Vice

Before President-elect Donald Trump takes office Jan 20, take a moment to remember the height of the network neutrality battles of 2014 and 2015. Remember the letter writing campaigns, the comments filed to the Federal Communications Commission (some of them handwritten), remember John Oliver’s rant. Remember that the people fought, and the people won, and for a brief moment, big telecom monopolies had at least some limits placed on them by the federal government. The letter writing campaign to the FCC was good training for what will be needed in the future: Targeted, grassroots efforts that show politicians that access to the open internet matters to voters.

The Guardian reported a shocking story alleging that the FBI asked the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for permission to spy on four members of Donald Trump’s political team who were suspected of having suspicious contact with Russian government officials. I say “shocking” not because the FBI would be interested in surveilling Trump’s team, but because, according to The Guardian, the court said no.

Here is the relevant paragraph from The Guardian’s article: "The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation."

Rep Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the arch-conservative who has received mountains of campaign cash from the telecommunication industry, has been chosen by the GOP to lead the House Communications Subcommittee, a key Congressional subcommittee with broad jurisdiction over cable, phone, and internet issues.

Rep Blackburn has waged a relentless campaign against the Federal Communications Commission’s policy safeguarding network neutrality, the principle that all internet content should be equally accessible, which she has disparaged as “socialistic.” She has also opposed efforts to promote community broadband networks, to make internet access more affordable for underserved communities, to increase competition in the video “set-top box” market, and to protect consumer privacy from broadband industry abuses. As a result, Rep Blackburn has earned a reputation among public interest advocates as the biggest enemy of internet freedom, openness, accessibility, and affordability on Capitol Hill. Among her other beliefs, Rep Blackburn has rejected the scientific consensus that humans contribute to global warming—she’s actually claimed that the Earth is cooling and questioned whether human activity is the “cause for carbon emissions”—and has stated that she does not believe in the theory of evolution.

The First Amendment is being put to the test on multiple levels this term before the US Supreme Court.

The high court will hear cases about the right to trademark offensive names and whether merchants have a right to inform customers that a credit-card surcharge is actually a surcharge. Two cases involve the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment. The first is about whether Missouri breached that clause by supplying recycled tire material for playgrounds to public and secular schools, but not to religious schools. The court has already decided to hear the Missouri case, but it has not decided whether it will consider a request to revive a challenge to Utah's law against polygamy. That lawsuit claims the law is a violation of "religious liberty rights protected by the First Amendment." At this stage, however, the justices most likely could decide this case without actually having to weigh in on polygamy or the First Amendment.

Back in November 2016, Consumer Reports announced the results of a survey that didn’t feel like news at all: People really hate their cell phone carriers. And while feeling screwed is almost part of the deal of owning a mobile phone, hundreds of irate customers literally think they’re being cheated by AT&T, according to information coming from complaints to the Federal Communications Commission obtained by a Freedom of Information Act Request. Among more than 500 complaints in the past three years, hundreds allege that the company is either changing customers’ plans without their consent, or attempting to do so by exerting pressure or promising cost savings.

These are serious allegations—because in 2012, the mobile giant settled with the FCC in a consent decree (meaning there was no admission of guilt) for $700,000 after numerous customers complained that AT&T changed their data plans without their knowledge or consent (usually away from the highly coveted unlimited data plans that are no longer offered, except to U-Verse or DirecTV subscribers). A review contained more than 50 instances of customers alleging that their plans were switched on them without their knowledge or consent. These all happened from 2013 to late 2016—after the consent decree.

The internet is a beautiful escape, the world's most wide-reaching communication device, the biggest business ever conceived, and a leveler of who has the tools to create art. But it’s also a perfectly-honed propaganda machine that bounces back our biases so often it’s become a hazard to the future. According to a year-long study from Stanford researchers, the inability of young students to tell “fake news” from real news is alternately “dismaying,” “bleak,” and a “threat to democracy.” If the children are the future, the future looks bleak. What age should educators—both at home and school—offer lessons on how to use the internet? As soon as humanly possible.

As the Evernote saga recently showed, there are quite a few reasons for a privacy policy to exist, and one of those is that it helps the public know when the apps they use are breaking the contract between the company and the end user. But what if that contract just wasn’t there at all? Turns out that this is a more common situation than you’d think, in part due to lax detection and oversight.

In Nov, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University cranked up this discussion by analyzing 18,000 Android apps in Google’s Play store. Roughly half of the apps studied didn’t have privacy policies at all, despite the fact that more than two thirds of apps (71 percent) used some form of personally identifiable information on the part of the user.

When Tom Wheeler was tapped by President Barack Obama to lead the Federal Communications Commission in 2013, many public interest advocates were skeptical, if not downright hostile, toward his appointment, because of his lengthy background as a top lobbyist for the cable industry, from 1979 to 1984, and the wireless industry, from 1992 to 2004. But over the next three years, Chairman Wheeler won over the public interest community, and infuriated his former clients in the cable and wireless industries, by successfully spearheading the most pro-consumer telecom policy reforms in a generation, including the agency’s landmark policy protecting network neutrality, and agency rules protecting consumers from broadband industry privacy abuses.

“Tom Wheeler has been—by far—the best FCC Chairman in the 45 years I have practiced communications law,” said Andrew Schwartzman, Benton Senior Counselor at the Public Interest Communications Law Project at Georgetown University Law Center's Institute for Public Representation.

When Donald Trump takes over the federal government on January 21, his administration will also gain complete control over much of the .gov suite of websites, which currently hosts a treasure trove of publicly available, taxpayer-funded scientific research. The academic world is bracing itself: Will that data remain available after his transition?

Scientists and university professors all around the country and in Canada believe we’re about to see widespread whitewashing and redaction of already published, publicly available taxpayer-funded scientific research, databases, and interactive tools, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Sea Level Rise viewer, NASA’s suite of climate change apps, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s maps of the country’s worst polluters. They also expect to see censorship, misrepresentation, and minimization of new government-funded research, specifically regarding climate change.

Even when hackers are stealing credit card details with malware en masse, and carrying out digital bank heists, there's still money to be made by gaming phone networks.

On Dec 12, a former Verizon employee pleaded guilty to helping run a sophisticated cell phone scam, which involved routing thousands of international calls through hijacked customer accounts. Farintong Calderon, 37, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud; access device fraud; the use, production or possession of modified telecommunications instruments, and the use or possession of hardware or software configured to obtain telecommunications services, according to a press release from the US Department of Justice. According to the indictment against the group, the conspiracy started sometime way back in August 2009, but kept on going right up to February 2013. In short, the allegedly six-man group, of which Calderon was part, got hold of information such as phone numbers and cell phone serial numbers, and then used these details to access people’s accounts. From here, the group could “clone” the victims' phones, charging any calls to a victim's account.