New York Times

President Barack Obama said that he refrained from taking aggressive public action in retaliation for Russian hacking of Democratic Party institutions before the presidential election because he was concerned that such moves might be interpreted as unfair meddling in the campaign. In a news conference before leaving for a two-week vacation in Hawaii, President Obama said that he told President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in September to “cut it out,” but that the United States government did not retaliate in a public way before the Nov. 8 election. “We did not,” he told reporters. “And the reason we did not was because in this hyperpartisan atmosphere, at a time when my primary concern was making sure that the integrity of the election process was not in any way damaged,” such a move would “immediately be seen through a partisan lens.”

President Obama lamented the powerful effect that fake news had on the 2016 presidential election, condemning "domestic propagandists." “If fake news released by foreign government is almost identical to reports that are issued through partisan news venues,” he said, “then it's not surprising that that foreign propaganda will have a greater effect, because it doesn't seem that farfetched.”

[Commentary] During the campaign, Donald Trump railed against powerful corporations and promised to prevent blockbuster mergers like the proposed $85.4 billion deal between AT&T and Time Warner. That was then. Since the election, President-elect Trump has been decidedly less interested in constraining the power of big companies, especially those in the telecommunications industry.

Investors and financial analysts are already betting that the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission under Trump will be more likely to approve mergers in this industry, including perhaps a deal between Sprint and T-Mobile. Trump appears ready to do away with regulations on this oligopolistic industry. As it is, a lack of competition for some services is driving up prices. Public interest groups, Democratic lawmakers and sensible Republicans in Congress ought to vigorously oppose Trump’s deregulatory agenda. This won’t be easy, but they could, for example, try to challenge policy changes by filing lawsuits against the FCC, a tactic the telecom industry has used countless times over the years to stymie or delay regulations they opposed.

When Senate Democrats pick a new FCC commissioner, they ought to pick a strong consumer advocate who will use the position to speak out forcefully for more competition in the industry and common-sense approaches like net neutrality rules. Susan Crawford, of Harvard Law School, and Tim Wu, of Columbia Law School, are two experts who specialize in telecommunication issues and fit that bill.

On social media, our political battles are increasingly automated. People who head to Twitter to discuss their ideals are, often unwittingly, conversing with legions of bots: accounts preprogrammed to spew the same campaign slogans, insults or conspiracy theories hundreds or thousands of times a day. And one of their most competitive battlegrounds is the prime digital real estate that opens up every time President-elect Donald J. Trump tweets. Any supporters or critics who reply quickly enough to Mr. Trump can see their own tweets showcased right beneath the biggest spectacle on Twitter. But in this fast-draw contest, propaganda bots always best human beings.

Yahoo, already under a cloud from its summertime disclosure that 500 million user accounts had been hacked in 2014, disclosed that another attack a year earlier had compromised more than 1 billion Yahoo accounts. The newly disclosed attack involved more sensitive user information, including unencrypted security questions. Yahoo is forcing all of the affected users to change their passwords and it is invalidating the security questions. Yahoo had agreed to sell its core businesses to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion. Verizon said that it might seek to renegotiate the terms of the transaction after the first hacking was disclosed. It’s unclear how the newest information will affect its view of the purchase.

An investigation reveals missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of a campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.

Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing e-mails and zeros and ones.

An examination by The Times of the Russian operation — based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama Administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack. The DNC’s fumbling encounter with the FBI meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks.

The low-key approach of the FBI meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top DNC officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the DNC, including Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private e-mail account was hacked months later.

The President’s Daily Brief (PDB) is a summary of high-level intelligence and analysis about global hot spots and national security threats written by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While the intelligence community produces many reports and assessments, the PDB is written specifically for the president and his top advisers.

Its origins trace back to a daily intelligence summary given to President Harry Truman starting in 1946, according to the C.I.A. Its current form began with CIA briefings for President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The intelligence community tailors the PDB to each president’s interests and style of absorbing information. At times, the briefing has included a “deep dive” into a specific question that a president may have asked or information that briefers believed he needed to know, such as the early August 2001 briefing President Bush received at his Texas ranch reporting that Osama Bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush received a supplement called the “threat matrix,” which listed more detailed intelligence about potential terrorist plans. Under President Obama, the brief has taken on some new topics and different forms, including a periodic update on cyberthreats against the United States. The P.D.B.’s form has also evolved. For example, President Bush preferred oral briefings to accompany the document, while President Obama has preferred to read the briefing on a secure tablet computer that lets him page through, underlining specific details.

[Commentary] Alphabet (the parent company of Google) and Facebook are among the 10 largest companies in the world. Alphabet alone has a market capitalization of around $550 billion. AT&T and Time Warner combined would be about $300 billion. Alphabet has an 83 percent share of the mobile search market in the United States and just under 63 percent of the US mobile phone operating systems market. AT&T has a 32 percent market share in mobile phones and 26 percent in pay TV. The combined AT&T-Time Warner will have $8 billion in cash but $171 billion of net debt, according to the research company MoffettNathanson. Compare that to Alphabet’s balance sheet, with total cash of $76 billion and total debt of about $3.94 billion. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, according to Brian Nowak, an analyst with Morgan Stanley. Google and Facebook can achieve huge net profit margins because they dominate the content made available on the web while making very little of it themselves. Instead, they both have built their advertising businesses as “free riders” on content made by others, some of it from Time Warner. The rise of these digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries of our country.

[Taplin is the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”]

[Commentary] Television news is going to have to do its part should President-elect Donald Trump and his administration try to make policy based on false assertions, the same way he used them on the campaign trail. (And, yes, television will have to be just as vigilant should Mr. Trump’s opponents use falsehoods to fight him, too.) The same holds for all of the news media, of course. But live television can be a safe harbor for falsehood and deflection. It’s easy for me to criticize as a columnist who has time to analyze and fact-check before writing. On television, in real time, even the best-prepared interviewers may have neither the time nor the facts to catch a lie and call it out. Even when they do, their attempts to call foul can turn into stalemates if the interviewee insists on continuing to forward something that’s false or unsubstantiated, which seems to be the latest craze. CNN’s Jake Tapper said, in this “year in which basic facts and basic decency are at risk, persistence is important at the end of the day.”

As increasing focus is being paid to the wealth and jobs created by tech companies outside Silicon Valley, Google’s arrival in small-town Pryor (OK) serves as a complex example of what happens when a modern internet company builds one of its data centers in a community. While they do bring in some work, these mostly automated facilities will never provide the thousands of good-paying blue-collar jobs that come with a new auto plant. What they do bring, however, is some stability to local tax revenues, and — at least in the case of Google — a cash-rich megacompany looking to make nice with the locals.