September 2016

Digitally Unconnected in the US: Who’s Not Online and Why?

When she announced the Commerce Department's Digital Economy Agenda a year ago, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker emphasized that broadband Internet access and digital skills are critical to the economy's success. The digital marketplace has created millions of new jobs in the United States. Digitally connected Americans are the modern workers, creative innovators, and new customers who will help sustain our nation's global competitiveness. But what about those Americans who do not use the Internet? Whether by circumstance or by choice, millions of US households are not online, and thus unable to meaningfully participate in the digital economy. Data from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's July 2015 Computer and Internet Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey confirm that the digital divide persists.

In 2015, 33 million households (27 percent of all US households) did not use the Internet at home, where families can more easily share Internet access and conduct sensitive online transactions privately. Significantly, 26 million households--one-fifth of all households--were offline entirely, lacking a single member who used the Internet from any location in 2015. As we previously reported, non-Asian minorities and people with disabilities were among those groups most likely not to use the Internet at home, as were those with lower incomes and lower levels of educational attainment. The reasons these and other offline households gave in 2015 reflect a consistent pattern since 2001, which is when NTIA first asked why people did not use the Internet at home.

Senators Introduce Rural Broadband Bill

Sens Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have introduced a bill to boost rural broadband in rural and tribal areas. The Broadband Connections for Rural Opportunities Program Act is meant to close the rural digital divide by providing new federal grants for high-speed broadband buildouts to supplement the money already available through the USDA's Rural Utilities Service. It would also double the RUS broadband program funding to $50 million.

Sens Capito and Gillibrand cited Federal Communications Commission stats saying that 40 percent of rural and tribal areas do not have access to broadband, but also suggested their bill was about competition, not just providing access where none existed. "When high-speed broadband is available, consumers often have only one choice for service and pay more for high-speed plans than consumers in some other advanced countries," they said in a joint release announcing the bill. Internet service providers have long argued that government funds should be targeted to areas without service first, not where government money underwrites competition to existing privacy investment and service.

You can vote online for potential presidential debate questions

For the next presidential debate, you'll be able to vote online for questions that could be asked of the candidates. The debate's organizers announced that they're working with the Open Debate Coalition to source questions online through the new site presidentialopenquestions.com. At the site, people can submit and vote on questions for the candidates. The top 30 questions will be eligible for consideration — although there's no guarantee that even a single question from the website will make it on air. This is the first time the Commission on Presidential Debates has considered questions submitted by online voting, and it seems to be viewing it more as an experiment than a true part of the second debate. The next presidential debate, on October 9th, will use a town hall format, with half its questions coming from "citizen participants" and half from the moderators.

Gaping holes, confusion mar FCC’s data on political ad buys

[Commentary] Four years after it began requiring TV stations to upload their records of political ad sales to a central government website, the Federal Communications Commission maintains a recordkeeping system that makes finding out who an ad’s sponsor is feel like a treasure hunt. In 2012, the FCC approved a rule requiring broadcast stations in the largest markets to upload the files showing who bought time for political ads, how much they paid and other details, saving journalists and others from having to visit to individual TV stations to get the info. The directive was gradually expanded and now includes most broadcast, cable, satellite and radio outlets. But the victory for open government turned out to be a website that is searchable only by station call letters, channel number, facility ID number and similar data — not by sponsoring group, candidate mentioned and other terms that would make it easier to track who is running ads in particular federal races, and how much they’re spending.

The current filing system is “pretty useless” for the public, said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, which put out a report on the system’s shortcomings. The political ad purchase records, also known as political files, were basically an unorganized pile of mostly non-machine readable documents with no uniform filing system. Earlier in Sept, the Center for Responsive Politics launched an ad data tracking tool searchable by state and zip code (and soon, by other terms) to continue efforts started by watchdog groups and news outlets such as Sunlight Foundation and ProPublica when the data first came out. But the federal agency responsible for the data still maintains only a vague “due diligence” standard when it comes to stations’ responsibility for ensuring the forms contain complete and accurate information.

[Soo Rin Kim is a reporting intern with the Center for Responsive Politics]
[The Benton Foundation filed complaints recently against several broadcasers on this issue.]

Librarians Stand Again Against FBI Overreach

[Commentary] We are the four librarians who fought a government gag order a decade ago when FBI agents demanded library records under the Patriot Act and told us, under penalty of criminal prosecution, that we couldn't talk about it. We members of what the media called "the Connecticut Four" haven't reunited in the civil liberties cause. Until now.

Attempts are being made in the US Senate to expand the amount and kinds of information that the government may compel libraries and others to divulge. This could once again infringe on the civil liberties of library patrons and silence librarians as we were silenced a dozen years ago. This past summer, the Senate barely defeated legislation that would have expanded the FBI's authority to collect information by using National Security Letters that could gag librarians and others without a court order. The legislation was attached as an amendment to a Justice Department spending bill. The senators could try again any time — including tacking the legislation onto the government funding bill that has to pass this week to avoid a shutdown.

[Peter Chase is retired from the Plainville (CT) Public Library. Barbara Bailey is director of the Welles-Turner Memorial Library in Glastonbury (CT). Jan Nocek is director of the Portland (CT) Public Library. George Christian is executive director of the Library Connection, a nonprofit cooperative of 30 libraries.]

Cyberattacks on personal health records growing ‘exponentially’

2016 marks the 20th anniversary of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known as HIPAA. Since it took effect, doctors’ offices, hospitals and other health-care providers have been very careful about releasing information. Sometimes frustratingly so. I’ve had providers refuse to send my information to me by e-mail, because that form of communication is considered less secure than the now-ancient practice of faxing. A new Government Accountability Office report shows that concern is warranted, now more than ever.

In 2015, 113 million electronic health records were breached, a major leap over the 12.5 million the year before. In 2009, the number was less than 135,000. The number of reported hacks and breaches affecting records of at least 500 individuals rose from none in 2009 to 56 last year, almost double from 2014. But electronic health records come with a cost. As cyberthieves become bolder, more creative and more successful, the risks to our personal information increases. That includes everything from Social Security numbers to medical conditions.

What a real cyber war would look like

Both US presidential candidates have vowed to take on the world when it comes to cyber warfare. But full-scale cyber retaliation might be hard to spot and even harder to count as a win. "Unlike a traditional war, there is no end where there are clear winners and losers, no physical flag to capture," said Peter Tran, senior director at RSA Security in the company's worldwide advanced cyber defense practice. If the US were to ramp up its counterattacks on countries it thinks are sponsoring hackers that breach American accounts, don't expect a sci-fi digital armageddon. The target's electric grid might still work, and so may the ATMs. Think of it more as a creeping worry that simple things we rely on can't be trusted — the machines that count our votes, the total on our bank balance, our personal digital files. In a hot cyber war, the first line of attack would not be like on Star Trek, with spectacular bursts of sparks flying out of computers. Instead it would be a stealth attack on the enemy’s military command and control infrastructure, to keep it from being able to strike, said Matt Devost, managing director of Accenture Security and a special government advisor to the US Department of Defense. A higher level of escalation involves damaging critical infrastructure.

What Facebook Knows About You

We live in an era of increasing automation. Machines help us not only with manual labor but also with intellectual tasks, such as curating the news we read and calculating the best driving directions. But as machines make more decisions for us, it is increasingly important to understand the algorithms that produce their judgments. We’ve spent the year investigating algorithms, from how they’ve been used to predict future criminals to Amazon’s use of them to advantage itself over competitors. All too often, these algorithms are a black box: It’s impossible for outsiders to know what’s going inside them. Sept 28 we’re launching a series of experiments to help give you the power to see inside. Our first stop: Facebook and your personal data.

Facebook has a particularly comprehensive set of dossiers on its more than 2 billion members. Every time a Facebook member likes a post, tags a photo, updates their favorite movies in their profile, posts a comment about a politician, or changes their relationship status, Facebook logs it. When they browse the Web, Facebook collects information about pages they visit that contain Facebook sharing buttons. When they use Instagram or WhatsApp on their phone, which are both owned by Facebook, they contribute more data to Facebook’s dossier. And in case that wasn’t enough, Facebook also buys data about its users’ mortgages, car ownership and shopping habits from some of the biggest commercial data brokers. Facebook uses all this data to offer marketers a chance to target ads to increasingly specific groups of people. Indeed, we found Facebook offers advertisers more than 1,300 categories for ad targeting — everything from people whose property size is less than .26 acres to households with exactly seven credit cards.

Facebook and Google: most powerful and secretive empires we've ever known

[Commentary] Google and Facebook have conveyed nearly all of us to this page, and just about every other idea or expression we’ll encounter today. Yet we don’t know how to talk about these companies, nor digest their sheer power. We call them platforms, networks or gatekeepers. But these labels hardly fit. The appropriate metaphor eludes us; even if we describe them as vast empires, they are unlike any we’ve ever known. Far from being discrete points of departure, merely supporting the action or minding the gates, they have become something much more significant. They have become the medium through which we experience and understand the world.

Facebook is not merely a “network” for connection, like the old phone network or electrical grid, as if it had no agency, and did not take a piece of every last interaction (or false start) between friends. When and how much we interact, we rely on Facebook to say. These are not mere “edge providers”, peripheral to infrastructure, or mere “applications” that we can select or refuse. The metaphors that we use – empire, medium, undertow – allude to the power of the all-knowing digital companies. Speaking clearly about this power and its effects is critical. Ultimately, the public needs more voice, more choice, more power. In the near term, we should pursue algorithmic accountability, independent auditing and consumer protection scrutiny, before we lose our agency as a public that is something other than their “user base.”

[Ellen P. Goodman is a professor of law at Rutgers University and co-directs the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law, RIIPL. Julia Powles is a legal academic working on technology law and policy at the University of Cambridge]

Roles of FTC, FCC Are Front and Center in Privacy Debate

The Federal Communications Commission’s proposed privacy rules for Internet service providers have ruffled the feathers in the tech industry since the agency passed the proposal in March. A key question as the agency moves forward to a final rule will be how the FCC’s entrance into privacy rules would interfere (or coexist) with the regime currently enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.

The details will come into focus in the coming weeks, as FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wants to finalize the proposal by the end of 2016. “It’s a turf war. Let’s be honest. It’s a turf war,” said Tim Sparapani, senior policy counsel at CALinnovates, a technology advocacy coalition. “We really need a do-over.” Sparapani was speaking at a privacy briefing Tuesday sponsored by CALinnovates. Just hours earlier in the same building on Capitol Hill, all three commissioners of the FTC testified before the Senate Commerce Committee. They offered a lukewarm endorsement of the FCC’s privacy endeavors. “In our initial bipartisan comment to the FCC, we were very supportive of their proposed rule in this area,” FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny said at the hearing. “We do believe that like the FTC, the FCC shares our goals of transparency, consumer choice, and security and that they have an important role to play in protecting consumer privacy.” Sparapani said the FCC is only confusing matters. “As communications services continue to evolve, and these kinds of companies begin to merge more and more across traditional silos of industry, none of this is going to make any sense,” he said.

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