Christian Science Monitor

Otis, Massachusetts, isn’t the sort of place you expect to spend a lot of time online. For Kirsten Paulson, who lives part time in Otis, that’s all a selling point. Another major one: Her internet service is better here than at her home outside Washington (DC). That’s because the town of 1,500 people built its own network to fill in the gaps left by private providers, which don’t offer high-speed internet in Otis.

Absent intervention by Congress or the courts, the Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality regulations, which prevent internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast from establishing tiered pricing and levels of access to the internet, will expire on June 11. But the rules, which are supported by big majorities of Americans in both parties, aren’t going down without a fight. Framing arguments on both sides of the debate are different metaphors about what the internet really is. Is the internet a grocery store, for instance, or more like a utility?

[Commentary] Rapid advances in biometric technology mean the public is surveilled – and their movements recorded – more than ever before. If this technology spreads without limits, it could soon impinge on basic rights.

There is more discussion to be had on the scope, scale, and implications of "biometrics," yet for the moment we will close with the logical truth that no people, no society need rules against behaviors that are impossible, but the ballistic trajectory of biometric capabilities is such that constructing prohibitory rules before something is possible has become wholly essential. Probabilistically, enumerating forbidden things must fail to anticipate some dangers hence the policy tradeoff is whether to nevertheless attempt that enumeration or to switch over to enumerating permitted things. A free society being one where "that which is not forbidden is permitted" and an unfree society being one where "that which is not permitted is forbidden," whether we can retain a free society by enumerating forbidden aspects (of biometrics) is now at question.

[Dan Geer is the chief information security officer for In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit investment firm that works to invest in technology that supports the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US intelligence community.]

[Commentary] There are few signs at the moment that a détente will come in the poisonous relationship between this administration and the mainstream news media. Both sides seem willing to dig in on opposite sides of the battle line, perhaps as their forebears did when Adams, Jefferson, Nixon, and others occupied the White House. This isn’t an encouraging prospect. But to me conflict between the press and the president is less worrisome than the prospect of being led by an administration for which facts and truths are fungible or irrelevant. The optimist in me believes, like Lincoln, that while the people can be fooled some of the time, they will not be fooled all of the time. I believe that most people know that real knowledge is rooted in facts, and that getting these facts makes them smarter. I therefore believe that the people will search for, find, and support those sources that consistently strive to deliver facts. Those sources are called journalists.

[Tom Fiedler, a former White House correspondent and editor of the Miami Herald, is dean and professor of the practice of journalism at Boston University’s College of Communication.]

By stepping back from Obama-era privacy rules, the Trump Administration’s Federal Communications Commission has made another decision that’s likely to benefit internet service providers, but not internet users. Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who authored the privacy rules, made clear that he’s still concerned about Internet users’ privacy. "The fact of the matter is it's the consumer's information," he said. "It's not the network's information."

How the media work through this challenge will affect not only how this insurgent presidency is portrayed, but also how the American public sees the role of the press – as a biased meddler or an essential pillar of American democracy.

Reporters are tackling Trump’s hostility head on. Some are trying to soften him up. “Just for the record, we don't hate you. I don't hate you,” said CNN’s Jim Acosta, embroiled in a longstanding feud told President Trump. Others are standing by their journalistic brethren with the hashtag #NotTheEnemy, highlighting the important work reporters do in holding officials accountable, bringing injustice to light, and covering wars, at times losing their life.

Linguist George Lakoff appreciates journalists’ effort to defend themselves, but says they’re going about it in the wrong way. By putting the word “enemy” in the hashtag, they’re reinforcing the very concept that Trump is promoting – and thus, they are unwittingly helping Trump make his point. It’s all about the “frame” – the way a subject is characterized, writes Professor Lakoff of the University of California, Berkeley, on his blog. “Avoid the language of the attacker,” he writes, “because it evokes their frame and helps make their case.”

As smartphones become ubiquitous, app makers are becoming more brazen about collecting personal data, say experts and privacy advocates. And while iPhones and Android devices have limited privacy settings, most consumers remain in the dark about what companies are collecting and how they are using that information. "With business models focused on advertisements and sharing information of others, we've seen massive amounts of tracking," says Norman Sadeh, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "There's been erosion of privacy over the past few years." Claire Gartland, a consumer privacy attorney at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), compared the smartphone app marketplaces to "the Wild West" when it comes to privacy regulations and says consumers are left on their own to protect their own personal data.

Greeley (CO) offers a lens into how wide the digital divide in the US has become, how much it is contributing to a two-tiered society, and, perhaps most important, whether it can be bridged.

In wealthy school districts around the country, parents and teachers talk often about keeping computer use to a minimum. The students live in homes with multiple laptops, iPads, tablets, iPhones – iEverything. The adults worry about the students’ excessive time spent online, about the distractions of the virtual world replacing interaction with the real world. But for hundreds of poor districts across the United States, especially in modernizing agricultural communities like Greeley, the struggle is entirely different. It’s about helping students with limited tech skills be prepared for a global economy that is becoming increasingly digitized. Yet these are often the districts with the fewest resources, the districts flailing to move somehow beyond the era of the floppy disk.

Silicon Valley has long been an apolitical bastion of brainy engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists more concerned about the next hot social media startup than what's happening in Washington. That began changing as internet access spread and companies such as Facebook and Apple become indelibly linked to daily life – and to politics. As a result, Apple, Google, and Facebook hired lobbyists in Washington and boosted political spending. Technologists have become more socially active as encryption, online censorship, internet surveillance, and digital security have become politicized. Now, as Trump is set to take office after an election in which Russian hackers, internet trolls, and fake news all played a role, Silicon Valley is reassessing its place in the national political conversation and pockets of tech workers are beginning to speak out with a more forceful – and unified – voice.

[Commentary] We are standing at a critical juncture in our collective digital history. The rise of cybersovereignty – or, as it might be more accurately called, cyberfascism – has ushered in a global wave of censorship, surveillance, monitoring, and filtering that could directly hamper, or even reverse, the spread of a free and open internet.

Couple that with Russian interference into not only the US election but potentially others around the world, and digital warfare puts core freedoms at risk globally. Once inaugurated, in his first 100 days President-elect Donald Trump needs to take immediate steps to establish a clear and effective cybersecurity policy and engage the global community in the realms of both digital offense and defense.
[Dr. Andrea Little Limbago is the chief social scientist at the cybersecurity firm Endgame]