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October 2016

And People Wonder Why Hillary Clinton Might Not Trust The Media?

[Commentary] Overall, think about how irresponsibly the press has handled the truly never-ending Hillary Clinton e-mail saga, and then ask yourself this: If the Democratic nominee already had lingering doubts about the press’ fairness, would the media’s performance in recent days have done anything to allay those fears? The press for years has fixated on Hillary Clinton’s relationship with the press, and specifically the idea that Hillary Clinton doesn’t like the press or trust the press, and that’s what accounts for the “famous Clinton secrecy.” As I’ve noted in the past, reporters can rarely point to any concrete evidence that Clinton disdains journalists. And with the arrival of Donald Trump’s campaign, in which the Republican regularly smears, taunts, and attacks journalists, the anti-press claim about Clinton came to be viewed as rather quaint in comparison. But it’s possible that over her 20-plus years on the national stage and having seen out-of-control “scandal” coverage up close, she maintains a certain level of well-earned distrust.

The media’s ongoing e-mail coverage since 2015 has likely done little to alter that, and especially the off-kilter and overblown FBI Director Comey coverage in recent days. Having invested thousands of hours covering the e-mail story over the last year-and-a-half, a story that has produced no criminal charges (but has produced hollow congressional hearings), the press still remains fully committed to pretending it’s a Very Big Scandal, which explained the unfettered caterwauling following the FBI news. So yes, maybe that’s one reason Clinton might distrust the press.

Legal expert: Election rants, threats are pushing First Amendment limits

[Commentary] Free speech is an American’s birthright. But for the first time in living memory, ordinary people are pushing the boundaries of the First Amendment. Message boards, on-line comment sections and social media make the problem even worse. A lot of these people may think that they are just blowing off steam. But when you are actually discussing using violence to overthrow the government or to interfere with an election, there’s a very thin line between “just talk” and criminal conspiracy.

In the modern world, it is perfectly possible to become a member of a criminal conspiracy by “liking” a tweet. Conspiracy is a little different than most crimes. The essence of conspiracy is an agreement by two or more people to do something illegal. Some conspiracy statutes require that at least one of the participants take some concrete step — known as an “overt act” — toward actually carrying out the conspiracy. Some statutes do not. The First Amendment is a national treasure. It protects our right to speak our minds without fear of government sanction. But the First Amendment also has limits. It does not protect violent conspiracy or planning bloody revolutions. It doesn’t protect casual talk about the “need” to assassinate the President. Know those limits and respect them. On Nov 9th, this election will be over and we will need to start putting the country back together. Start that process today. Speak out against calls for violence. Be a voice for civility and calm. Stand up for our democratic traditions. Not only will this help keep you out of trouble, it will help keep our country out of trouble.
[Truax is an appellate attorney in San Diego, California.]

Better Connections: Arkansas Rebuilds its Plodding K-12 Network into a Robust Broadband Service

Mark Myers remembers his very first day on the job in January 2015 as the state of Arkansas’ CIO and director of the Department of Information Systems (DIS). “I was with Gov. [Asa] Hutchinson in the mansion, and he said, ‘Hey, Mark, you have got to get this K-12 broadband thing fixed,’” he recalled. Myers admits that at the time he knew very little about the Arkansas Public School Computer Network (APSCN), which provides connectivity to all of the state’s K-12 classrooms. He did some research and found that APSCN was averaging a pokey 5 kilobits per second (Kbps) per user. In contrast, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set a K-12 Internet access target of 100 Kbps per student.

In 2014, the FCC made resources available to close the connectivity gap across the country by increasing its investment in K-12 broadband by $2.5 billion per year to a total of $3.9 billion annually. This should be sufficient funding to connect every public school classroom in America to high-speed broadband. With a goal of increasing the number of state school districts meeting the FCC Internet access target of 100 Kbps per student to 100 percent, Hutchinson directed DIS to upgrade APSCN to an all-fiber network.

The United States Of Facebook

[Commentary] The prospect of AT&T acquiring Time-Warner has triggered howls from both presidential campaigns, consumer-protection groups and free-press advocates, all of whom raised fears of media concentration, diminished competition and the threat to democracy posed by consolidation in the marketplace of ideas. Well, right burning church. Wrong burning pew. This is the case of one giant company with no other prospects for growth acquiring another giant company with no prospects for growth. It's as if the Titanic survivors took refuge on the Lusitania. The dangers to the rest of us are real, but they lie elsewhere.

If you are concerned about democracy and consumer choice, direct your attention to “social distribution” -- a shift in publishing, and a threat to publishing independence, that’s advancing at a breathtaking pace and scale. When you click on a Facebook Instant Article or an item from Google Amp, somewhere an important story is dying -- because social distribution, like high school and presidential campaigns, overwhelmingly benefits the popular. Whether a given story is served to a given reader is determined not by editors or curators but by algorithms, which do not measure substance, significance or potential impact on society. They measure only what users have looked at before, what they have commented on and what they have shared. Needless to say, such algorithms do not favor statehouse coverage and investigative reporting. At this particular moment in history, how prescient of Facebook to offer us -- in addition to its iconic “like” button -- an anger button, a tears button, a surprise button and a laughter button. Just in time, I say. Now all we need is a panic button.

Why you should assume your e-mail will get hacked or leaked eventually

The Podesta leak hasn’t just been embarrassing for John Podesta, it has also been embarrassing for many other Hillary Clinton campaign staffers who communicated with him. Also exposed were numerous other people in the progressive movement who either included Podesta in e-mail chains or had their e-mails forwarded to Podesta after the fact. So even if you’re extremely careful with your own online security, your private messages could still be exposed if anyone you correspond with is careless.

Your e-mails could also become public if, say, a former colleague becomes disgruntled and decides to deliberately leak embarrassing private e-mails to the press. Another danger is that your e-mail provider itself could be hacked. In Sept, we learned that hackers broke into Yahoo’s e-mail servers, gaining access to 500 million accounts. So far, it doesn’t appear that the culprits have released any of that information to the public, but whoever was responsible for the leaks likely has a great deal of juicy information they could release in the future. If you’re a prominent person — and especially if you’re a senior adviser to a presidential candidate or world leader — you should take the possibility of getting hacked very seriously. That partly means doing everything you can to lock down your e-mail service — by enabling two-factor authentication and ensuring everyone in your workplace or organization gets thorough training on e-mail security. But it also means you should be careful about what you write in an e-mail. Because there’s a very real risk that anything you write down and send over the Internet will eventually become available to the whole world.

Reject the AT&T-Time Warner Merger

[Commentary] Dear Acting Assistant Attorney General Hesse:
I am writing to urge you to block the proposed merger of AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Inc. This proposed merger is just the latest effort to shrink our media landscape, stifle competition and diversity of content, and provide consumers with less while charging them more. Consideration of this deal should receive the utmost scrutiny, particularly because it involves a sector so fundamental to a free democracy. As Public Citizen notes, “this merger aims to concentrate far too much market, communications and political power in one corporation, threatening to impede the free flow of information, undermine the integrity of the Internet, raise consumer prices and further corrupt our politics.” In this particular merger, the diversity of programming would be further diminished by truncating the relationship of content and distribution. When one giant company owns both the content and the means of distribution, there is a clear disincentive to provide additional choices to consumers. In these so-called “vertical relationships,” not only is competition reduced, but there is a heightened, if not insurmountable, barrier to the influx of new content and diverse voices.

The media and telecommunications landscape is changing. It is important that public policy concerns guide these changes, so that we may preserve our democratic discourse and open competitive markets for speech and commerce. That is the function of our antitrust laws. I ask you to enforce them and block the proposed merger.

Vague Email Controversy Brings Out the Worst in TV News Media

If you have stood within earshot of a television, peeked at a social media stream, or scanned the front page of a newspaper, you may have noticed that e-mails are once again the subject of commentator frenzy. And yet there is little consensus on what, in fact, the news actually is. Oct 28, in an alarmingly vague letter to Congress, FBI director James Comey wrote that the investigation into whether or not Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had endangered national security by using a private e-mail server was once again, possibly, relevant. Reporting since then has indicated that the FBI investigation into disgraced politician Anthony Weiner, who may have sexted a 15-year-old, surfaced e-mails that were stored on the server — probably because Weiner’s now-estranged wife, Huma Abedin, is a top Clinton aide, and the two shared devices. Even in Comey’s initial letter, the possible involvement of Hillary Clinton is either tangential or speculative — the e-mails may have been on this controversial private server, but they may also have already been in the possession of the FBI, albeit on a different device. They may implicate Clinton or Weiner; they may also do no such thing. It is explicitly unknown, and Comey confirmed that in a leaked internal memo.

That has not stopped media organizations, in the full flush of pre-election coverage, to make this some kind of “October surprise” for the Clinton campaign, seizing on it as a turning point in the narrative of election 2016. And due to the confluence of Comey’s inept attempt at transparency and the media’s appetite for inflated controversy, Comey’s letter has had the effect of lighter fluid on the finally cooling embers of a house fire. This election has been defined by the breakdown of our best intentions in the Byzantine political-media complex, where time must be filled, takes must be filed, and we as a nation have struggled to wholly apprehend what we have become.

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