Washington Post

[Commentary] In recent months, over a dozen district courts have handed down divided opinions on the legality of a single search warrant that was used to search the computers of many visitors to a child pornography website. The warrant raises interesting legal issues, although I think the significant issues are mostly not the ones that have received the most media attention. Many of these cases are headed to various courts of appeal, so I thought I would present an overview of the investigation and discuss some of the legal issues raised by the warrant.
[Orin Kerr is the Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor at The George Washington University Law School, where he has taught since 2001. ]

I’m writing because I have a request: Please stop calling us “the media.” Yes, in some sense, we are the media. But not in the blunt way you use the phrase. It’s so imprecise and generic that it has lost any meaning. It’s — how would you put this? — lazy and unfair. As I understand your use of this term, “the media” is essentially shorthand for anything you read, saw or heard today that you disagreed with or didn’t like. At any given moment, “the media” is biased against your candidate, your issue, your very way of life. But, you know, the media isn’t really doing that. Some article, some news report, some guy spouting off on a CNN panel or at CrankyCrackpot.com might be. But none of those things singularly are really the media. Fact is, there really is no such thing as “the media.” It’s an invention, a tool, an all-purpose smear by people who can’t be bothered to make distinctions.

As more and more political discourse has moved to the Internet, the techniques of political "astroturfing" have multiplied. Here are what some of the motivated actors are attempting now:

The bots: There are the bots, for starters — we tend to hear about those a lot. While an analysis by the Atlantic’s Andrew McGill found that there are relatively few Twitter bots among the direct followers of Donald Trump and Clinton, that certainly hasn’t been the case elsewhere. Especially seen in the Brexit vote.
The coordinated posters: That could also be said of what we’ll term the “coordinated posters” — real users who are secretly instructed to share similar political messages on behalf of a campaign or other organization. This isn’t fakery, per se — but it’s also not 100 percent certified organic.
The dark-money memes: viral videos, memes and other apparently amateur political ephemera, which behave like political ads but require very little disclosure.

[Commentary] Federal government lawyers are struggling to grasp the increasingly technical cases that come before them. Both federal prosecutors and the attorneys who represent executive agencies in court are bungling lawsuits across the country because they don’t understand what they’re talking about. Too few lawyers have the skill set or the specialized knowledge to make sense of code, networks and the people who use them, and too few law schools are telling them what they need to know.

[Garrett Graff is a former editor of Politico Magazine]

Reporting has uncovered extensive ties between Donald Trump and Russia. Trump has made little secret of his personal admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he has praised as having "great control over his country." The Republican presidential nominee even appeared to openly solicit Russian hacking of Hillary Clinton's e-mails — to the point that critics have accused him of treason. So it may seem surprising to hear the Trump campaign suddenly change its tone on Russia over an obscure battle on Internet policy.

Taking a swipe at Russia's support for Internet censorship, a Trump policy adviser warned Sept 21 against giving the Kremlin too much say in how the Internet should be governed. The statement reads like a snub to Putin — that is, until you realize that Trump's own policy could wind up giving the Russian leader precisely what he wants. According to critics, Trump's call to stop the transition would actually wind up helping Putin rather than undermining the Russian leader. "If the US is forced to abort the transition now it would play right into the hands of authoritarian states," said Milton Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "'Look,' they will say, 'the US wants to control the Internet. Why can’t we?'"

[Commentary] The government’s lawyers are struggling to grasp the increasingly technical cases that come before them. Both federal prosecutors and the attorneys who represent executive agencies in court are bungling lawsuits across the country because they don’t understand what they’re talking about. Too few lawyers have the skill set or the specialized knowledge to make sense of code, networks and the people who use them, and too few law schools are telling them what they need to know. “It would be enormously helpful to have a deeper bench of lawyers with technical backgrounds,” says Susan Hennessey, a Brookings Institution fellow and former National Security Agency lawyer. This situation is stymieing criminal investigations, upending innocents’ lives and making it harder to set legal boundaries around mass-surveillance programs. The result is that, when it comes to technology, justice is increasingly out of reach.

Today, cyber, data and privacy questions lie at the core of numerous corporate and government cases, and there aren’t anywhere near enough practicing lawyers who can adequately understand the complex issues involved, let alone who can sufficiently explain them in court or advise investigators on how to build a successful case. “This is a problem that pervades all of the national security apparatus,” says Alvaro Bedoya, who previously worked as the chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, and now leads Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology. “You don’t have a pipeline of lawyers right now who can read code.”

[Garrett Graff is the former editor of Politico Magazine, and is a leading authority on national security, technology, and politics]

In 1980, in one of his first big TV interviews, Donald Trump was asked whether television was ruining politics. “It’s hurt the process very much,” Trump told NBC’s Rona Barrett.

“Abraham Lincoln would probably not be electable today because of television. He was not a handsome man, and he did not smile at all. He would not be considered to be a prime candidate for the presidency — and that’s a shame, isn’t it?”

But in the years since Trump lamented the negative effect of TV, he has embraced it like no presidential candidate in history and has even derided rival candidates he deems not telegenic. Hillary Clinton, he said, doesn’t have “a presidential look, and you need a presidential look.” While real estate made him money, TV made him famous. Trump, who has never held elected office, became a household name through television, mainly his starring role for 14 years in “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.” The self-described “ratings machine” is as defined by television as past presidents have been defined by military or public service.

Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) has yet to endorse Donald Trump for president, but Donald Trump is endorsing Ted Cruz’s top legislative priority. Trump announced that he supports a GOP-led push to delay a planned end to the US government’s role managing a group that oversees Internet domain names.

Sen Cruz has been leading the charge to maintain US control over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as part of a short-term government spending bill that must pass before Sept. 30 to prevent a government shutdown. The fight to prevent control of ICANN from transitioning to international stakeholders on Oct. 1 has become a sticking point in negotiations over the stop-gap spending bill in recent weeks. Trump’s latest announcement will likely make it more difficult for negotiators to resolve the issue.

[Commentary] Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wants to engineer a United States takeover of a key Internet organization, ICANN, in the name of protecting freedom of expression. Cruz’s proposal is one of the key sticking points in finalizing the government spending bill necessary to avert a government shutdown on Sept. 30. But the misguided call for the United States to exert unilateral control over ICANN does nothing to advance free speech because ICANN, in fact, has no power whatsoever over individual speech online. ICANN — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — supervises domain names on the Internet. The actual flow of traffic, and therefore speech, is up to individual network and platform operators. We hope Congress will avoid the risk of breaking apart the extraordinary technical platform that connects the whole world.

[Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, is professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding director of the World Wide Web Foundation. Weitzner is director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative and was deputy chief technology officer in the White House from 2011-2012.]

[Commentary] Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who blew the cover off the federal government’s electronic surveillance programs three years ago, has his admirers. After the inevitably celebratory Oliver Stone film about him appears this weekend, he may have more. Whether Snowden deserves a presidential pardon, as human rights organizations are demanding in a new national campaign timed to coincide with the film, is a complicated question, however, to which President Barack Obama’s answer should continue to be “no.”