Washington Post
It seems as if maybe the White House doesn’t really want to talk to the press
Sarah Huckabee Sanders has held briefings less frequently than her two predecessors, her briefings have been shorter, and she has been more likely to fill up time with guests who can’t speak to what the White House is doing. Between January 2016 and Jan. 20, 2017, President Barack Obama's press secretary Josh Earnest spent 11,800 minutes briefing the media, with his deputies adding another 906 minutes. Since late last July, about 10 months, Sanders has spent 2,800 minutes briefing the media, only about four more hours than Sean Spicer spent during his tenure in the White House.
Op-Ed: John Bolton just weakened America’s cyberdefenses (Washington Post)
Submitted by Robbie McBeath on Fri, 05/25/2018 - 10:54How ‘Googling it’ can send conservatives down secret rabbit holes of alternative facts
Type “Russia collusion” into a Google search, and the search engine will try to guess the next word you’ll type. The first of those is “delusion.” For Francesca Tripodi, a postdoctoral scholar at Data & Society and assistant professor in sociology at James Madison University, the search results are a powerful tell of a phenomenon she set out to document. The “collusion delusion” results are seeking a conservative audience — which is exactly the demographic that would be more likely to search for the phrase in the first place.
The GDPR transforms privacy rights for everyone. Without Edward Snowden, it might never have happened.
In June 2013, halfway through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) negotiations, a National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden leaked documents on America’s global surveillance. The documents showed that the National Security Agency had backdoor deals with major Silicon Valley companies, allowing them to use consumer data as the basis of their counterintelligence operations.
New privacy rules could spell the end of legalese — or create a lot more fine print (Washington Post)
Submitted by benton on Thu, 05/24/2018 - 13:04No, Twitter still isn’t subject to the First Amendment — even if a judge said Trump’s account is
[Analysis] The ruling that President Trump violated the constitutional rights of Americans when he blocked some of his Twitter followers after they criticized him politically raises many more questions about the extent of those First Amendment obligations. President Trump cannot legally block his Twitter followers for political reasons, the judge ruled, because that would amount to “viewpoint discrimination” by a government official in a public forum.
President Trump’s interactions with media (Washington Post)
Submitted by benton on Thu, 05/24/2018 - 06:31Op-ed: Can Politico pull off its new partnership with a Chinese-owned paper? (Washington Post)
Submitted by Robbie McBeath on Wed, 05/23/2018 - 16:34President Trump cannot block Twitter users for their political views, court rules
President Donald Trump's decision to block his Twitter followers for their political views is a violation of the First Amendment, a federal judge ruled May 23, saying that President Trump's effort to silence his critics is not permissible under the US Constitution because the digital space in which he engages with constituents is a public forum. The ruling rejects administration arguments that the First Amendment does not apply to President Trump in this case because he was acting as a private individual.