Month: July 2017

Twitter has made it clear that it won’t ban Donald Trump from its service, whether the president follows its rules against harassment or not.

 That’s no surprise: The president’s tweets draw attention to the struggling service, even if tweets mocking reporters and rivals undercut Twitter’s stated commitment to make the service a welcoming place.

 The company has been cracking down on accounts that violate its terms, and Trump’s critics say he has broken Twitter’s rules multiple times.

 Calls to ban Trump from Twitter, largely by liberal activists, writers and Twitter users, sounded even before he became president. They were renewed recently when the president posted a mock video of him “body slamming” a man whose face was covered by CNN logo. Groups such as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press condemned the video as a threat against journalists (a White House aide said at the time that the tweet should not be seen as a threat).

The case for Trump

Twitter does ban harassment and hateful conduct, but there is a lot of wiggle room as to what constitutes such behavior. For instance, though it may be crude to tweet that a TV host was “bleeding badly from a face-lift,” they are at best in a gray area when it comes to violating Twitter terms.

When asked about Trump, Twitter says it doesn’t comment on individual accounts. But CEO Jack Dorsey told NBC in May that it’s “really important to hear directly from leadership” to hold people accountable and have conversations out in the open, not behind closed doors.

 It also makes business sense: Trump’s tweets are constantly in headlines, calling attention to Twitter and, ideally, getting more users to sign up.

 For now, it doesn’t appear to be helping. On Thursday, Twitter said its monthly average user base in the April-June quarter grew 5 percent from the previous year to 328 million, but it was unchanged from the previous quarter. Twitter’s stock fell more than 9 percent to $17.75 in pre-market trading Thursday after the numbers came out.

Twitter has never turned a profit. On Thursday, the San Francisco-based company reported a second-quarter loss of $116 million, or 16 cents per share, compared with a loss of $107 million, or 15 cents per share, a year earlier.

Revenue declined 5 percent to $574 million from $602 million, inching past Wall Street’s muted expectations.

Important tweets

Free speech advocates agree it’s better for Trump to stay.

Emma Llanso, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Free Expression Project, said Trump’s tweets are “very clearly politically relevant speech” and are even being cited in court cases challenging the president’s policies. For example, a U.S. appeals court used Trump’s tweets in June to block his travel ban on people from six predominantly Muslim countries.

Llanso said it’s understandable why there has been “so much pressure” on social media platforms to crack down on harassment. Long before Trump was elected, users and online safety advocates called on Twitter to do something about abuse on its service.

But when it comes to the president’s outsized presence on Twitter, she’d rather have a private company avoid deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed. Rather, she said, “we should be looking to the instruments of our democracy as the appropriate place to hold the president accountable.”

Surviving the crackdown

Twitter appears to agree. Earlier this month, the company announced that it is now taking some action, including suspensions, on 10 times the number of abusive accounts than it did a year ago (though it did not give a number). Trump, of course, was not in trouble.

In June, the president defended his use of social media, tweeting that the mainstream media doesn’t want him to get his “honest and unfiltered message out.” The White House did not immediately respond to a message for comment on Thursday morning.

It works both ways

Twitter provides a platform for the president to interact with the world directly, without intermediaries such as the news media. But if it’s important for people to hear directly from Trump, free speech advocates say, it’s also important for Trump to listen – and to allow people to see his messages.

His blocking of individual users on the service is the subject of a lawsuit .

Comedian Dana Goldberg, who says she has been blocked by the president but is not part of the lawsuit, likened it to him “giving the State of the Union and blocking out the TV sets of people who voted for (Hillary) Clinton.”

Her offense? Goldberg, who has about 7,680 followers compared with Trump’s 34.6 million, said it was her tweet calling Trump “a sad man” after he wished Sen. John McCain well following a cancer diagnosis, despite deriding McCain’s war record before.

“The fact that I was blocked by the president of the United States, it’s insane,” she said.

 
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A construction permit should be granted for a giant telescope planned for a Hawaii mountain summit that some consider sacred, a hearings officer recommended Wednesday.

Retired judge Riki May Amano, who is overseeing contested-case hearings for the Thirty Meter Telescope, had been weighing facts in the case since June, after hearing oftentimes emotional testimony that spanned 44 days.

The $1.4 billion project has divided those who believe the telescope will desecrate land atop Mauna Kea held sacred by some Native Hawaiians and those who believe it will provide Hawaii with economic and educational opportunities.

Many more hurdles

This isn’t the final say on whether the embattled project will proceed.

Now that Amano has issued her proposed decision and order, the state land board will set a deadline for telescope opponents and permit applicants to file arguments against her recommendations. The board will later hold a hearing and then make the final decision on the project’s conservation district use permit.

Gov. David Ige said his office was reviewing the conditions Amano put on her recommendation, including that employees attend mandatory cultural and natural resources training and that employment opportunities be filled locally “to the greatest extent possible.”

“Regardless of the (land board’s) ultimate decision, I support the co-existence of astronomy and culture on Mauna Kea along with better management of the mountain,” Ige said in a statement.

This second round of contested-case hearings was necessary after the state Supreme Court invalidated an earlier permit issued by the board.

The telescope’s board of directors held public meetings before selecting Mauna Kea as the preferred site in 2009. In 2011, opponents requested so-called contested-case hearings before the state land board approved a permit to build on conservation land. The hearings were held, and the permit was upheld. Opponents then sued. In December 2015, the state Supreme Court revoked the permit, ruling the land board’s approval process was flawed. That meant the application process needed to be redone, requiring a new hearing.

‘Far from done’

Telescope officials didn’t immediately comment on Amano’s recommendation. They have said they plan to build it in the Canary Islands if they can’t build in Hawaii.

Kealoha Pisciotta, one of the leaders fighting against the telescope, said she’s disappointed but not surprised.

“They’re far from done,” she said. “They still have to go before the board. We still have the right of appeal — before anyone can even begin to contemplate any action or earth-moving on Mauna Kea.”
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The U.S. Transportation Security Administration is boosting security measures by requiring any carry-on electronics larger than a cellphone to be screened separately at U.S. airports.

Security officers will ask travelers to take all larger devices out of their bags and put them in a bin by themselves, similar to the screening of most travelers’ laptops, TSA announced Wednesday.

‘An increased threat’

TSA cited an “an increased threat to aviation security” as the reason for the move. The change will not apply to PreCheck lanes.

The new rule eliminates one benefit of leaving laptops at home and traveling with a tablet. In the past, travelers weren’t required to fish out those smaller  electronics from their carry-on bags to be X-rayed.  

In May, the TSA said it was going to test additional screening measures for tablets at 10 U.S. airports. That pilot program was successful and the agency said it planned to expand the rules nationwide “during the weeks and months ahead.”

Worried about laptops

Airlines for America, a trade group representing American, Alaska, Atlas, Federal Express, Hawaiian JetBlue, Southwest, United and UPS airlines “remain committed to working collaboratively with DHS officials to strike the appropriate balance of maintaining the efficiency of the system, while ensuring the highest levels of security are in place.”

The threat of terrorists hiding explosives in laptops prompted the Department of Homeland Security in March to ban electronics larger than cellphones in carry-on bags on direct flights of nine airlines at 10 Middle East airports to the U.S.  That ban has since been lifted as each of the airlines tightened its screening.

John Kelly, the secretary of Department of Homeland Security, then announced tighter security for all 180 airlines flying directly to the U.S. from 280 airports worldwide. The measures that went into effect July 19 applied to 325,000 passengers on 2,000 daily flights.
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Against a backdrop of cyberattacks that have grown into full-fledged sabotage, Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos is bringing a new message to hackers and security experts at the Black Hat conference.

In short: It’s time for hackers once known for relatively harmless mischief to shoulder responsibility for helping detect and prevent major attacks.

The Black Hat security gathering, starting Wednesday in Las Vegas, follows a series of attacks and data breaches that have paralyzed hospitals, disrupted commerce, caused blackouts and interfered with national elections.

Stamos, a keynote speaker, is calling for more emphasis on defense — and basic digital hygiene — over the thrilling hunt for undiscovered vulnerabilities.

Stamos joined Facebook from Yahoo, which last year disclosed breaches of more than a billion user accounts.
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Facebook Inc (FB.O) will provide initial funding for a nonprofit organization that aims to help protect political parties, voting systems and information providers from hackers and propaganda attacks, the world’s largest social network said on Wednesday.

The initiative, dubbed Defending Digital Democracy, is led by the former campaign chairs for Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Mitt Romney, and will initially be based at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, which announced the project last week.

Facebook said it hoped additional participants would turn it into a freestanding information-sharing center controlled by its members. Facebook, with 2 billion monthly users, bills itself as a vehicle for political debate and education, but was also used as a major platform to spread fake news and propaganda during the U.S. presidential race.

Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos announced the company’s backing at the opening of the Black Hat information security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday. The event, named after the term for malicious hackers, is aimed mainly at corporate and government security professionals.

Stamos declined to say how much money the Facebook would spend.

“Right now we are the founding sponsor, but we are in discussions with other tech organizations,” Stamos said in an interview before the speech. “The goal for our money specifically is to help build a standalone ISAO (Information Sharing and Analysis Organization) that pulls in all the different groups that have some kind of vulnerability.”

The project will be managed by Eric Rosenbach, a former assistant secretary of defense who is co-director of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

“Most campaigns don’t have the tools right now to defend themselves from cyber attacks,” Clinton campaign chair Robby Mook said in an email. “Our initiative aims to fill that void and to help both Democratic and Republican campaigns defend themselves with greater information-sharing and security tools.”

“This is a forward-looking and bipartisan effort to tackle a real problem,” said 2012 Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades in an email.

Stamos also urged Black Hat attendees, many of whom are leery of government intrusion, to be more open-minded about helping law enforcement track criminals and terrorists.

Unthinking rejection of official requests could lead to legislation forcing companies to break their own encryption, Stamos warned.

Stamos said he would continue to argue against such steps.

“We’re not going to be effective unless we demonstrate that we have the same goals,” he said. “I want to present our position that strong cryptography is a critical part of building a safe, trustworthy future.”

 
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