March 2018

President Donald Trump has extended the cyber attack national emergency, which was declared by President Barack Obama in April 2015 but would have terminated April 1, 2018, while elsewhere on the broadband front, the White House was promoting efforts by Republicans in Congress to further broadband infrastructure buildouts, which the Administration has said are a priority inrural areas. In December 2018, President Trump issued an executive order with added steps to address that cybersecurity emergency.

Facebook has been rocked by reports of a massive data scrape carried out by Cambridge Analytica and one of its then-contractors, a Cambridge University academic named Aleksandr Kogan. Kogan claims that the data he collected from thousands of Facebook users and their friends—amounting to data on over 50 million users—abided by Facebook’s terms; Cambridge Analytica promises it deleted the data; and Facebook is auditing everyone it can for signs of the data. But while Facebook provided the original data, it wasn’t the only vehicle for Kogan’s app.