March 2015

James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, said keeping logs of US citizens' phone calls is a preventive measure for discerning potential threats. Any legislation that shifts collection from the government to private telecommunications companies -- a move Clapper has said he supports -- could fail to stop a terrorist attack, he added. Following public backlash, Clapper supported a failed 2014 bill, the USA FREEDOM Act, which would let communications providers store the phone records.

The Obama Administration already has changed executive branch rules to order that each log be destroyed after five years. Clapper said he thinks telecom companies won’t be that enthused about holding on to data for the full five years. "I think given the attitude today with the providers, they will probably do all they can to minimize the retention period, which from our standpoint lessens the utility of the data because you do need some -- and we can prove this statistically -- you do need some historical data, if you are going to discern a pattern,” he said. It's better to have the call records on hand, in case they can help thwart a disaster, he said. The policy, "to me, is much like my fire insurance policy. My house has never burned down, but every year, I buy fire insurance, just in case," Clapper said.

The Federal Communications Commission denies petitions to deny the renewal of a number of broadcast television stations because the outlets failed to meet the three-hour core informational and educational children’s programming guideline because the content of several of the programs relied on as core do not have education as a significant purpose of the program. The petitions were filed by The Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ and the Center for Digital Democracy.

Specifically, petitioners argue that the programs are not distinguishable from purely entertainment programs; do not clearly present educational content; and that a single moral message does not transform an episode into a core program specifically designed for children. In response to the petitions, all of the licensees rely on various affidavits from educators and programmers who maintain that the programming qualifies as informational or educational. In addition, DIC Entertainment Corp. filed a separate opposition, explaining the comprehensive process for the development of its informational and educational programs. The licensees and the program producers state that the programs were developed with the assistance of educational professionals, that education is a significant purpose of the programs; that although they present an action/adventure format that contains scenes of conflict, resolution of this conflict provides important pro-social educational and informational elements.

Despite the licensees’ defense of their programming lineups, all of the station’s Children’s Programming Reports (Form 398) disclose that each core programming lineup was promptly modified to replace the programs that were the subject of the petitions. Barbara Kreisman, the Chief of the FCC’s Video Division, writes, “In view of the deliberate processes engaged in by the licensees here in establishing their programming line-ups we are reluctant to substitute our views on the programs for that of the stations. In this content-sensitive area where each side has relied on panels of experts who have differing views, our focus will continue to be on the reasonableness of the broadcaster’s actions in making their own determinations, and with respect to the programming at issue here, relying upon the advice received as to the qualifications of the core programs as informational or educational.”

A team of computer scientists at Google has proposed a way to rank search results not by how popular Web pages are, but by their factual accuracy. To be really clear, this is 100 percent theoretical: It’s a research paper, not a product announcement or anything equally exciting. (Google publishes hundreds of research papers a year.)

Still, the fact that a search engine could effectively evaluate truth, and that Google is actively contemplating that technology, should boggle the brain. After all, truth is a slippery, malleable thing -- and grappling with it has traditionally been an exclusively human domain. Per this recent paper, however, it’s not too difficult for computers to determine whether a given statement is true or false. Basically, to evaluate a stated fact, you only need two things: the fact and a reference work to compare it to. Google already has the beginnings of that reference work, in the form of its Knowledge Graph -- the thing that displays “August 15, 1990” when you search “Jennifer Lawrence birthday,” or “American” when you search “Obama nationality.”

Lawmakers in Congress will be on the hook if they allow a spying program to expire, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned. If legislators aren’t able to reauthorize an expiring portion of the Patriot Act that authorizes a contested National Security Agency program, they should be held responsible, Clapper said. “If that tool is taken away from us ... and some untoward incident happens that could have been thwarted if we had had it, I hope that everyone involved in that decision assumes the responsibility and it not be blamed, if we have another failure, exclusively on the intelligence community,” he said.