Politico

Rep Khanna headed to Appalachia to support program that trains young people for tech jobs

Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA), whose Silicon Valley district is home to Apple, Google, Facebook and Tesla, says he’ll travel to Appalachia in March to lend his support to a program that trains young people — including the children of coal miners — for jobs like coding and computer tech.

The March 13 trip to Paintsville (KY) a rural community several hours east of Louisville, was organized with the help of tech giants like Cupertino-based Apple Computers. The plan is to train at least 40 young adults for four months in tech and software development, followed by four-month paid internships, said Khanna, a Democrat. According to Khanna’s office, the program is being funded with $4.5 million from TechHire Eastern Kentucky in cooperation with the Appalachian Regional Commission. It’s part of a 2015 TechHire initiative launched by the Obama administration.

Chief digital officer steps down from White House job over background check

White House Chief Digital Officer Gerrit Lansing was among the six staffers who were dismissed from the White House recently after being unable to pass an FBI background check, apparently. The issue with the background check was over investments. Lansing previously led the digital department for the Republican National Committee.

The background check, security questionnaire SF86, must be completed by White House staffers for positions that cover national security. President Donald Trump's director of scheduling, Caroline Wiles, was also among the six staffers who did not pass the intensive FBI screening. She is the daughter of Susan Wiles, Trump’s Florida campaign director. Caroline Wiles resigned Feb 17 before the background check was completed.

FCC Defends Prison Call Shift

Although Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai believes there’s market failure in the prison phone call industry, the FCC’s “well-intentioned efforts have not been fully consistent with the law,” the agency’s acting general counsel told lawmakers in a letter Feb 21.

Citing the reality that the commission’s current Republican leadership disagreed with parts of the FCC’s 2015 reforms, agency attorneys abandoned defense of rate regulation of in-state phone calls in a lawsuit brought by major prison phone providers. Acting general counsel Brendan Carr pointed out that the FCC still moved forward with oral arguments, and defended the agency’s authority to cap interstate rates and efforts to curb fees. “If the court ultimately agrees with the positions the FCC defended at oral argument, the result could go a long way in helping to reduce the rates and fees associated with inmate calling services,” Carr wrote in response to a letter from Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) and other Democrats.

Network neutrality could be GOP's next repeal-and-replace target

Leading Republicans want to get rid of the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules — and substitute them with less-stringent legislation. And they’re hoping the threat of an FCC repeal of the Obama-era regulations will coax congressional Democrats to the negotiating table.

It’s a scenario reminiscent of many Republicans’ approach to Obamacare, which they want to tear down without being accused of stripping health care coverage from millions of Americans. So far, Democrats aren’t taking the bait. Rather than cozy up to the majority to strike a deal, liberal lawmakers previewed a scorched-earth strategy to stop the FCC from repealing the rules in the first place. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said repeal would bring a “political firestorm” upon Republicans. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) likened the coming fight to the tech industry's 2012 uprising against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Maryland blogger settles defamation lawsuit brought by Melania Trump

A Maryland blogger has settled a defamation lawsuit filed by first lady Melania Trump. Webster Griffin Tarpley, who runs the blog Tarpley.net, has agreed to pay a “substantial sum” and issued a statement apologizing to the first lady and her family, according to a statement from Trump's attorneys. In August, Tarpley published unsubstantiated rumors that the first lady had previously been an “escort” and that she was suffering a “nervous breakdown” because of the presidential campaign. “I posted an article on August 2, 2016 about Melania Trump that was replete with false and defamatory statements about her,” reads Tarpley’s statement. “I had no legitimate factual basis to make these false statements and I fully retract them. I acknowledge that these false statements were very harmful and hurtful to Mrs. Trump and her family, and therefore I sincerely apologize to Mrs. Trump, her son, her husband and her parents for making these false statements.”

Trump's fleeting tweets alarm archivists

President Donald Trump sent a number of tweets to the 23.5 million followers of his personal Twitter account. But they didn’t show up in the tweets of his official Twitter handle @POTUS — raising questions about whether those messages from the most powerful man on Earth will be archived for posterity. Because some of Trump's headline-grabbing, market-moving tweets might never become part of the presidential history books, archivists fear that Americans could be left with an incomplete record of how the United States was governed in the Trump era.

The Politicization of Everything

Tired of the election and our latest First 100 Days already? Too bad. Good luck trying to disengage. Thanks to social media, and to the nature of our new president and his administration, politics is suddenly with us always, in every aspect of our lives, including wherever we may look for diversion.

Silicon Valley leaders organizing against President Trump

A collection of Silicon Valley executives, engineers and activists are quietly plotting a progressive counterattack against President Donald Trump, a sign of the industry's growing anger at his election victory and actions on immigration.

Through a new organization tentatively called Win the Future, or WTF, the likes of LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Mark Pincus are teaming up with former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach to connect political organizers and shore up progressive candidates and causes ahead of the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential elections. Their early efforts will include building a platform to connect activists and, potentially, a website similar to the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to fund progressive initiatives. The new organization points to a desire by the liberal tech industry to channel its outrage into a broader, more organized resistance.

Federal workers turn to encryption to thwart Trump

Federal employees worried that President Donald Trump will gut their agencies are creating new email addresses, signing up for encrypted messaging apps and looking for other, protected ways to push back against the new administration’s agenda. Whether inside the Environmental Protection Agency, within the Foreign Service, on the edges of the Labor Department or beyond, employees are using new technology as well as more old-fashioned approaches — such as private face-to-face meetings — to organize letters, talk strategy, or contact media outlets and other groups to express their dissent.

The goal is to get their message across while not violating any rules covering workplace communications, which can be monitored by the government and could potentially get them fired. At the EPA, a small group of career employees — numbering less than a dozen so far — are using an encrypted messaging app to discuss what to do if Trump’s political appointees undermine their agency’s mission to protect public health and the environment, flout the law, or delete valuable scientific data that the agency has been collecting for years, apparently.

Judge Gorsuch No Stranger to Tech

President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Judge Neil Gorsuch, has tackled some of the biggest issues in tech during his time on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, spanning e-mail privacy and Microsoft antitrust and the “Amazon tax.” Judge Gorsuch has also shown skepticism about the Chevron doctrine, whereby federal courts give deference to agencies' interpretation of laws and regulations. Given his experience on the bench and in private practice at a Washington law firm, Judge Gorsuch is likely to be "very strong on First and Fourth Amendment issues involving the internet of things," said Perkins Coie partner Andrew McBride.

Former FCC Staffers Launch Consulting Firm

Paul de Sa, Ruth Milkman and Jon Wilkins, who left the Federal Communications Commission at the end of Chairman Tom Wheeler’s era, are launching Quadra Partners, an advisory firm aimed at executives and investors in the wireless and broadband sectors. De Sa most recently led the FCC’s Office of Strategic Planning, Milkman was Wheeler’s chief of staff and Wilkins headed up the agency’s wireless bureau. They plan to focus on strategy development, new business creation, mergers and acquisition, and public/private investment.

Trump immigration order causes alarm among Europeans

Mexico isn’t the only close ally and trading partner peeved by President Trump’s flurry of executive actions. Trump also has caused alarm in the European Union with a line in his executive order on immigration instructing agencies to exclude foreigners from privacy protections, threatening to undermine years of intense negotiations over the sharing of commercial data and law enforcement information.

Trump’s aides didn’t consult agency officials who hashed out those agreements before he signed the order, apparently — another example of the White House taking action without the usual vetting that past presidents used to avoid a problem exactly like this one. Now those same officials and lawmakers who were blindsided are scrambling to reassure companies and European allies that the executive order doesn’t have the power to undo the agreements. It's not clear if the White House was aware of the agreements, but it didn’t seem to intend to unsettle them. A White House spokesman emphasized that the executive order says it will be “consistent with applicable law” and referred to the European Commission’s statement that the agreements aren’t affected. The two agreements in question are Privacy Shield, negotiated by the Commerce Department and the European Commission to let companies meet data protection requirements when transferring personal data across the Atlantic, and the U.S.-EU Umbrella Agreement, which covers personal data exchanged for preventing and investigating crime and terrorism.

President Trump moves to put his own stamp on Voice of America

On January 23, President Donald Trump dispatched two aides to scope out the studios of Voice of America, heightening concerns among some longtime staffers that President Trump may quickly put his stamp on the broadcasting arm that has long pushed US democratic ideals across the world.

The arrival of the two aides – both political operatives from Trump’s campaign – comes after Voice of America received blowback for sending out a series of tweets about White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s claims about inauguration crowd size that looked to some like an endorsement of his false statements. The news outlet later deleted one of the tweets. The concern among some staffers is especially acute because Trump’s administration is getting control over the broadcasting agency just weeks after Congress moved to eliminate the board of directors that had served as an integrity check on the organization, instead consolidating power with a CEO position appointed by the president.

Federal workers' Twitter brushfire burns President Trump

President Donald Trump may be a master of combat on Twitter, but he’s suddenly run into a growing digital uprising — anonymous federal workers who are using social media to tweak the president even as his agencies crack down on information-sharing.

This Twitter rebellion, apparently centered at the National Park Service, is winning cheers from liberal activists who seize on every 140-character outburst for signs of anti-Trump resistance. It’s also forcing Trump’s agencies to mount a whack-a-mole response, as they delete tweets about climate change and order employees to stay quiet online, each time stirring up headlines alleging an information lockdown. President Trump has yet to tweet a response to all the needling. But his team may be realizing months too late that it’s up against a foe it didn’t reckon with: Thousands of federal employees and contractors have access to government Twitter accounts. And of course, anybody can set up a non-government account when the official channels are off-limits.

Was Trump’s inauguration the most-streamed of all time?

In Sean Spicer’s first official daily press briefing Jan 23, he said that when you factor in people who streamed President Donald Trump’s inauguration online, it would make it the most-watched presidential inauguration in history. He has a point, but it is one that is almost impossible to prove. The reason? TV ratings and online streaming metrics are not an apples-to-apples comparison, so there is no easy way to calculate exactly how many people watched the inauguration online in a way that is comparable to TV viewership data released by Nielsen.

TV viewership for the inauguration was 30.6 million people, according to Nielsen, down from just under 38 million viewers in 2009. Still, those ratings were good enough to top the inaugurations of Bill Clinton and both George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush. In general, video streaming has been on the rise over the past decade, while linear TV viewership (people watching TV live on their television sets) has declined, but there is not yet data that brings together TV and online video viewership. Spicer cited CNN’s 17 million streams of Trump’s inauguration, which he added to the 2.6 million that watched CNN live on TV. The problem with that is that the 2.6 million figure is not the total number of people that watched CNN, it was the average number of people that watched. The 17 million streams are the total number of streams, not the average number of people watching. That 17 million figure may include people that reloaded the webpage, or that clicked in and watched for 30 seconds, or people where the inauguration started to auto-play on the CNN story they clicked through.

President Trump said to elevate Ajit Pai to FCC chairman

Apparently, President Donald Trump will tap Ajit Pai as his pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission in the new administration, elevating the sitting GOP commissioner to the top spot overseeing the nation's communications industry. The announcement could come as soon as the afternoon of Jan 20, apparently.

Pai, a Barack Obama nominee who has served as the senior FCC Republican for more than three years, could take the new role immediately and wouldn't require approval by the Senate because he was already confirmed to serve at the agency. Pai was widely assumed to be taking the agency’s gavel at least temporarily as an acting chairman at the beginning of Trump’s tenure. But President Trump’s decision to make him a more permanent chairman affords the Kansas-bred Republican a bigger mandate to make his mark on the agency and its rules.

President-elect Trump needs time to make whitehouse.gov great again

Donald Trump’s takeover of the White House’s website is going to come in on time and under budget — with a larger reboot planned a bit later in 2017.

Trump’s digital team plans to put off for a few months any major overhaul to the official White House online portal, even as it will relaunch to reflect the voice and message of its new occupant almost in tandem with Trump’s swearing in. The new administration is keeping — for now — the basic shell and design built under the leadership of President Barack Obama, including the fonts, format and blue colors that have come to be associated with many aspects of the outgoing Democratic administration. And, recognizing the blowback President Obama got in 2012 for appending information about his own presidency onto the biography pages of some of his predecessors, Team Trump said it won’t touch the sites for past presidents and first ladies. “That content is not political. It’s about the White House as an institution,” said Ory Rinat, who is advising the Trump transition on digital strategy.

Obama, Trump paint contrasting pictures of role of White House press corps

President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump described two very different visions for how the White House press corp should operate, with Trump setting the stage for significant changes to the status quo. Trump’s press team has been teasing out the possibility that White House daily briefing may be moved out of the Brady Briefing Room in the West Wing of the White House, perhaps to a space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, or the White House Conference Center. They have also raised the possibility of other changes, including taking over responsibility for which outlets and reporters get credentialed, and which reporters can sit where. Trump himself told Fox News that while the daily briefing will stay in the White House, his press team may restrict access to who can attend.

President Obama, in his final news conference as president, painted a very different picture of the role the White House press corp should play. “Having you in this building has made this place work better. It keeps us honest, it makes us work harder,” President Obama said, apparently in reference to the idea that the briefings should move outside of the West Wing. “America needs you, and our democracy needs you.”

C-SPAN: 'Internal routing error' caused RT interruption

C-SPAN said that an "internal routing error" was responsible for Russia Today suddenly taking over C-SPAN's online video feed. The company said that it had completed and internal investigation, and said that the mistake happened while it was testing for inauguration coverage. "C-SPAN has concluded its investigation and as we had anticipated last Thursday, the interruption of our C-SPAN.org livestream on January 12th was caused by an internal routing error," the statement reads. "C-SPAN.org was not hacked. We have determined that during testing for inaugural coverage, RT's signal was mistakenly routed onto the primary encoder feeding C-SPAN1's signal to the internet, rather than to an unused backup."

Trump transition team asks CNN to retract story about Tom Price

President-elect Donald Trump's transition is formally asking CNN to retract an article about Rep Tom Price (R-GA), Trump's nominee for Health and Human Services secretary. In the story, CNN Senior Political Reporter Manu Raju reports that in 2016 Rep Price purchased shares in a medical device manufacturer days before introducing legislation that would delay regulations that would have directly benefited the company. After being published on Jan 16, the story quickly became another piece of ammunition for Democrats who have questioned Rep Price's financial transactions while in office, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) calling for an ethics investigation into rep Price.

In a statement, the Presidential Transition Team said the story "omitted facts and drew conclusions in an effort to attack" Rep Price, before laying out a series of what it says are facts that "were available to CNN." "The Presidential Transition Team requests that CNN retract this blatantly false story," the statement concludes.

Sen Sessions 'not sure' whether he would prosecute journalists

Donald Trump attorney general pick Sen Jeff Sessions (R-AL) dodged a question during his Senate confirmation hearings about whether he would subpoena or prosecute journalists for doing their jobs. Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked Sen Sessions whether he would abide by current Justice Department regulations that make it difficult to subpoena or prosecute reporters, and whether he would pledge not to "put reporters in jail for doing their job." Sen Sessions offered a non-committal answer. "Senator Klobuchar, I am not sure," he testified. "I have not studied that, those regulations. I would note that when I was the United States Attorney, we knew, everybody knew, that you could not subpoena a witness or push them to be interviewed if they're a member of the media, without approval at high levels of the Department of Justice. That was in the 1980s. So I do believe the Department of Justice does have sensitivity to this issue."

Justice Department guidelines have long required federal prosecutors to receive approval for subpoenaing or prosecuting members of the media. It was these guidelines that prevented an assistant US attorney from indicting a Texas reporter in 1984. The key question is whether Sen Sessions, as the head of the Justice Department, would approve a federal prosecutor's subpoena or prosecution of a journalist.

The tech to-do list for the new Congress

Republicans in Congress are poised to tackle a host of tech and telecom issues in the new year, empowered by GOP control of the House, Senate and White House. Here's a rundown of the possibilities.

Spectrum targets: Two bills championed by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) were caught up in the drama surrounding Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel’s Senate confirmation fight, and Chairman Thune plans on making them a priority at the start of the 115th Congress. One is the MOBILE NOW Act, which would free up government and non-government spectrum for wireless providers and spur work on 5G networks. There's also the FCC Reauthorization Act, which would tweak the agency's responsibilities.

Communications Act rewrite: Both Chairman Thune and incoming House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) have expressed interest in rewriting the Communications Act of 1934 to better reflect the telecom landscape in the digital age.

Surveillance reform: Lawmakers are headed toward another major surveillance debate this year: Whether and how to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Patent trolls: Sen Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said he also hopes to return to the problem of “patent trolls,” which critics say exist solely to extract payments from companies by threatening them with litigation over patent infringement.

Former Obama staffers launching media company

White House alumni Tommy Vietor, Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer are further investing themselves into their popular podcast "Keeping it 1600" by launching a new media company, called "Crooked Media." To begin with, "Crooked Media" won't be much more than the new incarnation of "Keeping it 1600" called "Pod Save America," which will still be available on iTunes and other podcasting platforms, but soon Vietor, who was formerly President Barack Obama's national security spokesman said the website (which will live at GetCrookedMedia.com) will become a multimedia platform for political analysis and activism.

Vietor said that had Hillary Clinton won, it's likely they would've kept the podcast as what it was - a side hobby. But with the outcome of the election, Vietor said he and his co-founders said they felt a renewed mission. "I think the lesson from (President-elect Donald) Trump is if you're filtering every message and idea you have through traditional media, he will swamp you with a Tweet," he said. "So we need to build up infrastructure that allows people to communicate directly with young people across the country."

Buzz: Eshoo may give up telecom ranking spot

The rumor swirling on K Street and Capitol Hill is that Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA), the top Democrat on House Commerce communications subcommittee, has told people she won’t continue in that role in the new Congress. Rep Eshoo, who has served as the telecommunications ranking member for the last six years, declined to comment, but apparently while it’s not a done deal, they see the likely outcome as her relinquishing the role. The expectation is that rep Eshoo, 74, would retain a rank-and-file seat on the telecom subcommittee and also pursue a spot on Energy and Commerce’s health subcommittee — and potentially throw her hat into the ring to lead Democrats on the health subcommittee, although apparently some are less convinced she would do that.

Rep Eshoo giving up the top slot on the telecom panel, if that’s what winds up happening, would be a blow for tech companies, which she often supports. It would also open the door to new leadership there: Rep Mike Doyle (D-PA), the No 2 Democrat on the subcommittee, would be a top contender to replace her, though Rep Doris Matsui (D-CA) and Rep Gene Green (D-TX) — if Rep Eshoo were to wrest the health subcommittee ranking member post from him — could also pursue the position.