Slate

Since Jan 20, Sean Spicer’s press briefings have become must-see TV for 4.3 million Americans, many of whom tune in desperately hoping for the thrill of a confrontational moment. All the liberals I know are now press critics, screaming into their laptops, suggesting cleverly phrased questions the reporters should be asking instead of the apparently toothless ones they’re asking instead. My boss thinks the press should take off the gloves and attack! My colleagues want to ban multipart questions! And my friends seem to know exactly how they’d break Spicer, if only they could get inside the room. Well, I got inside the room. I spent several weeks attending White House press briefings at the start of the new administration, camping out in the back, jammed against the wall, at one point with a Daily Mail reporter sitting on my feet. I wondered: Are we doing these all wrong?

[Commentary] For years, the Federal Trade Commission has been the lead federal agency in protecting the privacy and data-security rights of the American consumer by bringing cases against companies that act against consumers’ privacy interests. The FTC has also advocated for telling consumers about the data being collected about them and for offering people a choice before sensitive information—like data about their health, finances, children, or geolocation—is gathered and shared.

But the system has worked because the FTC has not acted alone. Other federal agencies (including the Federal Communications Commission) and state attorneys general have been helpful in this mission. In October, the FCC took the historic step of enacting basic consumer-privacy rules for internet service providers and wireless carriers. These new rules were aimed at providing people with a choice about whether to allow their carriers and cable companies to use and share their sensitive personal information. They are remarkably similar to the enforcement practices of the FTC’s long-standing and successful privacy program. Unfortunately, with the change in administrations, one of the first orders of business for the cable and broadband companies (not to mention the Trump White House and congressional Republicans) is to rescind these rules. But removing them would essentially leave the cable and phone companies without any privacy regulator.

[Rep. Frank Pallone is the ranking member of the House Commerce Committee. Terrell McSweeny is a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission.]

In late spring, a community of malware hunters placed itself in a high state of alarm. Word arrived that Russian hackers had infiltrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee. The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.

In late July, one of these scientists found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name. More data was needed, so he began carefully keeping logs of the Trump server’s DNS activity. As he collected the logs, he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world. Six of them began scrutinizing them for clues. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank. The computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project,” he concluded. Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance.

[Commentary] Barring an act of Congress to modify Federal Communications Commission powers (don’t hold your breath), the battle over municipal returns to the statehouses. But it won’t be as hopeless there as many local control issues are.

In most cases, pre-emption disputes pit rural Republican state legislators against progressive urban policies like the minimum wage or a fracking ban. In Tennessee and North Carolina, there’s a twist: Chattanooga and Wilson already have high-speed internet, both public and private. It’s their rural neighbors that suffer from telecom companies’ reluctance to expand good service into low-density areas. In Tennessee, for example, municipal broadband remains legal—but expanding it beyond the provider’s existing coverage area is not allowed. Chattanoogans are allowed to keep their lightning-fast internet; it’s residents outside the EPB’s coverage area that suffer. “For several years we’ve been fielding requests from neighboring communities who have hardly had access, asking: ‘Would you guys bring services to us?’ ” explains Danna Bailey, vice president of communications at EPB. “And we’ve said: ‘We’d love to, but Tennessee state law prohibits it.’” That turns the traditional political calculus of state-vs.-city pre-emption bills on its head. In Tennessee, a state law to loosen the regulation of public broadband is being sponsored by a pair of Republicans: Sen. Janice Bowling and Rep. Kevin Brooks. And it was a Republican state senator, Todd Gardenhire of Chattanooga, who said, “AT&T is the villain here.” Proponents of public broadband see a parallel to the rollout of the electrical grid, which ignored rural areas in favor of population clusters where electricity provision was more profitable. “We see broadband in the 21st century as electricity was in the 20th,” said. Bailey. “To participate in this economy you’ve got to have access. Consumers are really starting to demand it, so legislators are hearing from their constituents: ‘I’ve got to have broadband. I have to drag my kid five miles down the street to McDonald’s to do her homework.’ ”

[Commentary] It’s increasingly dawning on people that they don’t really own a lot of the goods they buy, not in a world where software is infiltrating everything and can be modified at the whim of the seller. So it’s a breath of fresh air when the government steps in and tells a manufacturer it should allow, even encourage, customers to modify devices that most of us use in our homes and businesses: Wi-Fi routers that let us do our computing and communications without being tethered to a wire. That just happened in a case at the Federal Communications Commission, and it’s a very, very good thing.

If ever we needed the ability to modify a device by changing the software it shipped with, it’s this one. Many if not most routers are grossly insecure. Installing third-party operating software (sometimes called firmware) is sometimes the only way to plug gaping security holes. Moreover, changing the firmware can radically improve a router’s overall capabilities, such as creating community networks in places Big Telecom is slow to serve, and ensuring local communications in disasters.

[Gillmor teaches digital media literacy at Arizona State University]

[Commentary] The Republican and Democratic party platforms may clash on most issues, but they do agree on one thing: Broadband access is critical. According to the Republican platform, America must “pav[e] the way for high-speed, next generation broadband deployment and competition.” The Democratic platform echoes this view, proclaiming: “High-speed Internet connectivity is not a luxury; it is a necessity for 21st century economic success, social mobility, education, health care, and public safety.” Like electricity, high-speed data connectivity has become vital to the production of virtually everything else in the economy. Businesses, hospitals, office buildings, schools and other institutions require significantly more bandwidth than you use at home—so they need a far fatter pipe that is always available, reliable, and secure. Seems logical, right?

But currently the prices and terms for business broadband are often unreasonable and vary widely based on the number of competing providers. But there’s a chance this could change: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has promised to reform the broken market for enterprise-grade connections to the Internet in 2016, and Aug 9, is the deadline for public comments on proposals. Just as the FCC adopted strong network neutrality rules in 2014, reasoning that broadband access is increasingly essential to the rest of the economy, the commission should ensure businesses and other institutions pay a competitive market price for Internet access.

[Michael Calabrese is director of the Wireless Future Project, which is part of New America’s Open Technology Institute.]

A Q&A with Glenn Greenwald, co-founding editor of the Intercept, and best known for his role in reporting on Edward Snowden's disclosure of National Security Agency material.

During the course of the interview, we talked about why media elites have trouble reaching Trump supporters, Greenwald’s differences with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and the future of privacy in a world of hacks. Asked, "How do you think about Trump vs. Clinton, given your strong anti-establishment feelings?" Greenwald said, "Just take a step back for a second. One of the things that is bothering me and bothered me about the Brexit debate, and is bothering me a huge amount about the Trump debate, is that there is zero elite reckoning with their own responsibility in creating the situation that led to both Brexit and Trump and then the broader collapse of elite authority. The reason why Brexit resonated and Trump resonated isn’t that people are too stupid to understand the arguments. The reason they resonated is that people have been so fucked by the prevailing order in such deep and fundamental and enduring ways that they can’t imagine that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo. You have this huge portion of the populace in both the U.K. and the US that is so angry and so helpless that they view exploding things without any idea of what the resulting debris is going to be to be preferable to having things continue, and the people they view as having done this to them to continue in power. That is a really serious and dangerous and not completely invalid perception that a lot of people who spend their days scorning Trump and his supporters or Brexit played a great deal in creating."

[Commentary] The week of July 4, we objected to the Senate moving forward on the 2017 Intelligence Authorization bill. 

We are concerned that this bill would undermine a federal board that serves as an independent watchdog for intelligence agencies. We are even more concerned that this bill includes an unnecessary, sprawling expansion of the FBI’s ability to spy on what websites Americans visit and who they talk to on e-mail or in text messages and chats—all without obtaining a warrant, or any court oversight whatsoever.
 Given what web browsing history can reveal, there is little information that could be more intimate.

If you know that a person is visiting the website of a mental health professional, or a substance-abuse support group, or a particular political organization, or a particular dating site, you know a tremendous amount of private and personal information about him or her. That’s what you get when you can get access to their web browsing history without a court order.

The reality is that getting access to people’s web browsing history is almost like spying on their thoughts. This level of surveillance absolutely ought to come with court oversight. Yet a number of senators are moving to go in the opposite direction.

The annual intelligence bill would let any FBI field office issue something called a National Security Letter to demand this information. These letters are essentially administrative subpoenas and often come with gag order. Allowing government agents to see Americans’ web browsing history without court oversight is a half-baked solution that won’t make our country any safer, and the American people deserve better.

[Commentary] A great deal of the bafflement over Amazon’s purchase of Twitch comes from people who, like me, are too old to understand gaming on a deep-down, emotional level.

It’s a gaping generational chasm: For the younger cohort that populates Twitch, there’s nothing weird at all about passing an evening watching, learning, and chatting about the pastime they adore.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is proposing to adopt an online discrimination rule that could hurt government technology in at least three ways:
First, in a two-tiered Internet, sites in the slow lane will load slowly, buffer sporadically, and return errors. Wheeler has proposed letting cable giants “discriminate” so long as they offer sites a “minimum level of access.” The public knows that level as the “slow lane.”

Second, if there are slow, congested lanes, government sites will probably be in them.

Third, if governments do pay cable companies to avoid the slow lane, they simply transfer money from average citizens to cable companies.

[Anmori is a Future Tense fellow at New America]