industryterm:nonpartisan

Facebook & Russian election meddling: The FEC’s Ann Ravel sounded the alarm in 2015 — Quartz
▻https://qz.com/1076964/this-us-official-warned-about-russia-using-the-internet-to-skew-us-elections-yea
►https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/ap_358110062825-e1508362801776.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=16

In October 2014, vice commissioner Ann M. Ravel wrote a statement (pdf) accusing the FEC of turning a “blind eye” to the growing force of the internet in politics, and explaining the reason she and two of her co-commissioners, all Democrats, had voted for more disclosure of funding of political material on the web:

Some of my colleagues seem to believe that the same political message that would require disclosure if run on television should be categorically exempt from the same requirements when placed on the internet alone. As a matter of policy, this simply does not make sense. … This effort to protect individual bloggers and online commentators has been stretched to cover slickly produced ads aired solely on the internet but paid for by the same organizations and the same large contributors as the actual ads aired on TV.

The FEC had just undertaken a vote on the topic that ended in a deadlock, with three Republicans voting against their Democratic colleagues, a common impasse in the increasingly dysfunctional agency tasked with keeping US elections fair and transparent. Nonetheless, Ravel’s statement sparked outcry and anger, especially from conservatives who equated money spent on political advertising on the internet to “free speech”—the same argument that won the landmark 2010 “Citizens United” Supreme Court case, sending a torrent of cash into political elections.

A day after Ravel published her statement, co-commissioner Lee Goodman, a Republican, appeared on Fox & Friends (video) to warn that the three Democrats wanted to censor free speech online, and set up a “regulatory regime” that would reach deep into the internet. “Boy, I thought Democrats were for free speech,” commentated the Fox anchor interviewing him, Tucker Carlson. “That was obviously an earlier species.”

Ravel says Goodman’s Fox appearance unleashed a torrent of abuse. The issue was picked up by Drudge Report, Breitbart, and other right-wing news sites, which singled her out. Responses poured in from Twitter and e-mail, ranging from death threats to misogyny, everything from “stick it up your c-nt,” she recalled this week, to “You’re the kind of person the Second Amendment was made for.” They also included “Hope you have a heart attack,” and “You will more than likely find the ‘Nazi’ scenario showing its ugly head,” the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan group that investigates democracy, reported (Ravel is Jewish).

Despite the backlash to her 2014 push to get Facebook and other internet companies to be more transparent about where their ad revenue was coming from, Ravel kept pursuing the issue. In 2015, the FEC grappled with the topic of how to make sure foreign money wasn’t being used to pay for political advertisements on the internet, a clear violation of a federal law.

In doing so, Ravel even anticipated Putin’s influence. “I mean, think of it, do we want Vladimir Putin or drug cartels to be influencing American elections?” Ravel asked in an October of 2015 meeting, while pushing for the commission to require state and local campaigns to declare foreign contributions. The commission tried once again to hash out what was “local” or “national” given the internet’s global reach.

#Publicité #Politique #USA #Régulation #Menaces

Goodnight Democracy: How Big Money Bought Our Democracy, Children’s-Book Style
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/goodnight-democracy-how-big-money-bought-our-democracy-childrensbook

Remember Goodnight Moon, the children’s book about a young rabbit going to bed?

Rootstrikers, a nonpartisan network of activists seeking to get money out of politics, put together their...

Intelligence contractors donate millions to intelligence watchdogs in Congress
▻http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/09/13959/intelligence-contractors-donate-millions-intelligence-watchdogs-con

According to a new report, however, every single one of those lawmakers has received campaign funds from twenty of the largest contractors providing intelligence services to the Defense Department, which accounted for a signficant portion of the nation’s overall $75.4 billion intelligence budget in 2012.

The total, election-related benefits for current intelligence committee members, including ex-officio members, provided by companies in the industry they directly oversee amount to at least $3.7 million from the companies’ PACs and employees since 2005, according to the report released Dec. 9 by Maplight.org, a nonpartisan group that investigates campaign finance issues.

(...)

In 2007, 70 percent of the overall intelligence budget went to contractors, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but the number of contractors providing core services to the intelligence community has declined by about a third since then. A Senate intelligence committee report in March said that after some recent cutbacks, the intelligence contracting workforce “continues to grow.”

The issue of whether the contractor donations have any impact on the committees’ oversight functions is pertinent because so much of the committees’ authority is exercised behind closed doors. The Senate Intelligence Committee lists 56 hearings this year on its website, but only three were open to the public. Similarly, the House Intelligence Committee has had fewer than 10 open hearings this year.

The committees are “supposed to be exercising check and balances,” but they haven’t, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. He noted that in the aftermath of Snowden’s disclosures, for example, the intelligence committees have been “generally supportive” of the intelligence community, while the House and Senate Judiciary committees “have been quite critical on a bipartisan basis.”

“It says something about the character of the intelligence committees,” Aftergood said.

Spokesmen for the two intelligence committees, asked by phone and e-mail whether the campaign donations to their members influenced their work, declined to comment. Mikulski, Langevin, and LoBiondo also did not respond to requests for comment.

Technology in Schools Faces Questions on Value - NYTimes.com
►https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/technology/technology-in-schools-faces-questions-on-value.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1

“Rather than being a cure-all or silver bullet, one-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring — for better or worse,” wrote Bryan Goodwin, spokesman for Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning, a nonpartisan group that did the study, in an essay. Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.

Kyrene, which serves 18,000 kindergarten to eighth-grade students, mostly from the cities of Tempe, Phoenix and Chandler, uses its computer-centric classes as a way to attract children from around the region, shoring up enrollment as its local student population shrinks. More students mean more state dollars.

The issue of tech investment will reach a critical point in November. The district plans to go back to local voters for approval of $46.3 million more in taxes over seven years to allow it to keep investing in technology. That represents around 3.5 percent of the district’s annual spending, five times what it spends on textbooks.