Washington Post

Apparently, Facebook has been in talks for months with US government officials and wireless carriers with an eye toward unveiling an American version of an app that has caused controversy abroad.

The company is trying to determine how to roll out its program, known as Free Basics, in the United States without triggering the regulatory scrutiny that effectively killed a version of the app in India earlier in 2016. If Facebook succeeds with its US agenda for Free Basics — which has not been previously reported — it would mark a major victory for the company as it seeks to connect millions more to the Web, and to its own platform. The US version of Free Basics would target low-income and rural Americans who cannot afford reliable, high-speed Internet at home or on smartphones. The app does not directly pay for users' mobile data. Rather, it allows users to stretch their data plans by offering, in partnership with wireless carriers, free Internet access to resources such as online news, health information and job leads. Exactly what specific services would be offered in the US app has not been determined.

But the idea to bring Free Basics to the United States is likely to rekindle a long-running debate about the future of the Internet. On one side are those who view services such as Facebook's as a critical tool in connecting underserved populations to the Internet, in some cases for the first time. On the other side are those who argue that exempting services from data caps creates a multitiered playing field that favors businesses with the expertise and budgets to participate in such programs. The fight over this tactic, known as “zero-rating,” has largely taken place overseas where local start-ups are mixing with globally established firms in still-nascent Internet economies. But a launch of Free Basics would bring the discussion to US shores in a major way.

A federal contractor suspected of leaking powerful National Security Agency hacking tools has been arrested and charged with stealing classified information from the US government, according to court records and a law enforcement official familiar with the case. Harold Thomas Martin III, 51, who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, was charged with theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials, authorities said. He was arrested in August after investigators searched his home in Glen Burnie (MD) and found documents and digital information stored on various devices that contained highly classified information, authorities said.

The breadth of the damage Martin is alleged to have caused was not immediately clear, though officials alleged some of the documents he took home “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.” Investigators are probing whether Martin was responsible for an apparent leak that led to a cache of NSA hacking tools appearing online in August, according to an official familiar with the case. Those tools included “exploits” that take advantage of unknown flaws in firewalls, for instance, allowing the government to control a network.

Recently, Johns Hopkins University political scientists Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsberg conducted a study of the unglamorous DC bureaucrat. These are the people who keep the federal government humming — the Hill staffers, the project managers and all those desk workers who vaguely describe themselves as “analysts.” As Bachner and Ginsberg argue, civil servants exercise real power over how the government operates. They write and enforce rules and regulations. They might not decide what becomes law, but they have a hand in how laws are drawn up and how laws are implemented. For all their influence, though, nearly all of these technocrats are unelected, and they spend most of their time with people who are just like them — other highly educated folk who jog conspicuously in college tees and own a collection of NPR totes.

In their new book, which is part ethnography and part polemic, Bachner and Ginsberg argue that Washington’s bureaucrats have grown too dismissive of the people they are supposed to serve. Bachner and Ginsberg recently sent around an informal survey to selected members of this technocratic class, and the results, they say, were shocking. “Many civil servants expressed utter contempt for the citizens they served,” they write in their book, “What Washington Gets Wrong.” “Further, we found a wide gulf between the life experiences of ordinary Americans and the denizens of official Washington. We were left deeply worried about the health and future of popular government in the United States.”

While European business leaders envy the American tech industry’s success and innovation and consumers are eager to try the latest gadget or service, European authorities are chafing at the tech firms' perceived indifference to their countries’ laws and culture. German CEOs have even taken to adopting some of the more famous habits of so-called digital disrupters. When Daimler’s Dieter Zetsche discussed the future with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick at a tech event in Berlin this spring, he wore blue jeans and sneakers. Axel-Springer’s Döpfner sent three of his top executives to live together in a house in the tech mecca of Palo Alto, Calif., for a year. In a corporate video about this experiment, Döpfner is seen wearing a hoodie. The Palo Alto house became a key part of Axel-Springer’s pitch to investors as a digital leader. Old-school European corporations are willing to pay top dollar to hire tech people with Silicon Valley experience. Last November, for example, Volkswagen hired Johann Jungwirth, who had worked for Apple in Cupertino, Calif., to “reinforce” digitalization. For Volkswagen, Jungwirth is the perfect poster boy for tech disruption expertise. He introduces himself as “JJ,” praises the merits of his Tesla (which he has since traded in for a VW E-Golf) and cites Steve Jobs. Meanwhile, European regulators don’t seem as convinced that Facebook and other US tech companies are worth emulating.

Facebook has long characterized itself as a neutral platform that simply connects its users to the rest of the world. But over the past several months, the company faced greatly increased scrutiny, including accusations of bias, over the news it shows its users and where that news comes from. The further takeover of the algorithm was Facebook’s response to all that criticism, something that the company appeared to hope would quell accusations of human bias in its news recommendations. Instead, the early high-profile mistakes of the new trending regime only seemed to highlight how much work it still has to do.

In the first weeks of the new Trending bar, Facebook trended conspiracy theories, old news, fake news — including one story from a site that had “Fakingnews” in its domain name — and was generally slow to pick up on major developing news stories (with the very notable exception of its swift pickup of the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie divorce). We documented a lot of that in our pop-up newsletter on Facebook’s trends. Facebook showed us 31 articles each for Yahoo and USA Today through its trending topics — the top amounts for all of the publications we saw — yet they are both lagging behind in overall engagements for the same period.

There’s been a lot of consternation in recent months about Facebook’s impact on politics. If it’s not fears of partisan censorship and suppressed trending topics, it’s worries about echo chambers or hyper-targeted campaign ads. But in the upcoming presidential election, at least, Facebook’s influence will lie somewhere else: The social network is driving huge numbers of people to the polls — and most of those people are likely to vote Democrat.

This effect is not at all by design. Instead, it’s an accident of demographics. Facebook skews both young and female, which means the site’s powerful get-out-the-vote campaigns reach more potential voters in the Hillary Clinton camp. The same could be said of Twitter, which over-indexes with people of color. Or Airbnb, which is popular among older, white adults — those statistically most likely to be Republican voters.

When a user sends someone a message through Apple’s iMessage feature, Apple encrypts that message between Apple devices so that only the sender and recipient can read its contents. But a report from news site the Intercept is a good reminder that not all data related to iMessage has that same level of protection -- and that information can still be turned over to law enforcement authorities. That may be surprising to everyday users who view Apple as a privacy champion after it's legal battle with the Justice Department this year over a court order that would force the company to break its own security measures. But to experts, it's just a fact of how communication systems work. For instance, as security expert and noted iPhone hacker Will Strafach notes, Apple needs to know things such as whom you're chatting with via iMessage so that it can deliver your messages.

According to a document obtained by the Intercept, Apple logs information about whom you're contacting in iMessage while the app figures out if the person you are texting is also using an iOS device. If they are using iOS, the message gets encrypted and routed through iMessage, which is signaled by blue chat bubbles. If the recipient is not using an Apple device, the message gets routed as a standard text without that extra layer of encryption, and messages appear in green bubbles in the iMessage app. According to the document, which the Intercept says originated "from within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Electronic Surveillance Support Team," these logs don’t necessarily show that you messaged someone. Instead, they show when you opened up a chat window and selected the contact or entered a phone number.

Tracing the path from deadly hand-dug mines in Congo to consumers’ phones and laptops.

Cobalt is a mineral essential to the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power smartphones, laptops and electric vehicles made by companies such as Apple, Samsung and major automakers. The world’s soaring demand for cobalt is at times met by workers, including children, who labor in harsh and dangerous conditions. An estimated 100,000 cobalt miners in Congo use hand tools to dig hundreds of feet underground with little oversight and few safety measures, according to workers, government officials and evidence found by The Washington Post during visits to remote mines. Deaths and injuries are common. And the mining activity exposes local communities to levels of toxic metals that appear to be linked to ailments that include breathing problems and birth defects, health officials say.

[Commentary] Because social media is so young, political science hasn’t fully explored the political implications of how citizens use it to get news. Research has found that consuming news makes people more likely to vote. In theory, democracy should benefit from the presence of more information sources. But we don’t know yet exactly how social media influences its consumers. Here are three things to think about as you read your social feed.

1. More and more people rely on social media for news and information.
2. Despite its growing popularity, social media’s influence on political participation remains unclear.
3. Gathering political information via social media brings an increased risk of digesting information from questionable sources.

[Kevin Curry is the director of integrated media at Linfield College]

September 27 was National Voter Registration Day. To the extent that you were aware of this, it was probably because you, like me, were greeted with a prompt to ensure you were registered when you went to Facebook to see what some-guy-you-went-to-high-school-with's baby looks like. Or maybe you visited Google, where the daily doodle was focused on the subject.

If people clicked that, they were taken to a search page for "how to register to vote." Or, in Spanish, "registrarse para votar." After that push, Google saw a huge spike in searches for the Spanish-language phrase. Hispanic Americans typically vote at much lower rates than other groups. Census Bureau data suggests that Hispanics turn out for presidential elections at about the rate non-Hispanic white Americans turn out for midterms. There are a variety of reasons for this, but it has been a focus of Hispanic organizations for some time to boost those numbers. It has also been a priority for Democrats, particularly this year. Hispanics tend to vote more heavily Democratic than Republican, and activists see an opportunity this year given Donald Trump's disparaging comments about Mexican immigrants.