Slate

Google Is Testing a New App That Would Let Anyone Publish a Local News Story

Google is testing a new tool for people to report and publish local news stories, called Bulletin. A website first spotted online Jan 25 describes Bulletin as “an app for contributing hyperlocal stories about your community, for your community, right from your phone.” It’s designed to make it “effortless” to tell “the stories that aren’t being told” via your smartphone. It’s not just for techie early adopters: “If you are comfortable taking photos or sending messages, you can create a Bulletin story!”, the site says.

Europe Has a Message for Americans on Net Neutrality

[Commentary] As the chairman of both France’s regulatory agency for telecommunications and the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications, or BEREC, I believe it is my duty to share some evidence about net neutrality protections from Europe. Net neutrality rules are not deterring telecommunications and cable companies from investing in networks. Net neutrality is not about preserving internet as it is. It is about keeping doors open to reshuffle it again and again. Net neutrality is a worldwide responsibility for democracies.

All the Ways the FCC’s Process for Killing Net Neutrality Has Been Really Shady

The docket where the Federal Communications Commission has solicited public input has been saturated with fraudulent comments in favor of repeal—from bots, Russian email addresses, stolen identities, and even dead people. There was also a cyberattack on the comment system, an incident currently under investigation by the Office of Government Affairs.

FCC Chairman Rushing to Crush Net Neutrality Complained in 2014 About Rushed Process to Enshrine It

Back in May 2014, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai (he was a lowly commissioner back then) complained that the FCC was moving too fast on net neutrality changes.  “Indeed, on several recent issues, many say that the Commission has spent too much time speaking at the American people and not enough time listening to them,” then-Commissioner Pai said in response to then-Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposed open internet regulations, which at the time drew criticism from both Republicans and Democrats on the commission.

President Trump's FCC Is About to Destroy Net Neutrality, and Commissioner Rosenworcel Is Calling Foul

Network neutrality is on its deathbed, and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, appointed by President Donald Trump, is about to pull the plug. But not everyone on the FCC is gunning to undo the hard-won net neutrality protections. The FCC started soliciting comments from the public on Chairman Pai’s proposal to end network neutrality in May. More than 22 million comments came in, but there have been so many serious irregularities with the process that FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel thinks the FCC needs to slam on the brakes.

Sean Spicer and the White House Press Corps

Since Jan 20, Sean Spicer’s press briefings have become must-see TV for 4.3 million Americans, many of whom tune in desperately hoping for the thrill of a confrontational moment. All the liberals I know are now press critics, screaming into their laptops, suggesting cleverly phrased questions the reporters should be asking instead of the apparently toothless ones they’re asking instead. My boss thinks the press should take off the gloves and attack! My colleagues want to ban multipart questions! And my friends seem to know exactly how they’d break Spicer, if only they could get inside the room. Well, I got inside the room. I spent several weeks attending White House press briefings at the start of the new administration, camping out in the back, jammed against the wall, at one point with a Daily Mail reporter sitting on my feet. I wondered: Are we doing these all wrong?

New Rules Intended to Protect Your Online Privacy Are Already Under Threat

[Commentary] For years, the Federal Trade Commission has been the lead federal agency in protecting the privacy and data-security rights of the American consumer by bringing cases against companies that act against consumers’ privacy interests. The FTC has also advocated for telling consumers about the data being collected about them and for offering people a choice before sensitive information—like data about their health, finances, children, or geolocation—is gathered and shared.

But the system has worked because the FTC has not acted alone. Other federal agencies (including the Federal Communications Commission) and state attorneys general have been helpful in this mission. In October, the FCC took the historic step of enacting basic consumer-privacy rules for internet service providers and wireless carriers. These new rules were aimed at providing people with a choice about whether to allow their carriers and cable companies to use and share their sensitive personal information. They are remarkably similar to the enforcement practices of the FTC’s long-standing and successful privacy program. Unfortunately, with the change in administrations, one of the first orders of business for the cable and broadband companies (not to mention the Trump White House and congressional Republicans) is to rescind these rules. But removing them would essentially leave the cable and phone companies without any privacy regulator.

[Rep. Frank Pallone is the ranking member of the House Commerce Committee. Terrell McSweeny is a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission.]

Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?

In late spring, a community of malware hunters placed itself in a high state of alarm. Word arrived that Russian hackers had infiltrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee. The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.

In late July, one of these scientists found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name. More data was needed, so he began carefully keeping logs of the Trump server’s DNS activity. As he collected the logs, he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world. Six of them began scrutinizing them for clues. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank. The computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project,” he concluded. Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance.

Republicans Are Coming Around to This Public Internet Idea

[Commentary] Barring an act of Congress to modify Federal Communications Commission powers (don’t hold your breath), the battle over municipal returns to the statehouses. But it won’t be as hopeless there as many local control issues are.

In most cases, pre-emption disputes pit rural Republican state legislators against progressive urban policies like the minimum wage or a fracking ban. In Tennessee and North Carolina, there’s a twist: Chattanooga and Wilson already have high-speed internet, both public and private. It’s their rural neighbors that suffer from telecom companies’ reluctance to expand good service into low-density areas. In Tennessee, for example, municipal broadband remains legal—but expanding it beyond the provider’s existing coverage area is not allowed. Chattanoogans are allowed to keep their lightning-fast internet; it’s residents outside the EPB’s coverage area that suffer. “For several years we’ve been fielding requests from neighboring communities who have hardly had access, asking: ‘Would you guys bring services to us?’ ” explains Danna Bailey, vice president of communications at EPB. “And we’ve said: ‘We’d love to, but Tennessee state law prohibits it.’” That turns the traditional political calculus of state-vs.-city pre-emption bills on its head. In Tennessee, a state law to loosen the regulation of public broadband is being sponsored by a pair of Republicans: Sen. Janice Bowling and Rep. Kevin Brooks. And it was a Republican state senator, Todd Gardenhire of Chattanooga, who said, “AT&T is the villain here.” Proponents of public broadband see a parallel to the rollout of the electrical grid, which ignored rural areas in favor of population clusters where electricity provision was more profitable. “We see broadband in the 21st century as electricity was in the 20th,” said. Bailey. “To participate in this economy you’ve got to have access. Consumers are really starting to demand it, so legislators are hearing from their constituents: ‘I’ve got to have broadband. I have to drag my kid five miles down the street to McDonald’s to do her homework.’ ”

FCC Support for Hackable Wireless Routers Is a Win for All of Us

[Commentary] It’s increasingly dawning on people that they don’t really own a lot of the goods they buy, not in a world where software is infiltrating everything and can be modified at the whim of the seller. So it’s a breath of fresh air when the government steps in and tells a manufacturer it should allow, even encourage, customers to modify devices that most of us use in our homes and businesses: Wi-Fi routers that let us do our computing and communications without being tethered to a wire. That just happened in a case at the Federal Communications Commission, and it’s a very, very good thing.

If ever we needed the ability to modify a device by changing the software it shipped with, it’s this one. Many if not most routers are grossly insecure. Installing third-party operating software (sometimes called firmware) is sometimes the only way to plug gaping security holes. Moreover, changing the firmware can radically improve a router’s overall capabilities, such as creating community networks in places Big Telecom is slow to serve, and ensuring local communications in disasters.

[Gillmor teaches digital media literacy at Arizona State University]

The FCC Needs to Make Broadband Affordable for Schools, Hospitals, and Businesses

[Commentary] The Republican and Democratic party platforms may clash on most issues, but they do agree on one thing: Broadband access is critical. According to the Republican platform, America must “pav[e] the way for high-speed, next generation broadband deployment and competition.” The Democratic platform echoes this view, proclaiming: “High-speed Internet connectivity is not a luxury; it is a necessity for 21st century economic success, social mobility, education, health care, and public safety.” Like electricity, high-speed data connectivity has become vital to the production of virtually everything else in the economy. Businesses, hospitals, office buildings, schools and other institutions require significantly more bandwidth than you use at home—so they need a far fatter pipe that is always available, reliable, and secure. Seems logical, right?

But currently the prices and terms for business broadband are often unreasonable and vary widely based on the number of competing providers. But there’s a chance this could change: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has promised to reform the broken market for enterprise-grade connections to the Internet in 2016, and Aug 9, is the deadline for public comments on proposals. Just as the FCC adopted strong network neutrality rules in 2014, reasoning that broadband access is increasingly essential to the rest of the economy, the commission should ensure businesses and other institutions pay a competitive market price for Internet access.

[Michael Calabrese is director of the Wireless Future Project, which is part of New America’s Open Technology Institute.]

Is the Elite Media Failing to Reach Trump Voters?

A Q&A with Glenn Greenwald, co-founding editor of the Intercept, and best known for his role in reporting on Edward Snowden's disclosure of National Security Agency material.

During the course of the interview, we talked about why media elites have trouble reaching Trump supporters, Greenwald’s differences with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and the future of privacy in a world of hacks. Asked, "How do you think about Trump vs. Clinton, given your strong anti-establishment feelings?" Greenwald said, "Just take a step back for a second. One of the things that is bothering me and bothered me about the Brexit debate, and is bothering me a huge amount about the Trump debate, is that there is zero elite reckoning with their own responsibility in creating the situation that led to both Brexit and Trump and then the broader collapse of elite authority. The reason why Brexit resonated and Trump resonated isn’t that people are too stupid to understand the arguments. The reason they resonated is that people have been so fucked by the prevailing order in such deep and fundamental and enduring ways that they can’t imagine that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo. You have this huge portion of the populace in both the U.K. and the US that is so angry and so helpless that they view exploding things without any idea of what the resulting debris is going to be to be preferable to having things continue, and the people they view as having done this to them to continue in power. That is a really serious and dangerous and not completely invalid perception that a lot of people who spend their days scorning Trump and his supporters or Brexit played a great deal in creating."

Accessing People’s Browser History Is Almost Like Spying on Their Thoughts

[Commentary] The week of July 4, we objected to the Senate moving forward on the 2017 Intelligence Authorization bill. 

We are concerned that this bill would undermine a federal board that serves as an independent watchdog for intelligence agencies. We are even more concerned that this bill includes an unnecessary, sprawling expansion of the FBI’s ability to spy on what websites Americans visit and who they talk to on e-mail or in text messages and chats—all without obtaining a warrant, or any court oversight whatsoever.
 Given what web browsing history can reveal, there is little information that could be more intimate.

If you know that a person is visiting the website of a mental health professional, or a substance-abuse support group, or a particular political organization, or a particular dating site, you know a tremendous amount of private and personal information about him or her. That’s what you get when you can get access to their web browsing history without a court order.

The reality is that getting access to people’s web browsing history is almost like spying on their thoughts. This level of surveillance absolutely ought to come with court oversight. Yet a number of senators are moving to go in the opposite direction.

The annual intelligence bill would let any FBI field office issue something called a National Security Letter to demand this information. These letters are essentially administrative subpoenas and often come with gag order. Allowing government agents to see Americans’ web browsing history without court oversight is a half-baked solution that won’t make our country any safer, and the American people deserve better.

Why Would Anyone Watch Twitch?

[Commentary] A great deal of the bafflement over Amazon’s purchase of Twitch comes from people who, like me, are too old to understand gaming on a deep-down, emotional level.

It’s a gaping generational chasm: For the younger cohort that populates Twitch, there’s nothing weird at all about passing an evening watching, learning, and chatting about the pastime they adore.

Nixing Net Neutrality Would Produce More Healthcare.govs

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is proposing to adopt an online discrimination rule that could hurt government technology in at least three ways:
First, in a two-tiered Internet, sites in the slow lane will load slowly, buffer sporadically, and return errors. Wheeler has proposed letting cable giants “discriminate” so long as they offer sites a “minimum level of access.” The public knows that level as the “slow lane.”

Second, if there are slow, congested lanes, government sites will probably be in them.

Third, if governments do pay cable companies to avoid the slow lane, they simply transfer money from average citizens to cable companies.

[Anmori is a Future Tense fellow at New America]

Facebook’s Privacy Pivot

At Facebook, privacy is back -- not just as a social norm, but as a business model. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently singled out privacy features and private services like messaging and anonymous logins as keys to the company’s future growth.

Why? “Because,” he said, “at some level, there are only so many photos you’re going to want to share with all your friends.” He’s right.

Facebook’s Unethical Experiment

[Commentary] Facebook’s methodology raises serious ethical questions. The team may have bent research standards too far, possibly overstepping criteria enshrined in federal law and human rights declarations.

“If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor of technology and the law at the University of Maryland. “This is the kind of thing that would require informed consent.” Ah, informed consent.

Here is the only mention of “informed consent” in the paper: The research “was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research.” That is not how most social scientists define informed consent.

There is a vague mention of “research” in the fine print that one agrees to by signing up for Facebook. As bioethicist Arthur Caplan told me, however, it is worth asking whether this lawyerly disclosure is really sufficient to warn people that “their Facebook accounts may be fair game for every social scientist on the planet.”

Facebook presumably receives no federal funding for such research, so the investigation might be exempt from the Common Rule.

Even if the study is legal, it appears to flout the ethical standards spelled out in instructions to scientists who wish to publish in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Authors must include in the Methods section a brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments,” reads one requirement on the journal’s website.

Educational Technology Isn’t Leveling the Playing Field

Within the two very different Philadelphia communities of affluent Chestnut Hill and low-income Kensington, there are two places remarkably similar in the resources they provide: the local public libraries.

Each has been retooled with banks of new computers, the latest software and speedy Internet access.

Susan Neuman, a professor of early childhood and literacy education at NYU, and Donna Celano, an assistant professor of communication at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, spent hundreds of hours in the Chestnut Hill and Badlands libraries, watching how patrons used the books and computers on offer. The two were especially interested in how the introduction of computers might “level the playing field” for the neighborhoods’ young people, children of “concentrated affluence” and “concentrated poverty.”

They undertook their observations in a hopeful frame of mind: “Given the wizardry of these machines and their ability to support children’s self-teaching,” they wondered, “might we begin to see a closing of the opportunity gap?” Many hours of observation and analysis later, Neuman and Celanano were forced to acknowledge a radically different outcome: “The very tool designed to level the playing field is, in fact, un-leveling it,” they wrote in a 2012 book based on their Philadelphia library study. With the spread of educational technology, they predicted, “the not-so-small disparities in skills for children of affluence and children of poverty are about to get even larger.”

This is not a story of the familiar “digital divide”-- a lack of access to technology for poor and minority children. This has to do, rather, with a phenomenon Neuman and Celano observed again and again in the two libraries: Granted access to technology, affluent kids and poor kids use tech differently. They select different programs and features, engage in different types of mental activity, and come away with different kinds of knowledge and experience. The unleveling impact of technology also has to do with a phenomenon known as the “Matthew Effect”: the tendency for early advantages to multiply over time.

Scales of Justice

[Commentary] Way before Spotify, stereos, or even radio, Americans who wanted to listen to music at home had one choice: They could play it themselves. This changed by the 1890s, when a hot new technology arrived: the player piano.

Player pianos were miraculous in their ability to play popular songs and old standards alike while people sang along, danced, or just enjoyed the sounds. But as with a lot of newfangled machines, not everyone loved the player piano.

As we all know, the golden age of American songwriting did not end in 1908, when, in a case called White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co., the Supreme Court sided with the player piano companies.

Has the freedom to copy others’ songs, in exchange for a very low fee that the original songwriter has no power to override, suppressed the incentive to write new songs? There’s no evidence of that. Indeed, the opposite is true. Every day we see a continual outpouring of new songs.

[Raustiala is a professor at UCLA School of Law; Sprigman is a professor at the NYU School of Law]

Hollywood's Copyright Lobbyists Are Like Exes Who Won't Give Up

[Commentary] Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Tumblr, YouTube, Reddit, WordPress, and Facebook aren’t responsible for the copyright infringement of each of their millions of users, so long as they take down specific posts, videos, or images when notified by copyright holders.

But copyright holders thought that wasn’t good enough. They wanted to take down whole websites, not just particular posts, and without ever going to court.

In 2011, they proposed a bill that would let them do just that. It was called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Now the copyright lobbyists seem to be testing the waters again. Rather than introduce another bill, they are talking about “voluntary” commitments among copyright-holders and payment processors, advertisers, and others. The House Judiciary Committee, the folks in Congress who wrote SOPA, will hold a hearing about the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure, which is one of the cornerstones of digital copyright law -- and which SOPA would have gutted. But that’s not all. The US Patent and Trademark Office has scheduled a “multistakeholder forum” to discuss “improving the operation of the DMCA notice and takedown system”: another chance to build some voluntary consensus. Copyright lobbyists just can’t get over the breakup; like an ex insistently trying to catch up with drinks, they want SOPA back. The clearest public indicator of Hollywood’s intentions, though, came through at one of the last House Judiciary Committee hearings, a few months ago. It was called “The Role of Voluntary Agreements in the US Intellectual Property System.”

[Marvin Ammori is a Future Tense fellow at New America]

[March 10]

What Do Data Brokers Know About Me?

[Commentary] The US data business is largely unregulated, which is not the case in most Western European countries. Those countries require all data collectors to provide individuals with access to their data; the ability to correct errors in the data; and, in some cases, the right to delete the data.

After reading the fine print on 212 websites, I learned that only 33 of them offered me a chance to see the data they held about me. But upon closer examination, not all of them were real offers. Some required me to set up accounts in order to see my data. I contacted 23 data brokers and received my data from 13 of them. Some asked me to send my requests by postal mail, along with a copy of my driver’s license. Others allowed email requests. Most of the responses I got were from the biggest players in the industry.

[Angwin is the author of Dragnet Nation and an investigative journalist for ProPublica]