On Monday, President Donald Trump signed a congressional resolution to overturn internet privacy protections adopted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under President Barack Obama. Broadband internet service providers will now remain authorized to track and sell customers’ online data without obtaining explicit consent from consumers—a practice that Obama’s policy would have blocked had it taken effect in December 2017 as planned. Trump’s move honors longstanding Republican opposition to the Obama-era rules, approved in October, which would have applied to providers like Verizon and Comcast but not internet companies like Google and Facebook, which are regulated by the Federal Trade [...]
Intelligence controversies moved center stage in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s presidency and through its first months in office. As both president-elect and president, Trump accused the U.S. intelligence community, and the CIA in particular, of politicizing intelligence by leaking reports about investigations of contacts between his campaign advisers and Russian officials. Yet, Trump’s first appointment was a politician to head the Central Intelligence Agency—Mike Pompeo, a Republican congressman. Pompeo was clearly brainy enough for the job, having graduated first in his class at West Point and earned a law degree from Harvard University. Critics wondered, though, whether Pompeo, a [...]
Last week, The New York Times reported that the United States had secretly stepped up cyber attacks against North Korea’s missile program during President Barack Obama’s second term. The attacks were initially a success, according to the Times. “Soon a large number of the North’s military rockets began to explode, veer off course, disintegrate in midair and plunge into the sea.” Whether or not a series of test failures in recent years were the direct result of U.S. cyber interference, as the Times suggested, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is a prominent target for U.S. cyber warfare—and President Donald Trump [...]
