Lauren Frayer

On March 8, 2017, MIT announced that R. David Edelman, former White House Special Assistant to the President for Technology & Economic Policy, will join the Institute, effective immediately. At MIT, Dr. Edelman will direct the new Project on Technology, the Economy, and National Security, holding a joint appointment with the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the Department of Political Science’s Center for International Studies (CIS). An international relations Ph.D. whose scholarship has focused on cybersecurity and law, Dr. Edelman comes to MIT following six years at the White House — where he was the only policymaker to serve on President Obama’s National Economic Council, the National Security Council, and in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. He was most recently responsible for government-wide policy development and coordination on all matters of the digital economy, and in previous roles at the NSC, United Nations, and State Department, was a lead author of the U.S. government’s Internet and cyber foreign policy doctrine.

WikiLeaks will work with technology companies to help defend them against the CIA's hacking tools, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said. The approach sets up a potential conflict between Silicon Valley firms eager to protect their products and an agency stung by the radical transparency group's disclosures.

In an online news conference, Assange acknowledged that some companies had asked for more details about the CIA cyberespionage toolkit whose existence he purportedly revealed in a massive leak published March 7. “We have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out,” Assange said. Once tech firms had patched their products, he said, he would release the full data of the hacking tools to the public.

Summer 2016, as it wrapped up multiple settlements after the Roger Ailes sexual harassment scandal, Fox News and its parent company, 21st Century Fox, were trying hard to end the ugliest chapter in its 20-year history. The downfall of Ailes, the former chairman and chief executive, had exposed a newsroom culture that many women there called hostile and demeaning. 21st Century Fox ordered an internal investigation and stated publicly that “behavior that disrespects women” would not be tolerated.

Nearly eight months later, the company finds itself still dealing with fallout from that crisis. In late February, 21st Century Fox reached a settlement worth more than $2.5 million with a former Fox News contributor who reported that she was sexually assaulted by an executive at company headquarters two years ago.

As President Donald Trump continues to build out his administration, many of his officials are having trouble filling vacancies in their departments because of questions about the loyalty of the people they want to select — questions that include scrutiny of old social media posts. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is sufficiently frustrated about the situation that “people familiar with the matter” leaked about his frustration to Bloomberg: "The White House’s reasons for the holdups vary, but questions about loyalty to Trump played a role in at least two cases, some of the people said. Mnuchin’s pick for the Treasury’s top lawyer, Brent McIntosh, got an especially tough vetting by the White House personnel office after his Twitter feed was flagged as potentially critical of Trump." Apparently, candidates for jobs have been asked to hand over their Facebook passwords so that old posts can be scrutinized for criticism of Trump.

Federal Communications Chairman Chairman Ajit Pai said his agency is investigating an issue that left some AT&T customers unable to call 911. Both Chairman Pai and AT&T tweeted that the problem has since been resolved. “We're receiving reports of widespread AT&T 911 call outages,” Chairman Pai wrote on Twitter just before 10 pm March 8. “@FCC public safety staff are investigating. I'll post more info once available.”

The underappreciated but critically important E-Rate program faces a fork in the road in 2017. Created during the Clinton administration, E-Rate originally intended to make it easier for schools to purchase dial-up internet connections. However, the program languished for many years while internet and education technologies improved by leaps and bounds. In 2014, the Obama administration revamped the program by nearly doubling the available funding and incentivizing the adoption of 21st-century technologies. The funding mechanism and presumably better E-Rate results portend a positive year for the program, though political uncertainty under a new administration signals there may be some rough waters ahead.

E-Rate does not receive funding from the standard congressional appropriations process. A 1996 law requires telecommunication companies to contribute to the Universal Services Fund, which in turn provides the funding for E-Rate and other programs. Overall, this arrangement is equivalent to a tax, but it’s insulated from the tumult of the congressional budgeting process. The unique funding mechanism decreases the likelihood that E-Rate would attract negative attention from congressional Republicans. However, the new Republican leadership at the Federal Communications Commission could choose to cut spending. Returning E-Rate funding to pre-Obama reform levels, but keeping most of the modernization reforms, would be compatible with the position of new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican. Pai has explained that his 2014 vote against the Obama E-Rate reforms was due to concerns about financial waste in the program rather than questioning the overall usefulness of the program.

Broadband planners and supporters in Missouri and Tennessee say that legislative battles for publicly owned broadband have reached the tipping point this week. In MO, a bill that would prohibit municipalities from running broadband networks passed in the State Senate Jobs, Economic Development, and Local Government Committee and will move to the full Senate for debate.

In TN, several competing bills are in play, including one touted as a compromise that keeps the ban on municipal networks while allowing co-ops to offer broadband under certain conditions. Other proposals would remove municipal broadband limitations completely. On March 8, the TN bill was amended with the governor’s cooperation to allow co-ops to provide video. The original bill prevented co-ops from providing voice or video over any broadband networks they built. The last-minute change indicates that the wording of the bill is still open to negotiation — either to favor municipalities or to favor the positions of large telecommunications corporations that oppose the measure. In 2016, for example, when the Legislature was on the brink of removing municipal broadband restrictions entirely, AT&T forestalled the vote by helping push through a measure to study the issue for another year.

A new mobile broadband experience took place in New Orleans (LA) March 8, with the unveiling of Sprint Gigabit LTE. The new service, which is seen as an evolutionary step towards 5G, delivers much faster mobile broadband, with some caveats. Sprint and its technology partners, Qualcomm and Motorola, say this is the first commercial deployment of Gigabit Class LTE in the US. Sprint is using their 2.5 MHz spectrum for the service, of which they have very deep holdings – over 204 MHz, 160 of which are concentrated in the top 100 US markets.

The State Privacy and Security Coalition has asked the Federal Communications Commission to grant the petitions of Internet service providers, advertising agencies and others to reconsider its broadband privacy rules. It is preaching to the choir when it comes to the Republican FCC majority, which voted recently to stay part of the rules implementation and signaled they wanted to revamp the rules, or deed broadband privacy authority back to the Federal Trade Commission.

In a filing with the FCC, the coalition, which identifies itself as representing 25 leading communications, technology, retail and media companies and six trade associations (business leagues, chambers of commerce, real estate boards, according to ProPublica), took particular aim at the breach notification deadlines in the order, which it says are "confusingly out of kilter" with state and Federal Trade Commission deadlines—the FTC deadlines are for edge provider data collection, rather than ISPs, which the FCC privacy rules apply to. The coalition says none of the 47 state breach notification laws require the seven-day notice to law enforcement and 30-day consumer notification deadlines. It says most states have no consumer notice deadline and those that do have at least 45 days.

[Commentary] Fake news has become a cause célèbre and fighting it has attracted some powerful players. Facebook just launched its “disputed” tag for possible fake news, and Google has promised to also go on the attack. But can current tech firms really stop or even slow down fake news? Probably not. Frankly, these firms’ business models enable the economic engine that powers fake news, and the demand for a social media site’s version of the truth is probably quite low.

The key to combating fake news probably lies in creating an economic engine that is more powerful than the one that drives fake news. Since costs are already minimal, the engine would have to give consumers more value. Sounds like we need a disruptive innovation, which is what new tech businesses are all about.

[Jamison is the director and Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida. He is also on the FCC Transition Team for President Trump.]