Top Stories

  • A Facebook Inc. spokesperson said the company plans to apply its rules against creating fake accounts to those set up by the Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies, saying that “law enforcement authorities, like everyone else, are required to use their real names on Facebook,” and such accounts would be removed if discovered. U.S. Customs and Immigration Services has been creating fake social media accounts to investigate potential fraud and monitor those applying for green cards, citizenship and work visas. (Nextgov)
  • A Google lobbyist recently sent California lawmakers suggested language to exempt digital advertising from some of the rules in the California Consumer Privacy Act, according to documents and people familiar with the negotiations. The law, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, places limits on how companies can collect and profit from user data online, and Google and its allies are seeking the reported exemption, which could give advertisers the right to target users even if they opt out, in the final days of the state’s legislative session. (Bloomberg)
  • YouTube said it removed more than 100,00 videos and 17,000 channels between April and June that were flagged as hate speech through the platform’s new policies against bigoted and supremacist content. The Google unit also said it removed more than 500 million comments for containing hate speech. (The Hill)

Chart Review

Events Calendar (All Times Local)

09/04/2019
10th Annual Billington CyberSecurity Summit
ISS World North America
Intel and National Security Summit
K&L Gates and the American Bar Association Forum on Communications Law Digital Communications Committee’s webinar on content moderation 12:00 pm
09/05/2019
10th Annual Billington CyberSecurity Summit
Intel and National Security Summit 2019
ISS World North America
NEDAS 2019 NYC Summit 8:30 am
TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise 9:30 am
NTIA Software Component Transparency meeting 10:00 am
Sen. John Thune’s hearing in South Dakota on rural broadband 1:30 pm
World Wide Technology IoT Industry Day feat. officials from the Department of Agriculture, State Department and Energy Department 1:30 pm
09/06/2019
ISS World North America
American Enterprise Institute’s discussion on Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act 9:45 am
Silicon Flatirons “The Near Future of U.S. Privacy Law” event in Colorado 9:00 am
09/09/2019
Recode’s Code Commerce
View full calendar

Understanding Gen Z: The Definitive Guide to the Next Generation

Based on nearly 1,000 survey interviews with 18-21 year-olds, Morning Consult’s ‘Understanding Gen Z’ report digs into the values, habits, aspirations, politics, and concerns that are shaping Gen Z adults and the ways they differ from the generations that came before them.

Download the full report →

General

Senator says Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg should face ‘possibility of a prison term’
Todd Haselton, CNBC

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), in an interview with Willamette Week, suggested that Mark Zuckerberg should face a prison term for lying to American citizens about Facebook’s privacy lapses. “Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy,” Senator Wyden said in the interview.

U.S. effort to disqualify Huawei’s lead lawyer goes to court
Karen Freifeld, Reuters

A former U.S. Justice Department official who now represents Huawei Technologies is expected in Brooklyn federal court on Wednesday to defend his right to represent the Chinese company against U.S. charges of bank fraud and sanctions violations. U.S. prosecutors claim lead Huawei lawyer James Cole’s prior work as the No. 2 official in the Justice Department created “irresolvable conflicts of interest” that disqualify him as counsel for Huawei in the case.

Planned Eric Schmidt Talk at AI Conference Draws Protest
Tom Simonite, Wired

Eric Schmidt, former CEO and chairman of Google, has donated money to Stanford University, and taught at its business school. But a group of current and former Google employees, academics, and human rights activists wants the university to cancel a talk he is scheduled to give next month at a conference on ethics and artificial intelligence.

Yearslong Tax Dispute Could Cost Big Tech Companies Billions
Richard Rubin and Theo Francis, The Wall Street Journal

A long-running tax dispute is racking up a potentially hefty price tag of nearly $2 billion and counting for dozens of big U.S. companies, including Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc. Since the most recent ruling on the case, in June, more than two dozen companies have disclosed the potential impact on their financial results.

Uber Argues Driver Names Are ‘Closely Guarded Trade Secrets’
Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg

Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. have argued to Chicago city officials that the names of their drivers should be treated as “trade secrets,” and should not be released because competitors could use the information to attempt to hire them away.

Parents Thought They Wanted Tech in Every Classroom. Now They’re Not So Sure.
Betsy Morris and Tawnell D. Hobbs, The Wall Street Journal

When Baltimore County, Md., public schools began going digital five years ago, textbooks disappeared from classrooms and paper and pencils were no longer encouraged. All students from kindergarten to 12th grade would eventually get a laptop, helping the district reach the “one-to-one” ratio of one for each child that has become coveted around the country.

Trade-Secrets Case Linked to Google Seen as Warning to Silicon Valley
Heather Somerville, The Wall Street Journal

The federal indictment announced last week against a driverless-car engineer that accuses him of stealing trade secrets from Google’s parent company before he jumped to a rival is being viewed as a warning to Silicon Valley that prosecutors may scrutinize defections to competitors that involve sensitive technology.

Risk Back On as Tension Ebbs From U.K. to Hong Kong: Market Wrap
Robert Brand, Bloomberg

U.S. index futures rallied alongside European and Asian stocks as traders cheered a reduction in political tension from Italy and Britain to Hong Kong. Treasuries and gold retreated, while the dollar slipped.

Intellectual Property and Antitrust

Apple patents Watch band that could ID you from your wrist skin
Greg Kumparak, TechCrunch

It looks like Apple is playing with the idea of making the Apple Watch’s band a bit smarter. As spotted by PatentlyApple, the company was granted a handful of patents this morning, all focused on bringing new tricks to the Watch by way of the band.

Telecom, Wireless and TV

AT&T Elevates John Stankey to President, Next in Line to CEO
Scott Moritz, Bloomberg

AT&T Inc. named media chief John Stankey to the new position of president and chief operating officer, establishing a clear No. 2 to Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson. The company also said that technology chief Jeff McElfresh, 48, will become CEO of AT&T Communications, filling a post vacated last week when John Donovan abruptly stepped down.

Huawei Was Prepared for Anything—Except Losing Google
Juro Osawa, The Information

Over the years, people inside Huawei at times worried the Chinese technology powerhouse, now the world’s second largest smartphone company, was too dependent on some U.S. technologies. To reduce its reliance on American-made chips inside its phones, for example, Huawei switched to alternatives that it made in-house.

How Kentucky Gambled for Hundreds of Millions of Dollars From a Broadband Program It Didn’t Qualify for
Alfred Miller, ProPublica

In the spring of 2015, KentuckyWired, the Bluegrass State’s ambitious plan to bring high-speed internet access into rural areas, had ground to a halt. Officials were in talks with Macquarie Capital, an Australian investment bank known for organizing big infrastructure projects around the globe, to build and manage the new network.

Weather Agencies See Risk to Future Storm Forecasting From 5G
Thomas Seal and Angelina Rascouet, Bloomberg

Weather agencies are warning that signals from new 5G mobile networks will make it harder to predict and track deadly storms, as the fiercest hurricane in more than 80 years tore across the Bahamas to threaten the U.S. East Coast.

Wi-Fi 6 is barely here, but Wi-Fi 7 is already on the way
Stephen Shankland, CNET

Wi-Fi 6 is just now arriving in phones, laptops and network equipment. But engineers are already turning their attention to what’ll come next: Wi-Fi 7.

Mobile Technology and Social Media

Forget Politics. For Now, Deepfakes Are for Bullies
Tom Simonite, Wired

While Americans celebrated a long Labor Day weekend, millions of people in China enrolled in a giant experiment in the future of fake video. An app called Zao that can swap a person’s face into movie and TV clips, including from Game of Thrones, went viral on Apple’s Chinese app store.

Welcome to San Diego. Don’t Mind the Scooters.
Erin Griffith, The New York Times

The first thing you notice in San Diego’s historic Gaslamp Quarter is not the brick sidewalks, the rows of bars and the roving gaggles of bachelorette parties and conferencegoers, or even the actual gas lamps. It’s the electric rental scooters.

America’s Stormy Affair With Apple AirPods: Love ’Em and Lose ’Em
Rachel Feintzeig, The Wall Street Journal

For months, Danny Shea suffered a low-level anxiety that finally lifted in June as he boarded a flight from Munich. His left AirPod tumbled from his ear and fell, forever gone, to the runway below.

Cybersecurity and Privacy

Google accused of secretly feeding personal data to advertisers
Madhumita Murgia, Financial Times

Google is secretly using hidden web pages that feed the personal data of its users to advertisers, undermining its own policies and circumventing EU privacy regulations that require consent and transparency, according to one of its smaller rivals.

Amazon tests Whole Foods payment system that uses hands as ID
Nicolas Vega, New York Post

Forget the titanium Apple Card — Amazon’s latest payment method uses flesh and blood. The e-tailing giant’s engineers are quietly testing scanners that can identify an individual human hand as a way to ring up a store purchase, with the goal of rolling them out at its Whole Foods supermarket chain in the coming months, The Post has learned.

Jeremy Hammond, Anonymous Hacker and WikiLeaks Source, Summoned to Testify Before a Federal Grand Jury
Dell Cameron, Gizmodo

Imprisoned hacktivist Jeremy Alexander Hammond, a former WikiLeaks source once regarded as the FBI’s most-wanted cybercriminal, has been called to testify before a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, Gizmodo has learned.

Facebook will no longer scan user faces by default
Jay Peters, The Verge

Facebook is making facial recognition in photos opt-in by default. Starting today, it’s rolling out its Face Recognition privacy setting, which it first introduced in December 2017, to all users.

California adopted the country’s first major consumer privacy law. Now, Silicon Valley is trying to rewrite it.
Tony Romm, The Washington Post

For the past two months, residents here in California’s capital have been inundated by mysterious ads on Facebook and Twitter, warning that the government is about to destroy the Internet as they know it.

Lawmakers offer bill to shore up federal cybersecurity
Maggie Miller, The Hill

Reps. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) will introduce a bill this week intended to modernize a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program that ensures the cybersecurity of federal agencies. The Advancing Cybersecurity Diagnostics and Mitigation Act would formally codify the department’s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program, which provides tools and services to federal agencies to increase cybersecurity.

Opinions, Editorials and Perspectives

Why is the Russian meddling in 2016 such a big secret? I’m not allowed to say.
Stephanie Murphy, The Washington Post

In May, other members of Florida’s congressional delegation and I were briefed for 90 minutes in the U.S. Capitol by officials from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security regarding Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. I sought the briefing after then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report showed Russia had probed and even pierced election networks in Florida, among the most closely contested states in U.S. politics.

Build an Online Presence Without Giving Up Privacy
Thorin Klosowski, The New York Times

Every hiring manager will do a Google search on your name, most companies keep an eye on your social networks, and in several industries, you’re expected to have an online presence. With all this online performance, is it possible to retain some semblance of privacy?

Research Reports

Why 5G requires new approaches to cybersecurity
Tom Wheeler and David Simpson, Brookings Institution

“The race to 5G is on and America must win,” President Donald Trump said in April. For political purposes, that “race” has been defined as which nation gets 5G built first. It is the wrong measurement.

H.R. 3318, Emerging Transportation Security Threats Act of 2019
Congressional Budget Office

H.R. 3318 would require the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to establish a task force to analyze emerging and potential threats to transportation security. The bill also would require TSA to develop a strategy to mitigate those threats.

Morning Consult