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For many District of Columbia government officials, the first e-mail they read at 6 a.m. has long been the overnight police report. But now there is new competition: finding out what citizens said about them the day before.
The local government in the nation's capital is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a startup to gather comments on Twitter, Facebook and other online message boards as well as the government's own website. The data help form a letter grade for the bureaucracies that handle drivers licenses, building permits and the like. These social-media analytics services are already common for businesses such as restaurants and hotel chains that want to go beyond the comment cards most customers ignore. The D.C. experiment suggests governments are beginning to mirror the private sector in seeking real-time unvarnished feedback.
In DC, Social-Media Surveillance Pays Off
[Commentary] If you left a letter on your desk for 180 days, you wouldn’t imagine that the police could then swoop in and read it without your permission, or a judge’s. But that’s just what law enforcement officers can do with your e-mail. Using only a subpoena, government agents can demand that service providers turn over electronic communications they have stored, as long as those communications are more than six months old. Protections are even weaker for opened e-mail or documents stored in the “cloud.”
The advertisements that the Postal Service piles into your mailbox every day are legally sacrosanct; the medical notifications your health-insurance company sends to your Gmail account are not. This bizarre reality is thanks to the 1986 Electronic Privacy Communications Act, a law written before anyone dreamed that Americans would send, receive and store so much private information over third-party services such as Gmail or would draft documents using cloud computing that they intend to keep confidential. Now Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the 1986 law’s original author, wants to amend it into the 21st century.
Keeping e-mail private
There's good news and bad news for AT&T in Consumer Reports' latest annual cellphone service ratings. First the bad: the carrier finished last among the four major U.S. cellphone providers, behind Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile.
But AT&T also had a silver lining. The company's 4G (fourth generation) wireless network performed the best, at least judging by the fact that it received fewer complaints than any of its rivals. That's notable considering more people surveyed use AT&T's 4G network with their smartphones. As the leader, Verizon received favorable scores for voice and data service quality and for its support staffers' knowledge and ability to solve problems. Consumer Reports says Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T received mostly low to middle ratings on such attributes.
Mixed news for AT&T in Consumer Reports wireless survey
President Barack Obama won the nine counties of the Bay Area by margins ranging from 25 percentage points (in Napa County) to 71 percentage points (in the city and county of San Francisco). In Santa Clara County, home to much of the Silicon Valley, the margin was 42 percentage points. Over all, President Obama won the election by 49 percentage points in the Bay Area, more than double his 22-point margin throughout California.
Although San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley have long been liberal havens, the rest of the region has not always been so. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the Bay Area vote over all, along with seven of its nine counties. George H.W. Bush won Napa County in 1988. Republicans have lost every county in the region by a double-digit margin since then. But Democratic margins have become more and more emphatic. Obama’s 49-point margin throughout the Bay Area this year was considerably larger than Al Gore’s 34-point win in 2000, for example, or Bill Clinton’s 31-point win in 1992. The reason is that Democrats’ strength in the region is hard to separate out from the growth of its core industry — information technology – and the advantage that having access to the most talented individuals working in the field could provide to Democratic campaigns.
Companies like Google and Apple do not have their own precincts on Election Day. However, it is possible to make some inferences about just how overwhelmingly Democratic are the employees at these companies, based on fund-raising data. Over all, among the 10 American-based information technology companies on Fortune’s list of “most admired companies,” President Obama raised 83 percent of the funds between the two major party candidates.
In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns
Google, Facebook and Microsoft regularly take business risks to boost their bottom lines. But those companies were much less interested in taking political risks this election season and supporting congressional newcomers.
The three tech firms, combined, gave to only a few members of the incoming House and Senate freshman classes, even as telecom behemoths like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast together showered more than half of all newly elected lawmakers with big bucks in the 2012 cycle, according to a POLITICO analysis of campaign-finance data. The decision to avoid new congressional candidates is understandable for an industry that’s relatively new to the Washington influence game: Google only this year hit the gas on its election giving, and Facebook’s political action committee is not very old. Still, those three tech industry leaders are lagging behind other companies and sectors that long have used campaign dollars to develop policy champions on Capitol Hill.
Tech less generous to Hill newbies than telecoms
The UK’s self-regulated press waited on Nov 29 to discover what threats of further restrictions might be placed upon it following the behavior of some news organizations.
The 2,000-page report of a year-long judge-led inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press was due to be published at 1330 GMT, crystallizing 16 months of evidence-gathering from more than 400 witnesses and sparked by phone hacking, the biggest scandal to hit the media since the second world war. Lord Justice Leveson is expected to deal not only with recommendations for future regulation of the press, but also to opine on how the earlier behavior of powerful titles, and their editors and proprietors, affected the conduct of politicians and the UK’s major police forces.
The report is likely to focus attention again on the illegal methods used by some newspapers in the decade leading up to the phone hacking scandal.
UK press awaits findings of Leveson report British Lawmakers Warn Against Press Restrictions (New York Times)
Vodafone has warned that national telecoms groups are looking to re-establish their traditional monopolies across Europe, just two decades after regulators opened markets across the region to competition.
Vittorio Colao, chief executive, will go to Brussels this week for a meeting with Europe’s top digital commissioner. He will warn that large telecoms groups could restrict fair access to the crucial next generation of high-speed fiber networks being rolled out across Europe. In a move likely to split the telecoms industry, he will tell Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, that Vodafone would take legal action against any so-called “remonopolization” of the sector.
Vodafone chief fears monopolies revival
House Republicans approved their slate of committee chairmen. GOP members backed the chair selection of 19 males at a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill. According to lawmakers in the room, very little was said concerning the lack of females chosen by a select group of House Republicans to preside over the powerful panels in the next Congress.
The full slate of House committee chairmen for the 113th Congress is as follows:
- Agriculture – Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK)
- Appropriations – Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY)
- Armed Services – Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA)
- Budget – Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)
- Education and the Workforce – Rep. John Kline (R-MN)
- Energy and Commerce – Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI)
- Financial Services – Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)
- Foreign Affairs – Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA)
- Homeland Security – Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX)
- Intelligence – Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI)
- Judiciary – Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA)
- Natural Resources – Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA)
- Oversight and Government Reform – Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)
- Rules – Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX)
- Science, Space, and Technology – Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX)
- Small Business – Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO)
- Transportation and Infrastructure – Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA)
- Veterans’ Affairs – Rep. Jeff Miller (R-FL)
- Ways and Means – Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI)
House GOP approves committee chairmen House committees announce appointments for next Congress (Washington Post)
After once again being selected by his colleagues to serve as Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Congressman Fred Upton (R-MI) announced the committee leadership he intends to appoint for the 113th Congress and commented on key priorities for the future.
Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE) will succeed Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) leading the Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee and Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) will take the helm of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee from outgoing Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL). Chairman Upton also announced that Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) will serve as the full committee Vice Chair, a position previously held by Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC).
The committee's leadership team is expected to be rounded out by returning members including Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield (R-KY), Environment and the Economy Subcommittee Chairman John Shimkus (R-IL), Health Subcommittee Chairman Joe Pitts (R-PA), Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), and Chairman Emeritus Joe Barton (R-TX). Upton also intends to name five new subcommittee Vice Chairs, including tapping Rep. Michael C. Burgess, M.D. (R-TX), for the key slot on the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, in addition to his current role as Vice Chair of the Health Subcommittee. Burgess is a physician with extensive oversight experience who will play a significant role in the continued oversight of the Affordable Care Act.
Full Committee
- Chair: Fred Upton (R-MI)
- Vice Chair: Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)
- Chairman Emeritus: Joe Barton (R-TX)
Communications and Technology
- Chair: Greg Walden (R-OR)
- Vice Chair: Bob Latta (R-OH)
Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade
- Chair: Lee Terry (R-NE)
- Vice Chair: Leonard Lance (R-NJ)
Oversight and Investigations
- Chair: Tim Murphy (R-PA)
- Vice Chair: Michael C. Burgess, M.D. (R-TX)
Chairman Upton Announces Subcommittee Chairs and Vice Chairs for the 113th Congress Walden Remains Atop Communications Subcommittee (B&C) Rep. Terry to take over key privacy post (The Hill)
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), a skeptic of man-made global warming, is set to take over the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in the 113th Congress.
Rep Smith, like many of his Republican colleagues, has expressed doubt that global warming is caused by human behavior. In 2009, he criticized the media for not airing enough "dissenting opinions" about climate change. "The [ABC, NBC and CBS television] networks have shown a steady pattern of bias on climate change," Smith said in a statement at the time. "During a six-month period, four out of five network news reports failed to acknowledge any dissenting opinions about global warming, according to a Business and Media Institute study. The networks should tell Americans the truth, rather than hide the facts." He also referred to environmentalists and others who warn about the seriousness of the issue as "global warming alarmists." Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones magazine notes that Smith's congressional website acknowledges that the climate is changing, but does not admit that human activity is a major factor.
As chairman of the House science panel, Smith will be replacing Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), who is also a skeptic. In 2011, Hall accused climate scientists of conspiring to concoct evidence of a warming planet.
Lamar Smith, Global Warming Skeptic, Set To Chair House Science Committee