Niraj Chokshi

Support among American high school students for the First Amendment is stronger today than it has been in the last 12 years, according to the latest in a series of large nationwide surveys of the nation’s rising voters. Some 91 percent of high school students say they believe that individuals should be allowed to express unpopular opinions, according to a Knight Foundation survey of nearly 12,000 students conducted in 2016. The survey is the sixth in a series, the first of which was carried out in 2004, when 83 percent supported such rights.

A 17-word Facebook reminder contributed to substantial increases in online voter registration across the country, according to top election officials.

At least nine secretaries of state have credited the social network’s voter registration reminder, displayed for four days in September, with boosting sign-ups, in some cases by considerable amounts. Data from nine other states show that registrations rose drastically on the first day of the campaign compared with the day before. “Facebook clearly moved the needle in a significant way,” said Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state. In California, 123,279 people registered to vote or updated their registrations on Friday, Sept. 23, the first day that Facebook users were presented with the reminder. That was the fourth-highest daily total in the history of the state’s online registration site.

Facebook’s effort is notable not just for boosting voter registration, but also for the kinds of voters it may have helped to enlist. While Facebook could not provide demographic breakdowns of the users who registered, the social network is more popular among female internet users than male users, and the same is true for young users compared with older users. Both groups — women and younger adults — tend to lean Democratic.

They may both support the dissemination of government secrets, but Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks seem to disagree on how best to do it. On July 28, Snowden, the former government contractor who released a trove of National Security Agency documents and now lives in exile in Russia, credited WikiLeaks, a clearinghouse for similar disclosures, with furthering the cause of transparency but also criticized its unfiltered approach. "Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped. But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake," he tweeted. His words prompted a swift and cutting reply from WikiLeaks, which had once come to his aid.

Snowden, it suggested, was trying to ingratiate himself with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, just days after WikiLeaks had released embarrassing emails showing that Democratic Party officials had derided the campaign of her main rival in the primary, Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT). "Opportunism won't earn you a pardon from Clinton & curation is not censorship of ruling party cash flows," replied Wikileaks on twitter. WikiLeaks is often criticized for releasing documents without editing or regard for the sensitive information they may contain. Snowden, on the other hand, has said that he chose to work with journalists in 2013 to selectively release the NSA documents in order to limit the harmful consequences of exposing what he called the abuses of government surveillance. The exchange was all the more striking in light of the past collaboration between Snowden and the group, which helped him as he sought to find a place to settle into exile.

Minnesota passed the nation’s first law requiring smartphones to have the ability to be remotely disabled. The law requires smartphone manufacturers to introduce so-called “kill switches” in devices to allow users to make lost or stolen phones unusable.

In so doing, the state hopes to remove the incentive for such robberies, which are on the rise.

A Consumer Reports survey released in April month found that 3.1 million Americans had cellphones stolen in 2013, nearly double the 1.6 million thefts reported the previous year. Some of those robberies can become violent, as was the case for a Minneapolis mayoral candidate who received nine stitches after being assaulted by teenage thieves in December.

“This law will help combat the growing number of violent cellphone thefts in Minnesota,” Gov. Mark Dayton said in a statement to announce the bill’s signing. Minnesota is the first state to pass such a law. A similar measure is working its way through the California legislature.