Reuters

Diane Rinaldo, the acting head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the principal adviser to the White House on telecommunications and spectrum policy issues, is stepping down. Rinaldo has led the agency on an acting basis since May, when the prior head resigned. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the agency, said, “Diane has led NTIA to multiple successes on 5G, supply chain security, broadband and public safety communications.”

In 2016, the US Census Bureau faced a pivotal choice in its plan to digitize the nation’s once-a-decade population count: build a system for collecting and processing data in-house, or buy one from an outside contractor. The bureau chose Pegasystems Inc, reasoning that outsourcing would be cheaper and more effective. Three years later, the project faces serious reliability and security problems. And its projected cost has doubled to $167 million — about $40 million more than the bureau’s 2016 cost projection for building the site in-house.

An international "grand committee" of lawmakers called for a pause on online micro-targeted political ads with false or misleading information until the area is regulated. The committee, formed to investigate disinformation, gathered in Dublin to hear evidence from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other experts about online harms, hate speech and electoral interference. The meeting was attended by lawmakers from Australia, Finland, Estonia, Georgia, Singapore, the UK and United States.

President Donald Trump said the United States plans to cooperate with “like-minded nations” to promote security in next-generation 5G networks. In a letter to delegates at the 2019 World Radiocommunication Conference in Egypt, President Trump said the United States intended “to deploy 5G services rapidly” and was “in opposition to those who would use 5G as a tool to expand control of their own citizens and to sow discord among nations.”