Government & Communications

In the US Digital Serivces' annual report to Congress, Acting Administrator Matt Cutts—the Google transplant responsible for Gmail's spam filter—outlined the team's current priorities, many of which were established under President Barack Obama. The team reports to the Office of Management and Budget's acting deputy director and is now part of the American Technology Council, a convocation of prominent business leaders that President Donald Trump taps for advice on federal problems. USDS also works with the White House Office of American Innovation, a new team led by Jared Kushner aiming to modernize government technology, according to Cutts.

Despite stark differences between the two administrations' broader priorities—some experts predicted Trump would keep the tech teams but assign them to new projects—USDS appears to be continuing the progress it made under Obama. For instance, Kushner has listed the VA's internal technology as one of the Office of American Innovation's top priorities, and USDS has been working on various VA projects for years, the report noted. A USDS team built and deployed a system that could process claims for disability compensation in 2016, and piloted a new tool that would let lawyers and judges review evidence from those claims in April. It also helped launch Vets.gov, an online portal consolidating the thousands of federal benefit sites for veterans, in 2015; in November USDS added a check claim status tool, applications for education benefits, and other new features. USDS is still collaborating with the U.S. Citizenship and Innovation Services to digitize the immigration paperwork processing system, the report said.

China’s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength—the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them. The ability is part of a broader technology push by Beijing’s censors to step up surveillance and get ahead of activists and others communicating online in China. Displays of this new image-filtering capability kicked into high gear recently as Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo lay dying from liver cancer and politically minded Chinese tried to pay tribute to him, according to activists and a new research report.

Wu Yangwei, a friend of the long-jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said he used popular messaging app WeChat to send friends a photo of a haggard Liu embracing his wife. Wu believed the transmissions were successful, but he said his friends never saw them. “Sometimes you can get around censors by rotating the photo,” said Wu, a writer better known by his pen name, Ye Du. “But that doesn’t always work."

A majority of American voters trusts major media outlets more than President Trump, according to a new survey from a left-leaning polling firm. Fifty-four percent of Americans told Public Policy Polling they trust CNN more than Trump, while 39 percent said they trust the president more than the cable news network. Seven percent of voters said they were not sure. Majorities also said they trust ABC and NBC more than the commander in chief, at 56 percent apiece, while 38 percent responded to separate questions that they trust the president more than the news networks. Six percent said they were not sure in their responses. Fifty-five percent, meanwhile, said they trust The New York Times more than the president, while 38 percent chose Trump and 7 percent said they were not sure. And 53 percent said they trust The Washington Post more than the president, while 38 percent chose Trump and 9 percent were not sure.

[Commentary] On June 29, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders held an on-camera press briefing. The White House hasn't done one since. That's more than 2 weeks on the calendar -- and 12 work days. That's bad. 12 days. Zero on-camera briefings. This is not an accident. What the White House is doing is working to kill off the daily press briefing -- a ritual that has long functioned as the best (and often only) way for reporters to get the White House on record and on video about various issues affecting the country and the world. And even in the increasingly common off-camera briefings -- which were a very occasional occurrence in past White Houses -- Sanders and White House press secretary Sean Spicer appear to be working hard to be, at best, unhelpful and, at worst, openly misleading.

[Commentary] I am excited to embark on the most rewarding work of my career at The United States Digital Service. The USDS is a startup at The White House, using design and technology to deliver better services to the American people. My first project will be helping to untangle, simplify and successfully deliver an improved user experience for veterans on Vets.gov.

“The Vets.gov team is creating a single place for veterans to discover, apply for, track, and manage their benefits online. We are designing with users every step of the way, collaborating with dedicated civil servants, and building the most heavily used and needed services first. As functionality expands and traffic grows, we aim to deliver the best digital experience possible to those who have served our country."

[Randall Weidburg previously worked at Groupon]

The Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that gag orders issued with warrant-like national security letters do not violate the First Amendment. National security letters serve the same functions as a warrant but do not require judicial oversight. They are frequently used to solicit digital data from telecom companies and are frequently accompanied by nondisclosure orders barring the companies from informing customers that law enforcement has harvested their data.

Credo Mobile and CloudFlare, a cybersecurity firm, received a total of five national security letters between 2011 and 2013 and sued, arguing they had a First Amendment right to notify customers. In 2013, District Judge Susan Illston ruled that the letters were unconstitutional, but stayed her decision and later reversed it in 2016 once lawmakers added additional civil liberties protections. The appeals court upheld Illston's amended opinion, agreeing that civil liberties safeguards in place — including notifying recipients the letters could be challenged in court — were adequate. "The nondisclosure requirement in the NSL law therefore does not run afoul of the First Amendment," wrote Judge Sandra Ikuta in the decision.

On July 17, a group opposed to the rules said its analysis had uncovered 1.3 million likely fake pro-net neutrality comments from addresses in France, Russia and Germany "almost exclusively" from the e-mail domains Pornhub.com and Hurra.de "The gaming of the comment submission process continues and in fact appears to have reached epidemic proportions," Peter Flaherty, president of the nonprofit conservative watchdog group National Legal and Policy Center, said in a statement. "At this point, the deception appears to be so massive that the comment process has been rendered unmanageable and meaningless."

President Donald Trump on July 16 slammed the media on Twitter before spending the afternoon at one of his golf courses and tuning in to Fox News in the evening. Here's what President Trump posted, in case you missed it: "HillaryClinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media?" "With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country!" "The ABC/Washington Post Poll, even though almost 40% is not bad at this time, was just about the most inaccurate poll around election time!"

Complaints about polls and unnamed sources are standard fare from President Trump, but the president's team is plotting new, targeted attacks. In a report last week on the White House's response to news about Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer was this nugget from The Post's Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker: “A handful of Republican operatives close to the White House are scrambling to Trump Jr.’s defense and have begun what could be an extensive campaign to try to discredit some of the journalists who have been reporting on the matter. Their plan, as one member of the team described it, is to research the reporters’ previous work, in some cases going back years, and to exploit any mistakes or perceived biases. They intend to demand corrections, trumpet errors on social media and feed them to conservative outlets, such as Fox News.”

[Commentary] The Donald Trump presidency, dominated by images of decline and threat, “American carnage” and bad, bad people, has presented any number of challenges to the US press, whose instinct, after all, is to go dark itself. But President Trump has taken that impulse and supercharged it, creating yet another conundrum for reporters tasked with making sense of where we are: Is it possible, in this age, to be too bleak? Is the unremitting negativity of the news itself part of Trump’s approach to destabilizing the news business? Has this negativity in fact helped to facilitate Trump’s rise to power? Is it possible, or even plausible, to modulate the negativity in some way? New outlets should be the breeding ground, not of the type of alarming stories that create a yearning for a strong political hand, but of the knowledge of human imperfection and a way through or around it that puts a modest heroism within reach of the everyday reader.

[Lee Siegel is a New York City writer and cultural critic]

Rep Andy Biggs (R-AZ) is slamming the media's coverage of President Donald Trump and Russia, saying news outlets have a "fixation" on the issue. Rep Biggs said the coverage is intended to “delegitimize the president.” "If you mention the word ‘Russia,' it's Pavlovian to CNN and The New York Times," Reps Biggs said. He added that he believes Trump and Republicans in Congress are making progress on areas such as immigration, regulation and boosting defense, but those stories are being overshadowed by the coverage about Russia. “We have to do a better job messaging,” he said.