Washington Post

President-elect Donald Trump’s new proposals to crack down on lobbyists’ influence in Washington read like the most stringent attempt in recent history to rein in the booming influence industry. But the reality could be much different. Ethics experts and lobbyists say the new rules intended to “drain the swamp” of the special interests that President-elect Trump believes control the nation’s capital are rife with holes, appear vague and could be unconstitutional. And their biggest immediate impact is to make it more difficult for the Trump transition, which is already scrambling to fill thousands of government jobs in the next several weeks, to find qualified people to work in the administration. “It’s going to be really difficult to fully flesh out a working government if you’re not able to collect the talent of people who know how to pull the levers of government,” said Democratic lobbyist Zach Williams, a partner at the lobby firm Forbes-Tate.

Hundreds of local police departments across the United States have collectively spent about $4.75 million on software tools that can monitor the locations of activists at protests or social media hashtags used by suspects, according to new research. The research, by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit organization focusing on criminal justice issues, aims to take a comprehensive look at the fast-growing phenomenon of social media-monitoring by law enforcement. Using public records, the Brennan Center tracked spending by 151 local law enforcement agencies that have contracted with start-ups that siphon data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other sites, largely out of the public eye. Top spenders were the City of Los Angeles, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the County of Sacramento, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the County of Macomb, which is a large county in Michigan. Each spent roughly $70,000 over the past three years, Brennan found.

Gone are the days when federal infrastructure spending was measured in highways, bridges and ports. As President-elect Donald Trump considers a massive new spending plan on public works, policy experts, lawmakers and companies are racing to make the case that infrastructure could include anything from fast Internet networks to electric vehicle charging stations, from power transmission lines to drinking water systems.

During a Bloomberg News conference on infrastructure in Washington this week, Mrinalini Ingram, vice president of smart communities at Verizon, had her own candidates for infrastructure spending: Verizon networking technology embedded in LED street lights and blue-light kiosks where pedestrians in danger can call police.

For the past year and a half, Gov Mike Pence (R-IN) has been mired in a legal dispute over government transparency as his lawyers fight to withhold the contents of an e-mail that some say should be considered public record. Critics of the vice president-elect's decision to not release the records — specifically an e-mail attachment sent to Gov Pence's chief of staff in 2014 — say it sets a dangerous precedent that would give the executive branch the ability to decide what's public and what's not, without much accountability.

William Groth, a Democratic attorney who sued Gov Pence in 2015 in an effort to unseal the records, said there's also some “element of hypocrisy,” as the Republican governor and President-elect Donald Trump spent the past several months criticizing Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state.

SpaceX has asked the government for permission to test what could someday be a massive network of satellites that will beam Internet service down to Earth. The application, filed Nov 16 to the Federal Communications Commission, proposes a fleet of what will eventually include more than 4,400 satellites, covering the United States and the rest of the globe. SpaceX needs regulatory approval from the FCC to use the wireless airwaves that would power this network.

Orbiting more than 700 miles up, the satellites could provide speeds as fast as 1 gigabit per second, per user, according to a technical attachment to the filing. That's as much bandwidth as some premium Internet providers offer entire households. SpaceX would start by launching 800 satellites, the filing said. “The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, governmental and professional users worldwide,” according to the technical attachment. “Once fully deployed, the SpaceX System will pass over virtually all parts of the Earth’s surface and therefore, in principle, have the ability to provide ubiquitous global service.”

Businesses and policymakers are bracing for what could happen under President-elect Donald Trump's trade agenda. President-elect Trump has promised to slap a tax on Chinese goods, possibly as high as 45 percent; he also has said that he will reinvigorate US manufacturing by bringing it home. What would this mean for the goods we buy?

It costs Apple $224.80 to manufacture an iPhone 7, and that doesn't include the cost of R&D, marketing and distribution. A federal markup of 45 percent could drive up that price by more than $100. Apple could keep its retail price for a basic iPhone at $650, but the decision would cut significantly into its margins. Apple declined to comment on whether a tariff would lead to higher prices, saying in a statement that “Apple is responsible for creating more than two million jobs across the United States, from engineers, retail and call center employees to operations and delivery drivers. We work with over 8,000 suppliers from coast to coast and are investing heavily in American jobs and innovation.”

What really makes America great? It’s the meaning of 45 words found in the Bill of Rights: The First Amendment. Donald Trump’s presidency is very likely to threaten those First Amendment rights. If they are damaged or removed, we’ll be like a lot of unenviable places.

“Freedom of speech is a rare thing, after all. It’s one of the big differences between the United States and a place like Cuba,” wrote John Daniel Davidson last March in the Federalist. “Cuba has no freedom of the press — or rule of law. Libel is whatever the regime says it is.” These are rights that allow us to march in the streets, to worship freely, to publish tough stories about the government.

Despite his campaign vows to block the deal, President-elect Donald Trump could be forced to take a friendlier stance on AT&T's $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner than he initially laid out, analysts say — potentially disappointing supporters who were hoping for a big showdown with the company. Regulators at the Justice Department are likely to examine the proposed deal closely no matter what happens.

But a constellation of factors, from the makeup of President-elect Trump's transition team to the mundane details of antitrust law, may make it difficult for President-elect Trump to oppose the tie-up once he is in office. As a result, one of the earliest decisions to occur on President-elect Trump's watch may be the regulators' approval of the massive acquisition. “Either there's going to be mass tension within his team, or he's going to sit back and let the [establishment conservatives] have their way — in which case, all of his campaign rhetoric on blowing up Comcast and AT&T was just cheap talk,” said Hal Singer, an economist and senior fellow at the George Washington Institute for Public Policy. Analysts say AT&T was likely caught off-guard by President-elect Trump's victory. “They made a calculated bet with the Hillary administration — this is not what they expected,” said Frank Louthan, an industry analyst at Raymond James. “They may still prevail, but that was a shock.”

[Commentary] Liberals are understandably panicked about what President-elect Donald Trump can carry out. “We have a president-elect with authoritarian tendencies assuming a presidency that has never been more powerful,” Franklin Foer wrote. Trump will command not only a massive nuclear arsenal and the most robust military in history, but also the ability to wage numerous wars in secret and without congressional authorization; a ubiquitous system of electronic surveillance that can reach most forms of human communication and activity; and countless methods for shielding himself from judicial accountability, congressional oversight and the rule of law — exactly what the Constitution was created to prevent. President-elect Trump assumes the presidency “at the peak of its imperial powers,” as Foer put it.

Sen Barack Obama certainly saw it that way when he first ran for president in 2008. Limiting executive-power abuses and protecting civil liberties were central themes of his campaign. The former law professor repeatedly railed against the Bush-Cheney template of vesting the president with unchecked authorities in the name of fighting terrorism or achieving other policy objectives. Yet, beginning in his first month in office and continuing through today, President Obama not only continued many of the most extreme executive-power policies he once condemned, but in many cases strengthened and extended them. His administration detained terrorism suspects without due process, proposed new frameworks to keep them locked up without trial, targeted thousands of individuals (including a U.S. citizen) for execution by drone, invoked secrecy doctrines to shield torture and eavesdropping programs from judicial review, and covertly expanded the nation’s mass electronic surveillance.

[Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of the Intercept, led the NSA reporting that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for the Guardian.]

President-elect Donald Trump could eviscerate some of the most significant tech policies of the 21st century, all but erasing President Barack Obama's Internet agenda and undoing years of effort by lawmakers, tech companies and consumer advocates to limit the power of large, established corporations, analysts say. In particular danger are key initiatives of the Obama years, including network neutrality and a pivotal series of Internet privacy regulations that came along with it.

During the campaign, Trump vowed to “eliminate our most intrusive regulations” and “reform the entire regulatory code.” He has singled out net neutrality as a “top down power grab,” predicting it would allow the government to censor websites. Congressional Republicans have taken aim at net neutrality as well, setting the stage for a concerted effort by President-elect Trump and his House and Senate allies to undermine the policy. And because the government’s consumer privacy policies draw their power from net neutrality, they are likely to fall as well if conservatives successfully gut the rules. At first, President-elect Trump's FCC may simply decide not to enforce the rules. But soon they would take formal steps to strike the rules from the books, said an FCC official who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak more freely. Trump is expected to appoint a Republican FCC chair in 2017 who could vote to roll back Wheeler's decisions with the support of the agency's two other conservatives, Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly. (Both declined to comment.) It is still unclear whom Trump may nominate as chair, and a Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment