Lauren Frayer

To get aid for college from federal or state governments, as well as from colleges, students and their parents must fill out the Fafsa (the Free Application for Federal Student Aid). The notoriously complicated form, which is longer than the typical 1040 tax form, collects detailed information from students and families about income, expenses and taxes.

On March 3, families logging onto the website for federal aid found that a key component of the online application had stopped functioning. The component, known as the Data Retrieval Tool, automatically fills in a Fafsa application with information from an applicant’s tax return, via a data connection with the Internal Revenue Service. Without the tool, applicants have to transcribe tax information from their old returns or order tax transcripts from the IRS (which can take several weeks). Six days later, the Department of Education and the I.R.S. jointly released a statement saying that the IRS had “decided to temporarily suspend the Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) as a precautionary step following concerns that information from the tool could potentially be misused by identity thieves.” The agencies declined to elaborate, and it was unclear whether a breach had occurred or had only been feared.

Sens Orrin Hatch (R-UT),Steve Daines (R-MT), and Deb Fischer (R-NE) introduced the Highway Rights-of-Way Permitting Efficiency Act of 2017 (S 604), a bill that will streamline broadband permitting in existing highway rights-of-way for broadband infrastructure projects. Bill details:
State Permitting Authority: In pulling from the successful FHWA “NEPA Delegation Program,” which delegates federal environmental compliance to a state, this bill allows a state to opt-in to an agreement to take on the responsibility of environmental review—on behalf of the relevant federal agency.
Categorical Exclusion: Provides a categorical exclusion for any broadband project within an existing operational ROW.
Federal Broadband Permit Coordination; Designates a lead agency in the federal permitting process, regardless of whether a state opts-in to the “State Permitting Authority” agreement; This will consolidate efforts from the executive branch and create a single POC for a given broadband deployment project, intending to drive efficiencies into the permitting process.

The relationship between new Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and President Donald Trump is likely to continue to be a focal point for technology and telecommunications watchers. The pair met at the White House a week ago, one day before President Trump re-nominated Chairman Pai for another term. The Electronic Privacy Information Center is trying to pull back the curtain on that meeting, filing a Freedom of Information Act request seeking “memos, briefing papers, emails and talking points” pertaining to their conversation.

Federal Communications Commissioner Ajit Pai held a flurry of meetings with congressional Republicans and television broadcasters in the weeks before he took charge of the FCC, records obtained show — offering a flavor of his priorities and agenda as he sought the agency's top slot. His appointment calendar from Election Day to Jan. 25 shows then-Commissioner Pai kept in close contact with top GOP lawmakers, who are poised to play a key role in supporting and assisting with his deregulation agenda. He met with no congressional Democrats during that time frame, according to his schedule.

Chairman Pai also carved out a notable amount of time for broadcasters, an interest group that was frequently at odds with the previous FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. He met twice with Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the nation's largest TV station owners, and huddled with the chief executives of T-Mobile and DISH as well as leading industry trade groups. Commissioner Pai checked in with former-Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) on Dec. 5, after President Trump picked her to be ambassador to the United Nations. And if you’re looking to run across Chairman Pai at your daily power lunch, consider Oceanaire, Del Frisco’s and Charlie Palmer — three restaurants where he lunched with major communications trade group CEOs.

Fixed broadband is “on thin ice” in the US as the mobile first generation may be fueling broadband cord cutting, according to ReportLinker. Although the majority of households still access the Internet via fixed connections (cable, telecommunication, fiber, etc.), nearly 4 in 10 said they usually use mobile for home Internet access, according to the research.

ReportLinker points to Census Bureau data as further evidence of broadband cord cutting. According to the Department of Commerce agency’s report, the number of US households that rely solely on mobile devices and wireless network connectivity for Internet access doubled to 20 percent between 2013 and 2015. The shift is particularly strong among young adults.

A new report from Rand Corp may help shed light on the government’s arsenal of malicious software, including the size of its stockpile of so-called “zero days” — hacks that hit undisclosed vulnerabilities in computers, smartphones, and other digital devices. The report also provides evidence that such vulnerabilities are long lasting.

The findings are of particular interest because not much is known about the US government’s controversial use of zero days. Officials have long refused to say how many such attacks are in the government’s arsenal or how long it uses them before disclosing information about the vulnerabilities they exploit so software vendors can patch the holes. Rand’s report is based on unprecedented access to a database of zero days from a company that sells them to governments and other customers on the “gray market.” The collection contains about 200 entries — about the same number of zero days some experts believe the government to have. Rand found that the exploits had an average lifespan of 6.9 years before the vulnerability each targeted was disclosed to the software maker to be fixed, or before the vendor made upgrades to the code that unwittingly eliminated the security hole. Some of the exploits survived even longer than this. About 25 percent had a lifespan of a decade or longer. But another 25 percent survived less than 18 months before they were patched or rendered obsolete through software upgrades.

Congressional Republicans are moving against the Federal Communications Commission's broadband privacy rules. In recent days, lawmakers in both the House and Senate have offered legislation to roll back the Obama-era measures, with bills from Sen Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). Both bills aim to kill the rules using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which allows Republicans to block rules with only a simple majority in both chambers.

The FCC's privacy rules were approved under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler, a Democrat, in October, and bar internet service providers from collecting "sensitive" consumer data like browsing information and app usage data without their customers' express consent. But Congress has only 60 legislative days after the regulations were approved to roll them back using the CRA. That timeline means Sen Flake and Chairman Blackburn have until mid-May to get their measures through Congress. So far, things are moving in the right direction for opponents of the privacy rules.

Facebook is cutting police departments off from a vast trove of data that has been increasingly used to monitor protesters and activists. The move, which the social network announced March 13, comes in the wake of concerns over law enforcement’s tracking of protesters’ social media accounts in places such as Ferguson (MO) and Baltimore (MD). It also comes at a time when chief executive Mark Zuckerberg says he is expanding the company’s mission from merely “connecting the world” into friend networks to promoting safety and community.

Although the social network’s core business is advertising, Facebook, along with Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram, also makes money by selling developers access to users’ public feeds. The developers use the data to monitor trends and public events.

[Commentary] President Donald Trump and his White House don’t argue on the merits. They attack the institutions that come up with facts and arguments they don’t like. They even do it preemptively.

Last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer warned that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office couldn’t be trusted to come up with accurate numbers about the costs and coverage of the Republican’s replacement for the Affordable Care Act. “If you’re looking at the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place,” he said. So what’s the right place? The Oval Office?

Trump’s big lies are bad enough because they subvert the truth and sow confusion. But Trump’s attacks on the institutions we rely on as sources of the truth are even more dangerous, because they make it harder for the public to believe anything. In a democracy, the truth is a common good. Trump is actively destroying the truth-telling institutions our democracy depends on.

[Robert Reich is the Chancellor Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley]

[Commentary] You can’t fight propaganda with standard journalism. Watchdogging the fake-news machinery and fact-checking relentlessly is part of the prescription. So too is being more transparent about how we gather and verify the news; covering what’s important (not “barking at every car”); and using clearer labels to distinguish news from opinion. News organizations have to acknowledge their own biases internally, and constantly report against them.