February 2016

USTelecom argues its case against special access regulation in a three-piece set of white papers issued late during the week of Feb 8. USTelecom represents incumbent telecommunication carriers, including the nation’s largest telecommunication companies AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink. The move comes at a time when the Federal Communications Commission is considering whether to relax or increase its oversight over pricing for special access circuits – links that provide “last mile” connectivity between a carrier’s core network and a business customer location, cellsite or other location. These connections are often sold on a wholesale basis to competitive carriers, who argue that prices are too high. Coming in at a combined total of 45 pages, each of the USTelecom white papers focuses on a different area:

“The Broadband Economy is Thriving” argues that “price-regulating the networks that support the broadband Internet economy is unnecessary when competitive market forces are capable of ensuring affordable service to consumers.”
“The Competitive Business Broadband Marketplace” documents cable company success in building out network infrastructure and in making substantial inroads into the business and backhaul markets.
“The FCC Should Not Pick Winners and Losers” argues that “with competition rising and the prices that customers pay falling, there is no need for new or additional regulation of this thriving marketplace.”

Sen Ted Cruz's (R-TX) campaign sent a letter to TV stations across South Carolina and Georgia on Feb 16, demanding that they stop airing what it calls "a false attack ad" from the conservative super PAC American Future Fund that goes after Sen Cruz on national security. "The ad falsely claims 'Cruz proposed mass legalization of illegal immigrants.' Ted Cruz has never introduced, outlined, or supported any policy that would give legal status to illegal immigrants," wrote Eric Brown, general counsel to the campaign, in the letter shared with the media. "Indeed, quite the opposite, Ted Cruz led the fight in Congress against legislation written by Senator Rubio, among others, that created legal permanent status for millions of people in the country unlawfully. At least two fact-checks have evaluated this claim and determined it to be false, and others found no evidence to support it.”

In its statement, the Sen Cruz campaign urged the stations to consider their respective statuses as Federal Communications Commission-licensed entities in deciding whether to can the advertisement. "Because this advertisement makes a flatly false factual claim for which your station is ultimately liable, we strongly urge you to exercise your discretion as a licensee to refuse to continue to broadcast this advertisement, and, because it is already airing, immediately pull the advertisement from your rotation," Brown wrote.

[Commentary] In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency proclaimed that "we kill people based on metadata." Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.

In 2015, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person's likelihood of being a terrorist. Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the executive director at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bulls--t." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball said, makes the results scientifically unsound. Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and most of them were classified by the US government as "extremists," the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported. Based on the classification date of "20070108" on one of the SKYNET slide decks (which themselves appear to date from 2011 and 2012), the machine learning program may have been in development as early as 2007. In the years that have followed, thousands of innocent people in Pakistan may have been mislabelled as terrorists by that "scientifically unsound" algorithm, possibly resulting in their untimely demise.

[Christian Grothoff leads the Décentralisé research team at Inria, a French institute for applied computer science and mathematics research.
J.M. Porup is a freelance cybersecurity reporter who lives in Toronto.]