Lauren Frayer

Vanita Gupta, the Obama administration official who headed the Justice Department’s civil rights division, will become the first woman to run the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella organization founded 67 years ago that represents 200 national groups.

Gupta, 42, an Indian American lawyer, is also be the first child of immigrants to head the organization, which has been run for nearly 20 years by civil rights leader Wade Henderson. Gupta will take the reins of the Leadership Conference on June 1.

Lawmakers grilled law enforcement officials in a tense hearing March 22 over their use of facial recognition programs. Democrats and Republicans raised concerns about the FBI’s use of facial recognition technology during a House Oversight Committee hearing, pressing a bureau official about the ability to access photos of hundreds of millions of citizens and the technology’s accuracy.

“This is really Nazi Germany here that we’re talking about,” Rep Stephen Lynch (D-MA), said of the facial recognition databases. “They had meticulous files on individuals, most of them of Jewish faith and that’s how they tracked their people. I see little difference in the way people are being tracked under this.” Over 117 million American adults can be found in a law enforcement facial recognition database, which draws in part from drivers license data, according to an October report from the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law.

Chinese firms have become significant investors in American start-ups working on cutting-edge technologies with potential military applications. The start-ups include companies that make rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors for autonomous navy ships, and printers that make flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpits. Many of the Chinese firms are owned by state-owned companies or have connections to Chinese leaders. The deals are ringing alarm bells in Washington.

According to a new white paper commissioned by the Department of Defense, Beijing is encouraging Chinese companies with close government ties to invest in American start-ups specializing in critical technologies like artificial intelligence and robots to advance China’s military capacity as well as its economy. The white paper, which was distributed to the senior levels of the Trump administration this week, concludes that United States government controls that are supposed to protect potentially critical technologies are falling short, according to three people knowledgeable about its contents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

One of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s most welcomed, yet least noted, process reforms has been his unequivocal direction that staff should be completely up front with all Commissioners, not just the Chairman. The message from the Chairman was that all staff will not withhold information requested by Commissioners or fail to share information that is pertinent to the many matters before us. This should be very liberating for staff as they don’t have to worry about being sent to the proverbial doghouse for helping Commissioners do their jobs.

At a time when Commission leadership has changed and is reconsidering and reconstructing its approach to many issues across the agency, there needs to be a realization from everyone that those priorities of the past Commission – not directly required by statute – should not necessarily be the focus of staff time. With resources at such a relative premium, staff attention shouldn’t be spent pursuing outdated goals.For instance, it wouldn’t make sense to have staff still focus their valuable time on those cybersecurity and privacy issues over which the Commission lacks statutory authority. Moreover, our enforcement staff should move away from headline grabbing and eye popping penalties that will never be collected. Let’s refocus our attention on our statutory responsibilities and realize a new Chairman gets to set the Commission’s agenda.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) said he’s received dozens of reports showing that communications from President Donald Trump’s transition team — and possibly Trump himself — were intercepted during the transition period between Election Day and Inauguration Day. “I want to be clear, none of this surveillance was related to Russia or the investigation of Russian activities or the Trump team,” Chairman Nunes said.

He said his panel will “thoroughly investigate” the surveillance and dissemination of that information. While the reports show surveillance of Trump officials unrelated to the Russia investigation, Chairman Nunes said it doesn’t mean those surveillance orders don’t exist. He declined to disclose his sources for the surveillance reports. The announcement comes two days after Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee that he had seen no information that supports President Trump’s allegations that Trump Tower was wiretapped in 2016 under orders from President Barack Obama.

A Pew Research Center survey finds that many Americans are unclear about some key cybersecurity topics, terms and concepts. A majority of online adults can identify a strong password when they see one and recognize the dangers of using public Wi-Fi. However, many struggle with more technical cybersecurity concepts, such as how to identify true two-factor authentication or determine if a webpage they are using is encrypted. Those with higher levels of education and younger internet users are more likely to answer cybersecurity questions correctly.

An estimated 17,000 AT&T technicians in California and Nevada went on strike March 22, highlighting workplace tensions within the massive Dallas-based telecommunications giant. The strike follows a protracted dispute between AT&T and union members affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, District 9, who have been working without a contract for nearly a year.

Workers say they have been increasingly asked to perform the duties of higher-paid employees without the same level of compensation. Union members also have been upset by AT&T’s closure of US based call centers, including a facility near Anaheim, to hire workers in overseas locations. They contend that AT&T has moved thousands of call center jobs in recent years to the Philippines, Mexico and other countries. March 9’s walkout, which began at 6 a.m., was to protest what the union said was AT&T’s demand that technicians who typically install and maintain the company’s U-Verse TV service also work on the cables, hardware and other infrastructure used to provide landline phone service (AT&T’s wireless division is not affected by the action).

Years in the making, a proposal to mandate the installation of fiber conduits during federally funded highway projects might be gaining some new momentum. If the US adopts a "dig once" policy, construction workers would install conduits just about any time they build new roads and sidewalks or upgrade existing ones. These conduits are plastic pipes that can house fiber cables. The conduits might be empty when installed, but their presence makes it a lot cheaper and easier to install fiber later, after the road construction is finished.

Dig once legislation received specific support from House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), who said that he is "glad to see [Rep Anna] Eshoo’s (D-CA) 'Dig Once' bill has made a return this Congress. I think that this is smart policy and will help spur broadband deployment across the country." At the Federal Communications Commission, dig once has support from Democrats and Republicans. Former Chairman Tom Wheeler, a Democrat, endorsed the policy, and so has the current FCC chairman, Republican Ajit Pai. Pai said in 2016 that "government officials should adopt 'dig once' policies so that broadband conduit is deployed as part of every road and highway construction project."

Earlier in Feb the National Digital Inclusion Alliance and Connect Your Community, a Cleveland (OH) based organization, published a report indicating that AT&T had “systematically discriminated against lower income Cleveland neighborhoods in its deployment of home internet and video technologies over the last decade.” The analysis shows that AT&T has failed to upgrade its network in low income neighborhoods, including most of the City of Dayton, while deploying a high-speed fiber based network in wealthier suburban areas.

“The company has upgraded areas around the City to its mainstream technology (Fiber to the Node, VDSL) but has failed to do that in Dayton, leaving those neighborhoods with an older, much slower technology (ADSL-2),” said Ellis Jacobs, senior attorney with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, Inc. According to Jacobs, “this has all the appearances of ‘digital redlining,’ discrimination against residents of lower income urban neighborhoods in the type of infrastructure AT&T installs and the type of broadband service it offers. High-speed internet is a critical modern day utility. Without it, residents and businesses are at a distinct disadvantage.”

It’s 2017 and a lot of Missouri residents are still tortured by the lack of access to basic broadband service, and if a community broadband ban bill becomes state law it will remain that way for years to come. SB 186 is essentially a copy of 2016’s community broadband ban that eventually died in the legislature. Just like in 2016, many of the sponsors and promoters of the latest attempt to impose a municipal broadband ban have close ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and receive copious amounts of money from Missouri’s largest telecommunication companies. Some even win awards from the state’s biggest telecom lobbyists.