Politico

House Commerce Committee Chair Greg Walden (R-OR) was spotted dining with telecommunications lobbyists, among others, at the Trump International Hotel ahead of the President's address to Congress. The companies/organizations represented included AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, CTIA, and USTelecom.

The Senate Commerce Committee is adding Crystal Tully and Cort Bush to its staff ranks, a personnel influx that follows the departure of two of the panel's tech aides in the last couple of months. Tully, formerly an aide to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), will join the committee as a counsel, while Bush, who comes from Sen. Jerry Moran's (R-KS) office, will serve as a professional staff member.

Poisonous political divisions have spawned an encryption arms race across the Trump administration, as both the president’s advisers and career civil servants scramble to cover their digital tracks in a capital nervous about leaks. The surge in the use of scrambled-communication technology — enabled by free smartphone apps such as WhatsApp and Signal — could skirt or violate laws that require government records to be preserved and the public’s business to be conducted in official channels, several ethics experts say. It may even cloud future generations’ knowledge of the full history of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Conservative advocacy groups also denounce the use of encrypted technologies by career employees, comparing it to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of State. The House Science Committee has demanded an inquiry into the use of encryption by employees at the Environmental Protection Agency — although it has shown no similar curiosity about use of encryption in the White House.

Press secretary Sean Spicer is cracking down on leaks coming out of the West Wing, with increased security measures that include random phone checks of White House staffers, overseen by White House attorneys.

After Spicer became aware that information had leaked out of a planning meeting with about a dozen of his communications staffers, he reconvened the group in his office to express his frustration over the number of private conversations and meetings that were showing up in unflattering news stories. Upon entering Spicer’s office for what was described as “an emergency meeting,” staffers were told to dump their phones on a table for a “phone check," to prove they had nothing to hide. He explicitly warned staffers that using texting apps like Confide — an encrypted and screenshot-protected messaging app that automatically deletes texts after they are sent — and Signal, another encrypted messaging system, was a violation of the Presidential Records Act. Spicer also warned the group of more problems if news of the phone checks and the meeting about leaks was leaked to the media.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai wants to eliminate an FCC mandate forcing Charter Communications to compete head-to-head with other broadband providers in one million new locations. A draft order circulated among commissioners would jettison that requirement, but preserve a condition calling for overall broadband buildout to two million new households. The requirements were part of the FCC's approval of the $67 billion Charter-Time Warner Cable-Bright House Networks merger in 2016. An FCC spokesperson said it’s more important for Charter to build out to unserved households than to take on competitors.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Trevor Loudon, author of "Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress,” said: “The media is totally against the president. Hollywood is against the president. The radical left is against the president. He’s got all these forces against him. What we have is social media.” His call to action: “Get on Facebook, get on Twitter, and stand up.”

Ginni Thomas, the conservative journalist and activist (and, yes, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) said that given her “reverence for social media that gives us the power beyond the propaganda media to find the truth,” she was going to have speakers take turns "in order of who has the most Twitter followers." First up, with more than half a million followers: Milwaukee County Sheriff and conservative icon David Clarke. Going last, after Loudon (8,100 followers) and the Center for Security Policy’s Clare Lopez (6,100), was acting FTC Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen (3,900).

Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA), whose Silicon Valley district is home to Apple, Google, Facebook and Tesla, says he’ll travel to Appalachia in March to lend his support to a program that trains young people — including the children of coal miners — for jobs like coding and computer tech.

The March 13 trip to Paintsville (KY) a rural community several hours east of Louisville, was organized with the help of tech giants like Cupertino-based Apple Computers. The plan is to train at least 40 young adults for four months in tech and software development, followed by four-month paid internships, said Khanna, a Democrat. According to Khanna’s office, the program is being funded with $4.5 million from TechHire Eastern Kentucky in cooperation with the Appalachian Regional Commission. It’s part of a 2015 TechHire initiative launched by the Obama administration.

White House Chief Digital Officer Gerrit Lansing was among the six staffers who were dismissed from the White House recently after being unable to pass an FBI background check, apparently. The issue with the background check was over investments. Lansing previously led the digital department for the Republican National Committee.

The background check, security questionnaire SF86, must be completed by White House staffers for positions that cover national security. President Donald Trump's director of scheduling, Caroline Wiles, was also among the six staffers who did not pass the intensive FBI screening. She is the daughter of Susan Wiles, Trump’s Florida campaign director. Caroline Wiles resigned Feb 17 before the background check was completed.

Although Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai believes there’s market failure in the prison phone call industry, the FCC’s “well-intentioned efforts have not been fully consistent with the law,” the agency’s acting general counsel told lawmakers in a letter Feb 21.

Citing the reality that the commission’s current Republican leadership disagreed with parts of the FCC’s 2015 reforms, agency attorneys abandoned defense of rate regulation of in-state phone calls in a lawsuit brought by major prison phone providers. Acting general counsel Brendan Carr pointed out that the FCC still moved forward with oral arguments, and defended the agency’s authority to cap interstate rates and efforts to curb fees. “If the court ultimately agrees with the positions the FCC defended at oral argument, the result could go a long way in helping to reduce the rates and fees associated with inmate calling services,” Carr wrote in response to a letter from Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) and other Democrats.

Leading Republicans want to get rid of the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules — and substitute them with less-stringent legislation. And they’re hoping the threat of an FCC repeal of the Obama-era regulations will coax congressional Democrats to the negotiating table.

It’s a scenario reminiscent of many Republicans’ approach to Obamacare, which they want to tear down without being accused of stripping health care coverage from millions of Americans. So far, Democrats aren’t taking the bait. Rather than cozy up to the majority to strike a deal, liberal lawmakers previewed a scorched-earth strategy to stop the FCC from repealing the rules in the first place. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said repeal would bring a “political firestorm” upon Republicans. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) likened the coming fight to the tech industry's 2012 uprising against the Stop Online Piracy Act.