November 2016

Billionaires vs. the Press in the Era of Trump

A small group of superrich Americans — President-elect Donald Trump among them — has laid the groundwork for an unprecedented legal assault on the media. Can they succeed?

The new president will be a man who constantly accuses the media of getting things wrong but routinely misrepresents and twists facts himself. There are signs, too, of new efforts to harness the law to the cause of cowing the press. President-elect Trump’s choice for chief adviser, Stephen Bannon, ran the alt-right Breitbart News Network before joining Trump’s campaign last summer. Breitbart announced recently that it was “preparing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against a major media company” for calling Breitbart a “ ‘white nationalist’ website.” Even if Breitbart is bluffing, the threat will discourage other news outlets from using that term to describe it, and that will in turn help Breitbart and Bannon seem more acceptable to the mainstream. President-elect Trump was right about one thing: You don’t have to win every case to advance in the larger legal war.

President-elect Trump calls New York Times treatment of him 'very rough'

President-elect Donald Trump continued his media grievances tour on Nov 22, visiting The New York Times for both an off-the-record chat with its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, and an on-the-record conversation with reporters and columnists. The meeting was the latest example of President-elect Trump trying to reconnect with a media outlet that he has mostly left out in the cold since becoming president-elect, and which he made a major target during his presidential campaign.

Upon arriving, Trump had a 15-minute one on one with Sulzberger in the Churchill Room on the 16th floor of the Times building. A Times spokeswoman said it was “short and cordial” but declined to say anything about the tete-a-tete since it was off the record. “I have great respect for the New York Times. I have tremendous respect,” President-elect Trump said, according to a stream of live tweets from Times reporter Michael Grynbaum. “I think I've been treated very rough." But President-elect Trump said he wanted to turn a new leaf with the paper he so famously tangled with throughout the campaign, frequently calling the newspaper "the lying New York Times" or "the failing New York Times," and at one point even threatening to sue it.

Tech, Security Sectors Fear Renewed Crypto Fights Under Trump

As President-elect Donald Trump fills out national security and law enforcement posts in his new cabinet, the future of encryption may hang in the balance. On the campaign trail, the president-elect was a committed foe of cop-proof encryption systems that shield customer communications even from the communications provider. Most prominently, he urged supporters to boycott Apple over the company’s refusal to help the FBI bypass a security feature that prevented cracking into the encrypted iPhone used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook.

Supporters of strong encryption are also aware the president-elect has reined in some of his more controversial positions. They’re watching closely to see if his encryption stance may soften once he’s in the White House. “I think that’s going to be a prominent topic for a lot of the individuals engaged with the new administration, to make sure there’s a full understanding of the impact [of the encryption debate],” Ann Barron-DiCamillo, former director of the Homeland Security Department's Computer Emergency Response Team told Nextgov. “Understanding that impact and not just talking about it during a campaign is a very different place.”

Sens Wyden, Coons Slam DOJ Reply on FBI Hacking Power Expansion

Sens Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Chris Coons (D-DE) slammed the Justice Department for ducking lawmakers’ questions about an upcoming expansion of FBI hacking powers.

Sens Wyden and Coons were among 11 senators and 12 House members who queried DOJ about the hacking powers expansion in Oct. The department’s reply, which arrived Nov 22, should be “a big blinking warning sign about whether the government can be trusted to carry out these hacks without harming the security and privacy of innocent Americans’ phones, computers and other devices,” Sen Wyden wrote. Sens Wyden and Coons are also cosponsors of a bipartisan bill that would put a nine-month hold on the powers expansion, which will go into effect Dec 1 unless Congress intervenes. The expansion is an update to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Under the revised rule, a federal judge would be able to issue a warrant allowing police to hack into computers in multiple judicial districts rather than just the district in which that judge presides. Judges could also issue warrants to search a computer or device when the user has masked the device’s location.

True story: How fake news skews our impact models and what we can do about it

By far, the most visible debate about how and why fake news spreads so quickly revolves around the role that large social platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter play as conduits. While these platforms have in the past tried to claim that they’re just neutral pipes for content, sustained post-election pressure is beginning to move them to action.

Of course, only so much can be done to fix the problem on the supply side. At the end of the day, the problem lies on the demand side, among credulous news consumers who are emotionally primed to believe the worst about politicians and the powerful. “Sorry, but I don’t want Facebook to be the arbiter of what’s true,” writes Arizona State University professor and author Dan Gillmor. “Nor do I want Google — or Twitter or any other hyper-centralized technology platform — to be the arbiter of what’s true.” Instead, he argues, the platforms should help users learn how to read skeptically, seek out multiple perspectives, and create their own media. Primers such as this “How to Spot Fake News” piece from FactCheck.org are a useful start.

The future of health information technology in a Trump presidency

Under Trump’s Administration, no other sector will undergo as many fundamental changes as healthcare. President-elect Trump’s healthcare policies have been particularly vague; although he is intent on repealing Affordable Care Act, we are not certain about his solutions for replacing it, other than the proposal to allow health insurers to compete in multiple states.

While the exact outcomes of such proposal remain to be carefully analyzed, the idea behind it – fostering competition and relying on the invisible hand of the free market – may be a sound solution to our nation’s health information technology challenges. Over the past decade, despite spending billions of dollars, government interference in the health IT market has only resulted in small victories and big failures. In the following, I lay out a set of recommendations for fostering interoperability and protecting patient privacy as the two most important challenges in the health IT domain over the next four years.

ITU releases annual global ICT data and ICT Development Index country rankings

International Telecommunication Union's flagship annual Measuring the Information Society Report reports that the world is getting more and more connected and reveals that there are still huge investment opportunities for the private sector to connect the unconnected.

The Republic of Korea tops the Information and Communications Technologies Development Index (IDI) rankings in 2016 for the second consecutive year. The top 10 countries of the IDI 2016 also include two other economies in the Asia-Pacific region, and seven European countries. Three island countries in the Caribbean – St. Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, and Grenada – featured among the most dynamic countries with strong improvements in their IDI value and rank.

Mobile innovation will help 2 billion more people get access to healthcare and education

From music to movies, from banking to buying food, mobile phones have revolutionized the way we access the world today. But for low-income consumers in emerging markets, the full potential of mobile financial services is yet to be unlocked, a new report suggests. Despite the growth in smartphone adoption and mobile payment systems in many countries, telecom operators and regulators were yet to invest in products and distribution models that would cater for largely underserved or unbanked consumers.

The report from Swedish insurance technology company BIMA surveyed 4,000 low-income respondents in 10 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. BIMA notes that the lack of synergy between regulators and operators in emerging markets has also undermined the development of mobile solutions for complex services such as healthcare, insurance, and savings. In emerging markets, formal banking reaches about 37% of the population, compared with a 50% penetration rate for mobile phones financial systems, according to global management consultancy McKinsey. This constitutes 2.2 billion adults who don’t use banks or micro-financial institutions in the world—more than 326 million of whom live in Sub-Saharan Africa. If companies are able to successfully tap into these unbanked consumers, that will constitute a “second wave” of mobile financial services, where customers move beyond using mobile as a channel for just payments.

Broadband Economic Benefits: Study Finds Potential $11K Annual Savings

Growing numbers of Americans are relying on Internet, and increasingly mobile broadband, connectivity to earn their livings. Broadband connectivity also offers numerous and varied opportunities for consumers to save money, and the Internet Innovation Alliance highlights the top 10 of them in a new study about broadband economic benefits.

Starting out with the Labor Department’s ¨2015 Consumer Expenditure Survey¨ IIA went online to search for discounts on essentials such as housing, apparel, gasoline and food, as well as more discretionary spending, such as the cost of leisure activities. In its latest report IIA zooms in on online shopping savings for five of the 12 largest U.S. cities by population: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas and Jacksonville. Some of the resulting data required specific, city-level analysis while other was broader based. Online savings opportunities were greatest in the entertainment category. Consumers could save significantly by ¨cutting the cord¨ on a traditional cable TV subscription and relying on an OTT streaming video/TV service, such as Netflix, IIA highlights in an infographic about the broadband economic benefits.

Sec Pritzker Calls for US-China Collaboration to Build Robust, Open Digital Economy

US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker delivered remarks at the US-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT) Collaborative Program on the Digital Economy. As part of the “Reimagined JCCT,” this event brought the US and Chinese business communities together with government officials from both countries for a discussion on a topic that is ripe for collaboration.

Secretary Pritzker’s remarks focused on the need for the public and private sectors to work together to protect and promote the Internet as a platform for innovation, commerce, and economic opportunity. She focused specifically on engagement with the business community that is already taking place in two specific areas: the Internet of Things and technology standards. In closing, she asked participants in the discussion to be ambitious and far-reaching in their ideas for how the US and China can build a modern economy that is open, innovative, and global.

Benton

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