Colin Lecher

When Congress voted in March to block Federal Communications Commission privacy rules and let internet service providers sell users’ personal data, it was a coup for the telecommunication industry. Now, the nonprofit, pro-privacy group Fight for the Future is publicizing just how much the industry paid in an attempt to sway those votes.

The group unveiled four billboards, targeting House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and John Rutherford (R-FL), as well as Sens Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Dean Heller (R-NV). All four billboards, which were paid for through donations, were placed in the lawmakers’ districts. “Congress voting to gut Internet privacy was one of the most blatant displays of corruption in recent history,” Fight for the Future co-founder Tiffiniy Cheng said in a statement on the project. The billboards accuse the lawmakers of betraying their constituents, and encourage passersby to call their offices.

In 2015, the Federal Communications Commission moved in to cap what many consider to be exorbitant rates for inmate phone calls. Shortly thereafter, the agency was sued by the prison phone industry, which challenged the agency’s authority to set rates for calls within state lines. The lawsuit has been advancing, but the presidential election brought a new administration to the White House. Ajit Pai, the new, Donald Trump-appointed Chairman of the FCC, said in a letter that the agency would no longer defend the agency’s in-state rate caps in court.

Although that would seem to suggest a legal win by default for the phone industry, that’s not the case. Instead, a hearing continued as scheduled, with the FCC simply refusing to make its case. Other parties, however, continue to advocate for the caps in court, with the FCC on the sidelines. “It’s harder than usual to figure out what’s going on,” says Georgetown law professor Andrew Schwartzman, who argued for the rate caps in front of the court. “I’m not at all sure, however, that [Pai’s] letter… doesn’t have legal significance,” one member of the three-judge panel said as the court heard arguments. “There’s not a lot of precedent to deal with this kind of situation,” Schwartzman says.

President Donald Trump’s long-held Android phone is a security nightmare for a high-level politician, but according to a report from The New York Times, the newly inaugurated president is still using the device. In a profile of the president’s time so far in the White House, the Times reports that President Trump has held on to his “old, unsecured Android phone” — previously reported to be a Samsung device — despite some protests by his aides.

According to the Times, he used it to tweet Jan 24, suggesting he would “send in the Feds” to Chicago. (The tweet was apparently sent in response to a Bill O’Reilly segment.) Another Times report said Trump “traded in his Android phone for a secure, encrypted device approved by the Secret Service with a new number that few people possess,” but Trump has reportedly kept the Android phone to continue tweeting, and is even getting calls on it. In the Times profile, Trump did have kind words for the security of the White House phones, saying “words just explode in the air.” What he meant was that no one was listening in and recording his words.

While the Trump campaign continues to flounder weeks before Election Day, a new report is providing some inside information on the candidate's strategy, including an unorthodox use of Facebook. Businessweek explains how the Trump team has quietly organized a data enterprise to sharpen its White House bid. The campaign is meanwhile attempting to depress votes in demographics where Hillary Clinton is winning by wide margins. In one move, the Trump campaign reportedly created a cartoon animation with Clinton repeating her now-infamous line about "super predators," pairing it with the text, "Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators."

Businessweek reports that the Trump campaign is planning to use the ad in so-called "dark" Facebook posts — targeted, paid posts — to convince black voters not to come out for Election Day. Certainly there's nothing new about political ads trashing an opponent — but using Facebook to target the opposition's supporters is a different strategy. As Businessweek points out, there's no widely available evidence that such a plan will work. It may even backfire, unintentionally convincing some Americans to vote instead. But, the data the Trump campaign has built may be the foundation for a Trump project launching well past Election Day.

The nonprofit group Campaign for Accountability recently launched a project to compile documents about Google's lobbying practices, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The group says the repository of documents will be a resource for monitoring how Google interacts with the government. The first installment, which the group obtained through an independent researcher, features more than 1,500 pages of emails between the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Google employees. In the email exchanges, Google employees coordinate their messaging with the White House, occasionally steering around divisions within the administration. Nothing in the documents suggests improper behavior; they are a window into Google's high-level work on policy matters, and provide a case study on how deep the company's lobbying efforts go.

In an interview published by the New York Times, Donald Trump gave a winding response to a question about cyberattacks. Trump says he's all for "cyber," although it's unclear from the conversation what exactly that means. From the Times:
[DAVID E.] SANGER: You've seen several [NATO members in the Baltics] come under cyberattack, things that are short of war, clearly appear to be coming from Russia.
TRUMP: Well, we're under cyberattack.
SANGER: We're under regular cyberattack. Would you use cyberweapons before you used military force?
TRUMP: Cyber is absolutely a thing of the future and the present. Look, we're under cyberattack, forget about them. And we don't even know where it's coming from.
SANGER: Some days we do, and some days we don't.
TRUMP: Because we're obsolete. Right now, Russia and China in particular and other places.
SANGER: Would you support the United States' not only developing as we are but fielding cyberweapons as an alternative?
TRUMP: Yes. I am a fan of the future, and cyber is the future.

The killing of Alton Sterling at the hands of police in Baton Rouge (LA) has sparked national outrage after a video showing the incident was posted online. That video was the result of an organized effort by local activists, who use smartphones to monitor and record violence.

A nonprofit group in Baton Rouge, known as Stop The Killing, tracks crime through police scanner apps. When members of the group hear about an incident, they drive to the scene to document it, recording and producing videos to draw attention to violence in the community. There are seven or eight people in the organization that all regularly listen to the scanners — several different versions of police scanner apps of those that are publicly available — for reports of violent crime. "Sometimes we get to crime scenes before police," says head of the group, Arthur "Silky Slim" Reed. Stop The Killing tries to record a scene three or four times a week, Reed says, and has uploaded some of its footage — much of it showing graphic incidents of crime scenes — to YouTube.

A controversial ruling from a European court recently granted people the so-called "right to be forgotten," forcing Google to remove some search links upon request.

If you'd like a medium for sending such a request, Forget.me will now step in, spiriting away everything about you.

The site, a European privacy advocacy project, gives requesters a step-by-step procedure for lodging a request with Google, no knowledge on the finer points of law required. Log in, choose your country, perform a search for yourself, select the offending link, decide on which category your request falls under, and ship it all off to Google. While you wait, Forget.me will track the link's status, informing you when the information has left the physical plane.