Gov performance

The Federal Communications Commission’s public commenting process on network neutrality was such a debacle that the legitimacy of the entire body of comments is now in question. Many of the comments were filed with obviously bogus names.

Among the more visible cases of name theft: journalist and net neutrality advocate Karl Bode's identity was used without his consent for a comment favoring a roll back of the rules. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's name was used on hundreds of comments opposing his proposal, some threatening him with death or using racial slurs. John Oliver's name was used on more than 2,000 of comments as well. On a case by case basis, these forgeries are easy enough to spot. But in aggregate, they're making it harder to draw conclusions about the overall public sentiment of the proceeding. In May 2017, the FCC's site was also hit with what appeared to be a spambot submitting hundreds of thousands of anti-Title II comments with the exact same boilerplate language. The broadband industry is now using the chaos of the comments process to claim that the public actually supports repealing Title II.

Former FCC special counsel Gigi Sohn said, "I can’t imagine there is nothing they can do, and I’d love to see a citation to anything that says that they cannot remove a comment that has been proven to be fake." If anything, she says, the agency might have an obligation under the Administrative Procedure Act to remove fake comments from its consideration. "At a bare minimum, they should investigate these comments and if they can’t actually remove the comments, they can and should disregard them as part of their consideration of record."

[Commentary] Since the Justice Department named a special investigator, Robert Mueller, to handle the government’s official inquiry into Russian meddling in the U.S. election, the weight of public expectation has largely fallen on his shoulders. While the two congressional panels, the Senate and House intelligence committees, continue to hold hearings and question witnesses, both are led by members of a party that is, with the exception of Charlottesville, skittish about criticizing the president. The two intelligence committees should act as if their investigations will be the final (and possibly the only) ones — because they may be.

A central role for Congress is the only real way to guarantee a full report, with conclusions and recommendations, for the American people. I oversaw a similarly complex and politically fraught inquiry as co-chairman of the joint congressional inquiry into 9/11, so I know what it takes — as a matter of resources, time, perseverance and, yes, occasional political courage — to run an investigation of this size and importance. And I know this, too: The congressional intelligence committees, as they are constituted today, are not ready for this burden.

[Bob Graham was a U.S. senator from Florida from 1987 to 2005. He served as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 2001 to 2003 and as co-chairman of the Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.]

President Donald Trump seized on a letter from two Republican senators claiming evidence that FBI Director James Comey cleared former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing over her private e-mail server before concluding his investigation. In a message on Twitter, President Trump said it looked like Comey had "exonerated" Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, before the investigation was over. “Wow, looks like James Comey exonerated Hillary Clinton long before the investigation was over...and so much more. A rigged system!” he tweeted.

By this Public Notice, the Federal Communications Commission announces the states that will be part of the initial launch of the National Lifeline Eligibility Verifier (National Verifier). The Commission established the National Verifier in the 2016 Lifeline Order to make eligibility determinations and perform a variety of other functions necessary to enroll subscribers into the Lifeline program. The National Verifier will verify Lifeline subscriber eligibility, conduct checks to prevent duplicate benefits, recertify subscriber eligibility, and calculate support payments to eligible telecommunications carriers (ETCs). In the 2016 Lifeline Order, the Commission set as an expectation that the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) would deploy the National Verifier in at least five states by December 31, 2017.3 USAC has announced that the National Verifier will launch in six states – Colorado, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming – in December 2017. The National Verifier will have a soft launch date of December 5, 2017, and a hard launch date of March 13, 2018.

President Donald Trump promised big changes on cybersecurity after his election. During the Obama administration, the nation’s cybersecurity was “run by people that don’t know what they’re doing,” the president said during a post-election press conference. The Trump administration, he promised, would gather “some of the greatest computer minds anywhere in the world” and “put those minds together … to form a defense.” Seven months into the president’s administration, however, analysts are wondering what’s so different.

On most major cybersecurity issues, such as securing federal networks and critical infrastructure, Trump officials are in near lockstep with their Obama-era predecessors. Where they differ, there’s no clear Trump cybersecurity doctrine to explain the divergence. “It’s schizophrenic,” said Peter Singer, a cyber theorist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “That may be because of the absence of a strategy or it may be because the chaotic execution of that strategy undermines it.”

After months of debate, protests, and disruptions, the Federal Communications Commission’s comment period on its proposal to kill network neutrality is now over. The commission stopped accepting comments closing out with nearly 22 million total replies — setting an immense new record. The FCC’s previous comment record was just 3.7 million, set during the last net neutrality proceeding. But the process of receiving all those comments was far from smooth this time around.

The FCC’s website is fairly confusing. It’s also, apparently, susceptible to spam and other attacks, which we saw at multiple points across the past four months. All the while, the FCC’s chairman has been trying to explain that comments don’t really matter anyway, despite the commission’s requirement to act in the public interest and take public feedback. From the very beginning of the proceeding, FCC leadership laid out that it would be the quality, not the quantity, of the comments that made a difference. On the surface, that’s a reasonable argument, but it’s being set out as an excuse to ignore the overwhelming millions of comments in support of net neutrality in favor of few well-written filings by Comcast and the like. Now that the comment period has ended, the FCC will begin work on a revised version of its proposal, which it will then vote on and quite likely pass, making it official policy. The commission is supposed to factor public input into its revisions — and in fact, much of the original proposal was just a big series of open-ended questions — so it’ll probably be a little while before we see a final draft.

It’s entirely possible that the commission will go ahead with its original, bare-bones plan to simply kill net neutrality and leave everything else up to internet providers to sort out. But if the commission does decide to put in place some sort of protections, then we’ll have another debate to run through — one over exactly how effective those rules might be, and exactly how many ways companies can weasel around them.

The Federal Communications Commission's website already gets a lot of traffic—sometimes more than it can handle. But thanks to a weakness in the interface that the FCC published for citizens to file comments on proposed rule changes, there's a lot more interesting—and potentially malicious—content now flowing onto one FCC domain.

The system allows just about any file to be hosted on the FCC's site—potentially including malware. The application programming interface (API) for the FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System that enables public comment on proposed rule changes has been the source of some controversy already. It exposed the e-mail addresses of public commenters on network neutrality—intentionally, according to the FCC, to ensure the process' openness—and was the target of what the FCC claimed was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. But as a security researcher has found, the API could be used to push just about any document to the FCC's website, where it would be instantly published without screening. Because of the open nature of the API, an application key can be obtained with any e-mail address. While the content exposed via the site thus far is mostly harmless, the API could be used for malicious purposes as well. Since the API apparently accepts any file type, it could theoretically be used to host malicious documents and executable files on the FCC's Web server.

In his first seven months as president, Donald Trump has generally drawn high job approval ratings among Republicans. But a new survey finds that nearly a third of Republicans say they agree with the president on only a few or no issues, while a majority expresses mixed or negative feelings about his conduct as president. A separate survey, conducted on Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel, finds stark divisions between those who approve and those who disapprove of Trump’s job performance in their impressions of the president.

Those who disapprove of Trump cite several concerns about him: 32% point to his personality, including his temperament; 25% mention his policies, particularly foreign policy and its impact on U.S. standing in the world; and 19% fault his intelligence or competence. Trump’s supporters raise different concerns: 17% of those who approve of his job performance cite his use of Twitter and other social media, while 16% say they are most concerned about obstruction from others, such as Congress and the news media. About one-in-ten of those who approve of Trump say their biggest concern is his personality (11%) and a similar share point to his policies (10%).

With a bundle of Senate confirmations of Trump appointees just before the August congressional recess, it’s a good time to take stock of what progress the Trump administration has made in filling the positions that shape policy in the digital arena. My Brookings paper last fall, Bridging The Internet-Cyber Gap: Digital Policy Lessons for the Next Administration, included a “digital plum book” that identified the positions from the full Plum Book (the Government Printing Office compilation of senior federal positions that is a roadmap to presidential appointments) with real impact on the constellation of issues that affect the digital economy and digital society.

To see how the Trump administration is doing, we used the digital plum book as a scorecard. There are 95 positions in the digital plum book. For 65 of these positions, the administration has at least announced a nominee, and 37 of these have been confirmed to date. This compares favorably to unfilled positions overall: the Partnership for Public Service counts 117 confirmed out of 591 positions, with another 106 pending nominations as of this writing. The digital plum book also identified 32 positions as jobs where a broad understanding of digital issues is critical to the mission. Of these, 13 have been filled and another two have been announced. For the remainder, 12 are being filled in an acting capacity, and the other five are vacant altogether.

Shortly before the inauguration, I outlined four general areas where actions could be taken to reinvigorate investment: one, undoing harmful policies; two, clearing regulatory underbrush; three, developing and executing a strong pro-innovation agenda; and, four, overhauling the Commission’s arcane processes and its organization. I’m pleased to say that we’ve seen significant progress on each front....The Internet is arguably the greatest man-made technology of my lifetime and a testament to free-market principles embodying the American Dream. The government must remain steadfast that this platform should be unfettered by regulation. Doing so is the way to ensure that the economic revolution and expansion of opportunity, unsurpassed in modern history, will continue for future generations and empower their American Dreams.