Tech insiders are urging Congress and the White House to take a stronger stand against strict Chinese regulations on technology.
China has imposed new procurement rules there require government agencies to purchase equipment only from businesses that develop and register their intellectual property patents locally.
But that policy -- referred to as "indigenous innovation" -- essentially prevents U.S. and other international firms from selling countless tech goods to the Chinese government, the state's biggest purchaser, according to insiders.
In response, a handful of trade groups are now petitioning the White House, members of Congress and the Chinese government to relax its unprecedented intellectual property rules, with mixed success.
Their goal is to elevate the issue's importance ahead of China's upcoming strategic economic meeting with the United States next month, explained Michael Dabbs, director of government relations at the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC), which is part of that effort. Read more...
The White House is offering to share Republicans' healthcare alternative on its website before the two sides sit down Thursday for their bipartisan summit later this week.
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs made the political overture during his press briefing on Monday, telling reporters he would be "happy to post" the GOP plan next to the proposal President Barack Obama unveiled and published online earlier in the day.
Gibbs said that arrangement would ensure the "American people can come to one location and find out the parameters of what will largely be discussed on Thursday."
"The process started today, with our posting of ideas," Gibbs said, noting the White House had created a new healthcare Web page on Monday in preparation for Thursday's healthcare summit, which will be televised on C-SPAN.
"We hope it continues before Thursday," Gibbs continued, "with Republicans putting out their ideas ..."
The White House's offer on Monday could be characterized as an aggressive political move, given the criticisms Democrats have long levied at GOP lawmakers on healthcare.
Many in the majority party have railed on Republicans for failing to offer their own, viable healthcare alternative. That is to some degree a misstatement, as House GOP members did offer a less-expansive bill last year that would have cost the federal government less money but insured fewer Americans. At the same time, a few individual Republicans have spearheaded their own healthcare reform legislation.
But the Republican Party has not exactly rallied around one single, unified healthcare proposal — a fact the White House might be trying to highlight with its offer to post an alternative bill or guiding policy document on its website this week.
(Update, 3:20p.m.) However, Republicans quickly took issue with the White House latest line.
House Republican Leader John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office urged Gibbs instead to "talk with his boss," who only last month discussed healthcare reform with the chamber's GOP members at their annual retreat.
"Our health care alternative – the full text of the legislation – has been available at healthcare.gop.gov for months, which President Obama knows, since he discussed it with us in Baltimore a few weeks ago,” spokesman Michael Steele said.
The White House launched a new section of its website on Monday to highlight its healthcare plan.
After releasing the outline of its own healthcare reform proposal this morning, the White House laid out how and where visitors could learn about and engage the new proposal.
Federal investigators believe a Chinese man with government ties authored a substantial portion of the software used in a January cyberattack on Google and other U.S. businesses.
According to reports, the man shared the malicious code on a hacking forum as a work in progress, though he did not launch the attack himself.
However, it remains unclear who, exactly, spearheaded that cyber assault, which targeted users' online passwords and human rights activists' bank accounts.
But federal investigators did tell reporters that Chinese officials had "special access" to the code author in question. They did not clarify, though, how they discovered that link, or how significant the relationship was.
"If he wants to do the research he's good at, he has to toe the line now and again," a U.S. official told reporters about the hacker.
"He would rather not have uniformed guys looking over his shoulder, but there is no way anyone of his skill level can get away from that kind of thing," the official continued. "The state has privileged access to these researchers' work."
Ultimately, the hacker's relationship to the Chinese government is just one of many unanswered questions stemming from the coordinated January 12 cyberattack.
So far, investigators with the National Security Agency (NSA) have traced the incident to two prominent schools in China, one of which U.S. officials said had close ties to the military. However, both schools denied those allegations this weekend.
My interview with Kyle McSlarrow, head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, aired tonight on C-SPAN. Here's a clip of his reaction to Google's broadband experiment and his thoughts on what it means for the cable industry.
"They're not planning on turning themselves into an internet provider. It's an experiment," he said.
"We make available today... much more than a gigabit of capacity of data. we're using it for high speed Internet, a lot of video, phone and other interactive services....but over time... as demand calls for it, we can start switching more and more capacity to the Internet side," he said. "We're already rolling out the fastest national broadband plan in America. That's not an announcement. That's real world, today."
Federal prosecutors are demanding documents from one Pennsylvania school district that allegedly used a remote-controlled laptop camera to spy on a student.
A grand jury issued that subpoena to Lower Merion School District officials on Friday, requiring administrators to explain in detail how that controversial security system works, according to media reports.
Ultimately, the official request arrives in response to last week's news that school officials had recently activated a camera on one of those laptops to snap a photo of an unsuspecting high school student.
The security technology installed in Lower Merion's school-issued computers permits administrators to activate cameras remotely, primarily as a way to ensure the laptops are not stolen.
Technicians said they have activated the technology 42 times this year to take photos of suspects believed to be damaging laptops or otherwise committing wrongdoing, and they did so again last month in the case of a 15-year-old Harriton High School student.
Instead, they captured a photo of the student engaging in "improper activity" -- drug use, administrators believed, though that later turned out not to be the case, the family said.
The student and his parents have since sought redress in federal court, lambasting school officials for never informing them about the security features installed in their own laptops.
So far, district administrators have mostly defended the technology, though they did admit to the Philadelphia Inquirer on Saturday that some change to the policy was necessary.
"There is an essential need to clarify the procedures and specify the process of what should happen," Merion district spokesman Douglas Young told reporters.
The Gates Family Foundation – arguably the biggest charity in the world
with assets over $35 billion according to 2008 records – is in the
crosshairs of Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), who
see it as a money pot to help pay for a legislative fix for the estate
tax.
Well-placed sources say the senators might create a “toll
charge” on charitable foundations that would sock Democratic
heavyweights like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.
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