Publications: Michael McLaughlin

The United States still holds a substantial overall lead in AI, but China has continued to reduce the gap in some important areas and the EU continues to fall behind.

Citizens and businesses rely on government websites to access important information and services. Unfortunately, many Colombian government websites fail to meet basic website standards for security, speed, mobile friendliness, and accessibility.

As China emerges as a global economic and technological leader, what threats do its products pose to U.S. national security?

FedRAMP—the government program that sets standards for assessing, authorizing, and monitoring the security of cloud systems—can significantly improve. Absent reform, it will hamper agencies’ adoption of cloud services.

The advocacy group’s annual report on Internet and digital media freedom is more polemic than dispassionate analysis. The State Department should stop funding it unless it focuses on true violations of Internet freedom, such as political persecution.

Lawmakers have taken several positive steps in recent years to balance the benefits of data collection with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties. That should continue.

ITIF tested the page load speed, mobile-friendliness, and accessibility of all 50 state unemployment websites using publicly available tools. The results show that many of these sites are not just ill-suited to handle significant rises in traffic, but also poorly designed.

In a joint Assembly hearing, ITIF testified on the benefits of facial recognition technology, existing protection from abuses, what the state can do to improve oversight and accountability, and why it should not impose a ban.

A close look at data from a new NIST report reveals that the best facial recognition algorithms in the world are highly accurate and have vanishingly small differences in their rates of false-positive or false-negative readings across demographic groups.