Research

Congress is finally turning its attention to Silicon Valley, but to tackle these issues, congressfolk will first have to understand them. Which means it’s time to reboot the Office of Technology Assessment. The OTA was staffed with several hundred nonpartisan propellerheads who studied emerging science and tech. Every year they’d write numerous clear, detailed reports and they were on call to help any congressperson. It worked admirably. Its reports helped save money and lives. With a budget of only $20 million a year, the little agency had an outsize impact.

According to some of the nation’s top Wall Street analysts, wireless network operators are positioned to reap the financial benefits of a relatively quiet first half of 2018.

Russia's information attack against the United States during the 2016 election cycle sought to take advantage of the greater trust that Americans tend to place in local news.The information operatives who worked out of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg not only sought to pose as American social media users or spread false information from purported news sources, according to new details. They also created a number of Twitter accounts that posed as sources for Americans' hometown headlines. 

July 2018 marks the fifth anniversary of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which was first coined following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. In the course of those five years, #BlackLivesMatter has become an archetypal example of modern protests and political engagement on social media: A new Pew Research Center analysis of public tweets finds the hashtag has been used nearly 30 million times on Twitter – an average of 17,002 times per day – as of May 1, 2018.

CTIA’s Annual Wireless Industry Survey finds the industry beginning the transition from 4G to 5G wireless networks with significant growth in cell sites and data-only devices. That growth and continued demand for everything wireless contributed to Americans using an unprecedented amount of mobile data in 2017. The key wireless trends in this year's survey:

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) provides quarterly statutory reports to Congress on the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). This report covers activities from January 1 to March 31, 2018. NTIA continues to protect taxpayer investments by proactively engaging with these grant recipients to monitor project activities and grant compliance. Each quarter, the active BTOP recipients also report their financial and project performance. NTIA analyzes these reports closely to monitor progress and compliance.

Privacy policies from companies including Facebook, Google and Amazon don’t fully meet the requirements of th European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to the pan-European consumer group BEUC. An analysis of policies from 14 of the largest internet companies shows they use unclear language, claim “potentially problematic” rights, and provide insufficient information for users to judge what they are agreeing to.

The  Commercial Spectrum Enhancement Act (CSEA) requires annual reporting on federal agencies’ progress to relocate radio communications systems from spectrum or share spectrum that has been reallocated to commercial use. This report provides details on two separate spectrum auctions conducted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that included: 1) the 1710 to 1755 megahertz (MHz) band, and 2) the 1695-1710 MHz and 1755-1780 MHz bands. This report covers the period from January through December 2017.

Technology experts and scholars have never been at a loss for concerns about the current and future impact of the internet. Over the years of canvassings by Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, many experts have been anxious about the way people’s online activities can undermine truth, foment distrust, jeopardize individuals’ well-being when it comes to physical and emotional health, enable trolls to weaken democracy and community, compromise human agency as algorithms become embedded in more activities, kill privacy, make institutions less secure, open u