Reporting

Seven years after the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful – and that the US intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth. In a ruling handed down Sept 3, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.

All families with school-age children in suburban Cook County in Chicago public housing buildings will be eligible for free broadband internet under a program funded through federal coronavirus stimulus money.

Commercial satellite Internet has only been around for about 20 years, and it was highly limited at first. Despite the technology’s weaknesses, such as low speeds and data limits, satellite offered a path to improved connectivity for rural markets that had no other options. The capacity of satellite Internet will significantly increase when HughesNet and Viasat launch new satellites in 2021.

Facebook will prohibit new political advertisements in the week before the US presidential election in Nov and seek to flag premature claims of victory by candidates, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said.

In a joint filing Sept. 2 to the Federal Communications Commission, six diversity groups said "no" to the question of whether the FCC should accede to the Trump Administration's desire to regulate social media content to prevent what the President has called censorship of conservative speech. The groups said they were not against finding a way to weed out racial and gender discrimination voter suppression and other internet inequities — which they suggest should be Congress' job — but that Sec. 230 should not be unilaterally reinterpreted to suit the President's internet agenda.

In the aftermath of the Kenosha (WI) shooting, an activist group called Change the Terms is calling on Facebook to institute new policies around potentially dangerous content, including a blanket ban on “event pages that encourage people to bring weapons to events.” In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg on Sept 3, groups called for a broad enhancement of Facebook’s moderation against extremism, including more automated tools for proactive enforcement and better systems for detecting event pages that promote violence.

When it comes to telemedicine in 2020—and thanks to coronavirus, 2020 turns out to be the year for telemedicine—the digital divide isn’t equally distributed. In the early days of the pandemic, the federal government says, 44 percent of Medicare-funded primary care visits were conducted virtually; that figure was 0.1 percent in Feb.

Facebook moved to clamp down on any confusion about the November 2020 election on its service, rolling out a series of changes to limit voter misinformation and to prevent interference from President Donald Trump and other politicians. The social network, in one of its most sweeping sets of election actions, said it planned to bar any new political ads on its site in the week before Election Day. It said it would also strengthen measures against posts that try to dissuade people from voting.

More than a decade after experimenting with free municipal Wi-Fi, the city of Dayton (OH) wants to give it another try as COVID-19 increasingly forces people to use the Internet for medical appointments, work, learning, communication and staying in touch. The city is looking at using some of its federal coronavirus relief funds to offer free wireless Internet in northwest Dayton to provide access to telemedicine platforms and remote health care services during and after the pandemic, Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley said.

The United Kingdom has plummeted down the global broadband speed rankings to rate as one of the slowest countries in Europe, with a typical household taking more than twice as long to download a movie than the average home in western Europe. Britain has dropped 13 places in an annual study ranking the average broadband speeds of 221 countries and territories, placing it 47th fastest in the world. In 2019, the UK ranked 34th for average broadband speed.