Government & Communications

President Donald Trump vowed to continue using Twitter, even as his new chief of staff seeks to impose greater discipline in the West Wing. “Only the Fake News Media and Trump enemies want me to stop using Social Media (110 million people)," President Trump tweeted. "Only way for me to get the truth out!" President Trump is tamping down speculation that his hiring of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly as his new top aide means the president will curb his social media habit.

Former President Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski blamed Reince Priebus for leaks from the White House, saying he was "ultimately responsible" in a "Fox & Friends" interview. "If Reince couldn't control those leaks and those leaks continued to permeate, then he was the one who was ultimately responsible, and Gen. [John] Kelly was brought in to make sure those leaks do not continue," Lewandowski said when asked why Priebus was fired as White House chief of staff.

Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump personally dictated a statement in which Don Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared an article, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.” The claims were later shown to be misleading.

The extent of the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response adds to a series of actions that President Trump has taken that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy. As special counsel Robert Mueller looks into potential obstruction of justice as part of his broader investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, these advisers worry that the president’s direct involvement leaves him needlessly vulnerable to allegations of a coverup. Although misleading the public or the news media is not a crime, Trump advisers to and his family say that they fear any indication that President Trump was seeking to hide information about contacts between his campaign and Russians almost inevitably would draw additional scrutiny from Mueller. President Trump, they say, is increasingly acting as his own lawyer, strategist and publicist, often disregarding the recommendations of the professionals he has hired.

The Federal Communications Commission has told members of Congress that it won't reveal exactly how it plans to prevent future attacks on the public comment system. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Democratic lawmakers have been exchanging letters about a May 8 incident in which the public comments website was disrupted while many people were trying to file comments on Pai's plan to dismantle net neutrality rules. The FCC says it was hit by DDoS attacks. The commission hasn't revealed much about what it's doing to prevent future attacks, but it said in a letter in June that it was researching "additional solutions" to protect the comment system.

Democratic Leaders of the House Commerce and Oversight committees then asked Pai what those additional solutions are, but they didn't get much detail in return. "Given the ongoing nature of the threats to disrupt the Commission’s electronic comment filing system, it would undermine our system's security to provide a specific roadmap of the additional solutions to which we have referred," the FCC chief information officer wrote. "However, we can state that the FCC’s IT staff has worked with commercial cloud providers to implement Internet‐based solutions to limit the amount of disruptive bot-related activity if another bot-driven event occurs."

The Republican National Committee counsel's office asked employees to preserve all documents regarding the 2016 presidential election. The memo stresses that the RNC has not been contacted in any of the investigations into possible ties between President Trump's campaign or allies and Russia. The move is instead framed as a proactive step. “Given the important role that the RNC plays in national elections and the potentially expansive scope of the inquiries and investigations, it is possible that we will be contacted with requests for information,” says a July 28 memo to staff from the RNC counsel’s office. "Therefore, we must preserve all documents potentially relevant to these matters until they are resolved or until we are informed by all necessary parties that preservation is no longer necessary."

[Commentary] Legislation or regulations requiring companies to remove content pose a range of risks, including potentially legitimizing repressive measures from authoritarian regimes. Hate speech, political propaganda, and extremist content are subjective, and interpretations vary widely among different governments. Relying on governments to create and enforce regulations online affords them the opportunity to define these terms as they see fit. Placing the power in the hands of governments also increases the likelihood that authoritarian regimes that lack Germany's liberal democratic tradition will criminalize online content critical of those governments and, ultimately, create another mechanism for oppressing their own citizens.

Instead of government intervention, civil society should recognize and build upon the efforts of platforms that address these issues, while also pressing companies to step up to do even more.

[Tara Wadhwa is the associate director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. Gabriel Ng is a fellow at the Center]

Software made by foreign companies to help Chinese users skirt the country’s system of internet filters has vanished from Apple’s app store on the mainland. One company, ExpressVPN, posted a letter it received from Apple saying that its app had been taken down “because it includes content that is illegal in China.” Another posted a message on its official account that its app had been removed. A search showed that some of the most popular foreign virtual-private networks, also known as VPNs, which give users access to the unfiltered internet in China, were no longer accessible on Apple’s app store there. ExpressVPN wrote that the removal was “surprising and unfortunate.” It added, “We’re disappointed in this development, as it represents the most drastic measure the Chinese government has taken to block the use of VPNs to date, and we are troubled to see Apple aiding China’s censorship efforts.”

A federal judge in Virginia said that a local politician had violated the First Amendment rights of a constituent because the politician briefly banned the constituent from the politician's personal Facebook account. "The suppression of critical commentary regarding elected officials is the quintessential form of viewpoint discrimination against which the First Amendment guards," US District Judge James Cacheris wrote in a suit brought by a constituent against Phyllis Randall, the chairwoman of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors in Virginia.

The judge didn't issue any punishment against Randall, as the Facebook ban for constituent Brian Davison only lasted about 12 hours. That said, the judge noted Randall committed "a cardinal sin under the First Amendment" by barring the constituent who posted about county corruption. What's more, the judge pointed out from the first sentence of the ruling that "this case raises important questions about the constitutional limitations applicable to social media accounts maintained by elected officials."

A questioner raised an interesting prospect at TechFreedom's Back to the Future of Policy Summit earlier this week: the chance that artificial intelligence could be used to aid lawmakers on Capitol Hill as they make decisions. Automation has already come to the legal field — which overlaps with policymaking — but it is for lower-level tasks and isn't totally phasing out lawyers. "I'm not saying it's 10 years from now, maybe it's 20 years from now," replied House Oversight Committee Counsel Mike Flynn. "But at some point I would imagine there's going to be a role for that in policy making."

This report introduces students to the field of civic technology and the possibility that it could help to amplify citizen engagement. Rather than providing an exhaustive academic study of this topic or an in-depth exploration of a single organization, the case begins with a broad overview of the field (and several of the debates affecting it) and then contains a series of vignettes about three organizations in this space: the City of Chicago, Neighborly, and the City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. It aims to stimulate discussion around three core questions.

• First, what is civic technology, and what are some of the core forces, tensions, and debates shaping the field?
• Second, what are some of the most important considerations for civic technology organizations that are aiming to engage citizens in the democratic process and governmental decision-making?
• Third, where does civic technology—and, along with it, our conceptions of citizenship and engagement—go from here?