The $300 Million Contract Awarded to the Interior Secretary's Friend's Company Is Exempt from Government Audits

The federal government has awarded a tiny Montana company a $300 million no-bid contract to repair Puerto Rico's hurricane-wrecked electrical grid. The company, Whitefish Energy, has close ties to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. A copy of that contract leaked last night, and it seems to prohibit the federal government from auditing Whitefish's work and to shield other details of the company's efforts from being disclosed via open records laws.

"In no event," the contract says, will the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Comptroller General of the United States, "or any of their authorized representatives have the right to audit or review the cost and profit elements" of the deal.

The contract was posted online by Ken Klippenstein, a contributor to The Daily Beast, the first publication to report on the connections between the company and the secretary of the interior.

The leaked document seems to confirm concerns—voiced by lawmakers, pundits, and reform groups—that the Whitefish contract is a lucrative special deal for a friend of a top administration official, and that it places politics ahead of what's in the best interest of Puerto Ricans, many of whom are still without electricity.

Andy Techmanski, owner of Whitefish Energy, is a neighbor and friend of Secretary Zinke, according to multiple news reports. The two men have publicly disclosed their acquaintance. The company has only a handful of employees and is relying almost entirely on subcontractors to do the actual work of restoring power in Peurto Rico.

Members of Congress have called for an investigation into the Whitefish contract. Yesterday members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent a letter to Techmanski seeking copies of all contracts and subcontracts signed by Whitefish as part of its work in Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, members of the House Natural Resources Committee wrote to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) requesting more information about how and why Whitefish was selected for this work.

Separately, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have requested a Government Accountability Office review of the "use of public money to reimburse work completed by Whitefish Energy," according to Reuters.

Prior to landing the contract for repair work in Puerto Rico, Whitefish's largest project had been a $1.3 million deal to rebuild less than 5 miles of electrical lines in Arizona, The Washington Post reported this week. By comparison, there are more than 2,400 miles of transmission lines and 30,000 of distribution electrical lines in Puerto Rico.

The Trump administration and the company itself have offered only the barest of explanations for how a small electrical firm from Montana managed to land a lucrative contract for work in the Caribbean. Both have claimed that the company has experience working in mountain ranges and on rugged terrain and have denied that cronyism played a role in awarding the contract.

"There was no federal involvement," Chris Chiames, a spokesman for Whitefish Energy, told BuzzFeed this week. "There was never any special favors asked, nor would there have been."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is no stranger to fiscal malfeasance, said Friday that it had "significant concerns" about the Whitefish contract. According to The Hill, FEMA denied having signed off on the contract and said details of the contract suggesting as much were inaccurate.

Whether Whitefish gets the job done is supposed to be shrouded in secrecy. The copy of the contract posted by Klippenstein includes a provision prohibiting the government from auditing its work. Another part of the contract says the Puerto Rican government "waives any claim against [Whitefish Energy] related to delayed completion of work."

Until the Trump administration can offer a better explanation for the decision to award a multi-million no-bid contract to a company with close ties to a top administration official, this whole thing smells really bad. The administration sure looks like it's been swallowed by the very swamp it promised to drain.

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China pledges neutrality unless US strikes North Korea first

China’s government says it would remain neutral if North Korea attacks the United States, but warned it would defend its Asian neighbor if the U.S. strikes first and tries to overthrow Kim Jong Un’s regime, Chinese state media said Friday.

“If the U.S. and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime, and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so,” reported the Global Times, a daily Chinese newspaper controlled by the Communist Party.

Meanwhile, other Asia-Pacific countries have come out in support of the United States in the event of a North Korean nuclear attack.

Japan’s defense minister, Itsunori Onodera, said this week that his nation’s military was ready to shoot down North Korean nuclear missiles, if necessary.

In Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull described his country and the U.S. as being “joined at the hip,” the South China Morning Post reported.

“If there is an attack on the U.S., the Anzus Treaty would be invoked,” and Australia would aid the U.S., Turnbull told Australia’s 3AW radio Friday morning. Turnbull was referring to a collective security agreement between the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

The Chinese response to the heightened tensions between the U.S. and North Korea followed a number of hot-headed proclamations.

North Korea has threatened the U.S. with a nuclear attack on Guam, a U.S. territory south of Japan, after President Donald Trump said additional threats against the country or its allies would be met with “fire and fury.”

On Thursday, the president doubled-down on the remarks, saying his original comment possibly “wasn’t tough enough.”

In a separate appearance, Trump added: “Let’s see what [Kim Jong Un] does with Guam. He does something in Guam, it will be an event the likes of which nobody has seen before – what will happen in North Korea.”

One North Korean government official, meanwhile, accused Trump of “going senile,” Fox News reported.

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Donald Trump prepares supporters for worst as Robert Mueller's Russia investigation closes in

Embattled President tells fanbase election hacking conspiracy an establishment fabrication invented to deprive them of their leader of choice

President Donald Trump is again attacking the media on Monday, and his broadsides carry a newly ominous edge: He is both faulting the media for allegedly downplaying the size and intensity of support from his base and accusing them of trying to deliberately weaken that support for him.

7 Aug
Donald J. Trump  ✔ @realDonaldTrump
The Trump base is far bigger & stronger than ever before (despite some phony Fake News polling). Look at rallies in Penn, Iowa, Ohio.......

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Hard to believe that with 24/7 #Fake News on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYTIMES & WAPO, the Trump base is getting stronger!
7:18 AM - Aug 7, 2017
 25,742 25,742 Replies   16,584 16,584 Retweets   69,173 69,173 likes

This comes some 24 hours after Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein made big news by telling Fox News Sunday that if the special counsel finds evidence of crimes in the course of his probe into Russian sabotage of our election, it may be within the scope of his investigation to pursue them.

In these seemingly disparate developments, it is hard not to discern the potential for a volatile, combustible combination.

Because Trump is undermining our democratic norms and processes in so many ways, it is often easy to focus on each of them in isolation, rather than as part of the same larger story. But, taken together, they point to a possible climax in which Trump, cornered by revelations unearthed by Robert S. Mueller III's probe and by ongoing media scrutiny, seeks to rally his supporters behind the idea that this outcome represents not the imposition of accountability by functioning civic institutions, but rather an effort to steal the election from him - and from them.

On ABC's This Week, Trump counsellor Kellyanne Conway on Sunday dismissed the “entire Russia investigation” as a “total fabrication” to “excuse” Hillary Clinton's loss. This echoed Trump himself, who recently told a rally that the probe is an effort to “cheat” his supporters out of their legitimately elected leadership (i.e., him) with a “fake story” that is “demeaning to our country and demeaning to our Constitution.”

It bears repeating that Mueller's investigation is looking at how a hostile foreign power may have sabotaged our democracy, and at whether the Trump campaign colluded with it, and at conduct by Trump himself that came after the election: Whether the firing of former FBI Director James Comey after a demand for his loyalty was part of a pattern of obstruction of justice. The first of these has been attested to by our intelligence services, and evidence of the second (at least in the form of a willingness to collude) and the third of these has been unearthed by dogged scrutiny by news outlets. It is hardly an accident that Trump continues to cast doubt on the credibility of both those institutions, even as he and his spokespeople continue to cast the entire affair as an effort to reverse the election by illegitimate means.

This threatens damage on multiple levels. By casting the entire Russia story as fiction, Trump seeks to undermine the credibility of efforts to determine how our electoral system might be vulnerable to further attacks, separate and irrespective of what is learned about the Trump campaign's conduct, possibly making it less likely that we secure our system against any such future sabotage.

We don't know what all the ongoing scrutiny will produce in the way of revelations. But if it does produce any serious wrongdoing by Trump and/or his campaign - or even evidence of serious misconduct that is not criminal - it's not difficult to imagine what might happen next. Trump's advisers regularly tell us he will cooperate with Mueller's probe and play down the possibility of any effort to remove the special counsel. But Trump has confirmed that he is furious with his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for failing to protect him from Mueller's probe. That Trump confirmed this publicly only further underscores that he has zero sense of any obligation to the public to follow any rules of conduct, and plainly views any efforts to hold him accountable to those rules as illegitimate.

Conservative writer Matt Lewis floats a scenario in which Mueller, under pressure to produce results, slips into prosecutorial overreach, giving Trump voters legitimate reasons to feel that the presidency is being stolen from them. It is fair to worry about such an outcome, and we must remember that we are far from knowing the full truth about what happened in 2016. But it's also easy to envision the flip side: Trump demagoguing his supporters into a frenzy of rage, at rallies that are exactly like the ones we've seen in recent days, in the face of legitimate revelations.

To be sure, there are new signs that Republicans in Congress are taking steps to set up safeguards, should Trump try to remove Mueller. There is reassuring evidence that our institutions are holding - for now, anyway - and as Brian Beutler notes in The New Republic, it's likely that more future revelations about Trump's unfitness for the presidency will further undercut his efforts to cast institutions holding him accountable as illegitimate. But Trump is already giving every indication that he will go all out in trying. And how much damage that will cause is anyone's guess.

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U.S. government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections

The Obama administration on Friday officially accused Russia of attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections, including by hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations.

The denunciation, made by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, came as pressure was growing from within the administration and some lawmakers to publicly name Moscow and hold it accountable for actions apparently aimed at sowing discord around the election.

“The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations,” said a joint statement from the two agencies. “. . . These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”

The public finger-pointing was welcomed by senior Democratic and Republican lawmakers, who also said they now expect the administration to move to punish the Kremlin as part of an effort to deter further acts by its hackers.

“Today was just the first step,” said Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), a member of the Homeland Security Committee. “Russia must face serious consequences. Moscow orchestrated these hacks because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin believes Soviet-style aggression is worth it. The United States must upend Putin’s calculus with a strong diplomatic, political, ­cyber and economic response.”

The White House has been mulling potential responses, such as economic sanctions, but no formal recommendation to the president has been made.

The DNC publicly disclosed the intrusions in June, saying its investigation determined that Russian government hackers were behind the breach. That was followed shortly after by a major leak of DNC emails, some so embarrassing that they forced the resignation of the DNC chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

The administration also blamed Moscow for the hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the subsequent leak of private email addresses and cellphone numbers of Democratic lawmakers.

Other leaks of hacked material followed.

The digitally purloined material has appeared on websites such as DC Leaks and WikiLeaks. It has included the private emails of former secretary of state Colin Powell and aides to former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

An online persona calling himself Guccifer 2.0 has claimed responsibility for posting the material. Those sites and that persona are “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts,” the joint statement said. “. . . We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

The Kremlin on Friday dismissed the administration’s accusation.

“This is some sort of nonsense,” said Dmitry Peskov, press secretary for Putin. “Every day, Putin’s site gets attacked by tens of thousands of hackers. Many of these attacks can be traced to U.S. territory. It’s not as though we accuse the White House or Langley of doing it each time it happens.”

Hours after the administration called out Russia, WikiLeaks released some 2,000 emails apparently hacked from the personal Gmail inbox of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. They included excerpts of speeches Clinton made to Wall Street banks that she had resisted making public. In one of them, she said that Wall Street knew best how it should be regulated. The campaign has not acknowledged the excerpts’ authenticity. There was no immediate word from the FBI as to whether the Russians were behind this release.

The Obama administration noted that attempts to interfere in other countries’ political processes are not new to Moscow. Russian hackers have used hacking and other techniques to influence public opinion in Europe and Eurasia, it noted. On the eve of a critical post-revolution presidential vote in Ukraine in 2014, for instance, a digital assault nearly crippled the website of the country’s central election commission.

The intelligence community has for weeks been confident that hackers tied to Russian spy agencies were behind the DNC hack. Senior officials at the Justice Department and DHS pressed the White House to go public with an accusation.

But a number of administration officials were worried that such a statement would appear to politicize the issue in the weeks before the election. They were also concerned about the Kremlin’s reaction and about inadvertently disclosing sensitive intelligence sources and methods.

“Is it in our interest to act?” Lisa O. Monaco, Obama’s adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, said at a Washington Post cybersecurity summit Thursday. “The primary guiding and overarching focus in these discussions is: What is in the national security interest of the United States? That’s the North Star for those discussions.”

Senior administration officials in recent weeks had begun to hint that a public attribution might be coming.

“We know Russia is a bad actor in cyberspace, just as China has been, just as Iran has been,” ­Monaco said at a cybersecurity conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last month. “Nobody should think that there is a free pass when you’re conducting malicious cyber-activity.”

Assistant Attorney General John Carlin said at the same event that the message to countries, such as Russia, that attempt to meddle in the U.S. election is, “You can and will be held accountable.”

With the public naming of Moscow, the administration has now officially called out all its major nation-state foes in cyberspace: China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. But among the four, Russia is the only government that has not been subject to a deterrent measure.

The administration has a range of options, including economic sanctions for malicious cyber-activity, a new tool created by the president that has yet to be used. The Justice Department could bring indictments for hacking. The National Security Agency could take a covert action in cyberspace to send a signal to the Kremlin. Or the State Department can decide to eject Russian diplomats.

Jason Healey, a senior research scholar on cyber-issues at Columbia University, said the Pentagon’s Cyber Command should disrupt Russian hacking operations. “Go after their command and control,” he said. “ ‘Counteroffensive’ is the key word here.”

Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, urged the administration to work with European allies to develop a “concerted” response, whether it involves economic sanctions or other measures.

“The best way to push back,” Schiff said, “is in a truly international effort to let the Russians know there will be costs to this latest form of cyber-aggression against others.”

David Filipov contributed to this report.

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EXCLUSIVE: Woman held in psych ward over Obama Twitter claim

#IMNOTCRAZY!

A Long Island woman’s insistence that President Obama follows her on Twitter made doctors at the Harlem Hospital psych ward think she was delusional and suffering from bipolar disorder — but she was actually telling the truth, a lawsuit charges.

Kam Brock’s frightening eight-day “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” ordeal at the mental facility included forced injections of powerful sedatives and demands she down doses of lithium, medical records obtained through her suit filed in Manhattan Federal Court show.

They also indicate that doctors didn’t believe the leader of the free world followed her on Twitter — though @BarackObama follows over 640,000 accounts, including hers. They were also skeptical she worked at a bank, records show.

“I told (the doctor) Obama follows me on Twitter to show her the type of person I am. I’m a good person, a positive person. Obama follows positive people!” Brock, whose Twitter handle is @AkilahBrock, said.

A “master treatment plan” from Harlem Hospital backs up the Astoria Bank worker’s story.

“Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and will state that Obama is not following her on Twitter,” the document reads.

It also notes “patient’s weaknesses: inability to test reality, unemployment.”

Adding insult to insanity, the hospital hit Brock with a bill of $13,637.10, she charges in her suit seeking unspecified damages.

The bizarre experience began Sept. 12, when the NYPD seized her prized 2003 BMW 325Ci in Harlem because they suspected she was high on weed, her attorney, Michael Lamonsoff, said. Cops found no marijuana but confiscated her ride anyway, he said. The NYPD declined to comment.

The following day, Brock walked into the NYPD’s Public Service Area 6 stationhouse in Harlem to retrieve her car, her suit charges.

Brock — an eccentric 32-year-old born in Jamaica with dreams of making it big in the entertainment business — admitted in an interview she was “emotional,” but insisted she in no way is an “emotionally disturbed person.”

Nevertheless, cops cuffed her and put her in an ambulance bound for the hospital, her suit charges.

“Next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out,” Brock said, tearing up. “I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.”

Lamonsoff said race may have been a factor in the way Brock was treated.

“How would you act if you were being told you were crazy?” he said.

For eight days, she attended group therapy, endured injections of sedatives, and took lorazepam and lithium, medical records show, according to Lamonsoff.

Obama follows more than 640,000 accounts on Twitter.
POOL/REUTERS

Obama follows more than 640,000 accounts on Twitter.

When she was finally let go, the doctors didn’t tell her why she was being allowed to leave, Brock said.

Harlem Hospital declined to comment. The city Law Department said the suit would be reviewed.

As Brock wages her court battle, she had one wish. “Follow me on Twitter! Like Obama does!” she said.

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Trump & GOP Panic As Obama Launches Plan To Make 8 Million Immigrants Eligible To Vote

Immigration and the 11 million undocumented folks living in the United States have been catapulted to the forefront of American politics and have become the over-hyped, fabricated non-problem of the day. Donald Trump launched his campaign for president by spewing hateful rhetoric about “Mexican rapists” and scapegoating minorities in a shameful appeal to the Republican Party’s xenophobic, racist base. While the move may have allowed Trump to skyrocket to number one in the polls, it 

prompted millions of Americans with an undocumented immigrant family member to start looking for ways to push back against the right-wing hate that has been the focal point of the race for the White House; luckily for us, President Obama is stepping in and has sent a resounding message of support to legal American immigrants and a firm rebuke of Trump’s divisive rabble-rousing.

On Thursday, the White House announced plans to help the 8.8 million legal immigrants in the country to become American citizens. The  “Stand Stronger” Citizenship Awareness Campaign will be a multifaceted effort to change their immigration status so that they can fight back against the GOP hate in voting booths.

The outreach program will include a number of new ways to help the immigrants who want to become citizens. It includes:

• allow naturalization fees to be paid by credit card
• online civics practice tests
• a mobile citizenship class locator, including where to find English classes
• four prominent new Americans and children of immigrants as Presidential Ambassadors for Citizenship and Naturalization.
• expand the availability of pro-bono legal services to eligible legal immigrants

The pro-bono legal service expansion is huge. Contrary to popular Republican belief, the road to citizenship is not only difficult, but is costs thousands of dollars — and that’s before attorney fees. For this reason many immigrants receive their “green card” and never become full-fledged American citizens- many of them just cannot afford it. Pro-bono legal services will help millions of people who do not have the money to pay a lawyer who will help them navigate the bumpy road to citizenship.

While the Obama Administration is not necessarily saying this new push for citizenship is a partisan effort, it almost certainly is. Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy professor at the University of California, explained why:

“Anytime there’s a major push for naturalization by the White House … especially when a Democratic administration does it, there’s always the allegation that this is an attempt to try to get more Democratic voters.”

The Republican Party is terrified of millions of new citizens, because they know that Latinos vote for Democratic candidates in much higher numbers (2-1) than they vote for GOP candidates. The reason Hispanic voters are not fond of the right-wing isn’t that difficult to figure out- just take a look at Donald Trump. However, the New York billionaire isn’t the first member of his party to use immigrants as his personal punching bag, the GOP has been doing it for years; but the rhetoric is especially vile and inflammatory this campaign season and has prompted widespread condemnation and outrage across the country. The easiest way to fight against hate is at the polls and that’s what they are going to do.

Tara Raghuveer, the policy and advocacy director at the National Partnership for New Americans, one of the community partners working with the White House to promote citizenship, said her organization is encouraging people to become citizens “specifically in response to all the hate we’ve been seeing on a national stage about immigration recently.”

She added, “We’re telling people to naturalize now; we’ve had enough of this anti-immigrant rhetoric, and it’s time for us to step up.”

It is unlikely that there will suddenly be more than eight million new voters in time for the next election, but it could have an effect on long-term public policy. Manuel Pastor, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration told NPR that after California passed the anti-immigrant Prop 187 in the 1990s, naturalization rates increased dramatically.

This push for citizenship is an amazing move by President Obama. He is going to help millions of people protect themselves against the vitriolic, anti-immigrant Republican Party, who would love nothing more than to rip millions of families apart. The GOP should be absolutely terrified, in order to win a presidential election they need more than 40 percent of the Latino vote to win; Mitt Romney only received 23 percent and he was far less hateful than Trump. Imagine what would happen if there are 8 million new voters in the next decade, 5.4 million of them Latino? The Republican Party will never see the inside of the White House again.

Watch President Obama’s first “Stand Stronger” initiative video:

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F.C.C. Net Neutrality Rules Clear Hurdle as Republicans Concede to Obama

Photo

Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said that Democrats were lining up with President Obama in favor of the F.C.C. position on net neutrality. Credit Jabin Botsford/The New York Time

WASHINGTON — Senior Republicans conceded on Tuesday that the grueling fight with President Obama over the regulation of Internet service appears over, with the president and an army of Internet activists victorious.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected on Thursday to approve regulating Internet service like a public utility, prohibiting companies from paying for faster lanes on the Internet. While the two Democratic commissioners are negotiating over technical details, they are widely expected to side with the Democratic chairman, Tom Wheeler, against the two Republican commissioners.

And Republicans on Capitol Hill, who once criticized the plan as “Obamacare for the Internet,” now say they are unlikely to pass a legislative response that would undo perhaps the biggest policy shift since the Internet became a reality.

“We’re not going to get a signed bill that doesn’t have Democrats’ support,” said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. “This is an issue that needs to have bipartisan support.”

The new F.C.C. rules are still likely to be tied up in a protracted court fight with the cable companies and Internet service providers that oppose it, and they could be overturned in the future by a Republican-leaning commission. But for now, Congress’s hands appear to be tied.

The F.C.C. plan would let the agency regulate Internet access as if it is a public good. It would follow the concept known as net neutrality or an open Internet, banning so-called paid prioritization — or fast lanes — for willing Internet content providers.

In addition, it would ban the intentional slowing of the Internet for companies that refuse to pay broadband providers. The plan would also give the F.C.C. the power to step in if unforeseen impediments are thrown up by the handful of giant companies that run many of the country’s broadband and wireless networks.

Republicans hoped to pre-empt the F.C.C. vote with legislation, but Senate Democrats insisted on waiting until after Thursday’s F.C.C. vote before even beginning to talk about legislation for an open Internet. Even Mr. Thune, the architect of draft legislation to override the F.C.C., said Democrats had stalled what momentum he could muster.

And an avalanche of support for Mr. Wheeler’s plan — driven by Internet companies as varied as Netflix, Twitter, Mozilla and Etsy — has swamped Washington.

“We’ve been outspent, outlobbied. We were going up against the second-biggest corporate lobby in D.C., and it looks like we’ve won,” said Dave Steer, director of advocacy for the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit technology foundation that runs Firefox, a popular Web browser, referring to the cable companies. “A year ago today, we did not think we would be in this spot.”

The net neutrality movement pitted new media against old and may well have revolutionized notions of corporate social responsibility and activism. Top-down decisions by executives investing in or divesting themselves of resources, paying lobbyists and buying advertisements were upended by the mobilization of Internet customers and users.

“We don’t have an army of lobbyists to deploy. We don’t have financial resources to throw around,” said Liba Rubenstein, director of social impact and public policy at the social media company Tumblr, which is owned by Yahoo, the large Internet company, but operated independently on the issue. “What we do have is access to an incredibly engaged, incredibly passionate user base, and we can give folks the tools to respond.”

Internet service providers say heavy-handed regulation of the Internet will diminish their profitability and crush investment to expand and speed up Internet access. It could even open the web to taxation to pay for new regulators.

Brian Dietz, a spokesman for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, said the pro-net-neutrality advocates turned a complex and technical debate over how best to keep the Internet operating most efficiently into a matter of religion. The forces for stronger regulation, he said, became viewed as for the Internet. Those opposed to the regulation were viewed as against the Internet.

The Internet companies, he said, sometimes mislead their customers, and in some cases, are misled on the intricacies of the policy.

“Many of the things they have said just belie reality and common sense,” he said.

In April, a dozen New York-based Internet companies gathered at Tumblr’s headquarters in the Flatiron district to hear dire warnings that broadband providers were about to obtain the right to charge for the fastest speeds on the web.

The implication: If they did not pony up, they would be stuck in the slow lane.

What followed was the longest, most sustained campaign of Internet activism in history. A swarm of small players, like Tumblr, Etsy, BoingBoing and Reddit, overwhelmed the giants of the broadband world, Comcast, Verizon Communications and Time Warner Cable. Two of the biggest players on the Internet, Amazon and Google, largely stayed in the background, while smaller participants — some household names like Twitter and Netflix, others far more obscure, like Chess.com and Urban Dictionary — mobilized a grass-roots crusade.

“Our community is the source of our power,” said Althea Erickson, director of public policy at Etsy, an online craft market, where users embroidered pillows and engraved spoons promoting net neutrality.

In mid-October, the tech activist group Fight for the Future acquired the direct telephone numbers of about 30 F.C.C. officials, circumventing the agency’s switchboard to send calls directly to policy makers. That set off a torrent of more than 55,000 phone calls until the group turned off the spigot on Dec. 3.

In November, President Obama cited “almost four million public comments” when he publicly pressured the F.C.C. to turn away from its paid “fast lane” proposal and embrace a new regulatory regime.

Since then, the lobbying has grown only more intense. Last week, 102 Internet companies wrote to the F.C.C. to say the threat of Internet service providers “abusing their gatekeeper power to impose tolls and discriminate against competitive companies is the real threat to our future,” not “heavy-handed regulation” and possible taxation, as conservatives in Washington say.

Republicans have grown much quieter under the barrage.

“Tech companies would be better served to work with Congress on clear rules for the road. The thing that they’re buying into right now is a lot of legal uncertainty,” said Mr. Thune. “I’m not sure exactly what their thinking is.”

Mr. Thune said he was still willing to work with Democrats on legislation that he said would do what the F.C.C. is trying to accomplish, without a heavy regulatory hand: Ban paid “fast lanes” and stop intentional slowdowns — or “throttling” — by broadband companies seeking payment from Internet content providers.

But even he said Democrats were ready to let the F.C.C. do the job.

 
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Net Neutrality: What You Need to Know Now

What happened?

In May 2014, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler released a plan that would have allowed companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to discriminate online and create pay-to-play fast lanes.

Millions of you spoke out — and fought back.

Thanks to the huge public and political outcry, Wheeler shelved his original proposal, and on Feb. 4, 2015, he announced that he will base new Net Neutrality rules on Title II of the Communications Act, giving Internet users the strongest protections possible.

The FCC will vote on Wheeler’s proposal at its Feb. 26 meeting. If all goes well, it will be a watershed victory for activists who have fought for a decade to protect the open Internet.

What is Net Neutrality?

Net Neutrality is the Internet’s guiding principle: It preserves our right to communicate freely online. This is the definition of an open Internet.

 

Net Neutrality means an Internet that enables and protects free speech. It means that Internet service providers should provide us with open networks — and should not block or discriminate against any applications or content that ride over those networks. Just as your phone company shouldn't decide who you can call and what you say on that call, your ISP shouldn't be concerned with the content you view or post online.

 

Without Net Neutrality, cable and phone companies could carve the Internet into fast and slow lanes. An ISP could slow down its competitors' content or block political opinions it disagreed with. ISPs could charge extra fees to the few content companies that could afford to pay for preferential treatment — relegating everyone else to a slower tier of service. This would destroy the open Internet.

 

What was the FCC’s ‘Open Internet Order’?

The FCC’s 2010 order was intended to prevent broadband Internet service providers from blocking or interfering with traffic on the Web. The Open Internet Order was generally designed to ensure the Internet remained a level playing field for all — that's the principle we call Net Neutrality (we say “generally,” since the FCC’s rules prohibited wired ISPs from blocking and discriminating against content, while allowing wireless ISPs to discriminate against but not block websites).

 

In its January 2014 ruling, the court said that the FCC used a questionable legal framework to craft the Open Internet Order and lacked the authority to implement and enforce those rules.

 

Did the court rule against Net Neutrality? 

No. The court ruled against the FCC's ability to enforce Net Neutrality under the shaky legal foundation it established for those rules. The court specifically stated that its “task as a reviewing court is not to assess the wisdom of the Open Internet Order regulations, but rather to determine whether the Commission has demonstrated that the regulations fall within the scope of its statutory grant of authority.”

 

When the FCC made its open Internet rule, it relied on two decisions made by the Bush-era FCC, rulings that weakened the FCC’s authority over broadband Internet access network providers. There is nothing in the January court decision that prohibits the FCC from reversing those misguided decisions and reclassifying ISPs as common carriers.

 

In fact, both this decision and a prior Supreme Court decision clearly establish that the FCC must reclassify broadband if it wishes to prohibit practices like blocking websites or discriminating against apps.

 

What does ‘reclassify’ mean? 

When Congress enacted the 1996 Telecommunications Act, it didn’t want the FCC to treat websites and other Internet services the same way it treats the local access networks that enable people to get online. Congress understood that the owners of the access networks have tremendous gatekeeper power, and so it required the FCC to treat these network owners as “common carriers,” meaning they couldn’t block or discriminate against the content that flows across their networks to/from your computer.

 

However, in a series of politically motivated decisions first by FCC Chairman Michael Powell (now the cable industry’s top lobbyist) and then by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, the FCC decided to classify broadband Internet access service as an “information service,” meaning that the law sees it as no different from a website like freepress.net or an online service like LexisNexis. These decisions removed the FCC’s ability to prohibit ISPs from blocking or discriminating against online content (it also removed the FCC’s ability to ensure that ISPs protect your privacy). 

 

In Verizon vs. FCC, the court stated that the FCC lacks authority because of “the Commission’s still-binding decision to classify broadband providers not as providers of ‘telecommunications services’ but instead as providers of ‘information services.’” 

 

The FCC is free to revisit those prior classification decisions. If the FCC votes to define broadband as what we all know it is — a connection to the outside world that is merely faster than the phone lines we used to use for dial-up access, phone calls and faxes — then it can “reclassify” the transmission component of an ISP’s service back under the law as a “telecommunications service.”

 

Doing so would give the FCC authority to adopt Net Neutrality rules and/or intervene if ISPs harm the open Internet through discriminatory practices.

 

What has the FCC proposed for a vote?

Chairman Wheeler plans to introduce “the strongest open Internet protections ever proposed by the FCC” for a vote on Feb. 26. Wheeler's rules, based on Title II of the Communications Act, will ban throttling, blocking and paid prioritization.

 

While the public hasn't yet seen the full text of Wheeler’s proposal, early press reports and the chairman’s own comments look promising.  

 

Why is Net Neutrality important for businesses?

Net Neutrality is crucial for small business owners, startups and entrepreneurs, who rely on the open Internet to launch their businesses, create a market, advertise their products and services, and distribute products to customers. We need the open Internet to foster job growth, competition and innovation.

Net Neutrality lowers the barriers of entry for entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses by ensuring the Web is a fair and level playing field. It’s because of Net Neutrality that small businesses and entrepreneurs have been able to thrive on the Internet. They use the Internet to reach new customers and showcase their goods, applications and services.
No company should be able to interfere with this open marketplace. ISPs are by definition the gatekeepers to the Internet, and without Net Neutrality, they will seize every possible opportunity to profit from that gatekeeper control.
Without Net Neutrality, the next Google being built in a garage somewhere will never get off the ground.

Why is Net Neutrality important for communities of color?

The open Internet allows communities of color to tell their own stories and to organize for racial and social justice in the digital age.

The mainstream media have often failed to allow people of color to speak for themselves. And thanks to economic inequality and runaway media consolidation, people of color own just a handful of broadcast stations. The lack of diverse ownership is a primary reason why the media have gotten away with portraying communities of color stereotypically.

The open Internet gives marginalized voices an opportunity to be heard. But without Net Neutrality, ISPs can block unpopular speech and prevent dissident voices from speaking freely online. Without Net Neutrality, people of color will lose a vital platform to shape debates on issues that impact their communities’ well-being.

And without Net Neutrality, millions of small businesses owned by people of color won't be able to compete against larger corporations online, which will further deepen the economic inequality in our nation’s most vulnerable communities.

So what can we do now?

On Feb. 26, the FCC will vote on rules that use Title II to protect real Net Neutrality. If all goes well, it will be a watershed victory for activists who have fought for a decade to protect the open Internet.
Unfortunately, the cable and phone companies are doing everything they can to weaken these rules before the vote. And members of Congress are also trying to stop the FCC.
Go here to find out how you can help.

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Obama Urges F.C.C. to Adopt Strict Rules on Net Neutrality

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday put the full weight of his administration behind an open and free Internet, calling for a strict policy of so-called net neutrality and formally opposing deals in which content providers like Netflix would pay huge sums to broadband companies for faster access to their customers.

The president’s proposal is consistent with his longstanding support for rules that seek to prevent cable and telephone companies from providing special access to some content providers. But the statement posted online Monday, as Mr. Obama traveled to Asia, is the most direct effort by the president to influence the debate about the Internet’s future.

In the statement, and a video on the White House website, Mr. Obama urged the Federal Communications Commission to adopt the strictest set of neutrality rules possible and to treat consumer broadband service as a public utility, similar to telephone or power companies.

Continue reading the main story

Related Coverage

• Times Topics: Net Neutrality

“We cannot allow Internet service providers to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas,” Mr. Obama wrote in the statement.

The F.C.C. is an independent agency not subject to Mr. Obama’s direct authority. But the president is adding his voice to the 3.7 million people who submitted comments to the agency, most on behalf of a free and open Internet in which broadband companies could not pick which content would arrive quickly and which would be slowed down.

Mr. Obama said that new rules under consideration by the F.C.C. should adhere to several key principles: No website or service should be blocked by an Internet service provider; no content should be purposefully slowed down or sped up; there should be more transparency about where traffic is routed; and no paid deals should be made to provide a speed advantage to some providers over others in delivering content.

Continue reading the main story

• Obama for Net NeutralityNOV. 10, 2014

That last principle would directly affect some of the megadeals already being made by companies like Netflix, whose video streaming service has been gobbling up bandwidth and slowing down the Internet as millions of people attempt to watch movies and television shows on their computers and tablets.

Earlier this year, Netflix struck a deal with Comcast under which it pays Comcast for a direct connection into its broadband network so subscribers experience less delay in viewing Netflix’s streaming video.

Mr. Obama said he opposed such deals and urged the commission to adopt rules that would prevent them.

“Simply put: No service should be stuck in a ‘slow lane' because it does not pay a fee,” Mr. Obama wrote. “That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth. So, as I have before, I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction that has a similar effect.”

Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, on Monday said he welcomed the president’s input and said he agreed that the Internet should remain free and open. But he did not say whether he would fully support reclassifying broadband as a utility. He did say, however, that the F.C.C. would need more time to formulate its rules, meaning that a proposal was unlikely to come by the end of the year.

Mr. Wheeler had most recently been leaning toward a hybrid approach to net neutrality, one that would keep a light touch on the consumer end of Internet service but that would apply the more strict Title II oversight to the relationship between an Internet service provider and content companies.

“Whether in the context of a hybrid or reclassification approach,” he said, “Title II brings with it policy issues that run the gamut from privacy to universal service to the ability of federal agencies to protect consumers, as well as legal issues ranging from the ability of Title II to cover mobile services to the concept of applying forbearance on services under Title II.”

Recent Comments

JD

9 minutes ago

Obama would like to preventFast Web access being for rentHe wants net neutralityBut knows in realityProviders will not be content.

michjas

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During open season, the health care site would benefit from more speed. Generally speaking, high traffic sites need more broadband speed...

Paul

9 minutes ago

To all those kvetching about Obama coming late to this game, late to making such a strong statement about this issue, after much of the...

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“We found we would need more time to examine these to ensure that whatever approach is taken, it can withstand any legal challenges it may face,” he said.

Reaction from some of the biggest broadband companies was swift and negative. Shares of some of the big broadband providers, including Comcast and Time Warner Cable, were down about 3 percent on Monday morning.

Verizon, which brought the court challenge that struck down the F.C.C.'s 2010 rules on net neutrality, called Mr. Obama’s proposal “a radical reversal of course that would in and of itself threaten great harm to the Internet.”

Both Verizon, which provides both wired and wireless broadband services, and CTIA-The Wireless Association, the leading mobile phone association, also decried Mr. Obama’s call to apply net neutrality rules to wireless broadband.

“Imposing antiquated common carrier regulation, or Title II, on the vibrant mobile wireless ecosystem would be a gross overreaction,” said Meredith Attwell Baker, president and chief executive of the trade association and a former Republican commissioner for the F.C.C.

Such action “would impose inappropriate regulation on a dynamic industry and would threaten mobile providers’ ability to invest and innovate, all to the detriment of consumers,” she said.

Consumers groups hailed the president’s statement. Gene Kimmelman, president of Public Knowledge, said: “Today the Obama administration expanded its leadership to promote an open Internet by supporting the strongest tools to prevent blocking or throttling of Internet traffic, and by also supporting the strongest tools to deter fast lanes and prioritized traffic on the public’s most essential communications platform of the 21st century.”

Video

Play Video|2:53

How Net Neutrality Works

The future of protecting an open Internet has been the subject of fierce debate, and potential changes to the rules by the Federal Communications Commission could impact your online experience.

Video by Natalia V. Osipova and Carrie Halperin on Publish Date May 15, 2014.
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Obama’s Effort to Train Syrian Rebels to Fight ISIS Won’t Work: CIA

President Obama on Tuesday told coalition military officials from around the world that they’ve had some “important successes” against ISIS, though they face a long-term campaign with many ups and downs.

There are 60 countries in all taking part in in the U.S.-led efforts to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the ISIS terrorists who have overrun large sections of northern Iraq and Syria since last summer. So far, the campaign has been very much a mixed bag, “with the Islamic State losing control of territory in some places while making gains in other,” reported The Washington Post.

Related: The Merger of ISIS and al-Qaeda Could Cripple the Civilized World

The campaign will have “periods of progress and setbacks,” Obama said during Tuesday’s meeting of top military officials from the U.S. and 21 other countries during a strategy session at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

Yet a couple of new reports from The New York Times suggests that Obama’s overall strategy for ultimately toppling the Islamic jihadist organization may be highly flawed – and that the U.S. may face even more formidable challenges from ISIS than it thought:

First, an internal CIA study strongly suggests the president’s plan to train moderate Syrian rebels to fight ISIS likely will not work and is just the latest of many failed efforts by the U.S. to arm and train foreign forces to combat American enemies. The report, which is still classified, was commissioned in 2012 and 2013, when the Obama administration was deliberating about whether to intervene in the Syrian civil war against President Bashar al-Assad.

The CIA study, presented in the White House Situation Room, documented a sorry rate of success in these tactics throughout the CIA’s “67-year history – from Angola to Nicaragua to Cuba,” said The Times. Arguably the biggest fiasco was the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba ordered by President John F. Kennedy, in which CIA-trained Cuban guerrillas mounted a doomed invasion to fight Fidel Castro’s forces. And President Ronald Reagan suffered a major humiliation in the 1980s when the CIA tried and failed to topple Nicaragua’s Sandinista government by secretly supporting the contra rebels.

After nixing airstrikes on the Assad regime, Obama in April 2013 authorized the CIA to begin a program to arm and train moderate rebels at a base in Jordan. Obama recently decided to expand that mission with a much larger base in Saudi Arabia to train “vetted” rebels to fight ISIS in Syria.

Obama has been adamant about not deploying U.S. ground troops to Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS – so-called “boots on the ground” -- and insists it’s up to the Iraqi Army and moderate Syrian rebels to take on that onerous assignment. But the study found that the CIA was “even less effective when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground,” said The Times. The only exception was “when the CIA helped arm and train mujahedeen rebels fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan during the 1980s.”Read More >>

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