 Welcome to Hillicon Valley, The Hill's newsletter detailing all you need to know about the tech and cyber news from Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley. Welcome! Follow the cyber team, Olivia Beavers (@olivia_beavers) and Jacqueline Thomsen (@jacq_thomsen), and the tech team, Harper Neidig (@hneidig) and Ali Breland (@alibreland). VOTER FRAUD CLAIMS DOMINATE IN FLORIDA: President Trump on Friday sent a series of tweets alleging voter fraud took place in Florida during the gubernatorial and Senate elections this week, despite Florida law enforcement saying that it hasn’t found any evidence of voter fraud. Trump tweeted late Thursday that law enforcement was examining a "big corruption scandal" regarding "Election Fraud" in two Florida counties that have found themselves at the center of a bitter fight over vote counts in the state's hotly contested Senate race. And he followed it up with claims of voter fraud throughout the day on Friday. Still, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) said Friday that the agency has not launched an investigation into election officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties because it has not found credible allegations of voter fraud. The announcement contrasts from Thursday night, when the agency said that it planned to investigate officials in Broward and Palm Beach after Florida's Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who is running to oust Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), called for a probe into potential election fraud there. "Right now, we’re working with the Department of State and we will investigate if there are any credible allegations of fraud or criminal activity," FDLE spokesperson Gretl Plessinger told The Hill, adding that no such allegations have surfaced yet. Scott requested the investigation in a hastily called news conference Thursday night, in which he announced that his campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) had filed a lawsuit against Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes and Palm Beach Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher. That lawsuit alleges that Snipes's and Bucher's office have withheld crucial information about how many people had voted in their counties and how many ballots they have left to count. The security of U.S. elections was a priority for both federal and state officials after Russia successfully interfered in the 2016 race, but no evidence of meddling has emerged. Officials did say ahead of the election that they believed a false claim of election interference could undermine confidence in voting systems. Experts also told The Hill ahead of the election that Trump’s unfounded claims of voter fraud could also potentially impact voter turnout, or trust in election systems. Keep an eye for how these remaining elections play out, and what the president has to say about the ultimate results.
TOP NSA OFFICIAL SAYS CHINA IS BREAKING ESPIONAGE AGREEMENT: Senior National Security Agency official Rob Joyce said Thursday that he believes China is violating a 2015 agreement with the U.S. to end cyber economic espionage. Then-President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping reached a deal at the time to stop conducting cyber-enabled intellectual property theft. However, Joyce said at the Aspen Institute's Cyber Summit this week that it "is clear they are well beyond the bounds of the agreement today that was forged between our two countries." Joyce, who served in the chief cybersecurity position in the White House before returning to the NSA in April, said he didn’t think reaching the agreement instead of imposing such sanctions against China at the time was a bad idea, noting that it had “a marked effect on how the Chinese were behaving.” But Joyce didn’t rule out the U.S. hitting China with sanctions, adding that he didn’t “think the moment’s passed.” “Certainly sanctions are things we’ve used in context of cyber malfeasance, and we’ll continue to use that along with other capabilities,” Joyce said. Joyce’s comments come shortly after the Trump administration announced a crackdown on Chinese economic espionage. The Justice Department last month unveiled charges against a Chinese state-owned company, a Taiwanese company and three Taiwanese nationals for alleged economic espionage for the Chinese government. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at the time that the Chinese actions pose “a real and illegal threat to our nation’s economic prosperity and competitiveness.” Joyce also said at the event Thursday that while it's "concerning" that Chinese actors have been discovered probing U.S. critical infrastructure, like the power grid, for possible vulnerabilities to exploit, they haven't "transitioned onto the operational technology," which is where, he said, "they really need to be."
Read more here.
RESEARCHERS ACCUSE SPRINT OF THROTTLING SKYPE: Sprint has been throttling data used by Microsoft-owned Skype, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts. The ongoing study uses data from consumers who downloaded the researchers’ Wehe app, which tracks wireless providers practices in the wake of the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules. “In short, net neutrality violations are rampant, and have been since we launched Wehe,” the researchers said. “Taken together, our findings indicate that the openness and fairness properties that led to the Internet's success are at risk in the US." The research found that the rate of throttling was consistent throughout the day and didn’t change based on the location of the user. The 2015 net neutrality rules, which came off the books in June after being repealed by the FCC last year in a party-line vote, prohibited internet service providers from throttling data. The Wehe researchers found that all the providers who had been throttling were doing so while the 2015 rules were still in effect, and that throttling was widespread among wireless providers overall. The researchers noted that Skype relies on Sprint’s data network to reach its customers, but the two companies also directly compete with each other’s telephone services. They added that they could not reproduce the crowd-sourced results when running their own tests on a Sprint data plan, leading them to assume that the throttling was only occurring on certain types of plans.
Read more here.
TEXAS OFFICIAL ACCUSES PROJECT VERITAS OF BREAKING THE LAW: Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group, broke state laws in a recent video it made accusing Texas poll workers of enabling voter fraud, according to local election officials in Texas. In the video, published on Election Day on Tuesday, Project Veritas said it secretly recorded two poll workers in Travis County, Texas, saying that non-citizens could vote. The Project Veritas employee in the video asks the two poll workers whether a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, who she said was her boyfriend, could vote. One poll worker eventually confirms in the video that the non-citizen, if he had registered to vote, would be able to vote. The video prompted an investigation by the Texas attorney general's office, according to the Austin American-Statesman. “This video is a violation of state laws that prohibit use of electronic devices in polling places,” Ronald Morgan, Travis County Deputy Clerk, told The Hill on Thursday. “We referred it to the District Attorney’s office for their review.”
Read more here.
NOTABLE LINKS FROM AROUND THE WEB: Tech CEOs are in love with their principal doomsayer (New York Times) Why millions of Dish Network’s customers have been cut off from HBO (Washington Post) To understand where Silicon Valley went wrong, look at what Vine got right (Vanity Fair) PayPal to cancel accounts of the Proud Boys, antifa groups (The Verge) New York Times uses Google A.I. to analyze 5 million in photo archives (CNET) | 
沒有留言:
張貼留言