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  2. March 2017

March 2017

Demand Progress Seeks Funds for Pro-Privacy Rules Push

Demand Progress is asking for contributions for a "grassroots" push to fight Republicans' effort to repeal the Federal Communications Commission's broadband privacy rules.

The Senate voted recently along party lines (50 to 48 (with two senators not voting) to invalidate the October order, which Internet service providers, advertisers and some others want either Congress or the FCC to roll back. The House is expected to vote on the bill March 28. In an e-mail solicitation on March 26, Demand Progress made it all about Comcast--a frequent Big Media target. "Will you chip in $5 to help stop Comcast from selling my personal financial information and browsing history?," it asked, pointing out that the bill would now be taken up in the House, "unless we can kill this awful idea."

America's plan for stopping cyberattacks is dangerously weak

[Commentary] The United States again confronts the grim challenge of managing technological advances and their implications for warfare (as it has several times since, from chemical weapons to missiles to drones). Today, cyberweapons are nearly as synonymous with military power as fighter jets. What’s more, as demonstrated by the recent New York Times report on the cyberattacks used to disrupt North Korean ballistic missile tests and the latest WikiLeaks claims about a CIA hacking unit, cyber capabilities are too tempting for governments to refrain from using — even in peacetime.

Persuading the world’s militaries and intelligence agencies to stop building ever more powerful cyber arsenals appears as impossible as convincing them to renounce the use of attack aircraft. Nevertheless, the United States must find a way to reduce the threat from hostile state actions in cyberspace, or else risk cyber hostilities escalating into full-blown war. Doing so will require changes to US cyber diplomacy, the bolstering of cyber defenses, and the establishment of credible cyber deterrence.

[Greg Allen is a George Leadership fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. ]

From coal to broadband to Trump’s budget, The Daily Yonder reports on rural life for the people actually living it

President Donald Trump’s unveiling of his budget blueprint — and the ensuing analysis and criticism — was probably the first many urban readers had heard of the Appalachian Regional Commission, one of the initiatives he proposes cutting completely. But The Daily Yonder has been reporting on these issues for a long time.

The urban-rural divide has been one of the biggest points of discussion following the election, in which rural voters overwhelmingly chose Donald Trump. And while large news organizations have pledged to pay more attention to that division — at the beginning of the year, The Washington Post assigned a reporter to the divide specifically — the Yonder focuses on the people who have a connection to rural communities because they live in them, used to live in them, or work in them, by reporting on specific issues in depth.

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