Category: Policies

FCC Puts Data Security Protections on Hold

As expected the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday voted 2-1 along party lines to stop a new data security rule from taking effect.

The rule would have required internet service providers to take “reasonable” measures to protect consumers’ personal data.

It was part of a bigger set of privacy regulation, approved by the FCC in October, that’s supposed to protect consumers’ sensitive personal information online. The rules have been controversial because they establish stricter requirements for broadband and wireless companies than they do for other internet companies, such as Google or Facebook, which also collect user information and are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai signaled last week his intention for the full FCC to vote on pausing the rollout of the rule. He and acting Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Maureen Ohlhausen issued a joint statement arguing that the FTC, and not the FCC, should regulate all privacy and data security and privacy practices online.

“All actors in the online space should be subject to the same rules, enforced by the same agency,” they said in the statement.

In January, several telecom and cable industry groups filed petitions challenging the rules. The data security rule was supposed to go into effect on March 2. Today’s vote puts the new rules on hold until the FCC votes on a reconsideration of them.

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, the only Democrat on the commission, criticized the move in a statement. She called the move a “proxy” for gutting the FCC’s full set of privacy regulation, and stated that consumers would be left vulnerable.

“If a provider simply decides not to adequately protect a customer’s information and does not notify them when a breach inevitably occurs, there will be no recompense as a matter of course,” Clyburn wrote.

This is the latest move by the Republican-led FCC to kill controversial regulations pushed by former Democratic Chairman Tom Wheeler. Pai has already closed consideration of rules to reform the cable set-top box market. He also reversed several other consumer-protection orders, reports and proceedings that were adopted in the final weeks of Wheeler’s FCC. This included telling nine companies they won’t be allowed to participate in the federal Lifeline program. Lifeline’s purpose is to provide low-cost broadband access to low-income consumers. Pai wants to reverse these orders and reports because they were decreed at the last minute by a departing administration.

Meanwhile, Pai has already begun to take steps to dismantle net neutrality. At the FCC’s open meeting last week, he led the vote to expand the number of companies that receive exemptions to parts of the net neutrality rules.

In opposition, Democrats in the Senate, including Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Al Franken of Minnesota, have vowed to fight to protect the privacy and net neutrality rules. In a statement, Markey said this was just the beginning of Pai’s efforts to dismantle many consumer protections.

“Chairman Pai has fired his opening salvo in the war on the Open Internet Order, and broadband privacy protections are the first victim,” he said. “This carve out for the broadband industry will make consumers’ information more vulnerable to breaches and unauthorized use.”

(h/t CNet)

Betsy DeVos Press Release Celebrates Jim Crow Education System as Pioneer of “School Choice”

Donald Trump met Monday at the White House with the leaders of a number of historically black colleges and universities. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos commemorated the meeting with one of the more bonkers statements you will ever see a 21st century politician make, somehow twisting an attempt to bring up her pet issue of school choice into praise for the segregated higher education system of the Jim Crow South:

First of all, it sounds like a seventh-grader wrote this, which is perhaps what happens when you put someone who has never really had a real job in charge of the Department of Education. Second, this official 2017 federal government press release celebrates legal segregation (!!!) on the grounds that the Jim Crow education system gave black students “more options,” as if there was a robust competition between HBCUs and white universities for their patronage. (When black Mississippian James Meredith chose the “option” of enrolling at the University of Mississippi in 1962, a massive white mob formed on the campus; two people were shot to death and hundreds injured in the ensuing battle/riot, during which federal marshals came under heavy gunfire, requiring the ultimate intervention of 20,000 U.S. soldiers and thousands more National Guardsmen.)

DeVos is delivering the keynote address Tuesday at an HBCU event at the Library of Congress. Should be interesting.

(h/t Slate)

 

Trump Signs Executive Order to Roll Back Clean Water Rule

President Trump’s newest executive orders target a water-protection rule and elevate an initiative on historically black colleges and universities into the White House.

Trump signed the executive orders in back-to-back signing ceremonies at the White House on Tuesday. The first seeks to undo the Waters of the United States Rule, an Obama administration regulation that sought to reinterpret the Clean Water Act to extend federal protections to smaller rivers and streams.

In a Roosevelt Room ceremony with farmers and lawmakers, Trump called the rule “one of the worst examples of federal regulation” and said “it has truly run amok.”

At issue: the definition of “navigable waters” under the Clean Water Act. Under the 2015 Obama rule, those waters could include, for example, anything within a 100-year floodplain or within 4,000 feet of a high-tide mark. “A few years ago, the EPA decided that ‘navigable waters’ can mean nearly every puddle or every ditch on a farmer’s land, or anyplace else that they decide — right? It was a massive power grab,” Trump said.

Trump’s plan of attack is similar to his earlier order aimed at a consumer-protection regulation called the Fiduciary Duty rule. Because the rule was finalized in 2015, the Trump administration will have to start the regulatory process from the beginning to remove it from the books. The executive order instructs the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do just that, asking them to reconsider whether federal jurisdiction extends to non-navigable streams.

But unlike the Fiduciary Duty Rule, which was scheduled to go into effect April 10, the Waters of the United States rule has already been blocked by a federal appeals court in Cincinnati. The executive order also asks the Justice Department to put that appeal on hold while the administration reconsiders the rule.

And it gives direct advice to agencies about how Trump would like to see the term “navigable waters” defined. In a 2005 Supreme Court decision, Justice Antonin Scalia defines them “only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water forming geographic features that are described in ordinary parlance as streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes.”

Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, did not sound optimistic that the rule would survive.

“If this were an objective review, I think that would be fine,” he said. “If this is a review that the Trump administration has already decided what the outcomes going to be, that’s not good.”

A second executive order moves the federal initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, into the White House from the Department of Education, where it was housed under the Obama administration.

Trump’s executive order establishes a President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs, but still leaves much of the budgeting and administration of the initiative in the Department of Education.

“With this executive order, we will make HBCUs a priority in the White House — an absolute priority,” Trump said. “A lot of people are going to be angry that they’re not a priority, but that’s O.K.”

Grambling State University Richard Gallot, one of 80 college presidents who met with Trump Monday, welcomed moving the HBCU initiative back to the White House. “It does makes sense,” he said. “When an agency receives something from the White House suggesting action on HBCUs it has a different tone than three layers down from the Department of Education.”

Since President Jimmy Carter in 1980, every president has signed an executive order reorganizing the initiative. But Trump said moving the initiative into the White House will make it “an absolute priority.”

The HBCU order comes the day after Trump hosted the presidents of historically black colleges at the White House — cramming 64 of them into the Oval Office for a meeting. “I don’t think we’ve ever had this many people in the Oval Office,” Trump said to laughter. “This could be a new record, forever.

(h/t USA Today)

Reality

According to Vox, there is a catch: Rolling back this rule won’t be easy to do. By law, Pruitt has to go through the formal federal rulemaking process and replace Obama’s regulation with his own version — and then defend it in court as legally superior. And, as Pruitt’s about to find out, figuring out which bodies of water deserve protection is a maddeningly complex task that could take years.

AG Sessions Says DOJ to ‘Pull Back’ on Police Department Civil Rights Suits

Donald Trump’s attorney general said Tuesday the Justice Department will limit its use of a tactic employed aggressively under President Obama — suing police departments for violating the civil rights of minorities.

“We need, so far as we can, to help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness. And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“So we’re going to try to pull back on this,” he told a meeting of the nation’s state attorneys general in Washington.

Sessions said such a move would not be “wrong or insensitive to civil rights or human rights.” Instead, he said people in poor and minority communities must feel free from the threat of violent crime, which will require more effective policing with help from the federal government.

While crime rates are half of what they were a few decades ago, recent increases in violent crimes do not appear to be “an aberration, a one-time blip. I’m afraid it represents the beginning of a trend.”

Sessions said he will encourage federal prosecutors to bring charges when crimes are committed using guns. Referring local drug violations that involve the use of a firearm, for example, to federal court can result is often a stiffer sentence than would be imposed by state courts.

“We need to return to the ideas that got us here, the ideas that reduce crime and stay on it. Maybe we got a bit overconfident when we’ve seen the crime rate decline so steadily for so long,” he said.

Under the Obama Administration, the Justice Department opened 25 investigations into police departments and sheriff’s offices and was enforcing 19 agreements at the end of 2016, resolving civil rights lawsuits filed against police departments in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, New Orleans, Cleveland and 15 other cities.

On Monday, Sessions said he is reviewing the Justice Department’s current policy toward enforcing federal law that prohibits possession of marijuana, but has made no decision about whether to get tougher.

His opposition to legalization is well known, and he emphasized it during an informal gathering of reporters . “I don’t think America will be a better place when more people, especially young people, smoke pot.”

States, he said, can pass their own laws on possession as they choose, “but it remains a violation of federal law.”

The current policy, spelled out in a 2013 memo from former deputy attorney general James Cole, said federal prosecutions would focus on distribution to minors, involvement of gangs or organized crime, sales beyond a state border, and growing marijuana plants on federal land.

(h/t NBC News)

White House Accused of Blocking Information on Bank’s Trump-Russia Links

The White House has been accused of withholding information from Congress about whether Donald Trump or any of his campaign affiliates have ever received loans from a bank in Cyprus that is partly owned by a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

A group of Democratic senators have been waiting for two weeks for Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor who has served as vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus since 2014, to answer a series of questions about possible links between the bank, Russian officials, and current and former Trump administration and campaign officials. Ross also received a second letter on Friday from Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey with more detailed questions about possible Russia links.

But in a speech on Monday night, just before the Senate voted to approve Ross’s nomination as secretary of the commerce department, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said the White House “has chosen to sit on” a written response by Ross to some of those questions even though Ross told the senator he was eager to release his response.

Nelson, the top Democrat on the Senate commerce committee, said in a speech on the Senate floor that other senators were “troubled and frustrated” by the White House move. Nelson said it had been “verbally reiterated” to him by Ross that the commerce department nominee was not aware of any “loans or interactions” between the Bank of Cyprus and the Trump campaign or Trump Organization.

Ross, a private equity investor who has said he would step down from the bank after his final confirmation, had also been asked to provide more details about his own relationship with previous and current Russian investors in the bank, including Viktor Vekselberg, a longtime ally of the Russian president, and Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, the former vice-chairman of Bank of Cyprus who is also a former KGB agent with a close relationship to Putin.

Ross also told Nelson that he had one meeting that lasted about an hour with a Russian investor in the bank in 2014, but no other details were provided.

“I believe him in what he has told me, that it is true to his belief,” Nelson said in a speech on the Senate floor. “I want to say, at the same time, the White House and the way they have handled this matter is not doing Wilbur Ross any favors.”

An attorney for Ross said he was not handling the matter and referred questions about the issue to the commerce department, which declined to respond .

The senators’ scrutiny of Ross’s ties to Bank of Cyprus comes as the Trump administration faces several investigations, including by the FBI, into possible links between Trump campaign officials and Russia.

The first letter, sent on 16 February, was led by Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, the top Democrat on the Senate commerce committee, and was co-signed by Cory Booker of New Jersey, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Tom Udall of New Mexico and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.

Details of the letter were first reported by McClatchy, the US news organisation.

Among other questions, the letter asked Ross if he was “aware of any contacts between any individuals currently or formerly associated with the Bank of Cyprus and anyone affiliated with the Trump presidential campaign or the Trump Organization”. It also asked whether Ross was “aware of any loans made by the Bank of Cyprus to the Trump Organization, its directors or officers, or any affiliated individuals or entities”.

A second letter sent by New Jersey senator Cory Booker said the list of Russian businessmen with ties to both Putin and the Bank of Cyprus was “startling”.

“The American public deserve to know the full extent of your connections with Russia and your knowledge of any ties between the Trump administration, Trump campaign or Trump Organization and the Bank of Cyprus,” Booker wrote. “Americans must have confidence that high-level officials in the United States government are not influenced by, or beholden to, any foreign power.”

Among Booker’s list of 11 questions was a demand to know more about if – and when – Ross first learned about Strzhalkovsky’s ties to the KGB, and whether the former KGB official ever met Trump.

Booker also asked Ross whether he had any knowledge about the 2008 purchase of Trump’s Palm Beach home by Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian billionaire and investor in Bank of Cyprus. The beach house was reportedly sold for $95m.

Ross’s nomination to lead the commerce department has so far been relatively uncontroversial, in part because Ross is liked by Democrats and labour unions who credit the private equity investor with saving tens of thousand of jobs in the steel industry after buying up bankrupt steel companies in 2002.

But Ross’s 2014 investment in the Bank of Cyprus has received little public attention amid the broader concerns in Washington over the Trump administration’s potential ties to Russia.

During a nearly four-hour confirmation hearing in January before the Senate commerce committee, Ross was not asked any questions about his involvement in a €400m ($424m) investment in the bank in 2014, which gave Ross’s investment group an 18% stake in the bank.

Ross recruited a high-profile banker with close ties to Russia, former Deutsche Bank chief executive Josef Ackermann, to serve as chairman of the bank. In a 2015 interview with the New York Times, Ackermann suggested his work for the Bank of Cyprus was an effort to “give something back to the people”.

In his letter, Booker asked Ross to explain why he had appointed Ackermann as chairman of the bank, noting that Deutsche Bank is the Trump Organization’s largest creditor.

Ross’s investment followed a controversial 2013 bailout of the bank at the height of the European debt crisis that was agreed by the EU, IMF and European Central Bank. At the time, the deal was scrutinised by German politicians who expressed concern that taxpayer funds were being used to bail out a money laundering haven used by Russian oligarchs. A German intelligence report cited by Der Spiegel at the time suggested that Russian deposits in Cyprus banks were worth between €8 to €35bn ($8.5 to $37bn).

(h/t The Guardian)

Trump on ‘New York Times’: ‘The Intent is So Evil and So Bad’

President Trump got specific in his latest discussion about the “fake news media,” singling out The New York Times for scorn, while heaping praise on Breitbart News and an individual Reuters reporter.

As in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, the president explained that he is not calling all media the “enemy of the American people” during an Oval Office interview with Breitbart Monday. Rather, it is only the “fake media” that he considers the “opposition party.”

“There’s a difference,” Trump said. “The fake media is the enemy of the American people. There’s tremendous fake media out there. Tremendous fake stories. The problem is the people that aren’t involved in the story don’t know that.”

“I didn’t say the media is the enemy — I said the ‘fake media,'” the president explained. “They take the word fake out and all of a sudden it’s like I’m against — there are some great reporters like you. I know some great honorable reporters who do a great job like Steve [Holland] from Reuters, others, many others. I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the ‘fake media,’ where they make up everything there is to make up.”

Trump has included some of the country’s most widely-consumed and well-respected news organizations in his definition of “fake media.” All three major television networks (NBC, ABC and CBS), CNN, MSNBC and The Washington Post are among the outlets Trump has slapped the label on.

But no news media organization has drawn the president’s ire like the Times.

“If you read The New York Times, it’s — the intent is so evil and so bad,” Trump told Breitbart. “The stories are wrong in many cases, but it’s the overall intent.”

Trump cited a May 2016 story titled “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved Badly With Women in Private,” as an example of what he considers bad reporting by the newspaper. One of the women interviewed in the story, Rowanne Brewer Lane, went on cable news after the piece ran to criticize the Times‘ story, saying her words were taken out of context.

“They did a front page article on women talking about me, and the women went absolutely wild because they said that was not what they said,” Trump said. “It was a big front-page article, and the Times wouldn’t even apologize and yet they were wrong. You probably saw the women. They went on television shows and everything.”

The Times stood by the story.

Annonymous sources have been a particular source of consternation for Trump. FactCheck.org points out that the use of unnamed sources has been the subject of ongoing debate within the media. But despite Trump’s tirades against the practice, he has often used anonymous sources himself, according to FactCheck.org.

Citing “oligopolies in the media,” the Breitbart interviewer suggested that Trump might consider blocking the pending merger of AT&T with Time Warner because Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.

“I don’t want to comment on any specific deal, but I do believe there has to be competition in the marketplace and maybe even more so with the media because it would be awfully bad after years if we ended up having one voice out there,” Trump replied.

(h/t USA Today)

Trump Budget May Cut State Department Anti-Semitism Positions

President Trump’s first budget may eliminate special envoy positions at the State Department for combating anti-Semitism, according to a new report.

Trump’s plan may also cut the agency’s diplomatic staff dedicated to addressing climate change and conducting outreach to Muslim communities, Bloomberg said Monday.

Bloomberg said it confirmed the possibility with people familiar with the Trump administration’s plans for State.

Trump is also expected to eliminate one of the agency’s deputy secretary positions and reassign the staff elsewhere, it said.

The role in question oversees State’s management and resources, Bloomberg added, and the agency’s foreign aid is under similar scrutiny for potential cuts.

The administration announced earlier Monday that it is proposing a budget to increase defense spending by $54 billion by reducing spending elsewhere.

Reports emerged the same day Trump is expected to demand major reductions at State and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to fund his defense spending boost.

Trump is reportedly seeking major cuts to the EPA’s climate change programs and foreign aid through State.

Office of Management and Budget officials have not specified where the overall reductions would occur, but reports have said State’s budget could be slashed by up to 30 percent.

The EPA’s reductions are less severe, with as much as 24 percent of its budget possibly getting trimmed.

More than 120 retired generals and admirals urged Congress Monday not to slash funding for State’s diplomacy and foreign aid.

“The State Department, USAID, Millennium Challenge Corporation, Peace Corps and other development agencies are critical to preventing conflict and reducing the need to put our men and women in uniform in harm’s way,” they wrote.

“We urge you to ensure that resources for the international affairs budget keep pace with the growing global threats and opportunities we face. Now is not the time for retreat.”

Monday’s letter included such notable signatories as former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus and former National Security Agency head and retired Gen. Keith Alexander.

Trump has reportedly instructed his Cabinet and administration officials to prepare budget requests for a first outline, expected March 13.

(h/t The Hill)

Trump: ‘Nobody Knew That Healthcare Could Be So Complicated’

President Trump said Monday that “nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated,” as Republicans have been slow to unite around a replacement plan for ObamaCare.

“I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject,” Trump said after a meeting with conservative governors at the White House.

The GOP governors were in town this weekend for their annual conference and met with Trump to talk about a variety of things, but it’s likely the conversation largely focused on healthcare.

Governors have been split on what should be done with ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion, which brought health coverage to many even in deep-red states.

Trump didn’t publicly address that issue Monday morning, but said ObamaCare’s repeal and replacement will give states more flexibility “to make the end result really, really good for them.”

“We have come up with a solution that’s really, really good I think. Very good.”

Trump also dismissed polls that show support for ObamaCare is at an all-time high.

The latest tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that 48 percent view the law favorably compared to the 42 percent who don’t.

“People hate it but now they see that the end is coming and they say, ‘Oh ,maybe we love it.’ There’s nothing to love. It’s a disaster, folks.”

(h/t The Hill)

Trump Rejects Intelligence Research on Muslim Ban

The White House is dismissing a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intelligence report rebuffing President Trump’s claims that citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries pose an increased terror threat, the Wall Street Journal reported late Friday.

“The president asked for an intelligence assessment,” a senior administration official told the Journal. “This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for.”

Trump administration officials claim that the report failed to include available evidence that supports the president’s Jan. 27 order barring citizens from Syria, Iraq, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Sudan and Somalia from entering the U.S.

That executive order was blocked by a federal appeals court earlier this month, and Trump has said he is crafting a new order that can withstand legal muster.

Acting DHS Press Secretary Gillian Christensen also challenged the agency’s report, calling it an “incomplete product.” But she said the administration’s reason for taking issue with it was not political.

“Any suggestion by opponents of the president’s policies that senior [DHS] intelligence officials would politicize this process or a report’s final conclusions is absurd and not factually accurate,” Christensen told the Journal.

“The dispute with this product was over sources and quality, not politics.”

The DHS report came after Trump reportedly asked the department to help bolster his legal case for implementing the controversial travel ban.

But the findings seemed to directly contradict the president’s key argument, saying that an individual’s citizenship is an “unlikely indicator” of the threat they pose to the U.S., according to the Associated Press.

As a presidential candidate, Trump took a hardline stance on terrorism by Islamist extremists, and often contended that the U.S. was too willing to allow people from Muslim-majority countries to enter its borders.

But his efforts to implement a travel ban on certain countries was met with sharp criticism by many, who accused it of being a de facto Muslim ban and a violation of religious freedom protections.

(h/t The Hill)

DOJ Walks Back Guidance Discouraging Use of Private Prisons

The Department of Justice has rescinded guidance from August that discouraged the use of private prisons.

“This will restore (the Bureau of Prison’s) flexibility to manage the federal prison inmate population based on capacity needs,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

In August, then-deputy Attorney General Sally Yates directed the Bureau of Prisons to reduce its use of private prison contracts. In the August memo, she said private prisons had been used to house a prison population that had grown 800% between 1980 and 2013.

But, she said, the population is now on the decline, from 220,000 in 2013 to 195,000 in 2016.

A DOJ official said on background Thursday that the BOP has 12 private prison contracts, housing approximately 21,000 inmates.

In a new memo dated February 21 and released for the first time on Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote that the Yates memo “changed long-standing policy and practice, and impaired the bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.” He directed the bureau to “return to its previous approach.”

“This will restore BOP’s flexibility to manage the federal prison inmate population based on capacity needs,” the Justice Department said in a statement Thursday.

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker was quick to speak out against the change in policy.

“The Trump administration’s decision to reverse course on existing policies designed to gradually end the use of private prisons is a major setback to restoring justice to our criminal justice system,” Booker said in a statement. “The Bureau of Prisons’ own inspector general has found that privately-managed prisons housing federal inmates are less safe and less secure than federal prisons, and these facilities have seen repeated instances of civil rights violations. Attaching a profit motive to imprisonment undermines the cause of justice and fairness.”

(h/t CNN)

Reality

As The Week put it: “Private prisons ultimately pose a greater threat to inmates because of their raison d’être; they exist solely to make a profit off of incarcerated individuals.”

The private prison industry also have contributed big sums to pro-Trump groups, including the organization that raised a record $100 million for his inauguration last month.

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