of users and it's battle tested. The usability is way better than anything you can build, customize. Custom stuff rarely comes in on time and at the quality that you need to have hundreds of thousands of users. So really, I think consumer software has gotten to a level now, especially because it's been developed to help people work together on teams when they're not co-located for work. It's amazing, stuff that helps multinational corporations run teams are great for campaigns. Stuff like Slack, Google Apps, Facebook groups, Trello. If you don't start with almost free stuff, that's amazing and try and figure out how to build a campaign around that. You're spending a lot of time and resources on building something that could be really subpar, even if it's more custom to your uses. Okay, excellent. Thank you all so much. Thank you. We're unfortunately out of time. Okay, we're gonna thank you to that panel. We're gonna take a 15 minute break, coffee if you need to recharge a little bit, restrooms on either side and please be back in your seats by 10 to four. 15 minute break.


I was a communist for the FBI. Starring Dana Andrews and an exciting tale of danger and espionage. I was a communist for the FBI. From the actual records and authentic experiences of Matt Sevetik. How many of the incidents in this unusual story? Here is our star Dana Andrews as Matt Sevetik. Who for nine fantastic years, lived as a communist for the FBI. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. You'll find that quotation in the Bible. I found the proof of it in the communist party. It wasn't hard to find at all, but believe me, it was brutally hard to accept. This story will illustrate what I mean. In a moment, listen to Dana Andrews as Matt Sevetik, under cover man. This story from the confidential file is marked, The Crossed Heart. Strange town miles from home. You know what it's like. You walk the streets, looking for secrets or surprises. Study the crowds, the blur of bland, impersonal faces. Seeking someone you might know, something familiar to give you that sense of belonging. That's how it usually is with strangers, but I was an unusual stranger. My visit to this town was sponsored by the communist party. I wasn't permitted to take my natural instincts with me. Every instinct, every action and reaction was planned and prescribed by my far-seeing red comrades. I was to report to this address, a private residence. I was to ask for a Mrs. Breen. Then I was to let nature, as authorized by the commies, take its course. How do you do? Good evening. I'm looking for Mrs. Breen. Mrs. Breen, won't you come in? Come in, young man. Come in. You'll catch your death out there. This little old lady, the shawl, the white hair, the rimless glasses. No. She was the type you write songs about. Not the sort you're associated with. I followed her through the gloomy, age-heavy house into a room that had been set aside as a little office. Watching her gestures, so gentle, so prim and proper, I felt sure that somehow the commies or I had made a mistake. There we are. It's so much more comfortable in here, isn't it? Yes. Yes, it is. Now, let me see. Oh, I'm forever misplacing those applications. Here we are. Your name, please. Hmm? Oh, uh, Sevetik. Matt Sevetik. S or C? C. C-V-E-T-I-C. Uh, Mrs. Breen, I think... Your age? I think there's been some... Well, never mind. Let's just say over 30 under 40. All right? All right. Now, I'd say you're about six feet tall. About that. Now, any preference of two types? Types of what? Oh, silly girls, of course. Girls? Look, I... Now, now, now, nothing to worry about. All information is strictly confidential. Our service is licensed by the state. What kind of service? Same as anywhere else. Once you subscribe, I give you three names and telephone numbers. Chosen according to your personal tastes and specifications. If you aren't satisfied, just call in and I'll give you three more. $15 for a month's service. 25 for three months. That's the usual rate? Oh, now, don't start fretting. I've been expecting you, Comrade. Forgive me for confusing you so. We just have to be so very careful, you know. I know. Now, I've arranged a date for you for tonight. A date? Well, that's why you're here, isn't it? Is it? I'm not the least bit sure why I'm here, Comrade Breen. Mrs. Breen, Mr. Svetik, we must be careful. Must, must, must. Okay. Well, tell me about my date. Her name is Clara Malone, a good client. A very important client to the club. I see. She's a widow with quite a bit of money. Rather pretty, too. You call for her, take her to dinner, and most important, you collect an envelope from her. What's in it? Money. She owes the club some money. See that you bring it to me immediately. Now, here's her name, her phone number, her address. Here you are. Vika, this is Red. Oh, good. I just joined a Lonely Hearts Club. What? A Lonely Hearts Club. Some kind of commie front. Okay. Well, I don't know yet. I'll know more after tonight. What's tonight? My first date. Clara Malone, a wealthy widow, I understand. I called her a while ago and got no answer. Well, keep at it, Matt. Well, not yet. Just be there when I need you. I'm on Clara Malone's line. It was getting late now. Mrs. Breen's place was closed, and I couldn't risk violating party orders. So I decided to go directly to the address Mrs. Breen had given me. Maybe by the time I got there, Clara Malone would have arrived, too. I don't know him yet, I guess. I could see a light in her apartment through the crack in the door. Either she was out or she... Hello. This might be Clara Malone. She didn't look like she needed a Lonely Hearts Club to supply her with dates, but then you never know. She came straight for this apartment. Looking for someone? Oh, yes. I was looking for Mrs. Malone. I'm Mrs. Malone. Clara Malone? Oh, no, I'm Judith, Clara's sister. Isn't she home yet? Well, she hasn't answered the door. That's funny. Is there anything I can do? Not exactly. See, Clara and I have a date for the night. Oh. Well, come on in then. She should be home any minute. All right. She might have run down to the store. What's the matter? What is it? What's the matter? Holy smokes. A good reason for not answering the door. She was dead. My first instincts told me to get out of there fast. But from the looks of things, her death was a suicide. And Judith wasted no time in calling the police. The police inspector, a tired, shabby little guy named Bychek, thought it was a suicide tool, but he wasn't sure. And in his job, he had to be sure. Sorry we had to bring you two all the way down here, but you know how it is. Sit down, Mrs. Malone. Thank you, Inspector. Yeah, you too. Uh, what's your name again? Servetic. That's right. You were a friend of the deceased, Svendick. No, I never saw her before tonight. This is my first day in town.  Well, yes, it was a blind date, a mutual friend. How about her, Miss Malone? Is this guy a friend of your sister's? I don't know, Inspector. Don't you share that apartment with your sister? Yes, but Clara dated a lot of men I knew nothing about. Too many, I suppose. Too many? She's been terribly unhappy since her husband died. Lonely and unhappy. Any special reason for killing yourself? Finances? No. She inherited a lot of money from her husband. He didn't care about money much. Inspector, do you think it wasn't suicide? I mean, do you think that Clara was... Oh, it looks like suicide, all right, Miss Malone? Probably is. But the coroner's report isn't in yet. There are a few funny angles to this mess. But who? Who would want it to hurt Clara? She was a lonely widow. She had money. She dated a lot of strange guys. Too many, you said. Like Sweetic here. Somehow he knew her phone number and address, but he didn't know her. Just a minute, Inspector. I'm a cop, Sweetic. My job don't give me much time to trust people. Listen, I'm a... Never mind. Skip it. Didn't go. Both of you. Sorry for all the trouble, Miss Malone. All right, Inspector. I won't heckle you unless it's necessary. Thank you. Say, Sweetic, what? You better stay around town a while. If the coroner comes in with any surprise decisions, we'll want you for questioning. I couldn't leave town anyway. I was under orders from the Reds. But I couldn't let the police know that. I had some vital questions to put to sweet old Mrs. Breen, like how did the Reds figure in Clara's death? If it was murder, it was I to be the patsy for the party. But she wasn't to be found. Her house was dark, locked up. I waited around a while. No use. I headed for my hotel to get some sleep. You're back early. How did you get in here? Oh, please don't be angry with me. I told the room clerk I was your mother, and I wanted to surprise you. Well, you did.  I just didn't want you to be burdened too long with that envelope, temptation, you know. What envelope? The envelope you collected from Clara. She's dead, Mrs. Breen. Cold stone dead. What are you talking about? You know full well what I'm talking about. Clara Malone was dead when I got to her apartment. It looks like suicide, but it may be murder. Murder? Skip the performance, Mrs. Breen, and get this straight. If that phone rings, it'll be the police. It's been ringing all evening. Oh? It will probably ring again. Well, if it does, it's because the cops have a good reason to suspect me of killing Clara Malone. I'll have to tell them about you and your Lonely Hearts Club. No, Comrade Stettich. You mustn't do that. No? Watch. The party can't afford to be involved in that sort of thing. If you did that, we'd see that you... The phone, Comrade Stettich. Well, aren't you going to answer it? Look, if it's the police, I'm going to... Just remember, young man, the police operate according to bourgeois concepts of justice. The party has its own concept. Yeah. Yeah, I know. You'd better answer the phone. Answer it, Comrade, right now. Hello? Andrew, starring as Matt Severick, and I was a communist for the FBI and the second act of our story. The telephone can be an instrument of torture, and right now, I was its victim. The receiver was at my ear. I'd spoken a greeting into the mouthpiece. Then there was a moment's silence, bitter, excruciating silence. A glance at Mrs. Breen standing in my elbow told me that a murder charge would be delightful compared to what the commies would do to me if I told the truth to the police. Yes? Inspector Bychek is trying to get you all evening. What do you want? Now? Well, it's pretty late. I know. You got the coroner's report? Yeah. Well, I'll be down. I was saying, Comrade, the party has its own way of treating those who violate its confidence. You mean they let me be charged with a murder? I didn't commit. Well, what can they do, Comrade? After all, what's more important? The life of one young man or the life of the proletariat revolt? You look nervous. It's late, Inspector. I'm tired. Me, too. We got the coroner's report on Clara Malone. He's satisfied that it's suicide. Well, then what do you want? I'm not satisfied. Smenic, why'd you come to this city? Business. What business? Just business. Business with Clara Malone? Oh, no. That was just a date. Yeah. Arranged by a mutual friend. A business associate? All right. Here. Look. The report from Clara Malone's bank. She inherited $300,000 when her husband died. Look what's left. She's practically broke. Where did it go? Wherever it went, it went during the last year or so. Somebody was bleeding this dame dry, Smenic. She has a couple of kids to wait at an exclusive private school, but she has. You didn't know that? No. Smenic, I warn you, either you tell us what you know or...   I'm trying to give you a break. Clara Malone was the victim of a shakedown, Smenic. Whoever's responsible is just as responsible for her suicide, directly or indirectly. In spite of you, I intend to find out who and why and how. Well, I wish I could help, Inspector. Yeah, I'll bet. Okay, Smenic, get out. Get out of here. Secretly, I hoped Inspector Bychek would fulfill his threat. I left police headquarters praying silently that he'd be able to pin his suspicions on Mrs. Breen and the commies, but I couldn't help him. I'm sure I might have been noble and named names, but nobility comes hard when you know the commie technique for vengeance. The streets of this strange city were even stranger now. They were empty, silent, wet with that pre-dawn mist. Whoa! It's ready. It's ready. Go in here, hurry. Sorry, pal, I'm going the other way. Get in the car, Smenic.  Let go, I can't. Get in, I said. Any trouble? No trouble, Comrade Breen.  I'm dedicated to my work. It makes a difference. That's all for now, George. Okay. Are you all right, Comrade Stettig? No, I don't like being shoved around by that goon boy of yours. He's Comrade Stettig. I'd like to know what you told the police. Nothing. Oh, now come there. If I did tell them anything about you or this club, don't you think you'd know by now? Well, you're right, of course. Do the police know anything about us? Just hunches. The coroner called Clara Malone's death a suicide. But the inspector thinks there's blackmail involved. Where did he learn that? Not a fool, you know. He checked Clara's bank account and learned that she went through a lot of money in a big hurry. I wonder how much that sister of hers knows. Not too much from what I could see. We've got to be sure, Comrade. We've got to be sure. Well, she's... Would you mind finding out for me, please? What? Well, you've met Judith. You've talked with her. Find out what she knows about the club, the blackmail, anything. If she knows more than she should, then... Then what? We'll see. We'll see. Your job now is to find out what she knows before she tells the police. The commie web was being spun again. This time, the victim was to be Judith Malone. I had to keep her free of that web somehow. But I had to keep myself clear of the web, too. Maybe there was a way, some way, to turn the web against the spinner, to strangle the commies with their own vicious weapon. It was worth a try. One good try. Beaker, this is Red. Hi, what's up? I need some bugs and lines, fast. Small mics, okay. They don't know you at the local field office, do they? No. Yeah, Roger's Market down the street. There'll be a package for you there in an hour. Oh, Matthews. Okay. Pick up your groceries in an hour, Mr. Man. And my groceries were waiting for me in an hour. The package was camouflaged pretty well, but I knew the equipment I needed was there. Coils of wire, small microphones, earphones, the works. My next step was to call Mrs. Breen and tell some whoppers. You mean she knows the whole story? Yeah, Clara told her everything. But Judith has a pretty sensible attitude about it. Oh, she's more sensible than that. There's one simple way to keep Judith quiet. Oh, no. Violence, no. Terms, yes. Did she tell you that? She hinted at it pretty strongly. You'd better phone her, make an appointment, make her an offer. Is it her place? No, cops all over the neighborhood. Tell her you realize that silence is golden. Tell her you have some important information about her sister. That should do it, I hope. I checked in at Mrs. Breen's place later and learned that she'd made an appointment with Judith Malone for 8.30 that night. About six o'clock, Mrs. Breen decided to go out for a bite to eat. Want to join me, comrade Svitic? No, thanks. I'll stay here. Judith may change her mind. Can't take any chances. Well, you're probably right. Incidentally, you'll be here tonight when I see her, won't you? You don't want me here. Too many of us might overemphasize the importance, make her boost the price even more. All right. And remember, she's quite a little actress. She'll play the innocent role right up to the hilt, but don't let her fool you. Don't worry, young man. I'll be back soon. Don't take your time. I've nothing to do anyway. There was plenty to do, of course. As soon as Mrs. Breen was gone, I unwrapped my groceries, which I'd hidden in the shrubs outside the house. As quickly as possible, I wired her office for sound. One tiny microphone under the rug near her desk, another near the big armchair. I ran the wires up behind the draper's out the windows and into the shrubs, where the miniature recording setup would be located. Back in the little office, I was about to test the microphone. Svitic, where is Mrs. Breen? Well, she went out for something to eat. Why? That Malone dame is here. Now? Well, I thought he ate 30. Well, she says she was nervous. Couldn't wait. I better get Comrade Breen. Oh, no, no. I'll go. I know where she's eating. Uh, have you been here in the house all this time? Sure. Where'd you think I'd be? Why? Nothing. Just curious. That's all. I went out the back door to avoid Judith. There was no chance to test the equipment now. No chance for anything but cold, naked luck. When Mrs. Breen went inside to meet Judith, I ducked behind the shrubbery, switched on the recorder, dusted the earphone, and prayed. Now come on, come on, pick it up. Pick it up. Come on, please. Pick it up. Please, please. About time we got straight to the point this Malone, I'm willing to pay any reasonable price for your silence. Silence? What have I to be silent about? Oh, let's stop playing possum young lady. We'll go to any lengths to stop you from telling the police what you know. We prefer to do business on a purely financial basis. So here are my terms. And I expect you to accept them. We have all we need to hang the blackmail charge on Mrs. Breen and the local commie speaker. That'll clear me with the party. Be sure the local papers get the same story. And I'll phone Inspector Bajek to tell him to expect the record. He has it already. So soon? I had it delivered to him direct. But you'd better call and explain what it's all about. I'll do it. Yeah, Beaker. Soon. Later I stood in the shadows across the street from Mrs. Breen's house. A police car was parked at the curb. One by one I saw the lights in the house blink out. Then the door opened and Inspector Bajek came out with Judith, Mrs. Breen and the red goon George. When the car drove away, the street became a dark ribbon silence stretched across the strain city. Again, walking across town, I felt the hollow distinction that only a stranger can feel. But I'd be a stranger in any city, anywhere. I had to be. It was my job. I had to walk alone. Andrews will return in just a moment. This is Dana Andrews, friends, with a reminder that most precious commodities increase in value as they become less accessible. But freedom is the one exception. The more the world sees of it, the more valuable it becomes. Let's increase the value of our freedom by sharing it with the world. In this story, as in all others, names, dates and places are fictitious to protect innocent persons. Next week, another fantastic adventure. Join us, won't you?


Bemidji Girls beginning their postseason against Crookston. In the fifth minute, Bemidji attacking. Lindsay Hildenbrandt up the right side, picks her spot from 15 yards out and banks it right off the post. A perfect shot. They take the lead. Now up 2-0, Sam Hansen takes the long shot. The goalie can't snatch the ice cold freezing soccer ball in Hildenbrandt, cleans it up for her second of the day. Bemidji wins easily by a final of 10-0. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Seven twenty six in the morning. Are you sure you got to go outside already? Oh Morning folks. We're here in the Hotel Sandman Sandman hotel trucks in the shop getting a few things up there getting fixed Should be ready today sometime. I was thinking we would sleep a little bit longer today seems we got really nothing to do but Somebody had other plans Come on, bud. Let's go outside.  I'm gonna take you outside Didn't we take you out? We did take you up before bed. You drink a lot of water All right, bud Can you open the door? We're going outside for you. You think that you'd open the door? No, okay. Don't forget this on a mission this way It's a rainy morning. Don't eat that.  Look at this. See if I got a new Chevy it would be this It's a blocked out Silverado Z71 trail boss Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Very nice This is the hotel that we're staying at Sandman Diesel you woke me up to go stand out in the rain.  Beautiful Come on bud Let's go on says charge to the mud man. Let's go inside Got myself set up here I couldn't fall back asleep after we got up at 7 30 this morning So I just stayed up and catching up my videos here I guess you guys have probably noticed I've started scheduling them again at 4 a.m. Central time. I really I Like that system and we did that for years before and I sort of miss it. So I'm gonna try it again for a bit and see what happens Just making coffee for myself over there. I've been running off coffee. My truck is still in the shop Apparently they have the same tech that works on it Which I sort of like but he gets off at midnight yesterday and he hadn't finished and he starts at 11 30 this morning So they don't put someone else on my truck in the meantime. They wait for him to come back in today So it's the same guy that works on the truck the whole time. So it's actually 1145 now, so he should have my truck back in the shop right now I'm trying to diagnose that engine light. They replaced the air dryer yesterday and Now just get that engine light diagnosed sort of got my stuff full Over the place here. All right. It's update time. So talk to the shop Not good news not good news So they dove into the engine light and they found that there are Not just one or two error codes But several error codes and that there are also power problems that I knew already But I thought I had had that fixed at the last shop that I was at in Steinbeck They were supposed to have cleaned all my battery terminals turns out they only cleaned the battery terminals They didn't clean the grounds and somewhere in my truck Something is drawing power drawing power and that might be what's causing some of these engine light problems There might also be an injector that's on the way out that I need to replace So all in all It's been eight hours at a hundred and sixty four dollars an hour To diagnose this engine light and they're still working on it They have replaced the air dryer system and they've got that all working fixed all the air leaks and everything That's that's good. That was five hundred dollars approximately and They think that this is going to get pushed to Monday today Saturday when I'm filming this So it looks like I'm going to be in a hotel here for two more nights and My truck bill is going to be in the thousands of dollars. I was hoping it'd be something small but they could just you know Push some buttons in their computer and fix it Looks like it's gonna be a little more serious than we thought So Here we are It's five thirty right now. They told me to give them a call around seven o'clock if they if I haven't heard from them yet Just to get an update They'll tell me then whether or not I need to book this hotel room for another two nights or not Not too happy about this but at the same time I'm glad that we're catching this all now because if there is an injector on the way out I would much rather have caught it now then have it go out on me while I'm out on the road somewhere and Get me stranded and have to pay for a tow Whatever's going on with my power system my power supply through my batteries through my system whatever's drawing power I'm glad that they're looking into it and fixing it because I was getting tired of my battery draining so quickly and Unexplicably like sometimes I would it's happened to me twice now where I'm at a customer and Just unloading right and while they're unloading me like sometimes it takes them a little while to do their stuff Sometimes up to four hours right and I'll usually play my farming game or edit some videos or something on my computer And just having my computer plugged into those batteries for four hours Drain those batteries twice. That's why I got them looked at in Steinbeck last time and they told me they were good to go Batteries might be good to go. The system is not somewhere in the system It's not delivering full power to the whole system of the ECU the computer components are not getting full power I'm not a mechanic. So excuse my simple talk. I don't know all of the Fancy terms for everything. I should know more about how to fix a truck and I'm learning as I go It's called the process of life. So one day I will know more about that, but excuse my simple terms here so Getting that looked at I'm glad they're fixing it now because like I said, I don't want to be stranded somewhere with a dead battery Because I had my computer on her because I was charging my phone overnight, right or like my bunk heater on or something So that'll be fixed. It's a good thing. We're getting this all fixed now. I'm happy about it I'm just kind of scared to see the bill and I also have another problem This one's not quite as big, but it is kind of a problem. Uh, the pizza's almost gone Chuck checks out robotic cars. There's no better meal than a robot meal In one of the fastest vehicles On the entire plan wants to be Final update of the evening. I know you've just been looking at me sitting in a hotel room all day tomorrow We'll try to get out and do something different. I'm going to be here for tomorrow and part of Monday But I do have some good news to update you with right now. Oh Finally some good news. Okay, so they figured out what was wrong Remember I've been telling you guys that my batteries need to be replaced But the shop that I brought my truck to to get safety that said that they tested the batteries and said they were fine But I wasn't just here. What was going on there? Okay, well, they tested the voltage on my batteries here and these batteries were junk They were junk. So they replaced my batteries and that actually fixed all the problems because the problem was the engine light was coming on because the ECU and he labeled off bunch other technical Parts that need power weren't getting the correct voltage and because of that it was kicking my engine light on Now there was another problem that we caught luckily Must have happened just recently, but my turbo actuator was seized shot Which isn't good. I believe I could have blown my turbo if I ran like that for too long Which is a very expensive part now this actuator isn't cheap in itself either, but it's a lot cheaper than a new turbo It's a $1400 Canadian dollar part, which is let's say just over a thousand bucks American or so 1100 bucks It's for you Americans, but we're gonna talk on Canadian dollars here. So a $1400 part for that they replaced all four batteries, which was $367 The total labor that's gone into diagnosing these problems is $1200 They replaced my air dryer, which was $400 and I believe there was an hour of labor on that too Which was another hundred and sixty four dollars so they're sending me a bill to my email and I can look it over over tomorrow and Give them an answer on on Monday Or well workout pimp the trucks not gonna be ready tonight yet They're gonna need a little bit of Monday to get it done yet So with all that being said, I believe what I'm thinking right now. I think we're sitting around Either around $4,500 to $5,000. I think is what I think the total is gonna be We'll see how close I am when it actually comes through. I'm supposed to be getting an email from them soon Show up yet They're gonna email me. Oh here it is. Yes. Okay. Oh I'm nervous. Are you guys nervous? It says hi Josh Attached is the estimate for repairs before taxes and shop supplies Core charges will be removed once repairs are completed Please review and advise how you would like to proceed Here we go opening her up the quote right now. Oh, it's more than I thought It's more than I thought Okay Hey, they said the core charges will be removed but right now the quote is at $5,585 and 65 cents Total parts two thousand six hundred seventy five dollars total labor two thousand three hundred eighty five dollars Oh core charges five hundred twenty four dollars. Oh, okay. So five hundred twenty four dollars are coming off of this yet Okay, so I was right. It was around five thousand dollars. I was hoping forty five hundred to five thousand but so five thousand plus taxes Now we're in British Columbia. So they're pretty tax happy out here on the West Coast. I Don't know what their tax rates are here. I think they're in Manitoba our tax rates are 13% Say five thousand dollars plus. Let's say 13% $5,600 so let's just round it up and say it'll probably be six thousand five hundred dollars There's always hidden charges. There's always hidden charges Well, if that doesn't knock the breath out of you, I don't know I don't know what will and if that doesn't convince you to join the trucking industry I don't know what will But I love what I do. It's priceless to me. I love trucking You know, I My parents sent me through a private school I got accepted into University at two different universities to go through criminology courses I could have gone through that been a lawyer or a cop or whatever I wanted to be I decided I wanted to be a truck driver And I've never regretted it. I've never regretted it This is what I've always dreamt of being my dad was a truck driver growing up And this is what I've always wanted to be wanted to do And here I am living the dream and this is one of those parts of the dream that aren't very fun. They're expensive They'll set us back but we'll catch up and uh We'll make it happen We'll make it happen Pretty good guess though, right? I said 4,500 to 5,000 Almost bang on 5,000 The high end of it But uh, yeah, so that just goes to show like uh, you got to love what you do You don't have to be a truck driver But I just hope that whatever career you find yourself in that you enjoy your career as much as I enjoy mine Even on the bad days because even on the bad days now. I haven't had one thought go through my head Going like oh, maybe this is not what I want to do with my life You know The only thing that makes me think that is the fact that I don't have my wife here with me That is the hardest part of this job You know, I started this job before I met her even and uh, I knew it would be hard ones I got married but man some of these days out here being away from her and we don't have kids yet But once we have kids That's the hardest part of the job But no job is easy And it's always worth it to do a job that you enjoy Otherwise, you're completely miserable So I'm going to end the vlog here. I've been mostly just sitting around Maybe we should just like move around a bit change the scenery a bit for you guys Let's stare at this uh Art I think that's art. Anyways could just be a random picture of You never know You never know could be worth like thousands of dollars That's me trying to add something else into this video other than me just sitting around talking about my truck Thanks for hanging out with me this long. I know it's probably been quite a bit of talking today If you've made it to the end, I appreciate it. Uh tomorrow, we'll try to go out to find a dog park For me and the weasel to go for a run Sure, he'll take me for a walk because I've been Kind of stressed out today and haven't gone out much We've gone on a few short walks, but haven't gone out much. I've just been Slowly losing my mind waiting for this bill to come in that I read off with you Right here right now. So I'm glad it was close to what we were expecting So I'll see you guys tomorrow for another day hanging out in british columbia Tune in we'll try to make a little more exciting than this. I promise


Yeah, like that three-strike long and Kelly you get three straight niggas go to jail for life. That's it Crack you get you get three first-degree felonies You get all the mad life sentence man. If you get come big thing on your third first-degree felony No, I'm trying to get past that shit, but it I can't go back to that though if a nigga violate You know I think you said a lot people know that the jail ain't what you supposed to be a dog Like I say everybody glorified doing this doing that, but they don't glorify jail come behind it, too Yeah gel come with it man. Yeah, like main ingredients to the recipe.  It's just somebody being in captivity.  What would you add were you a Ferguson or use that I was on the words unit at that time in Texas Clemens Clemens, yeah, I know by Clemens, but it's to Clemens though.  I was at the one in Houston on burning here They call it burning here. That's rather young means that the game. So that ain't the one what they're releasing you out because you know They trying to get you ready for society. I'm the one I come from the one where the members it certified gang members niggas under 25 25 another with gang-related charges that on fire for gang activity Going to Clemens a wild P8 where they be sending them young niggas from T. Y. C. But for them when they be charged to adults They sit on the Clemens and how long did you how long did you stay on that thing? I stay on the flight for years three years Yeah, what's my idea at one time? That was the time I did like oh I did like foe but I was in T. Y. C. for like three and a half In a time I didn't even the county they got a pool like 18 months in the county this time 16 months that time, you know, I'm saying you ready to go to the P. M.  That's really love complete compared to certain places Yeah, like in New York. I'm gonna do a five minute to a year for a prison case You know I'm saying yeah, yeah I'm gonna five years a minute to avoid plus the case.  Wow Apple pistol, you can't really just not have one.  So that's why I do like that.   No Kelly. No Kelly for you is I like