Washington Post

[Commentary] The groupthink that has overtaken national media outlets is embarrassing. There is an intellectual climate so suffocating that even stating that truth, or daring to line up a presidential interview, makes one be seen as a member of a suspect class. Reporters don’t have to like Donald Trump. But they do need to stop hyperventilating long enough to approach the next four years with a balanced perspective and at least start pretending to once again be objective. As for those who attacked me this weekend for doing my job, facts are stubborn things.

[Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, hosts the MSNBC show “Morning Joe."]

[Commentary] News organizations should commit to opening at least five bureaus in midsize and smallish cities somewhere in the middle of America in 2017. I don't have any set list of what those cities should be, but just for kicks, here are five: Omaha (NE), Knoxville (TN), Dallas (TX), Missoula (MT), Columbus (OH). President-elect Donald Trump carried all five states. The states represent significant geographic diversity. They range from tiny (Missoula) to pretty darned big (Dallas).

In the modern age of reporting, the relative costs for an effort like this are low. You need to hire one person in each of these places. They can work from home. You pay for their salary, their Wi-Fi, their cellphone and their gas for reporting trips. Given what is expended on, say, covering a presidential campaign, we are talking about peanuts. Technology allows a reporter to work from anywhere, at a low cost. The times demand different coverage. Why not this? And why not now?

The Obama Administration announced sweeping new measures against Russia on Dec 29 in retaliation for what US officials have characterized as interference in 2016’s presidential election, ordering the expulsion of Russian “intelligence operatives” and slapping new sanctions on state agencies and individuals suspected in the hacks of US computer systems. The response, unveiled just weeks before President Barack Obama leaves office, culminates months of internal debate over how to react to Russia’s election-year provocations.

In recent months, the FBI and CIA have concluded that Russia intervened repeatedly in the 2016 election, leaking damaging information in an attempt to undermine the electoral process and help Donald Trump take the White House. Because Dec 29's announcement is an executive action, it can be undone by the next administration. President Obama also ejected 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and imposed sanctions on Russia’s two leading intelligence services.

With weeks to go in his tenure, President Barack Obama on Dec 23 moved to end the controversial “dual-hat” arrangement under which the National Security Agency and the nation’s cyberwarfare command are headed by the same military officer. It is unclear whether President-elect Donald Trump will support such a move. A transition official said only that “cybersecurity has been and will be a central focus of the transition effort.”

Pressure had grown on President Obama to make such a move on the grounds that the two jobs are too large for one person to handle, that the two organizations have fundamentally different missions and that US Cyber Command, or Cybercom, needed its own leader to become a full-fledged fighting force. “While the dual-hat arrangement was once appropriate in order to enable a fledgling Cybercom to leverage NSA’s advanced capabilities and expertise, Cybercom has since matured” to the point where it needs its own leader, President Obama said in a statement accompanying his signing of the 2017 defense authorization bill.

President-elect Donald Trump appointed a handful of campaign loyalists to senior positions in his White House with responsibility for overseeing the administration’s outreach to the public and managing Trump’s sometimes hostile relationship with the news media.

• Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager who was an unyielding promoter and defender of his on television, will serve as counselor to the president with direct access to advise him on his message strategy and political tactics across a broad range of issues.
• Conway will serve as a public face of the administration along with Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s chief strategist and communications director, who was named White House press secretary. A veteran operative with deep relationships among Republican officials and political journalists, Spicer will ascend to one of Washington’s most coveted jobs, representing the president in briefings with the press corps.
• Also leading the communications operation will be Jason Miller, the Trump campaign’s senior communications adviser, who will serve as director of communications;
• Hope Hicks, Trump’s longtime spokeswoman who was at the candidate’s side nearly every day of his 16-month campaign, who will be director of strategic communications; and
• Dan Scavino, a onetime golf caddy who managed Trump’s presence on Twitter and Facebook during the campaign, who has been named director of social media.

As rumors swirl about Verizon's plans for acquiring Yahoo, business analysts say the former search giant could see choppier waters ahead if Verizon backs out of the deal, as some observers have suggested it should do. The initial hack could have been written off as a one-time event, analysts say, but the bigger breach will be impossible to ignore. For Verizon, the stakes have risen.

Although it has not raised fresh warning flags over the new disclosure, the telecom firm must balance Yahoo's initial estimated value against the possibility of discovering even more hackings down the road. "It’s like buying a ticking time bomb,"said Jeff Kagan, an independent industry analyst. "You never know when it’s going to blow again, and could keep blowing up time after time." Security experts have criticized Yahoo's use of outdated security technologies to defend user data, and the company's top security official resigned in protest in 2015 when he was cut out of a major decision to allow the federal government to scan customer emails. Backing out of the deal, Kagan said, probably would cause Yahoo's value to decline. But Verizon is more likely to seek a discount than to walk away, according to a mergers and acquisitions lawyer familiar with the transaction who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters of corporate strategy.

[Commentary] Donald Trump’s Nov 8 victory surprised almost everyone. But if pollsters had looked at Twitter, they might have recognized that the race was close — or so we learned in our recent research. Even when polls were showing a big lead for Hillary Clinton, real-time analysis of social media was showing it getting tighter — even if you subtract the propaganda bots used by Trump staff, estimated to make up about 20 to 30 percent of the total volume of pro-Trump social media traffic.

Public opinion has profoundly changed. And the way to measure it must change as well. Social media information offers useful signals about public sentiment. Catching them is the challenge for those who study and predict politics.

[Andrea Ceron is assistant professor of political science at the University of Milan and co-founder of VOICES from the Blogs. Luigi Curini is associate professor of political science at the University of Milan. Stefano M. Iacus is professor of statistics at the University of Milan.]

[Commentary] A combination of legislation, technology, law and advocacy can improve online life. We need laws that acknowledge harassment by proxy and that attribute actions of the incited mob to the original upstream offender.

Rep Katherine M. Clark (D-MA) is in the vanguard, introducing legislation stopping some of the most formidable online acts. One bill criminalizes the malicious publication of private information, another prevents blackmailed demands for sexual acts, and a third punishes people who falsely report emergencies causing SWAT teams to be dispatched. Other important proposed legislation penned by Rep Clark is focused on the infrastructure of law enforcement – one requiring the Justice Department to publish statistics related to cybercrimes and funding, another providing funding to hire and train law enforcement officers to investigate cybercrimes and to procure advanced computer forensic tools. Meanwhile, Rep Jackie Speier (D-CA) introduced the Intimate Privacy Protect Act in 2016, to criminalize non-consensual pornography, with co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle.

[Carrie Goldberg is an attorney in Brooklyn at CA Goldberg, PLLC and a board member at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.]

In June, a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a horrific spate of violence at a gay nightclub in Orlando (FL). Now, the families of some of the victims are suing Google, Twitter and Facebook, arguing that the tech companies had a role in radicalizing the shooter.

The families are accusing the companies of providing support to the Islamic State, the terrorist organization that appeared to inspire the attack. Although the gunman, Omar Mateen, did not appear to have official ties to the Islamic State, also referred to as ISIS, the victims' families say the group's indirect influence over the gunman is at least partly attributable to its “unfettered” ability to recruit fighters on social media. Through their data-driven business models, companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook even “profit from ISIS postings through advertising revenue,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in a Michigan federal court Dec 19. The families of Tevin Eugene Crosby, Juan Guerrero and Javier Jorge-Reyes are demanding a trial and unspecified monetary compensation. “Without … Twitter, Facebook, and Google (YouTube), the explosive growth of ISIS over the last few years into the most feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible,” the lawsuit reads.

The FBI told a federal judge that it needed to search a computer to resume its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server because agents had found correspondence on the device between Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin but they did not know what was being discussed, according to newly unsealed court documents. The bureau argued that Clinton and Abedin were previously on e-mail chains in which classified information was discussed, and so there was probable cause to search a computer belonging to Abedin’s estranged husband, disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, for information potentially related to the Clinton e-mail case.

That search — along with FBI Director James B. Comey’s decision to tell Congress that the investigation into Clinton’s e-mail practices had resumed — came less than two weeks before the election and upended the presidential campaign. US Magistrate Judge Kevin Nathaniel Fox approved a search warrant in the case, but the FBI is likely to draw criticism that it relied on flimsy evidence to resume its Clinton probe.