Vox

[Commentary] The United States again confronts the grim challenge of managing technological advances and their implications for warfare (as it has several times since, from chemical weapons to missiles to drones). Today, cyberweapons are nearly as synonymous with military power as fighter jets. What’s more, as demonstrated by the recent New York Times report on the cyberattacks used to disrupt North Korean ballistic missile tests and the latest WikiLeaks claims about a CIA hacking unit, cyber capabilities are too tempting for governments to refrain from using — even in peacetime.

Persuading the world’s militaries and intelligence agencies to stop building ever more powerful cyber arsenals appears as impossible as convincing them to renounce the use of attack aircraft. Nevertheless, the United States must find a way to reduce the threat from hostile state actions in cyberspace, or else risk cyber hostilities escalating into full-blown war. Doing so will require changes to US cyber diplomacy, the bolstering of cyber defenses, and the establishment of credible cyber deterrence.

[Greg Allen is a George Leadership fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. ]

Rush Limbaugh called government, academia, science, and media the “Four Corners of Deceit.” This is not just run-of-the-mill ranting. It expresses something profound about the worldview of conservative media and its audience, something the mainstream media has ignored, denied, or waved away for many years. In Limbaugh’s view, the core institutions and norms of American democracy have been irredeemably corrupted by an alien enemy. Their claims to transpartisan authority — authority that applies equally to all political factions and parties — are fraudulent. There are no transpartisan authorities; there is only zero-sum competition between tribes, the left and right. Two universes. One obvious implication of this view is that only one’s own tribe can be trusted.

Over time, this leads to what you might call tribal epistemology: Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. “Good for our side” and “true” begin to blur into one. Now tribal epistemology has found its way to the White House. President Donald Trump and his team represent an assault on almost every American institution — they make no secret of their desire to “deconstruct the administrative state” — but their hostility toward the media is unique in its intensity.

As President Donald Trump continues to build out his administration, many of his officials are having trouble filling vacancies in their departments because of questions about the loyalty of the people they want to select — questions that include scrutiny of old social media posts. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is sufficiently frustrated about the situation that “people familiar with the matter” leaked about his frustration to Bloomberg: "The White House’s reasons for the holdups vary, but questions about loyalty to Trump played a role in at least two cases, some of the people said. Mnuchin’s pick for the Treasury’s top lawyer, Brent McIntosh, got an especially tough vetting by the White House personnel office after his Twitter feed was flagged as potentially critical of Trump." Apparently, candidates for jobs have been asked to hand over their Facebook passwords so that old posts can be scrutinized for criticism of Trump.

5G will genuinely be transformative — when it finally gets here. But the problem we’re seeing at Mobile World Congress, is that people are getting excited about the potential of 5G, but overlooking the immediate reality. Dan Bieler, a telecoms analyst with Forrester, said that hype surrounding the technology has “picked up noticeably compared with MWC 2016.” Journalists’ inboxes have been bombarded with news of 5G trials and prototype hardware from pretty much every big tech company around. Samsung, AT&T, Ericsson, Verizon, Nokia, Sprint, Qualcomm, have all had news to share, just to name a few. But while these firms are making genuine steps forward with 5G, some of the language might make you think the technology is right on the cusp of being widely available.

Facebook has a new plan to get more of Africa online: Fiber optic cables.

The company announced plans to lay nearly 500 miles of fiber cable in Uganda by the end of the year, infrastructure that Facebook believes will provide internet access for more than 3 million people. Facebook is not, however, providing its own wireless network. The company is partnering with Airtel and BCS to provide the actual internet service, and says the fiber will offer more support for “mobile operators’ base stations.” The company also says that it’s “open” to working with other network providers down the line. All three organizations are making some kind of financial commitment to the project, though it’s unclear who is paying for what. The move to dig up ground and lay physical fiber cables is the latest in a string of efforts Facebook has made over the past two years to get more people online. Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone in the world with its social network, but that’s hard to do if significant portions of the world don’t have internet access.

It seems that the pending AT&T–Time Warner merger continues to be a political hot potato, with different factions of government and industry continuing to argue over who will review it. Whether the merger ends up at the Department of Justice alone or at the DOJ and the Federal Communications Commission will make all the difference: DOJ policies make it likely to approve the merger, whereas the FCC, even with its corporation-friendly chairman, will have to give it a more rigorous review that could kill the deal or at least place some restrictions on it.

As you may remember, back in the strange world of 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump expressed very clear opposition to the proposed merger, saying it was “a deal we will not approve.” That seems clear cut, except it’s Trump, so... maybe not. And while he can pressure the FCC to act one way or another, the commission is technically independent and out of his complete control. News Corporation / 21st Century Fox overlord Rupert Murdoch “now regularly lobbies Trump against AT&T and Time Warner's tie-up,” trying to have him get it under the FCC’s review so that the commission can block it. The FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, Mignon Clyburn, is also trying to get some say over the merger.

[Commentary] Social media scholars talk a lot about “context collapse,” the term that describes what happens when, on a platform like Facebook, users find that they can’t communicate freely with their friends while their relatives are reading the same posts, or with their relatives while the employers get to read, too, etc. The mix of audiences (on Facebook especially) has led to miscommunications, conflicts and, increasingly, self-censorship. Keeping up with the news is important.

Communicating with friends and family is important, too. But maybe it’s time to separate the “news” from the newsfeed again — not because either of them is unnecessary or frivolous, but because they deserve different kinds of attention. Blended together, they now blur into a whole less meaningful than its parts.

[Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University.]

[Commentary] The Telecommunications Act of 1996 turns 21. Signed into law by President Bill Clinton on Feb. 8, 1996, it was the first major revision of telecommunications regulation since the passage of the original Communications Act of 1934, which established the Federal Communications Commission and gave it jurisdiction over broadcasting and telephony.

Of course, two decades is a long time in the world of technology, and telecom is vastly different today than it was then. In 1996, just 16 percent of Americans had mobile phones, which only supported voice communications, with simple text messaging just beginning to appear. Apple’s iPhone, which kicked off the smartphone era in 2007, was still a decade away. There are a number of other big challenges that will require attention by policymakers in the immediate future. A new report from the Aspen Institute (which I authored), “Setting the Communications Policy Agenda for the New Administration,” based on a meeting of industry stakeholders, public interest advocates and other experts held this past summer, identifies several top priorities:

• Supporting the transition to 5G
• Providing more spectrum for mobile broadband
• Supporting innovation and modernization of telecom
• Expanding access
• Improving cyber security

[Richard Adler is a noted futurist and distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto (CA)]

In January, we reached out to BuzzFeed in the wake of the dossier to find out whether the company felt it would be putting itself at risk — legal and financial — by publishing such materials. Recently, Aleksef Gubarev, the Russian-born chief executive of tech firm XBT, sued BuzzFeed for defamation.

Though Gubarev’s lawyer insists that his client is in no way tied to the president’s administration and the suit is not political, it does pose a major question for BuzzFeed: What are the potential repercussions of its aggressive approach to journalism, which pushes beyond some of its more traditional competitors? And in the Trump era, how should it balance the risk and reward of hard-hitting journalism at a company that makes most of its money on light-hearted entertainment?

[Commentary] Never before have people been able to self-organize and multiply for offline action almost instantly and with such little financial cost and planning effort. This awesome power — facilitated by free, ubiquitous and mobile tools for many-to-many communication — creates new possibilities for the grassroots to drive electoral and legislative outcomes, whether by rejecting establishment candidates or bringing people out into the streets to protest government action. We’re witnessing an important reminder that the tools we build in Silicon Valley can meaningfully shift sources and forms of political power. And as with all technologies, whether it is leveraged for good or bad is ultimately up to those who use it.

As an emerging sector, civic tech is beginning to improve the machinery of democracy even if our scale hasn’t yet transformed ballot box outcomes in the way that the Internet and iPhones have transformed the speed and scale of protests. Perhaps the best place for these new tools of democracy to focus is at the state and local level, where a new battleground is forming and where voter turnout is especially low.

[Mahan is CEO of Brigade, a startup he co-founded with Sean Parker in 2014 to reenergize public participation in democracy.]