Government & Communications

This report examines the implications for communities of color of fifth-generation wireless technology (also known as 5G) and Smart City technology. Currently, major mobile network operators, such as AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon, offer the fourth generation of wireless broadband technology (4G). Over the next four years, these companies will start to offer 5G in select cities. 5G will facilitate the growth of Smart City technologies, which are tools that allow cities and counties to manage public services such as transportation and power grids more efficiently.

Rep Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced legislation to classify presidential social media posts — including President Donald Trump's much-discussed tweets — as presidential records. The Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement (COVFEFE) Act, which has the same acronym as an infamous Trump Twitter typo in May, would amend the Presidential Records Act to include "social media." Presidential records must be preserved, according to the Presidential Records Act, which would make it potentially illegal for the president to delete tweets.

[Commentary] Over the last month, the Federal Communications Commission received 2.6 million public comments critical of Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to roll back President Obama’s "network neutrality" rules. This outpouring of public sentiment must be evidence of participatory democracy at it best, right? Not quite. A sizable percentage of these comments appear to be fake. What the net neutrality comment debacle underscores is that the Internet age may mean the collapse of the public comment process, at least for significant public policy issues.

Sophisticated bots and automated comment platforms can create thousands and thousands of comments from senders who may or may not be real. Most rulemaking pertains to subject matter that is less widely-watched than net neutrality, and usually concerns only a small sliver of the public. The public comment process has some virtues and should continue. It is time to recognize, however, that for rulemaking over issues on the scale of net neutrality, with entrenched and vocal participants on both sides of the aisle, the public comment process has become a farce.

[Peter Flaherty is president of the National Legal and Policy Center.]

President Doanld Trump doubled down on his tweet in which he called former FBI director James Comey “a leaker” following Comey’s testimony. The president took questions during a Rose Garden newser June 9. As is standard, the president took two questions from the US press. The first reporter called on was Dave Boyer of the Washington Times, who was caught off guard. “Come on, Dave,” said President Trump. “Thank you, Mr. President. Apologies.” Boyer asked Trump why he feels vindicated by James Comey’s testimony. “No collusion, no obstruction. He’s a leaker,” said Trump.

The president then scanned the crowd before calling on the second US reporter. “Should I take one of the killer networks that treat me so badly as fake news? Should I do that? Go ahead, Jon. Be fair, Jon.” “Oh, absolutely,” said ABC’s Jon Karl.

Former US attorney Preet Bharara talked about the three times Donald Trump called him, and the one time he didn't answer. Bharara was a US attorney until March, when the President fired him after Bharara refused to resign along with a raft of other Obama-era Justice Department attorneys. The sudden showdown came after several interactions with Trump during his transition to the presidency, when Bharara said he had two "unusual phone calls" with him. "When I've been reading the stories of how the President has been contacting (former FBI Director) Jim Comey over time, felt a little bit like deja vu," Bharara said. In the interview June 11, Bharara said he thought there is enough evidence to open an investigation against President Trump for obstruction of justice, but he warned people from jumping to a conclusion either way.

The world’s 3.6 billion internet users depend on computer algorithms to sort through the vast ocean of information available online. Algorithms follow a set of programmed instructions to transform data into a form that humans can understand, deciding everything from the content of social media feeds to the creditworthiness of borrowers. Though algorithms handle digital data, their decisions also have consequences in the analog world.

In May, a homeowner in Illinois filed a lawsuit against the real estate data website Zillow, alleging that their home value estimator tool significantly undervalued her home and impeded its sale. To protect European citizens when their data is used in “automated decisionmaking”, the European Union enacted new data protection rules last year. This kind of scrutiny may increase with a greater reliance on algorithms to make sense of online data.

[Commentary] Prime Minister Theresa May’s political fortunes may be waning in Britain, but her push to make internet companies police their users’ speech is alive and well. In the aftermath of the recent London attacks, PM May called platforms like Google and Facebook breeding grounds for terrorism. She has demanded that they build tools to identify and remove extremist content. Leaders of the Group of 7 countries recently suggested the same thing. Germany wants to fine platforms up to 50 million euros if they don’t quickly take down illegal content. And a European Union draft law would make YouTube and other video hosts responsible for ensuring that users never share violent speech. The fears and frustrations behind these proposals are understandable. But making private companies curtail user expression in important public forums — which is what platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become — is dangerous. Outraged demands for “platform responsibility” are a muscular-sounding response to terrorism that shifts public attention from the governments’ duties. But we don’t want an internet where private platforms police every word at the behest of the state. Such power over public discourse would be Orwellian in the hands of any government, be it May’s, Donald Trump’s or Vladimir Putin’s.

[Keller is the director of Intermediary Liability at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, and previously was associate general counsel to Google]

CNN is asking questions about the White House’s decision to place their reporter in the back of a White House press briefing.

“We were in the equivalent of Siberia, no pun intended, when it comes to where we were seated,” CNN’s Jim Acosta told Wolf Blitzer. “That could be seen as an oversight on the part of the White House staff but it could also be seen as retaliation over the reporting we’re doing over here at CNN.”

CNN reporters are typically seated with other cable news networks at the front of press events so that their cameras have an unobstructed view for stand up live shots. The White House has occasionally changed seating arrangements in the past for various reasons, however during the June 9 event President Donald Trump specifically called out the cable news networks for treating him "so badly." "Should I take one of the killer networks that treat me so badly as fake news?" President Trump asked, before calling on ABC’s Jon Karl.

President Donald Trump accused James B. Comey, the former FBI director, of lying under oath to Congress in testimony that the president dismissed as a politically motivated proceeding. President Trump also asserted that Comey’s comments, in which the former FBI director implied that the president fired him for pressing forward with the Russia investigation, had failed to prove any collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow nor any obstruction of justice.

“Yesterday showed no collusion, no obstruction,” President Trump said in the White House Rose Garden, during a news conference with the visiting Romanian president, Klaus Iohannis. “That was an excuse by the Democrats, who lost an election they shouldn’t have lost,” he said. “It was just an excuse, but we were very, very happy, and, frankly, James Comey confirmed a lot of what I said, and some of the things that he said just weren’t true.”

Congress wants to know if President Donald Trump taped his conversations with fired FBI Director James Comey. A House panel led by Reps Mike Conaway (R-TX) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) sent a letter to White House counsel Don McGahn demanding the release of any "tapes" of conversations between Comey and President Trump.

The president first suggested the existence of such tapes after Comey revealed that he wrote memos of his private conversations with President Trump leading up to his firing. Reps Conaway and Schiff are representing the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Russia investigation, and a separate bipartisan group of Senate Judiciary Committee members led by Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also sent letters requesting the notes Comey wrote documenting the same meetings with Trump. The Senate group requested the memos from Professor Daniel Richman, the friend Comey gave his notes to, and the House group requested any memos still in Comey's possession. Reps Schiff and Conaway provided a deadline of June 23.