Government & Communications

The Government Accountability Office was asked to review Federal Communications Commission’s management of its enforcement program. In this report, GAO addresses: (1) actions FCC has taken in the last 5 years to update its enforcement program, (2) FCC’s enforcement performance goals and measures, and (3) selected stakeholders’ views on FCC’s enforcement program and external communications.

GAO reviewed FCC’s enforcement policies and procedures; analyzed FCC’s performance measures and spoke with officials of similarly sized independent agencies with enforcement missions; and interviewed FCC officials and 22 stakeholders from public and private organizations who were knowledgeable of the Enforcement Bureau and the communications industry. The GAO Recommends: FCC should establish and publish: (1) quantifiable performance goals and related measures for its enforcement program; and (2) a communications strategy outlining its enforcement program for external stakeholders. FCC concurred with the recommendations.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made the case for why former FBI Director James Comey broke the law, expanding on comments from the day before about how federal prosecutors should consider bringing a case. Comey testified earlier in 2017 that he arranged for a close friend to leak the contents of personal memos detailing his encounters with President Trump. The purpose of the leak to the media, he said, was to ensure a special counsel would be appointed to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

A reporter challenged Sanders on why Comey’s leaks would be illegal if there was no classified information in his memos. Sanders was prepared for the question and read her response from a statement at the lectern: “The memos that Comey leaked were created on an FBI computer while he was the director,” Sanders responded. “He claims they were private property, but they clearly followed the protocol of an official FBI document. Leaking FBI memos on a sensitive case regardless of classification violates federal laws including the Privacy Act, standard FBI employment agreements, and nondisclosure agreements all personnel must sign. I think that is clean and clear that that would be a violation.”

Apparently, Russia’s effort to influence US voters through Facebook and other social media is a “red-hot” focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election and possible links to President Donald Trump’s associates. Mueller’s team of prosecutors and FBI agents is zeroing in on how Russia spread fake and damaging information through social media and is seeking additional evidence from companies like Facebook and Twitter about what happened on their networks, said one of the officials, who asked not to be identified discussing the ongoing investigation. The ability of foreign nations to use social media to manipulate and influence elections and policy is increasingly seen as the soft underbelly of international espionage, another official said, because it doesn’t involve the theft of state secrets and the US doesn’t have a ready defense to prevent such attacks.

[Commentary] The problem is that the Federal Communications Commission’s annual broadband report, by law, demands both a factual conclusion and a regulatory call to action. Depending on its findings, the agency is required to increase or decrease regulation. As a result, the temptation to slant the report’s findings to support a broader agenda has proven difficult to resist.

The FCC should create an interactive broadband dashboard, one that can be continually updated with the most current information on broadband technologies, speeds, performance and coverage. The dashboard should provide, to paraphrase the old Dragnet TV show, “just the facts.” No opinions about adequacy, timeliness, or what constitutes “reasonable.” The FCC could present the data it collects in ways that enable broadband stakeholders to improve their solutions to deployment issues. The FCC could do the country a huge favor by making sure it gets the facts right and letting stakeholders interpret their meaning — before the commission develops its own policy agenda.

[Larry Downes is project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.]

Imagine you've been detained at customs, waiting to cross the border. Or maybe you've been pulled over for a traffic violation. An officer waves your cellphone at you. “Look at this. Is this yours?” he asks. Before you can respond, a tiny infrared sensor in the phone has scanned your face. Matching those readings against the copy of your face that is stored in its archive, the phone concludes that its owner is trying to unlock it. The device lowers its defenses, surrendering its contents in moments to the law enforcement officer holding your phone. “You have to work pretty hard to get me to put my fingerprint on a reader,” said Chris Calabrese, vice president for policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “You have to work less hard to put a phone in front of somebody's face.”

The US government on banned the use of a Russian brand of security software by federal agencies amid concerns the company has ties to state-sponsored cyberespionage activities, according to US officials. Acting Homeland Security secretary Elaine Duke ordered that Kaspersky Lab software be barred from federal civilian government networks, giving agencies a timeline to get rid of it, apparently. Duke ordered the scrub on the grounds that the company has connections to the Russian government and its software poses a security risk.

“The Department is concerned about the ties between certain Kaspersky officials and Russian intelligence and other government agencies, and requirements under Russian law that allow Russian intelligence agencies to request or compel assistance from Kaspersky and to intercept communications transiting Russian networks,” the department said. “The risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky, could capitalize on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates U.S. national security.”

An official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has instructed employees not to speak directly with members of the press. Several health journalists quickly condemned the CDC move, calling it “really disturbing” and a “gag order." A late August e-mail by a CDC public affairs officer directs staff to route any correspondence with journalists—“everything from formal interview requests to the most basic of data requests”—through the communication office at its Atlanta headquarters.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the federal government in hopes of curbing the wide-ranging ability of federal agents to search and seize the smartphones and computers of travelers — including US citizens — as they arrive on American soil but have not yet formally entered the country.

The practice, which remains rare but has grown more frequent in recent years, allows agents in border zones such as the arrivals areas of international airports to sidestep the Supreme Court’s landmark Riley decision in 2014 requiring that law enforcement officers get search warrants before examining the contents of digital devices.That ruling grew from the long-running contention by civil rights groups that modern digital devices carry such massive amounts of data and such sensitive records — including photographs, location data, e-mails, videos and Web browsing histories — that they should be afforded full Fourth Amendment protections against searches and seizures without warrants.

Sept 13's suit demands stricter legal standards for device searches in border areas. They argue that relatively lax rules established for searching luggage or goods bought in duty-free shops should not apply to modern smartphones, tablets and laptop computers routinely carried across borders. The suit says that the number of such searches — conducted by Customs and Border Protection agents, sometimes with the assistance of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has grown sharply in recent years and is on track to hit about 30,000 in the current fiscal year. That remains a tiny fraction of the several hundred million travelers who enter the nation every year.

Can calling government offices or officials to insult them — especially after being told to stop — be punished the way that calling a private individual to insult them might be? I think the answer should be “no,” and the lower court precedents on the subject seem to agree; but in two recent cases, government officials seem to think that such speech can indeed be criminalized.

Next Century Cities released a playbook on tech-powered civic engagement detailing lessons learned over the past year among its three Benton Next Generation Engagement Award winners: Austin (TX), Louisville (KY) and Raleigh (NC). The Washington, D.C.-based broadband advocacy group wants the guide to serve as a checklist for cities’ future projects. Communities are encouraged to engage all stakeholders in a civic tech project area, collaborate across sectors and have their approach match project function.