Research

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) collects and maintains personal data on millions of individuals, including data related to security clearance investigations. In 2015, OPM reported significant breaches of personal information that affected 21.5 million individuals. The Senate report accompanying the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2016 included a provision for GAO to review information security at OPM. GAO evaluated OPM's (1) actions since the 2015 reported data breaches to prevent, mitigate, and respond to data breaches involving sensitive personnel records and information; (2) information security policies and practices for implementing selected government-wide initiatives and requirements; and (3) procedures for overseeing the security of OPM information maintained by contractors providing IT services. To do so, GAO examined policies, plans, and procedures and other documents; tested controls for selected systems; and interviewed officials. This is a public version of a sensitive report being issued concurrently. GAO omitted certain specific examples due to the sensitive nature of the information.

GAO is making five recommendations to improve OPM's security. OPM concurred with four of these and partially concurred with the one on validating its corrective actions. GAO continues to believe that implementation of this recommendation is warranted. In GAO's limited distribution report, GAO made nine additional recommendations.

The Federal Communications Commission is exploring ways to improve the quality, accuracy, and usefulness of the data it collects on fixed and mobile voice and broadband service. At the same time, the FCC is examining how it can reduce burdens on industry by eliminating unnecessary or onerous data filing requirements. A Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeks comment on proposals to accomplish both these goals as part of the FCC’s ongoing efforts to improve the value of the data it collects.

Lack of access to fast internet is typically thought of as a rural problem, but many of the country’s urban areas make a poor showing in the share of adults with access to fast home internet.

The Bronx has only 35.3 percent access, and Manhattan fares only slightly better with 35.6 percent access; Clark County, Nevada, home to Las Vegas, has 39.1 percent access. While rural residents’ access might be hindered by their remote location, city residents who don’t have broadband often lack it because of income disparity and a dearth of basic knowledge about the internet and computers. Many urban residents, particularly older ones, haven’t been exposed to the internet or computers much in their lifetime. And without that knowledge and exposure, a person is likely to be further marginalized in economic and educational opportunities, caught in a cycle of literal and metaphorical disconnection.

Unlimited data plans are slowing down mobile speeds for Verizon and AT&T customers, according to data released by mobile network measurement company OpenSignal.

Verizon and AT&T reinstated their unlimited plans in February to compete with T-Mobile and Sprint, which have long offered unlimited data plans, and have since seen a deluge of demand. Greater data demand — either more data usage or more customers — means slower speeds. Think of it as increased traffic on a highway. Verizon and AT&T also have nearly double the subscribers of T-Mobile and Sprint, so changes in their offerings hit their networks harder. Carriers have long supported greater leeway to manage their networks as part of the US government’s fierce debate over net neutrality. T-Mobile’s unlimited plan often limits video streaming quality in a bid to ease the burden on its network; others like Verizon recently have tested similar tools to improve speeds. To staunch advocates of open internet rules, however, these techniques violate the spirit of federal safeguards meant to ensure all web traffic is treated equally. Both Verizon and AT&T saw a notable decline in speeds after introducing unlimited plans.

“” explores nuances of rurality, details challenges rural libraries face in maximizing their community impacts and describes how existing collaborative regional and statewide efforts help rural libraries and their communities. Authors Brian Real and Norman Rose combine data from the final Digital Inclusion Survey with Public Libraries Survey data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to find:

• Rural library broadband capacity falls short of benchmarks set for US home access, which is 25 Mbps download and 4 Mbps upload speeds. By contrast, rural fringe libraries average 13/8.6 Mbps, rural distant is 7.7/2.2 Mbps and rural remote is 6.7/1 Mbps.
• Overall, one in 10 rural libraries report their internet speeds rarely meet patron needs.
• Rural libraries are on par with colleagues in larger communities in terms of public Wi-Fi access and providing patrons’ assistance with basic computer and internet training, but more specialized training and resources can lag.
• More than half of all rural libraries offer programs that help local residents apply for jobs and use job opportunity resources (e.g., online job listings, resume software), and rural libraries are comparable to their peers in providing work space for mobile workers.

The authors consider the roles of state and regional cooperation in adding capacity and resources for rural libraries, looking at examples from Maryland and Iowa.

Millions of United Kingdom broadband customers who do not get the connection speeds they pay for should receive compensation. A new report calls on Ofcom, the UK media and telecommunications regulator, to get tough on broadband providers that promise fast speeds but fail to deliver. The British infrastructure group of Members of Parliament (MPs), led by former Tory party chairman Grant Shapps, estimates that as many as 6.7 million UK broadband connections may not hit the 10Mb minimum that the government wants to be the UK standard for a basic decent service. The Broadband 2.0 report, which is backed by 57 MPs, calls for automatic compensation for customers who do not get the level of speed promised from the internet packages they buy. “Although broadband is increasingly considered to be an essential utility, the quality of customer services has simply not caught up with demand,” said Shapps. “It is unacceptable that there are still no minimum standards in the UK telecoms sector to protect customers from protracted complaints procedures, and ensure that broadband providers are fully accountable to their customers.”

This report introduces students to the field of civic technology and the possibility that it could help to amplify citizen engagement. Rather than providing an exhaustive academic study of this topic or an in-depth exploration of a single organization, the case begins with a broad overview of the field (and several of the debates affecting it) and then contains a series of vignettes about three organizations in this space: the City of Chicago, Neighborly, and the City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. It aims to stimulate discussion around three core questions.

• First, what is civic technology, and what are some of the core forces, tensions, and debates shaping the field?
• Second, what are some of the most important considerations for civic technology organizations that are aiming to engage citizens in the democratic process and governmental decision-making?
• Third, where does civic technology—and, along with it, our conceptions of citizenship and engagement—go from here?

A poll from The Economist/YouGov asked Americans whether they would support “permitting the courts to shut down news media outlets for publishing or broadcasting stories that are biased or inaccurate.” The results were scary for anyone concerned about the future of American democracy.

According to the poll, Americans are roughly evenly divided on whether the US government should have the power to shut down unfriendly media outlets: 28 percent favor, 29 percent oppose, and 43 percent are unsure. But the results become really striking when you break them down by partisan identification: A fairly large plurality of Republicans — 45 percent — support allowing media organizations to be shuttered. A scant 20 percent oppose the idea; that’s less than half the number who support it. The remaining 35 percent of Republicans have not made up their minds.

FiveThirtyEight analyzed every county’s broadband usage using data from researchers at the University of Iowa and Arizona State University and found that Saguache (CO) was at the bottom.

Only 5.6 percent of adults were estimated to have broadband. But Saguache isn’t alone in lacking broadband. According to the Federal Communications Commission, 39 percent of rural Americans — 23 million people — don’t have access. In Pew surveys, those who live in rural areas were about twice as likely not to use the internet as urban or suburban Americans....Unforeseen serendipitous opportunities — summer jobs that become careers — are what motivate the county’s small internet providers to continue to pursue broadband as a public good. For now, no one in Saguache County is counting on a deus ex machina of funding from the federal government that turns universal broadband service from fantasy to reality. In real life, the practicalities wear.

Free Basics, Facebook’s free, limited internet service for developing markets, is neither serving local needs nor achieving its objective of bringing people online for the first time. That’s according to research by citizen media and activist group Global Voices which examined the Free Basics service in six different markets – Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan and Philippines – to see whether it was serving the intended audience. Free Basics is a Facebook-developed mobile app that gives users access to a small selection of data-light websites and services. The websites are stripped of photos and videos and can be browsed without paying for mobile data. The Global Voices report identifies a number of weaknesses in the service, including not adequately serving the linguistic needs of local populations; featuring a glut of third-party services from private companies in the US; harvesting huge amounts of metadata about users and violating the principles of net neutrality.