es to listen deeply to their constituents.

This is happening today in Japan. Constituents have spent about eight thousand
hours engaging with Mirai?s AI Interviewer since 2025. The party?s gamified
volunteer mobilization app, Action Board, captured about 100,000 organizer
actions per day in the runup to last week?s election.

It?s how Team Mirai, which translates to ?The Future Party,? does politics. Its
founder, Takahiro Anno, first ran for local office in 2024 as a 33 year old
software engineer standing for Governor of Tokyo. He came in fifth out of 56
candidates, winning more than 150,000 votes as an unaffiliated political
outsider. He won attention by taking a distinctive stance on the role of
technology in democracy and using AI aggressively in voter engagement.

Last year, Anno ran again, this time for the Upper Chamber of the national
legislature -- the Diet -- and won. Now the head of a new national party, Anno
found himself with a platform for making his vision of a new way of doing
politics a reality.

In this recent House of Representatives election, Team Mirai shot up to win
nearly four million votes. In the lower chamber?s proportional representation
system, that was good enough for eleven total seats -- the party?s first ever
representation in the Japanese House -- and nearly three times what it achieved
in last year?s Upper Chamber election.

Anno?s party stood for election without aligning itself on the traditional axes
of left and right. Instead, Team Mirai, heavily associated with young, urban
voters, sought to unite across the ideological spectrum by taking a radical
position on a different axis: the status quo and the future. Anno told us that
Team Mirai believes it can triple its representation in the Diet after the next
elections in each chamber, an ostentatious goal that seems achievable given
their rapid rise over the past year.

In the American context, the idea of a small party unifying voters across left
and right sounds like a pipe dream. But there is evidence it worked in Japan.
Team Mirai won an impressive 11% of proportional representation votes from
unaffiliated voters, nearly twice the share of the larger electorate. The
centerpiece of the party?s policy platform is not about the traditional hot
button issues, it?s about democracy itself, and how it can be enhanced by
embracing a futuristic vision of digital democracy.

Anno told us how his party arrived at its manifesto for this month?s elections,
and why it looked different from other parties? in important ways. Team Mirai
collected more than 38,000 online questions and more than 6,000 discrete policy
suggestions from voters using its AI Policy app, which is advertised as a
?manifesto that speaks for itself.?

After factoring in all this feedback, Team Mirai maintained a contrarian
position on the biggest issue of the election: the sales tax and affordability.
Rather than running on a reduction of the national sales tax like the major
parties, Team Mirai reviewed dozens of suggestions from the public and
ultimately proposed to keep that tax level while providing support to families
through a child tax credit and lowering the required contribution for social
insurance. Anno described this as another future-facing strategy: less price
relief in the short term, but sustained funding for essential programs.

Anno has always intended to build a different kind of party. After receiving
roughly $1 million in public funding apportioned to Team Mirai based on its
single seat in the Upper Chamber last year, Anno began hiring engineers to
enhance his software tools for digital democracy.

Anno described Team Mirai to us as a ?utility party;? basic infrastructure for
Japanese democracy that serves the broader polity rather than one faction. Their
Gikai (?assembly?) app illustrates the point. It provides a portal for
constituents to research bills, using AI to generate summaries, to describe
their impacts, to surfacing media reporting on the issue, and to answer users?
questions. Like all their software, it?s open source and free for anyone, in any
party, to use.

After last week?s victory, Team Mirai now has about $5 million in public funding
and ambitions to grow the influence of their digital democracy platform. Anno
told us Team Mirai has secured an agreement with the LDP, Japan?s dominant
ruling party, to begin using Team Mirai?s Gikai and corruption-fighting Mirumae
financial transparency tool.

AI is the issue driving the most societal and economic change we will encounter
in our lifetime, yet US political parties are largely silent. But AI and Big
Tech companies and their owners are ramping up their political spending to
influence the parties. To the extent that AI has shown up in our politics, it
seems to be limited to the question of where to site the next generation of data
centers and how to channel populist backlash to big tech.

Those are causes worthy of political organizing, but very few US politicians are
leveraging the technology for public listening or other pro-democratic purposes.
With the midterms still nine months away and with innovators like Team Mirai
making products in the open for anyone to use, there is still plenty of time for
an American politician to demonstrate what a new politics could look like.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech
Policy Press.

** *** ***** ******* *********** *************
Sen. Wyden Warns of Another Section 702 Abuse

[2026.03.25] Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702:

    Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about
the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to
lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd
being unwilling to agree to basic constitutional limitations on NSA
surveillance. But that?s just a jumping off point ahead of Section 702?s
upcoming reauthorization deadline. Buried in the speech is a passage that should
set off every alarm bell:

        There?s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that
directly affects the privacy rights of Americans. For years, I have asked
various administrations to declassify this matter. Thus far they have all
refused, although I am still waiting for a response from DNI Gabbard. I strongly
believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs
to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, when it is
eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so
long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient
information.

Over the decades, we have learned to take Wyden?s warnings seriously.

** *** ***** ******* *********** *************
As the US Midterms Approach, AI Is Going to Emerge as a Key Issue Concerning
Voters

[2026.03.26] In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order
that neutered states? ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to
both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This acti
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