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The Trump administration on Thursday announced that the U.S. will now officially act to deter and respond to cyberattacks with offensive actions against foreign adversaries. The U.S.'s new cyber strategy, signed by President Trump and now in effect, marks the federal government officially taking a more aggressive approach to cyber threats presented from across the globe.
Although science may seem to be underappreciated in D.C., demand in the federal government for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) expertise remains high. Each September since 1973, the Science & Technology Policy Fellowships program has responded to this pressing need by bringing scientists and engineers to Washington for a yearlong placement.
Twitter shares fell 6 percent Wednesday as CEO Jack Dorsey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. Dorsey testified alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg about election meddling and abuse on their platforms. Google was also invited to testify, but the tech giant declined to send its CEO or parent company Alphabet's CEO.
Chairman Pai published a wide-ranging blog post on Medium Tuesday that discussed social media giants’ role in privacy and censorship ahead of Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey’s hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s hearing on Wednesday.
A Chinese electronics company called Hikvision, partly owned by the Communist government, was one of several such firms banned from working for the U.S. government under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed into law by President Trump on Monday. Hikvision is reportedly assembling a powerhouse team of Washington lobbyists to fight back, a battle that pits the Chinese and American models of politicized economics against each other on America’s home turf.
China's Communist Party is intensifying covert influence operations in the United States that include funding Washington think tanks and coercing Chinese Americans, according to a congressional commission report. The influence operations are conducted by the United Front Work Department, a Central Committee organ that employs tens of thousands of operatives who seek to use both overt and covert operations to promote Communist Party policies.
John Holdren, Obama’s science adviser, called him “a very good pick.” Climate scientists such as Katherine Hayhoe and Judith Curry have expressed their approval. It’s rare we see Myron Ebell, who headed the EPA transition team, and Rush Holt, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in emphatic agreement.
China’s complaints about the act come as the world’s two biggest economies engage in an increasingly bitter fight over trade, levying tariffs on each others’ products. U.S. President Donald Trump signed a $716-billion defense policy act on Monday that authorizes military spending and waters down controls on U.S. government contracts with China’s ZTE Corp and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd .
To help community colleges make technology upgrades that will help them deliver cybersecurity education, the U.S. Department of Education has been allotted $1 million in an omnibus spending law, H.R. 1625, approved by Congress earlier this year.
The Senate approved the compromise fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in a 87-10 vote, sending it to Trump’s desk for his expected signature and keeping it on track to become law before the start of the fiscal year for the first time since the fiscal 1997 bill.