Lauren Frayer

China to US: Stop hacking us

China asked the US government to stop spying on and hacking other countries, after WikiLeaks revealed data showing that the CIA can hack a range of devices, including some manufactured in China. Software companies quickly tried to detect security weak points following the WikiLeak news, with some calling for more details about what the US intelligence community was doing.

Cisco routers, which are widely used to provide wireless internet, were listed as a target in the WikiLeaks data. Cisco, a California-based company, markets its routers as providing “strong security and services to enterprise, service providers, and industrial networks.” Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE also are on the list. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang asked the US to stop hacking China. "We urge the US side to stop listening in, monitoring, stealing secrets and internet hacking against China and other countries," Geng said.

A Little Part of the First Amendment Dies at FCC Oversight Hearing

The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on oversight of the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday, March 8. A good time was had by all. The committee’s senators highlighted a wide range of issues during the 2+ hour hearing. Here we focus on the First Amendment, broadband deployment, network neutrality, privacy, and the future makeup of the FCC. In an op-ed published in The Hill, former-FCC Commissioner Michael Copps urged new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to speak out in defense of the First Amendment and freedom of the press. As a FCC Commissioner, Pai said, “In my view, anyone who has the privilege of serving at the FCC—any preacher with a pulpit, if you will—has the duty to speak out whenever Americans’ First Amendment rights are at stake.” With President Donald Trump calling journalists “the enemy of the American people”, Copps and others are looking to the nation’s top communications regulator to declare the government has no place pressuring media organizations. In his opening remarks, Committee Ranking Member Bill Nelson (D-FL) said, “Ultimately, for this senator, the success or failure of the commission rests not on the fulfillment of special interest wish lists, but on how those who are least able to protect themselves have been treated and whether first amendment rights, including those of journalists, are vigorously protected.” During the hearing, Senators Tom Udall (D-NM) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) pressed Chairman Pai to affirm his support of a free press, but Pai repeatedly refused to directly answer whether he agreed or disagreed with the President. Instead Pai said, “I don’t want to wade into the larger political debates, but I will simply reaffirm the quotes that you offered from last year and the year before.” Sen. Udall pressed Pai saying, “You refuse to answer that, about the media being the enemy of the American people.” Later Sen Hassan also returned to the issue saying, “I’d just like to give you another chance, because it seems to me that if you’re an outspoken defender of the free press, that should be a pretty easy question for you.” “No,” Pai answered. “I believe that every American enjoys the protections of the First Amendment offered by the Constitution.” Sen. Hassan said she wished she had gotten a different response.

6 changes the FCC has made in just six weeks

Here's some of what the Federal Communications Commission has done under President Donald Trump:

  1. Set aside a key Internet privacy rule. The FCC voted 2-to-1 to temporarily stay a data security regulation within a set of new privacy rules, passed in October 2016. That provision would have subjected Internet service providers (ISPs) to different privacy standards than web sites, apps and other Net players.
  2. Ended Zero-Rating Investigation. An FCC report issued before Chairman Tom Wheeler left office in January found that free data plans such as AT&T and Verizon may violate the agency's Net Neutrality rules, officially called the Open Internet rules, passed in 2015. Last month, Pai ended the investigation, saying that the practices enhanced competition and were popular with consumers. But critics called the move an initial offensive on the Net neutrality rules as a whole.
  3. Blocked approval of nine companies from Lifeline. Chairman Pai revoked the designation of nine companies as providers to the Lifeline plan, which subsidizes broadband service for low-income Americans. Like the Zero-Rating report, the Lifeline approval was a last-minute action by the Wheeler commission, Pai said at the time, and "should not bind us going forward."
  4. Approved broadband and wireless access. The commission over the last month approved $2 billion to improve rural broadband access and $453 million to improve wireless connectivity in rural America and in tribal lands.
  5. Made public items on its monthly agenda. Chairman Pai has begun posting the text of items to be considered by the commission on the agency's blog. In the past, Pai and fellow Republican commissioner Michael O'Rielly criticized Wheeler for not making agenda items public.
  6. Removed the set-top box rule from consideration. Before the first meeting he chaired, Pai removed from the agenda an order that would require pay-TV providers make free apps so subscribers could watch programming without a set-top box.

Meet the Hundreds of Officials President Trump Has Quietly Installed Across the Government

While President Donald Trump has not moved to fill many jobs that require Senate confirmation, he has quietly installed hundreds of officials to serve as his eyes and ears at every major federal agency, from the Pentagon to the Department of Interior. Unlike appointees exposed to the scrutiny of the Senate, members of these so-called “beachhead teams” have operated largely in the shadows, with the White House declining to publicly reveal their identities. While some names have previously dribbled out in the press, we are publishing a list of more than 400 hires, providing the most complete accounting so far of who Trump has brought into the federal government. Here is a run-down of some of the Trump hires:

Curtis Ellis was a columnist for WorldNetDaily, a website best known for its enthusiastic embrace of the false notion that President Obama was born outside the United States. Ellis was hired Jan. 20 as a special assistant to the secretary at the Labor Department. Asked about his role in a brief phone interview, he said: “Nothing I can tell you.”
Jon Perdue, a self-described guerrilla warfare expert and fellow at a little-known security think tank, wrote a book called “The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism.” He is also a onetime contributor to Breitbart. Perdue was hired as a special assistant at the Treasury Department.

Poll: Vast majority wants President Trump to tweet less

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll reports that registered voters, by a 2-1 margin, want President Trump to cut down on his tweeting. Fifty-nine percent of the 1,000 surveyed say Trump "should stop tweeting so much,” and 28 percent agree with the statement "his tweets are a good way to communicate directly with Americans."

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken just before Trump took office on Jan. 17 showed 69 percent of those polled agreeing with the statement that "in an instant, messages can have unintended major implications without careful review.” Just 26 percent said the tweeting "allows a president to directly communicate to people immediately."

Sens Markey, Lee introduce bill to crack down on certain robocalls

Sens Ed Markey (D-MA) and Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced a bill aimed at cracking down on robocalls from government contractors. The bill, dubbed the Help Americans Never Get Unwanted Phone Calls (HANGUP) Act, would remove loopholes that exempt government contractors and federal debt collectors from robocall regulation, the lawmakers said.

“When Congress passed the [Telephone Consumer Protection Act], the goal was clear: consumers should not be subject to unwanted robocalls and robotexts on their phones,” Sen Markey said. “But recent carveouts by Congress and the FCC allow government contractors to robocall and robotext consumers without their affirmative express consent," he added, referring to the Federal Communications Commission. Sen Lee characterized the legislation as "a check on Congressional entitlement and bureaucratic overreach." "If independent and private businesses are not allowed to harass consumers with unwanted robocalls and texts, government and government contractors should be held to that same standard," Sen Lee said.

Spicer: ‘Big difference' between publishing Podesta e-mails and classified CIA files

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that there is a “big difference” between WikiLeaks publishing Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked e-mails and the site's recent release of classified CIA information. During the presidential campaign, President Donald Trump praised WikiLeaks and urged the group to continue publishing Podesta’s hacked e-mails, which US intelligence agencies believe were obtained by Russian-backed hackers. Spicer was asked if President Trump is still a fan of WikiLeaks, a day after the group published a massive trove of documents pertaining to the CIA’s hacking programs. “There is a big difference between disclosing John Podesta’s Gmail accounts and the back-and-forth about his undermining of Hillary Clinton and his thoughts on her on a personal level, and of leaking classified information,” Spicer said.

Civil Rights Groups Seek Meeting With FCC's Pai

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—whose over 200 members include the Communications Workers of America, the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League—has written Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to express concerns about his early actions as chairman. Those included rescinding the eligibilities of most of a dozen new Lifeline subsidy applicants and withdrawing the March 2014 guidance on review of joint sales agreements. They said given those decisions, and Pai's dissent from the FCC's attempt to lower prison phone rates, they requested a meeting with the chairman to express their concern in person, adding that they were encouraged that he had said he was interested in hearing from those who disagree with him.

"While we appreciate your announced intentions to address the digital divide and to proceed in a more transparent manner, your recent decisions on Lifeline, Joint Sales Agreements (JSAs), and inmate calling rates are of profound concern to The Leadership Conference and its Media/Telecommunications Task Force, organizations that are dedicated to ensuring affordable broadband, increasing media ownership diversity, and ending predatory prison phone rates," they wrote.

White House official terrorizes network green rooms

White House official Boris Epshteyn, a combative Trump loyalist tasked with plugging the president’s message on television, threatened earlier in 2017 to pull all West Wing officials from appearing on Fox News after a tense appearance on anchor Bill Hemmer’s show. Epshteyn, apparently, got in a yelling match with a Fox News booker after Hemmer pressed him for details of President Donald Trump’s controversial executive order cracking down on immigration from Muslim-majority countries — a topic he was not expecting to be grilled on. “Am I someone you want to make angry?” Epshteyn told the booker, the sources said. When he threatened to pull White House officials from the network, the fed-up booker had had enough. “Go right ahead,” the booker fired back, the sources said, aware that Epshteyn had no power to follow through on a threat that would have upended the administration’s relationship with a sympathetic news network. Ultimately, White House officials have continued to appear on Fox News, and the network said that it handled the flare-up professionally.

Mike Pence says he advocates for a free press. Here’s his shaky history with transparency.

Speaking in front of Washington's top political journalists recently, Vice President Pence said he is — and has always been — an advocate of a free and independent press. He talked about his time as a radio commentator in the 1990s — a “Rush Limbaugh on decaf,” as he had been described. He also brought up his sponsorship of a federal shield law that would have protected reporters from having to testify or reveal their confidential sources. Pence sponsored versions of the legislation a few times when he was in Congress. Although the Free Flow of Information Act never became law, Pence's advocacy for the news media earned him praise from journalists, including an award from a newspaper association.

But while Pence does have a track record of supporting a free press and the First Amendment, that record is tainted and his stance on the public's right to know has become muddled, critics say. During his time as Indiana governor, for instance, Pence found himself rebuked by free speech and open-government advocates — once because of a widely criticized plan to create a taxpayer-funded news service, and again when his staff deleted Facebook comments that disagreed with his stance on same-sex marriage.