New America

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.