Government & Communications

Following the false emergency alert that went out across Hawai‘i on January 13 and caused widespread panic, Sens Brian Schatz (D-HI), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Cory Gardner (R-CO) introduced the Authenticating Local Emergencies and Real Threats (ALERT) Act, legislation that would improve the emergency alert system and give the federal government the sole responsibility of alerting the public of a missile threat, prohibiting state and local governments from doing so.  The Schatz-Harris-Gardner legislation would strengthen the way states and local governments use the Integrated Public Alert a

Google’s Translate tool “learns” language from an existing corpus of writing, and the writing often includes cultural patterns regarding how men and women are described. Because the model is trained on data that already has biases of its own, the results that it spits out serve only to further replicate and even amplify them. It might seem strange that a seemingly objective piece of software would yield gender-biased results, but the problem is an increasing concern in the technology world.

Instead of forcing cities to reinvent the wheel with every new project, federal agencies can bring them to the table to share what works and what doesn’t work in areas like cybersecurity and privacy, said Sokwoo Rhee, the associate director of the cyber-physical program at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).

Today I'm going to talk about what the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NDIA) and the Administration are doing to help promote investment in broadband and ensure that all Americans have access to the connectivity they need to meaningfully participate in the modern economy.

At its own discretion, the Federal Communications Commission has chosen to block the release of records related to a video produced in 2017 in which FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and a Verizon executive joke about installing a “Verizon puppet” as head of the FCC.

[Commentary] China is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism.

I would like to discuss how my approach to select communications policies is informed by certain conservative principles, with a fair hint of libertarianism. In my first visit to Hudson, I declared preserving and advancing economic freedom to be my primary goal
and the paramount lens by which I would examine issues at the Commission.  Fast forward four years and economic freedom has generated some subcomponents worthy of discussion, thereby allowing a more fulsome examination of certain policy matters. So, with your indulgence, I’d like to explore some of these this afternoon:

US presidents are held up as examples on the world stage. For the past several decades, they have aggressively pushed for human rights and free press, while critiquing countries that don’t share these values. Past presidents have pushed for free press — regardless of the type of coverage they receives. President Donald Trump shifted this rhetoric. His willingness to dismiss negative news coverage as “fake” appears to have opened the door for leaders of other countries to follow suit.

Department of Homeland Security draft report from late January called on authorities to continuously vet Sunni Muslim immigrants deemed to have “at-risk” demographic profiles.

The New York Times is asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to unseal secret documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page, the onetime Donald Trump campaign adviser at the center of a disputed memo written by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee. The motion is unusual. No such wiretapping application materials apparently have become public since Congress first enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978.