Tag Archives: Regulations

Anatomy of an oversight investigation: White House security clearances

Posted on August 29, 2019 by | Leave a comment

By Isabella Gelfand and Jackson Gode – Since regaining the majority in January, House Democrats have been conducting oversight of the Trump administration on issues ranging from family separation at the border to the rollback of environmental regulations. While the policy areas addressed by these investigations are diverse, House committees often apply the same tools to perform oversight. As Congress attempts to exert influence on the White House in hopes of obtaining information, Trump administration officials continue to utilize several tactics of their own to stall the process.

As part of its mandate to conduct oversight of “the operation of Government activities at all levels,” the House Oversight and Reform Committee is frequently engaged in conflicts with the executive branch over information access. One such clash during the 116th Congress has involved the White House security clearance process, which came under fire when media reports indicated that the administration allowed individuals to operate under interim security clearances for extended periods and ignored concerns raised by intelligence officials. Here, we outline the ongoing security clearance investigation and use it to highlight a set of common steps in the oversight process.

When conducting oversight, members of Congress have several tools at their disposal. Most notably, they can request documents, call witnesses to testify, issue subpoenas, and hold individuals in contempt of Congress for noncompliance. Oversight investigations are often initiated by an official request for information, usually in the form of a letter written by a committee chair to an executive branch official. The chair uses this correspondence to ask for documents and/or to invite a witness to give testimony before the committee. more>

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How European telcos are monitoring our online activity

Posted on May 30, 2019 by | Leave a comment

The security and privacy of personal data are being jeopardized as Deep Packet Inspection is deployed by internet service providers.
By Katherine Barnett – Europe has not escaped the global move towards ‘surveillance capitalism’. Numerous pieces of legislation are under consideration which put online freedoms and privacy at risk—the UK’s Online Harms white paper is just one example.

The European Digital Rights (EDRi) organization recently discovered that European telcos were monitoring internet connections and traffic through a technique known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).

European telcos have so far escaped penalization for their use of DPI, on the grounds that it counts as ‘traffic management’. Under current net-neutrality law, it is technically allowed for purposes of network optimization—but its use for commercial or surveillance purposes is banned.

In January, however, the EDRi produced a report, outlining how as many as 186 European ISPs had been violating this constraint, using DPI to affect the pricing of certain data packages and to slow down internet services running over-capacity. Alongside 45 other NGOs and academics, it is pushing for the use of DPI to be terminated, having sent an open letter to EU authorities warning of the dangers.

Deep Packet Inspection is a method of inspecting traffic sent across a user’s network. It allows an ISP to see the contents of unencrypted data packets and grants it the ability to reroute or block traffic.

Data packets sent over a network are conventionally filtered by examining the ‘header’ of each packet, meaning the content of data traveling over the network remains private. They work like letters, with simple packet filtering allowing ISPs to see only the ‘address’ on the envelope but not the contents.

DPI however gives ISPs the ability to ‘open the envelope’ and view the contents of data packets. It can also be used to block or completely reroute data.

Regulators have so far turned a blind eye to this blatant disregard for net-neutrality law and telcos are pushing for DPI to be fully legalized.

This sparks major concerns about user privacy and security, as DPI renders visible all unencrypted data sent across a user’s connection, allowing ISPs to see browsing activity. more>

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Updates from Chicago Booth

Posted on February 19, 2019 by | Leave a comment

What causes stock market crashes, from Shanghai to Wall Street
By Michael Maiello – The Shanghai Stock Exchange reached a historic peak in June 2015, and then plunged, losing almost 40 percent of its value in a month. This crash of the world’s second-largest stock market evoked comparisons to the 1929 Wall Street collapse, and provided a laboratory for testing an enduring explanation of its causes.

It has long been theorized that the 1929 crash reflected “leverage-induced fire sales,” according to University of International Business and Economics’ Jiangze Bian, Chicago Booth’s Zhiguo He, Yale’s Kelly Shue, and Tsinghua University’s Hao Zhou. They acknowledge that the theory has been well-developed to explain how excessive leverage makes investors sell in emergency conditions, accelerating market crashes. But they suggest that, until now, the empirical research has been lacking—and the China crash finally offers empirical evidence.

The researchers analyzed account-level data for hundreds of thousands of investors in China’s stock market. Because leverage was introduced in mainland China only in 2010, Bian, He, Shue, and Zhou were able to examine the implications of leverage-limiting regulations imposed in this decade. During the first half of 2015, there were two sources of leverage for Chinese investors—regulated brokerage houses and nonregulated online lending platforms. The latter, along with other nonbank lenders such as trust companies, formed the shadow-banking industry in China. The researchers thus studied the effects of each type of borrowing. more>

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Updates from ITU

Posted on January 10, 2019 by | Leave a comment

ITU brings new clarity to 5G transport
ITU – 2018 has seen the launch of a major ITU drive to define the requirements of IMT-2020/5G systems as they relate to transport networks, the extremely high-capacity optical networks that form the ‘backbone’ of the ICT ecosystem.

These 5G transport projects have built strong momentum, drawing on the expertise of a wide range of working groups within ITU’s standardization expert group for ‘transport, access and home’, ITU-T Study Group 15.

The baseline for this work was established in February 2018 with the release of an influential ITU Technical Report placing emerging 5G radio requirements in the context of their demands on transport networks.

The second version of this Technical Report was agreed in October 2018. Download the report… more>

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The Wounds Won’t Heal

Posted on October 11, 2018 by | Leave a comment

By David French – We usually place outsized emphasis on elections that define our politics and too little emphasis on the values that define our culture.

But it was the nomination of Kavanaugh and the wrenching debate about core cultural and constitutional values that dominated American discourse these past few weeks. It’s a debate that illustrated the fundamentally different ways in which conservatives and progressives view the world, and it unlocked not just an intellectual response but an emotional response that has radicalized otherwise reasonable and temperamentally moderate individuals into believing that the other side hates even the good people in their own tribe.

And so when Ford came forward, it’s as if her allegations landed in two different countries. The good-faith residents of Redworld were skeptical and said, “Prove it.” The good-faith residents of Blueworld believed Ford and said, “Finally, she has a chance for justice.” The presumptions were diametrically opposite, and everything that followed turned on those different presumptions. more>

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The Tragedy of the Commons: How Elinor Ostrom Solved One of Life’s Greatest Dilemmas

Posted on October 2, 2018 by | Leave a comment

By David Sloan Wilson – As an evolutionary biologist who received my PhD in 1975, I grew up with Garrett Hardin’s essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in Science magazine in 1968. His parable of villagers adding too many cows to their common pasture captured the essence of the problem that my thesis research was designed to solve.

The farmer who added an extra cow gained an advantage over other farmers in his village but it also led to an overgrazed pasture. The biological world is full of similar examples in which individuals who behave for the good of their groups lose out in the struggle for existence with more self-serving individuals, resulting in overexploited resources and other tragedies of non-cooperation.

Is the so-called tragedy of the commons ever averted in the biological world and might this possibility provide solutions for our own species?

Evolutionary theory’s individualistic turn coincided with individualistic turns in other areas of thought. Economics in the postwar decades was dominated by rational choice theory, which used individual self-interest as a grand explanatory principle. The social sciences were dominated by a position known as methodological individualism, which treated all social phenomena as reducible to individual-level phenomena, as if groups were not legitimate units of analysis in their own right. And UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became notorious for saying during a speech in 1987 that “there is no such thing as society; only individuals and families.” It was as if the entire culture had become individualistic and the formal scientific theories were obediently following suit. more>

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Posted in Book review, Business, Economic development, Economy, Education, History, Leadership, Media, Net, Regulations, Science, Technology

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Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?

Posted on August 2, 2018 by | Leave a comment

By Annie Lowrey – Stock buybacks are eating the world. The once illegal practice of companies purchasing their own shares is pulling money away from employee compensation, research and development, and other corporate priorities—with potentially sweeping effects on business dynamism, income and wealth inequality, working-class economic stagnation, and the country’s growth rate. Evidence for that conclusion comes from a new report by Irene Tung of the National Employment Law Project (NELP) and Katy Milani of the Roosevelt Institute, who looked at share buybacks in the restaurant, retail, and food industries from 2015 to 2017.

Buybacks occur when a company takes profits, cash reserves, or borrowed money to purchase its own shares on the public markets, a practice barred until the Ronald Reagan administration.

The regulatory argument against allowing the practice is that it is a way for companies to manipulate the markets; the regulatory argument for it is that companies should be able to spend money how they see fit.

In recent years, with corporate profits high, American firms have bought their own stocks with extraordinary zeal.

Federal Reserve data show that buybacks are now equivalent to 4 percent of annual economic output, up from zero percent in the 1990s. Companies spent roughly $7 trillion on their own shares from 2004 to 2014, and have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on buybacks in the past six months alone. more>

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How to govern AI to make it a force for good

Posted on July 26, 2018 by | Leave a comment

In the interview, Gasser identifies three things policymakers and regulators should consider when developing strategies for dealing with emerging technologies like AI.
Urs Gasser – “Everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence and its many different applications, whether it’s self-driving cars or personal assistance on the cell phone or AI in health,” he says. “It raises all sorts of governance questions, questions about how these technologies should be regulated to mitigate some of the risks but also, of course, to embrace the opportunities.”

One of the largest challenges to AI is its complexity, which results in a divide between the knowledge of technologists and that of the policymakers and regulators tasked to address it, Gasser says.

“There is actually a relatively small group of people who understand the technology, and there are potentially a very large population affected by the technology,” he says.

This information asymmetry requires a concerted effort to increase education and awareness, he says.

“How do we train the next generation of leaders who are fluent enough to speak both languages and understand engineering enough as well as the world policy and law enough and ethics, importantly, to make these decisions about governance of AI?”

Another challenge is to ensure that new technologies benefit all people in the same way, Gasser says.

Increasing inclusivity requires efforts on the infrastructural level to expand connectivity and also on the data level to provide a “data commons” that is representative of all people, he says. more>

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Guidelines to Achieve Digital Transformation

Posted on July 12, 2018 by | Leave a comment

GSR-18 BEST PRACTICE GUIDELINES ON NEW REGULATORY FRONTIERS TO ACHIEVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
itu.int – Digitization is increasingly and fundamentally changing societies and economies and disrupting many sectors in what has been termed the 4th Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, ICT regulation has evolved globally over the past ten years and has experienced steady transformation.

As regulators, we need to keep pace with advances in technology, address the new regulatory frontiers and create the foundation upon which digital transformation can achieve its full potential. Being prepared for digital transformation and emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine to Machine communications (M2M) and 5G is fundamental.

Advances in technology are creating new social phenomena and business models that impact every aspect of our personal and professional lives – and which challenge regulatory paradigms. M2M, cloud computing, 5G, AI and IoT are all bringing further profound change. Recognizing the potential of emerging technologies and the impact that policy and regulatory frameworks can have on their success, regulators should encourage a regulatory paradigm pushing frontiers and enabling the digital transformation. more> draft doc (pdf)

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Why The Only Answer Is To Break Up The Biggest Wall Street Banks

Posted on June 7, 2018 by | Leave a comment

By Robert Reich – Glass-Steagall’s key principle was to keep risky assets away from insured deposits. It worked well for more than half century. Then Wall Street saw opportunities to make lots of money by betting on stocks, bonds, and derivatives (bets on bets) – and in 1999 persuaded Bill Clinton and a Republican congress to repeal it.

Nine years later, Wall Street had to be bailed out, and millions of Americans lost their savings, their jobs, and their homes.

Why didn’t America simply reinstate Glass-Steagall after the last financial crisis? Because too much money was at stake. Wall Street was intent on keeping the door open to making bets with commercial deposits. So instead of Glass-Steagall, we got the Volcker Rule – almost 300 pages of regulatory mumbo-jumbo, riddled with exemptions and loopholes.

Now those loopholes and exemptions are about to get even bigger, until they swallow up the Volcker Rule altogether. If the latest proposal goes through, we’ll be nearly back to where we were before the crash of 2008. more>

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