Hill, The

Representatives from social media giants Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn are helping White House staffers find jobs for after President Barack Obama leaves office. Facebook and Instagram figures are advising staffers on the current job market, while LinkedIn officials are offering help with resumes and marketing their skills.

Georgetown University is also offering a customized career development program called “Future44,” named after Obama’s service as the 44th president. The program, funded by an anonymous donor, has hosted 271 White House staffers so far. Several high-profile former Obama staffers landed at tech companies after their White House service.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus are pressing Facebook to change an advertising feature that allows advertisers to exclude certain racial groups. “We are writing to express our deep concerns with reports that Facebook’s 'Ethnic Affinities' advertising customization feature allows for advertisers to exclude specific racial and ethnic groups when placing housing advertisements,” they wrote in a letter to Facebook on Nov 1. “This is in direct violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and it is our strong desire to see Facebook address this issue immediately."

The letter was signed by Rep Robin Kelly (D-IL), the ranking member of the Oversight Subcommittee on Information Technology, and members from the House Commerce Committee, including CBC Chairman GK Butterfield (D-NC) and Reps Yvette Clarke (D-NY) and Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO). The lawmakers' letter also hammered Facebook on diversity at the Menlo Park (CA) tech giant. “With 2 percent of Facebook’s U.S. employees being African American, and 4 percent Hispanic, we remain convinced that a stronger commitment to diversifying the ranks of your company ... will help in ensuring that innovative and inclusive platforms continue to be promoted by your company,” they wrote.

[Commentary] Rather than give the Department of Justice — and, assuming jurisdictional issues are resolved, perhaps even the Federal Communications Commission— an opportunity to look dispassionately at the facts of AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, law and economics of the transaction, some consumer groups are going for the political jugular. But then again, who can blame them?

As FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has actively encouraged such conduct by steadfastly choosing to ignore substance and view every major policy initiative from network neutrality to set-top boxes to municipal broadband through a political lens, this playbook appears to be quite successful. Still, ignorant sophistry is no excuse for ill-formed policymaking. Let's just hope that the new administration — regardless of party — rejects the politicized approach to telecom policy favored by the Obama Administration and returns to first principles: an honest, rigorous and dispassionate review of the transaction.

[Spiwak is the president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies]

[Commentary] In the wake of recent cyberattacks, many policymakers are left wondering what, if anything, they can do to prevent future attacks and how they can make the burgeoning Internet of things more secure. Fortunately, there is a relatively simple step that Congress could take to jump-start cybersecurity in the fledgling internet of things: require companies to publish a security policy. Most companies today publish a privacy policy. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), in particular, has actively monitored the privacy practices of the private sector and held companies accountable for adhering to their stated practices. The overall result is that companies in the United States have a significant degree of autonomy and flexibility in how they collect and use personal data, which has allowed innovation to flourish, but they still must answer both to their users and to government regulators.

As the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has argued before, the United States, like most other countries, has a schizophrenic approach to cybersecurity that is broken and ineffective. The current policy emphasizes relative security over absolute security. Nations want to be able to hack in to the systems of their adversaries, but they do not want their own systems to be vulnerable. So rather than working together to improve global information security practices for everyone, nations spend billions to penetrate systems and horde zero-day vulnerabilities. This needs to change. But in the interim, there is at least one concrete step policymakers can take to begin to change the security practices of the private sector and help pave the way for a more secure Internet of things.

[Castro is vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation]

The hacker or hackers who stole National Security Agency-built cyber tools have dumped new files in what appears to be yet another change of plans in monetizing the heist. The new files provide some insight into the targets of the NSA affiliated hacking team called The Equation Group. Those targets include government servers in China and universities in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. This is the second dump of files that came from the group The ShadowBrokers, who in August released sample files containing previously unknown hacking techniques used to circumvent popular security hardware.

The August files also contained a tracking code used by the NSA that matched previously unreleased Edward Snowden documents, appearing to confirm the breach’s provenance. In August, the group offered the complete cache of documents for auction. Not seeing the bidding totals they wanted, the group changed to a crowdfunding approach, saying it would release all files publicly if enough people donated money to a bitcoin address. The latest leaks contain yet another change in business model: a direct appeal to the United States to purchase the remaining files from the group. “How bad do you want it to get? When you are ready to make the bleeding stop, payus, so we can move onto the next game. The game where you try to catch us cashing out! Swag us out!” wrote the Brokers in their latest release. The newly released files are divided by NSA target in folders titled with domain names and internet addresses. If authentic, they would reveal hundreds of historic targets across the world — the files appear to be nearly a decade old — in nations ranging from Russia to Japan to Germany and Hungary.

[Commentary] Free speech is an American’s birthright. But for the first time in living memory, ordinary people are pushing the boundaries of the First Amendment. Message boards, on-line comment sections and social media make the problem even worse. A lot of these people may think that they are just blowing off steam. But when you are actually discussing using violence to overthrow the government or to interfere with an election, there’s a very thin line between “just talk” and criminal conspiracy.

In the modern world, it is perfectly possible to become a member of a criminal conspiracy by “liking” a tweet. Conspiracy is a little different than most crimes. The essence of conspiracy is an agreement by two or more people to do something illegal. Some conspiracy statutes require that at least one of the participants take some concrete step — known as an “overt act” — toward actually carrying out the conspiracy. Some statutes do not. The First Amendment is a national treasure. It protects our right to speak our minds without fear of government sanction. But the First Amendment also has limits. It does not protect violent conspiracy or planning bloody revolutions. It doesn’t protect casual talk about the “need” to assassinate the President. Know those limits and respect them. On Nov 9th, this election will be over and we will need to start putting the country back together. Start that process today. Speak out against calls for violence. Be a voice for civility and calm. Stand up for our democratic traditions. Not only will this help keep you out of trouble, it will help keep our country out of trouble.
[Truax is an appellate attorney in San Diego, California.]

The FBI’s announcement that it may have found new evidence related to Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server is a “stunning development” that “raises serious questions” about the Democratic presidential nominee, the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC) said. "The FBI’s decision to reopen their criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s secret email server just 11 days before the election shows how serious this discovery must be,” said Chairman Reince Priebus in a statement shortly after news broke about the FBI’s action. “This stunning development raises serious questions about what records may not have been turned over and why, and whether they show intent to violate the law." "What’s indisputable is that Hillary Clinton jeopardized classified information on thousands of occasions in her reckless attempt to hide pay-to-play corruption at her State Department,” Priebus continued. “This alone should be disqualifying for anyone seeking the presidency, a job that is supposed to begin each morning with a top secret intelligence briefing.”

Facebook rolled out a ballot guide aimed at preparing people for the voting booth, the company’s latest effort at civic engagement. The feature allows users to scroll through and get more information about the candidates and ballot issues they’ll see when they go to vote. What users see on the guide is what they'll see on their ballot, according to Facebook. “We’re interested in offering people a space that’s separate from News Feed where they can prepare for that they’re going to do in the ballot box,” said Jeremy Galen, a product marketing manager with the company.

A user can scroll through to see all the candidates for a given office and choose to see their position on the issue, assuming the candidate has uploaded that information to their Facebook page. They can also see other users who have endorsed the candidate. The website serves information on the presidential race first, followed by down-ballot races and ballot questions. The order in which candidates are presented on the page is randomized. The information comes from the Center for Technology and Civic Life, a nonprofit group. Users can favorite a candidate they plan to support, an action they can either keep to themselves or share with friends. That data will be discarded 60 days after Election Day, the company said, and will not be used for any advertising purposes.

[Commentary] The recent news that Facebook staffers had sought to delete Donald Trump’s posts calling for restrictions on Muslim immigration as violating the company’s hate speech policies has revived the ongoing controversy about ideological neutrality in the social networks. This time at least, the Facebook employees were overruled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the grounds that this would amount to political censorship, but the issue raises the question: Is there a problem of anti-conservative bias in the social media? And if so, what’s the answer?

It should be noted that Trump is not a standard conservative — indeed, many conservatives say he’s not a conservative at all — and plenty of people on the right have denounced his proposed Muslim ban. But this is far from the only instance in which major social media platforms have been accused of political censorship toward right-leaning content. Last May, allegations were made that Facebook had suppressed conservative views from its “trending topics;” while Facebook claimed that its internal investigation found no evidence of systematic suppression, the company also announced that it would modify the process of trending topic selection to minimize the potential for abuse. To stop the fragmentation, these companies’ leadership should make a good-faith effort to live up to their promise of political inclusiveness and free debate. The conversation on curbing harassment while protecting speech is important; but it must include a truly diverse base of advocates.

[Young is a contributing editor for Reason magazine and a columnist for Newsday.]

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign-in-waiting appeared unprepared for a New York Times story in 2015 that exposed her exclusive use of private e-mail account and server for government business, according to a newly released e-mail. The day the Times story was published, John Podesta, who would later be named campaign chairman, asked future campaign manager Robby Mook if he had seen it coming. “Did you have any idea of the depth of this story?” Podesta asked Mook in an e-mail late on the evening of March 2, 2015, roughly a month before Clinton launched her bid for the White House. “Nope,” Mook responded after 1 am that night. “We brought up the existence of emails in reserach (sic) this summer but were told that everything was taken care of.”

The discussion, which was released by WikiLeaks from a batch of messages apparently stolen from Podesta’s account, sheds additional light on the campaign’s lack of preparation for questions about Clinton’s bespoke setup. The private e-mail arrangement has become a cloud over the Democratic presidential nominee and spurred a yearlong FBI investigation. The e-mail released Oct 27 is one of several published by WikiLeaks detailing the Clinton campaign’s scurrying response to revelations about her e-mail server.