Lauren Frayer

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) accused the media of being “accomplices” to Russia's efforts to meddle in the 2016 election. “I think the press were accomplices in the undermining of our election by the Russians by not pointing out this stuff [the e-mails] is worthless,” Rep Pelosi said. “Because it comes from an undermining of our election, or at least reminding the public where this — these e-mails, the leaking of these e-mails came from.”

Some instantly saw a media double standard. The press was apoplectic when President Trump labeled it the “enemy of the American people,” after all. So now that Rep Pelosi was apparently charging it with a crime against American democracy and aiding an adversarial foreign power, why no outcry? One of the reasons for the disparate reactions is that Rep Pelosi's accusation doesn't require that the press willingly worked against the American people. Being an accomplice doesn't require you to collude or act deliberately; there is such thing as an “unwitting accomplice.” So when the press sees Rep Pelosi call it an accomplice, it registers more as a criticism of its choices rather than its loyalties — as Trump's “enemy” comment does.

Russian hackers are targeting US progressive groups in a new wave of attacks, scouring the organizations’ e-mails for embarrassing details and attempting to extract hush money, according to two people familiar with probes being conducted by the FBI and private security firms. At least a dozen groups have faced extortion attempts since the US presidential election, apparently.

The ransom demands are accompanied by samples of sensitive data in the hackers’ possession. In one case, a non-profit group and a prominent liberal donor discussed how to use grant money to cover some costs for anti-Trump protesters. The identities were not disclosed, and it’s unclear if the protesters were paid. At least some groups have paid the ransoms even though there is little guarantee the documents won’t be made public anyway. Demands have ranged from about $30,000 to $150,000, payable in untraceable bitcoins, apparently.

Facebook has begun flagging fake news. Or as Facebook calls it: "disputed" news. A warning label is being slapped on articles that clearly have no basis in fact or reality — at least some of them. The giant social network first promised to roll out a "disputed" tag in December. Among the disputed offenders that people spotted on Facebook: A fictionalized story "Trump's Android Device Believed To Be Source of Recent White House Leaks" from a fictional publication "The Seattle Tribune." The story carried a disputed label with links to fact-checking services that explained why it was not true. The website has a disclaimer that it is a "news and entertainment satire web publication." But the story fooled people anyway.

The "disputed" tag is part of Facebook's grand plan to crack down on fake news as the company tries to tamp down the controversy over its role in the spread of misinformation that sharpened political divisions and inflamed discourse during and after the presidential election.

So much of Blacksburg (VA) is made up of Virginia Tech. But drive 15 minutes in any direction and this emerging tech hub of a town gives way to rural, rolling plains of farmland. That geographic divide also marks a digital wall between internet haves and have-nots — one fiercely felt along the 40-mile stretch between Blacksburg and Roanoke (VA), a city of 100,000-plus people whose broadband speeds are slower than those found in the capital of Latvia. A similar digitally divided drama is playing out across America, as access to high-speed internet becomes the great infrastructure opportunity of this century — and a challenge, perhaps, even more pressing than the “crumbling” highways, bridges and airports that President Donald Trump has promised to address.

[Commentary] Today’s internet has transformed media and delivered prodigious value to consumers in entertainment, ecommerce, and personal productivity. Yet the next waves of the internet will extend to new industries in the physical world, delivering a far greater variety of services and requiring connectivity that is even faster, more ubiquitous, and more robust than today. To drive and accommodate this embrace of information by the real economy, we’ll need something bigger and better than the internet. We’ll need the “exanet.”

If the first several decades of internet were based on interoperability through digital packet switching and expanded capacity via fiber optics and broadband, the next phase will (in addition to continual capacity additions) focus on ubiquity, latency, reliability, application diversity, and security.

[Swanson is president of Entropy Economics LLC]

Sprint has been filing patent lawsuits over VoIP for more than a decade now, and the company may have just scored its biggest payout yet. On March 3, a jury in Sprint's home district of Kansas City (MO) said that Time Warner Cable, now part of Charter Communications, must pay $139.8 million for infringing several patents related to VoIP technology. The jury found that TWC's infringement was willful, which means that the judge could increase the damage award up to three times its value. “We are disappointed with the outcome and are considering our options,” a Charter spokesperson said. A Sprint spokesperson said the company was pleased with the verdict, which represented its "full damage demand."

On the campaign trail, none of President Trump's rivals could — or would — match the brazenness of his attacks on the news media. Trump's rejection of basic political norms helped him win the election, but it is becoming a problem now that he is president. As other Republicans refuse to follow his lead, Trump is growing frustrated.

A recent Washington Post story claims, "A few hours after Trump had publicly defended his attorney general and said he should not recuse himself from the Russia probe, [Jeff] Sessions called a news conference to announce just that — amounting to a public rebuke of the president." The president became irritated all over again March 5, after he received little support for his unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign: "Few Republicans were defending him on the Sunday political talk shows. Some Trump advisers and allies were especially disappointed in Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL), who two days earlier had hitched a ride down to Florida with Trump on Air Force One. Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd to explain Trump’s wiretapping claim, Rubio demurred. 'Look, I didn’t make the allegation,' he said. 'I’m not the person that went out there and said it.'"

[Commentary] Here is what Attorney General Jeff Sessions should have said when he stepped up to the podium and addressed reporters last week at the Justice Department: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Sessions is the victim of the type of McCarthyite character assassination that the left used to condemn. Remember when accusing people without evidence of coordinating with the Kremlin was frowned upon? No longer, apparently.

In fact, what Sessions faced may be worse than McCarthyism. At least McCarthy was right when he claimed that there were Russian spies in the State Department (see Hiss, Alger, among others). On “Meet the Press” this weekend, former Obama director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. declared that the US intelligence community he headed until a few weeks ago had found “no evidence” of any collusion between members of the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. No evidence.

[Thiessen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush]

A White House spokeswoman criticized the media while defending President Trump after he claimed that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower before the election. "The media loves to create this false narrative against the current president but is so quick to dismiss anything under the past administration," said Sarah Huckabee Sanders. "If the president walked across the Potomac, the media would report that he couldn't swim." Huckabee Sanders said the current administration is asking that "the same standard be applied to this president as the past president." "And let's look and let's get the details and let's put those out there for the American people to make a decision," she said.

Recently, a number of legal experts and policy activists have called on antitrust regulators to incorporate the possession of data into their analyses of mergers and possible anticompetitive practices. These observers fear that control of large amounts of data will give companies an unfair advantage over competitors, allowing them to use their market power to harm consumers and competitors. These claims are incorrect.

Data-rich companies are not an economic threat, but rather an important source of innovation, which policymakers should encourage, not limit. And because the use of data is non-rivalrous, one company’s possession of data does not come at the expense of another’s. As such, there is no need to impose additional antitrust scrutiny merely because a company relies on data to conduct business. Moreover, regulators already have sufficient powers to deal with any actual behavioral problems that may arise.