President Joe Biden’s engagement with industry leaders to develop cybersecurity solutions is encouraging, Information Technology Industry Council CEO Jason Oxman said Wednesday, after Biden met with several tech and other CEOs. Among CEOs in attendance were Amazon's Andy Jassy, Apple's Tim Cook, Google's Sundar Pichai, IBM's Arvind Krishna and Microsoft's Satya Nadella. “A strong partnership between the Biden Administration and the world’s leading innovators is key to both keeping U.S. networks secure and resilient, and to expanding the cybersecurity workforce,” said Oxman. CEOs from several of the Bank Policy Institute’s member companies attended the meeting hosted by the White House and the National Security Council, said BPI.
President Joe Biden signed a national security memorandum Wednesday directing the Department of Homeland Security and National Institute of Standards and Technology to “develop cybersecurity performance goals for critical infrastructure.” DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will work with NIST and other agencies. Those standards will help companies providing services for utilities to strengthen cybersecurity, the White House said. The NSM established the President’s Industrial Control System Cybersecurity (ICS) Initiative, a voluntary program between government and industry “to facilitate the deployment of technology and systems that provide threat visibility, indicators, detections, and warnings.” CISA issued an advisory Wednesday with the Australian Cyber Security Centre, U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre and the FBI. It listed “top Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) routinely exploited by cyber actors in 2020 and those vulnerabilities being widely exploited thus far in 2021.” Four of the “most targeted vulnerabilities in 2020 involved remote work, VPNs, or cloud-based technologies,” CISA said. Federal agencies need to “strengthen efforts to address high-risk areas” in cybersecurity and information technology, GAO said Wednesday. The auditor noted agencies implemented about 73% of about 5,100 recommendations on cyber and IT since 2010: About 950 cybersecurity and approximately 300 IT recommendations remain.
Facebook needs to close a “loophole” allowing ex-President Donald Trump to remain a “regular presence” on the platform despite his two-year ban, advocates wrote the company Monday. Common Cause signed the letter with Center for American Progress, Free Press, National Hispanic Media Coalition and others. They criticized the platform for allowing the Team Trump page, run by Trump’s Save America political action committee, to “continue running political ads on Facebook.” They cited Facebook’s reasoning that “groups affiliated with the former president are not barred from posting on Facebook so long as they are not posting in his ‘voice.’” They asked the platform to clearly define “what content it considers to be in the voice of public figures and align its content moderation policies with campaign finance law.” The company didn’t comment.
The White House and Facebook should turn over any documents and communications on coordination about COVID-19 misinformation, House Republicans wrote Thursday. Republicans, including ex-President Donald Trump and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, have raised First Amendment questions about such coordination (see 2107080072). House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan, R-Ohio; Mike Johnson, R-La.; and Dan Bishop, R-N.C., sent letters to the White House and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. They demanded a staff-level briefing from the Biden administration on work with cellphone carriers and Facebook on COVID-19 misinformation on the platform. They requested all documentation and communication between the sides involving coordination. Facebook and the White House didn’t comment.
The federal government can’t force companies to “censor or publish speech to comport with its view of the truth,” American Civil Liberties Union Senior Legislative Counsel Kate Ruane in an emailed statement Tuesday. She made the comment in reaction to the Biden administration’s announcement that it’s reviewing Communications Decency Act Section 230 and social media company accountability for misinformation. The government can’t “be trusted to label ‘truth’ or ‘fiction’ any more than Facebook or Twitter,” said Ruane. “The First Amendment protects people -- and social media companies -- from legal risk for misinformation, but also for information that is thought to be false and later turns out to be true. That’s essential.”
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carrbacked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) call for the Biden administration to enable U.S. businesses to provide internet service to Cubans. “While Cuba’s communist regime is blocking Internet access in an effort to hide their brutal crackdown on freedom, American enterprises have the technical capability to beam connectivity to the Cuban people and help power their real and ongoing struggle for life and liberty,” Carr said. “With the backing and authorization of the federal government, these private sector innovators can get to work immediately.” Also Wednesday, Carr spoke with DeSantis about serving remote locations in Cuba. DeSantis sent a letter to President Joe Biden requesting federal assistance to provide internet access to Cuba. He requested “all necessary authorizations, indemnifications, and funding to American businesses with the capability to provide internet access” there. The White House didn’t comment Thursday.
President Donald Trump’s lawsuits against Facebook, Google and Twitter (see 2107070065) raise “an interesting argument” about when a private entity becomes a state actor subject to First Amendment restraints, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said Thursday. Supreme Court precedent establishes that a private entity effectively becomes a state actor when “sufficiently coordinating with government actors,” Carr said during an FCBA event: “We’ll see how that case plays out.” And there are examples of affirmative, anti-discrimination obligations placed on private entities that involve public accommodation law, said Carr. He described a spectrum of speech obligations for cases involving data roaming and cable’s must-carry provisions. It can be argued that social media companies are in the realm of the cable must-carry cases, he said. It’s time for Congress to close the gap between tech platforms’ corporate power and the lack of accountability, he argued. “Reform” for Communications Decency Act Section 230 is one “important piece,” he said, but it’s not sufficient. Big Tech also needs to provide more transparency, he said, voicing support for the Promoting Rights and Online Speech Protections to Ensure Every Consumer is Heard (Pro-Speech) Act (see 2106100070). The bill “pretty much nails it,” Carr said. Congress should also consider methods for banning pretextual content moderation and imposing affirmative, anti-discrimination obligations, he said. Trump’s legal complaints aren’t “frivolous,” said Free State Foundation President Randolph May. He noted Trump’s argument CDA Section 230 immunity “amounts to a delegation of authority by Congress that facilitates the companies’ censorship actions.” If correct, Big Tech companies can’t censor posts, May said, though he’s “not convinced at this point that Section 230’s grant of immunity, standing alone, is sufficient to make the Big Tech social media companies state actors.” It’s possible discovery “could uncover a trove of emails from various congressional officials urging the social media companies to take certain actions which the firms quickly took,” he added.
Federal and state broadband legislation will be “effective” only if it simultaneously addresses “access, affordability and adoption” barriers, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative reported. Federal and state governments “should actively work to promote investment in areas that need it by allocating funds to build reliable broadband infrastructure, even if an existing provider may claim to serve the area,” the paper said. “Governments must take care when they intervene in markets -- but there is no real functioning market for most in broadband Internet access. ... The first step is recognizing that the standard for government intervention has to be based on enterprise and residential needs, not solely on whether the FCC has blindly announced an area is served because a company claimed it was.” Also Wednesday, President Joe Biden promoted the bipartisan infrastructure framework he endorsed last month (see 2106240070). “We’re not going to have 40 weeks of ‘This is infrastructure,’” he said during a speech in Crystal Lake, Illinois, alluding to failed infrastructure legislative efforts during Donald Trump’s administration. The deal got support from the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and some other Republicans have misgivings.
Legislative language for $65 billion for broadband in the bipartisan infrastructure deal President Joe Biden backed Thursday (see 2106240070) “must be provider-neutral and not favor city-run solutions” as Biden previously sought, said Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Broadband and Spectrum Policy Director Doug Brake. Biden’s March proposal prioritized “support for broadband networks owned, operated by, or affiliated with local governments, non-profits, and co-operatives” (see 2103310064). Brake said “the best way to close the digital divide is by distributing grants through an open and competitive process that is genuinely neutral with respect to technology and ownership.” Senate Republicans raised concerns with Biden’s statements backing pursuit of a second legislative package in tandem with the bipartisan measure via budget reconciliation. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., accused Biden in a floor speech of “caving completely in less than hours” to Democrats’ calls for a supplemental reconciliation. Biden’s support for parallel measures “hasn't been a secret,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Friday. “He hasn't said it quietly.”
Huawei believes the U.S. should “put the evidence out there” to justify recent actions to curb the presence of the Chinese telecom gear vendor’s products on U.S. networks, the company's U.S. Chief Security Officer Andy Purdy said during an episode of C-SPAN’s The Communicators set to telecast this weekend. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Friday denied Huawei’s challenge to the FCC ban of its equipment from networks funded by the USF (see 2106220053). Commissioners are to vote July 13 on congressionally mandated changes to its system for replacing insecure U.S. network equipment from Huawei and fellow Chinese vendor ZTE (see 2106210062). U.S. restrictions hurt Huawei “pretty badly in terms of our ability to do business” in the country, Purdy said. “Things are not going very well.” If “Huawei has done bad things, show us” so “the whole world can see so that they don’t just need to create incentives” not to buy Huawei products, he said. “There is not such evidence” and there “is no connection” between Huawei and the Chinese government “other than any other company around the world would have.” The U.S. shouldn’t “do things” like the FCC did in using “predictive judgment” to justify its anti-Huawei actions, Purdy said. “That’s not really consistent with the rule of law approach” that federal agencies generally employ.