Politico

Comcast and Time Warner Cable are sponsoring a dinner honoring Federal Communications Commissioner Mignon Clyburn at a time when the agency is weighing whether to approve a multibillion-dollar merger between the two companies.

Comcast will pay $110,000 to be a top-level “presenting sponsor” at the Walter Kaitz Foundation’s annual dinner in September, at which Commissioner Clyburn is receiving the “diversity advocate” award, according to a foundation spokeswoman.

Time Warner Cable paid $22,000 in May to the foundation for the same event, according to a Senate lobbying disclosure filed at the end of July. The foundation supports diversity in the cable industry.

[Commentary] The national press corps loved former President Richard Nixon, and then they hated him. Understand that, and President Nixon’s implosion makes sense. It’s a media story, in more ways than one.

First there’s the largely forgotten opening chapter: President Nixon’s spectacular rise -- he went from House freshman to the vice presidency in just six years -- was built on exceptionally favorable notices in the press.

In both fueling President Nixon’s early career -- and then destroying him later -- members of the press abandoned professed standards of objectivity. And President Nixon’s innate wariness, in turn, evolved into arrant hatred. In the end, this dysfunctional relationship helped fuel a national tragedy. It put the country on the road to Watergate. Just because President Nixon was paranoid didn’t mean his enemies weren’t conspiring to get him.

[Farrell is an author of a forthcoming book on the life of Richard Nixon]

Amazon rarely shies away from a fight, whether it’s battling publishers to conquer the e-book market or warding off investors who want the company to deliver bigger profits. But Amazon increasingly is shipping those hardball tactics to Washington, where it is fighting agencies and wooing regulators more than ever before.

The company has boosted its political machine, hiring a crop of new lobbyists and writing bigger checks to members of Congress. It recently retained a powerhouse firm in Washington (DC) to lobby the Federal Aviation Administration on delivery drones and has flexed its muscle to win a key government technology contract. CEO Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, raised his Beltway profile through his personal purchase of The Washington Post in 2013.

Dag Vega -- the White House liaison to the TV networks, and one of the few original Obama staffers who moved into 1600 Pennsylvania five-and-a-half years ago -- will leave for a soon-to-be-announced job in the private sector on July 25.

Vega was hired by Dan Pfeiffer in June 2008 as director of surrogate press in the Chicago campaign office and has been with Team Obama ever since.

Many of the biggest players tasked with protecting the country after Sept 11 have a new mission, and one that pays: securing all of the data the corporate world collects on its customers.

Ex-Cabinet chiefs Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff count Fortune 500 companies among their clients anxious to secure computer systems and avoid the fate of Target, the victim of an epic data breach last fall.

Former Capitol Hill lawmakers and senior staff central to the last decade’s battles over privacy and security have traded their top-secret government clearances for lucrative jobs as consultants and lobbyists. Retired Gen Keith Alexander, the former National Security Agency director tarred by Edward Snowden’s leaks, launched his own firm this spring, just weeks after leaving government.

Lobbying on cybersecurity, privacy and other data issues has skyrocketed over the past decade, with a more recent hiring spree driven by the Snowden scandal and major security breaches at some of the country’s largest companies. Dozens of boutique firms and established K Street players are entering the red-hot market and touting their top recruits from the executive and legislative branches.

Imaging Advantage CEO Naseer Hashim explained that educating the public on what “big data” actually means could help solve America’s hesitation toward the subject.

“I think one of the problems is that most people don’t actually know what big data is or what it means, so I think it’s become more of a popular catch-all phrase to refer to data analytics or data mining,” Hashim said. “I think one thing that’s very important is we don’t get caught up in the jargon where people don’t understand what it is, but really to explain the essence of what the objective is, which is to be able to aggregate large amounts of data in order to bring specific solutions to people.”

Burfield added that startups, in particular, are important to understand when learning about big data, as they are beginning to play a larger role in collection and analytics than local governments.

“What we see more of than startups making a bunch of money off of government data is the exact opposite,” Burfield said. “The startups are starting to generate so much data about the cities than the cities themselves have that where we’re seeing the interesting returns is the cities buying the data so that they can actually figure out what’s happening in their city.” In the future, Burfield expects this to change and for the focus to shift to the public sector.

If you’re asking whether Washington has kept pace with technological innovation in Silicon Valley, Rep Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has a blunt response: “Are you kidding?”

“There are very few people who understand or appreciate tech,” Rep Chaffetz said. “I think it scares a lot of members of Congress.”

Much of Congress’ connection to Silicon Valley is through fundraising only, added Rep Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), whose district routinely sees visiting lawmakers raising cash. “But that doesn’t mean they have any idea of what is going on in the tech world,” she added.

Washington’s slow understanding of technology and telecom development comes amid an increasingly active private-sector -- most notably, a pair of major mergers between AT&T and DirecTV and Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Lawmakers won’t have direct authority over whether those deals go through, but many legislators have still not been hesitant to weigh in.

“It concerns me because we need a competitive marketplace and you can mess that up in a variety of ways,” Rep Lofgren said. Rep Chaffetz added, “Some of the consolidation is healthy in the process.”

Hillary Clinton doesn’t need an official presidential campaign for the tech set to take to the playing field on her behalf.

Democratic data and political operatives have begun building Clinton the fundraising tools, voter lists and social media programs that are essential for a modern-day White House run -- part of a shadow-campaign-in-waiting that seeks to avoid her 2008 technological mishaps while incorporating many of the Barack Obama-inspired advances. Just as important: Technology gurus who spurned Clinton six years ago say that absent the arrival of a lightning-strike, Obama-like candidate, they are ready to help elect the former secretary of state.

It’s a strong sign that bygones are bygones and that Clinton herself will heed calls to run a looser race than she did in 2008, when she was bested in part because of the Obama campaign’s innovation superiority.

“The out-of-touch aura that I think she was suffering from in 2008 isn’t there,” said Laura Olin, Obama’s 2012 social media director.

So far, Clinton’s talking the talk that the tech set wants to hear, from her recent admission to People magazine that she and her husband had “totally binge-watched” Netflix’s “House of Cards” to diving into the weeds of net neutrality, Internet speeds and immigration reform during an April conference with technology executives in San Francisco.

Facebook is also scheduled to broadcast a live interview with Clinton from the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival. “Even if she’s not technologically adept herself, she’s very comfortable in that world,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, president of the New America Foundation and Clinton’s former State Department policy planning director. “She’s certainly not a digital native, but I’d say she’s surrounded by lots of them.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) tore into major US tech firms for their opposition to a House surveillance reform bill that many Internet industry leaders have denounced as too weak.

"We should be very mad at Google, Facebook and Microsoft, because they're doing a very dangerous thing," Rep Rogers said.

The House intelligence chairman charged that by opposing the House version of the USA Freedom Act and calling for more limits on surveillance the American firms are putting their profits ahead of their loyalty to the United States.

"They say, 'Well, we have to do this because we're trying to make sure we don’t lose our European business.' I don't know about the rest of you but that offends me form the words 'European business,'" Rep Rogers said. "Everyone on those boards should be embarrassed and their CEOs should be embarrassed and their stockholders should be embarrassed.....That one quarter [of European market profits] cannot be worth the national security of the United States for the next ten generations."

Moms and dads from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children.

In a frenzy of activity, they’ve catapulted student privacy -- issue that was barely on anyone’s radar up until now -- to prominence in statehouses from New York to Florida to Wyoming.

Now, parents are rallying against another perceived threat: huge state databases being built to track children for more than two decades, from as early as infancy through the start of their careers. Promoted by the Obama Administration, the databases are being built in nearly every state at a total cost of well over $1 billion. They are intended to store intimate details on tens of millions of children and young adults -- identified by name, birth date, address and even, in some cases, Social Security number -- to help officials pinpoint the education system’s strengths and weaknesses and craft public policy accordingly.

“Every parent I’ve talked to has been horrified,” said Leonie Haimson, a New York mother who is organizing a national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. “We just don’t want our kids tracked from cradle to grave.” Eager to support technological innovation and wary of new regulations, Congress has taken little notice of parent concerns. But state legislators have raced to respond. Since January, 14 states have enacted stricter student privacy protections, often with overwhelming bipartisan support, and more are likely on the way.