iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 29/09/2026

Ah, should have clarified better. My apologies.

Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 29/09/2026

The thing I’m asking my police department is if Cicero and Skokie share Flock info - could the Feds use Skokie’s camera to help ICE? It’s also rich that NOW Cook County is concerned after just voting to expand Flock in May.

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Chicago Reader @chicagoreader.com · 29/09/2026

Federal authorities tapped into a network of Flock automated license plate readers and surveillance cameras while trying to prosecute Marimar Martinez and Anthony Ruiz last year, according to court records reviewed by the Reader. 🧵

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 29/09/2026

I don’t know how I would feel telling a chatbot about my PTSD. The form requires you talk about your experience and the VA put a lot of thought into the process. It puts the veterans crisis line right beforehand and reminds you that it saves and you can come back later

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 29/09/2026

My first read is that like many other NDS websites the real functionality is ‘coming soon’ - I tested a VA disability claim and it directs me to the VA site. It claims to be able to do that in 2027 but that’s a significantly heavier lift than building an LLM wrapper.

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Matt Henry 🥄 @matthenry.fyi · 29/09/2026

Several civic technologists, civil servants, and concerned citizens signed on to an open letter to GSA leadership and members of congress asking them to protect USWDS as a piece of critical digital infrastructure. I'm proud to be one of them. fedscoop.com/websites-jeo...

fedscoop.com

Websites ‘in jeopardy’ amid U.S. Web Design System takeover, coalition tells GSA

The letter comes after administration officials changed leadership for the system, implemented new AI tooling, and shut out members of an open-source community.

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CNN @cnn.com · 29/09/2026

Migrant children as young as 2 are showing up at immigration courts nationwide, many without attorneys, to make their case to stay in the US and avoid deportation. cnn.it/4huSk5M

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 29/09/2026

Who was the first @cpsc.gov character? Honest Ron right?

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

There has been no accountability around DOGE as a project or as a theory of governance. For the first, we need a credible Congressional commission. For the second, explaining why DOGE failed feels like a useful exercise for informing what we should do next. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-year-on-...

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 28/09/2026

Yes, I know. The whole ‘swearing allegiance’ may be a little corny, but when you can out hands on things that impact people’s lives at scale you need it.

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 28/09/2026

Caun McCann’s “Build With, Not For” mantra continues to be the defining feature of civic tech and DOGE’s bullying is its antithesis. Those who joined federal government also took their oath of office seriously - their allegiance is to the Constitution, not to Musk or their bank account.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

New, from me: Once memory-holed, DOGE is now the subject of revisionism. To better understand why DOGE failed, I talked to people in the civic tech movement that DOGE displaced, who continue to offer the alternative model for how to modernize govt. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doge-vs-ci...

donmoynihan.substack.com

DOGE vs. Civic Tech

As DOGE revisionism picks up, a contrast with the civic tech movement it displaced illuminates its failure

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PBS News @pbsnews.org · 27/09/2026

More than 1.2 million children lost access to food aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program between July 2025 and 2026, according to a new analysis. to.pbs.org/4dwuKEf

to.pbs.org

More than 1.2 million children have lost SNAP benefits since last July. Experts explain why

Experts say that the drop is a cause for worry, and that it’s unlikely that the need for food assistance has dropped.

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 26/09/2026

Bill also has ‘Move Carefully and Fix Things’ on t-shirts billhunt.dev/shop/

billhunt.dev

Shop

Personal website and blog of Bill Hunt

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 26/09/2026

Course, if the whole purpose of the AI program is to make it harder for people to get benefits - then the project was a complete success!

static.klipy.com

Billy Madison: I Award You No Points

Alt: Billy Madison: I Award You No Points and May God have mercy on your soul

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 26/09/2026

There’s also tried and true ways to launch things with reduced risk. You saw this with Direct File which first launched in a few states under specific circumstances then opened it up as the system proved itself.

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 26/09/2026

USDS and 18F had a process called a discovery sprint which dug into all facets of the problem that was being solved for. Civic technologists know a lot about digital delivery, but that doesn’t automatically make them experts in the program you’re working in

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 26/09/2026

This is one of those painful examples of why @krusynth.bsky.social’s “Move Carefully and Fix Things” is so important. People who work on gov systems that impact lives have a responsibility to ‘Do No Harm’ because if you f’k up it has *consequences*

But others carried on. One vendor, Zyter, had data discrepancies for months because it apparently didn't understand the difference between Medicare Part A, which covers inpatient/hospital care, and Part B, which covers outpatient services. Zyter's CEO, Sundar Subramanian, told Ars Technica in a written statement that the company is now "fully functional across Medicare Part A and Part B claims." The company is working closely with federal partners and the healthcare providers to
"enhance the experience," Subramanian said.

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Reminder that in Canada upon becoming an engineer you get an iron ring made of a collapsed bridge, purposely designed to be uncomfortable, to remind you that your ethics demand you give a fuck even about the boring grudgework of such as double-checking your math. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring

en.wikipedia.org

Iron Ring - Wikipedia

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Anna Bower @annabower.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I thought NYT was the first to report this, but it’s was actually @chicago.suntimes.com. Kudos to @jonseidel.bsky.social, the reporter who broke the story.

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 25/09/2026

What worries me about this is if the same thing happened to Grok. You know why.

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VoteVets @votevets.org · 24/09/2026

Elon Musk's DOGE is gone, but the wreckage it left behind at the VA is still being felt. A new VA Inspector General report found that DOGE, alongside Trump's VA appointees, terminated 435 contracts worth a total of $1.1 billion. www.stripes.com/veterans/202...

stripes.com

$1 billion in VA contracts terminated following requests from DOGE, senior officials

Most of the terminated contracts were for consulting services, which included administrative and program management as well as communications.

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Katie Bergh @katiebergh.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

🚨New: With data added from more states, we now estimate that about 2 million fewer kids are receiving SNAP in the wake of deep cuts enacted in last year’s Republican reconciliation law. Overall, more than 5 million people have lost SNAP since July 2025. www.cbpp.org/research/foo...

cbpp.org

SNAP Tracker: People Are Losing Food Assistance as the Harmful 2025 Republican Reconciliation Law Is Implemented

SNAP participation nationwide fell by roughly 5 million people (12 percent) between the law’s July 2025 enactment and May 2026, based on the latest month of data.

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ponder @ponder.ooo · 24/09/2026

calling this "misalignment" instead of "negligence" is an accountability dodge. we already have laws about cyber crimes and there's no scale of ML model you can incorporate into your code that makes you not responsible for running it

In a statement, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company was "conducting an extensive review of misaligned model activity" during training, and notifying third parties when there was a potential impact on their systems.

"During this review, we identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation," they said.

"In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 24/09/2026

Money, power, & this..*waves hands*..transference of agency to the AI. The AI program does what its told. It doesn't actually have any agency, but every time this happens it's "Oh, the *AI* did something we didn't intend - look how smart & scary it is! Also, buy our cybersecurity services!"

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 24/09/2026

*flips tables* THIS! This thing. This thing right here. This is bad for national security. Hacking an ally is bad ok? Know what would be worse? If OpenAI had 'accidentally' hacked an adversary and done real damage. These companies need to be held accountable *now*

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The SNAP stuff was the part that they allowed to take effect before the midterms. That gives you a sense of just how awful the Medicaid stuff they are holding until after the midterms will be.

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Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Taught the Fugitive Slave Act for the first time in a few years. Man, my head was spinning as I uttered my familiar refrain about how the FSA radicalized Northerners who maybe never thought much about slavery until they saw people being snatched off the street right in front of them...

static.klipy.com

Euphoria Wait Is This Fucking Play About Us

Alt: Euphoria Wait Is This Fucking Play About Us

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 23/09/2026

This is a downside of administrative burden. The more hoops you build to make getting benefits harder makes the machine more complicated and more likely to break.

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 23/09/2026

There’s countless other examples of stuff like this. Michigan mistakenly accused thousands of people of unemployment fraud because the algorithm in their new system was done badly - The state settled for $20 million. www.michigan.gov/ag/news/pres...

michigan.gov

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 23/09/2026

A lot of what opponents of social safety net programs call ‘fraud’ is actually clerical errors done at scale by computers not people. You have to get it in your head that America is a huge country. 30k people out of over 200 million register voters is .15% www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

reuters.com

How US states mistakenly added 30,000 non-citizens to voter rolls

The findings suggest that inadvertent bureaucratic failures, ‌rather than organized efforts to register immigrants illegally, are a major source of non-citizen registrations.

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Heather Cherone @heathercherone.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Not included in this round up: Silverio Villegas González, killed by ICE agents outside Chicago on Sept. 12, 2025

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Nick Ulivieri @nuphoto.com · 22/09/2026

Happy #Chicagohenge, everyone! Astronomical fall officially arrives at 7:05pm CDT today. Happy shooting if you're out chasing the sun between Chicago's concrete (and steel and glass) canyons. The forecast is iffy this afternoon, but worth a shot.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

To me, this feels like an extension of DOGE. Big claims about fraud, using data-matching to drop people from coverage. Without actual data, or investigation, it is impossible to refute the claims, but such transparency is unlikely to be forthcoming.

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Governor JB Pritzker @govpritzker.illinois.gov · 22/09/2026

When experts and industry leaders sound the alarm bell, we should listen. I'm establishing the Illinois AI Cabinet to assess the risks AI poses to Illinoisans' safety, identify safeguards, and determine how we respond. We're not waiting for Congress or this White House to act.

Governor JB Pritzker today signed Executive Order 2026-07 establishing the Illinois Artificial Intelligence (AI) Cabinet, a group of individuals from across industries and fields that will assess the various risks posed by AI to the safety of Illinoisans.

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Christopher Whitaker @civicwhitaker.com · 22/09/2026

Ask any civic technologists whose been doing service delivery long enough and they'll tell you all sorts of stories about how letters get mailed in late, to the wrong address, or in the wrong language. And because government hasn't cracked down on scam letters and calls, it makes it harder.

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Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

BREAKING WaPo: JD Vance and admin officials are set to announce that they're removing hundreds of thousands of people from Affordable Care Act coverage — claiming that they were fraudulently enrolled in the program, according to three people with knowledge of the forthcoming announcement.

washingtonpost.com

Trump officials plan to cut hundreds of thousands from ACA, claiming fraud

Vance targeted ACA enrollment as part of a broader administration crackdown on suspected fraud.

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Pam Herd @pamherd.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The plan is paid for by taking child care supports away from low income parents (mothers), just as they're requiring these same families (women) to *work* to access Medicaid and SNAP. The real goal is to punish poor single mothers. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/u...

nytimes.com

White House Plan to Subsidize Stay-at-Home Parents Divides Conservatives

Some praise the idea championed by Vice President JD Vance to direct federal money to support traditional families, while others say it cuts against conservative principles.

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