Washington Post

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.

[Commentary] Why do democratic governments so often engage in violent covert actions? The United States is roiled by controversy over Russia’s broad covert operation to undermine the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election and Western democracy in general. But the US government has interfered in other democracies’ decisions with violent clandestine operations that go back generations. We examined unclassified Central Intelligence Agency documents and historical academic research on US interventions to identify 27 US clandestine operations carried out between 1949 and 2000. Most US “secret wars” were against other democratic states.

[Mariya Y. Omelicheva is associate professor in the department of political science at the University of Kansas. Christian Crandall is professor in the department of psychology at the University of Kansas.Ryan Beasley is senior lecturer in the school of international relations at St. Andrews University.]

President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to create an infrastructure “task force” that will help carry out the ambitious federal spending program he intends to undertake upon taking office, according to several individuals briefed on his plans.

Key members of Trump’s team — including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, senior counselor Stephen K. Bannon, senior adviser Stephen Miller and Gary Cohn, whom Trump has tapped to head the National Economic Council — are all involved in the discussions. The task force head is “not Cabinet level,” but would play a critical role in coordinating among federal, state and local officials as well as private investors as the new administration prepares to inject hundreds of billions of dollars into projects across the country. The task force would also have to help identify what qualifies as infrastructure, a word that has been used to describe everything from roads to broadband, from bike trails to electric transmission lines.

Reporters hung out with Donald Trump over the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, though American news consumers won’t be reading too much about the event. That’s because it was all off-the-record, meaning that Trump could say anything he wanted, and the journalists who heard it all couldn’t pass along a single word.

Mike Allen, the former Politico mainstay turned correspondent for start-up Axios, tweeted some pictures from the event. Those were allowed by the authorities.

There is plenty of precedent for reporters doing off-the-record discussions with presidents, and the tradition remained strong in the Obama years. The rationale for attending is that journalists can get a window into the president’s thinking on stuff. And the rebuttal to that rationale is that the president uses the opportunity to spin reporters on his position, without any fingerprints on the transaction. It’s a way of getting the media to internalize the official view of things.

New York Times Washington bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller said, “Our policy on off-the-record with presidents and presidents-elect is to push long and hard to do things on record.” However: “With journalists, you need some insight into the president-elect’s thinking. We have found in the past that this has helped us with Obama,” says Bumiller, arguing that the exposure has given the newspaper the “thought and direction to pursue stories afterward.”