Government & Communications

The revelation that the Justice Department had seized years of phone and email records from Ali Watkins, a New York Times journalist, raised concerns that the Trump administration was adopting a highly aggressive approach, continuing a crackdown that ramped up in the Obama years. Under Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., the Justice Department obtained private records from reporters at Fox News and The Associated Press. Eventually, facing criticism from the news media, AG Holder strengthened rules meant to minimize the seizure of journalists’ data.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's team is reportedly reviewing the encrypted messaging apps of witnesses in the Russia investigation. The team is looking at what experts say are some of the best apps at keeping messages private. Not all encrypted messaging apps disclose their user numbers, so it's hard to pinpoint just how prolific they have become. But the most popular among them, WhatsApp, claims 1.5 billion users around the world.

Reps Ted Lieu (D-CA), Mike Bishop (R-MI), Suzan DelBene (D-WA), and Jim Jordan (R-OH) reintroduced the Ensuring National Constitutional Rights for Your Private Telecommunications (ENCRYPT) Act. The legislation would preempt state and local government encryption laws to ensure a uniform, national policy for the interstate issue of encryption technology.

Even as the Commerce Department was confirming a deal to remove an export ban affecting ZTE, Congress was moving to prevent government money to be used to buy ZTE equipment.

Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler says that there was no 2014 cyberattack meant to overwhelm the agency's comment system during the net neutrality debate, as claimed by a former agency IT official in emails recently published by Gizmodo. The Gizmodo story says that in 2017, after the agency claimed to have experienced a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) taking down its comment system, agency IT chief David Bray told the media that there had been a similar attack in 2014 — and that Wheeler had decided to keep the matter quiet for fear of copycat attacks. 

Apparently, special counsel Robert Mueller's team is requesting that witnesses turn in their personal phones to inspect their encrypted messaging programs and potentially view conversations between associates linked to President Donald Trump. Since as early as April, Mueller's team has been asking witnesses in the Russia probe to turn over phones for agents to examine private conversations on WhatsApp, Confide, Signal and Dust, apparently.  Fearing a subpoena, the witnesses have complied with the request and have given over their phones.

The Government Accountability Office is investigating the Federal Communications Commission’s claim that its commenting system suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack during a controversial debate over repealing net neutrality rules in May 2017. The alleged DDoS attack, which slowed but did not completely disable the commenting site, came after comedian John Oliver urged his viewers to submit comments opposing the net neutrality rewrite favored by the Trump administration. The timing has led some critics to suggest the massive increase in traffic to the FCC commenting site may have

On June 5, President Donald Trump tweeted an unfounded conspiracy theory that originated in some of the internet’s worst “fake news” corners. “Strzok-Page, the incompetent & corrupt FBI lovers, have texts referring to a counter-intelligence operation into the Trump Campaign dating way back to December, 2015,” the president wrote. “SPYGATE is in full force!” The supposed source for this claim is text messages between two FBI employees, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were having an affair during the 2016 campaign.

The close working relationship between Verizon and information technology officials in Sacramento (CA) could turn out to be a model for communities across the country as cities move forward with smart city projects and the high-capacity communications networks needed to support them. About two years ago, Verizon approached the city to launch a 5G, fiber-optic build-out, with Sacramento as Verizon’s first foray into launching 5G.

The Precision Agriculture Connectivity Act (S. 2343) would direct the Federal Communications Commission to establish the Task Force for Reviewing the Connectivity and Technology Needs of Precision Agriculture in the United States and select 15 members to serve two-year terms. The task force would be required to recommend rules and steps the FCC should take to expand broadband Internet access to unserved agricultural land and to report annually to the FCC. The task force would terminate on January 1, 2025.