New America

[Commentary] New America’s Open Technology Institute has been working on answering this question: how do you get companies to do the right thing? We’ve studied three positive privacy and security practices that have been adopted by internet companies over the years—first by a few companies as an innovative new practice, then as a best practice by more companies, and finally as an established standard practice by most of the industry—so that we could chart the different events and influences that helped make that widespread adoption possible. Our hope was that by looking across several cases, we could identify what types of political, technical, and social interventions were most likely to help spur widespread change at the industry level, and could maybe even provide a roadmap for future advocates to follow.

Specifically, OTI’s new “Do The Right Thing” project has mapped the key milestones along the road to adoption for three major privacy and security practices that have now become standard in the internet industry: (1) publishing transparency reports that detail government demands for user data, (2) encrypting web traffic by default (as of the end of last year, over half of all web traffic is now encrypted!) and (3) offering two-factor authentication (2FA) to better guard your online accounts against unauthorized intruders.

New America is pleased to announce the appointment of former White House Domestic Policy Council Director Cecilia Muñoz to direct a major new initiative in public interest technology and to lead the New America National Network, starting April 1, 2017. The emerging field of public interest technology allows professionals to use their technology expertise in service of the common good. But opportunities to deploy these skills across sectors remain rare, and the career path is often uncertain. With a major five-year grant from the Ford Foundation and Reid Hoffman, New America seeks to become a unifying hub for these professionals. The initiative—which is expected to grow with additional funders—will apply research, fellowships, interdisciplinary programming, and encourage cross-sector collaboration among different civic organizations, the private sector, and academic institutions. Muñoz will serve as Vice President for Policy and Technology and Director of the New America National Network. New America is building hubs across the country, beginning with New York, California, and Chicago, to support, connect, and publicize successful efforts to tackle important public problems from the bottom up.

The incoming US administration will face unprecedented challenges to internet freedom, and without strong leadership by the world’s major democracies, internet users can expect that their freedom of expression and access to information will continue to decline, even as they suffer from increasingly aggressive attacks by a range of state and non-state actors. Our newly elected officials will need to act swiftly and decisively to protect a free and open internet.

Several months prior to the election, a team at New America’s Open Technology Institute began to develop a set of recommendations for the 45th presidential administration to preserve and advance the cause of internet freedom—regardless of the final outcome. Drawing upon these recommendations which we have seen to resonate across the domestic political spectrum, we have released a paper that we hope can serve as a useful policy reference and roadmap, containing concrete policy steps that will enable the new administration to assert global leadership in advancing global internet freedom.

Let’s not let a good crisis in journalism go to waste. We can all beat ourselves up over how much time and energy was wasted on polling and predictions, but that noise drowns out what did not get enough time or energy, and what we can do to make it better next time. The 2016 election cycle revealed what journalism nerds have known for years: how little local reporting by local journalists working for local news organizations is being done in the United States, outside of the big, coastal cities. Can you name more than three reporters who don’t work for a news organization in a coastal state? Can you name even one?

As 2017 dawns, platforms (mainly Facebook) have proven adept at solving the short-term, but important, problems vexing journalism—namely, distribution and audience. But, they’ve done so largely at the expense of traditional forms of journalism. Leaders in the field should step back and work to solve the root difficulty of the civic information ecosystem and, in particular, the critical and difficult work of actual people asking tough questions of leadership.

[Commentary] Coffee shops, parks—bring your device to any public place and see what networks are out there. Your phone is constantly calling out, looking for any Wi-Fi networks it has connected to in the past, and any networks that it might want to connect to in the future. (Your smartphone is definitely in an open relationship with your home network.) Some of these Wi-Fi networks have names you want to trust: OHare Airport Official Wi-Fi, for example. Some definitely scream “stay away”—like GetOffMyLAN. Some are bizarrely complex—Purchase4478_Open3’—and some are thoroughly bland—Netgear00. But what do you really know about any of them?

Using a VPN is an easy step to take—much like wearing shoes—and can go a long way towards protecting your cyber health.

[Jamie Winterton is the Director, Strategy with ASU's Global Security Initiative, where she specializes in creating novel solutions for multifaceted and disparate problem spaces that relate to global security.]

On what should have been any other normal Saturday night in Orlando (FL), 49 people were shot and killed in a nightclub. The perpetrator, Omar Mateen, claimed allegiance to ISIS, though there is no evidence he was in direct contact with the group or its members. The June 2016 attack at the Pulse nightclub is now considered the worst terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11—and the deadliest public mass shooting in US history.

Security vulnerabilities—whether domestic or international—will never vanish completely, but communities, governments, media, and members of the public each play a role in promoting the resilience that prevents societies from bowing to terrorist threats. Several of these institutions played a part in the attack and aftermath in Orlando.

In the Digital Age, governance, technology, education, science, platforms, and more are being pushed to become more “open.” Open movements are working to remove barriers that prevent the public from fully accessing these institutions, systems, and fields. In the United States, open government strives to improve transparency, increase collaboration, and facilitate public participation in our democracy. Underlying this movement is one critical need: open use of information. The public must be able to fully engage with the information fueling each of these endeavors. Much of this information is funded by the federal government, which collects, produces, and distributes more information than any other organization, public or private, in the United States. Unfortunately, restricted access to this information—information produced with public funds—is all too common. Why? In part, this is because institutions have failed to recognize that openness is about more than simply being able to view or see information online. Open use requires that information is not only free, but also that it is available for the public to download, copy, keep, analyze, or reuse for any purpose. Movement toward open use policies has come in fits and starts, and faulty federal policies that treat different kinds of information differently have impeded progress. Many policies continue to delay the publication of information; grant use of information to a select few; or even, and most antithetically to an open movement, limit access to those who can pay.

In The Case for Open Use Policies: Realizing the Full Value of Publicly Funded Information, a new report from New America’s Education Policy program, I argue that these ambiguities in public rights to different kinds of information must be addressed. The report details policy recommendations that would move the federal government toward stronger open use policies.

“Now the cyber is so big,” Donald Trump said at an appearance in Virginia. It was part of a longer, equally incoherent statement about “cyber,” which, according to him, “is... becoming something that a number of years ago, short number of years ago, wasn’t even a word.” Of course, that’s not strictly true—cyber has been around for a while now, as both a noun and a prefix used in all manner of contexts and ways ranging from online sex to all-out apocalypse (or cyberpocalypse, if you will). Still, there’s something about that particular construction—“the cyber”—that feels off, like it’s either missing a word (“now the cyberthreat is so big”) or has an extra definite article (“now cyber is so big”).

Many of us are still wrestling with the idea of cyber as a noun rather than an adjective, though Trump is hardly the first to use it that way. (See, for instance, this summer, when NATO announced that it would extend its operations to the cyberdomain and the AP headline touted the change as “air, land, sea, cyber.”) But while that expansion into new parts of speech is intellectually interesting, it isn’t nearly as troubling as the sense that the more we invoke the term cyber in a general manner, the less we have any clear idea what it means or what we’re actually talking about.

[Commentary] Between election day and inauguration day, there are ten and a half weeks for a new President to get his or her policy agenda in order, and the next President will need to hit the ground running once in office. When it comes to internet policy, it will be necessary to build on the forward momentum that has brought this Administration closer to closing the digital divide.

President Obama’s technology agenda was ambitious, particularly on issues like network neutrality and broadband access and adoption, and his success on those issues is likely to shape his legacy as a technology leader. One of the most important tasks on the next President’s plate will be to resist the temptation to focus exclusively on newer, shinier policy priorities, and to instead continue to build on the groundwork that the Obama Administration laid to fully close the digital divide. President Barack Obama worked to ensure an open, robust, and affordable internet in communities across the country. He made impressive progress. But the next President must ensure that the benefits of broadband access are realized for all communities.