Michael McLaughlin

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.

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.

Policymakers should seek to maximize the benefits of Internet openness while maintaining carefully designed guardrails that reduce the Internet’s most clearly harmful uses.

While law enforcement needs tools to protect the public, requiring companies to provide access to encrypted consumer data would have the unintended consequence of putting vulnerable populations at risk without solving law enforcement’s most significant challenges in using digital evidence.

The UK currently has many advantages in developing and using AI, but as Michael McLaughlin writes for SC Magazine, it will fall behind if it doesn’t take the right steps to secure its AI leadership.

Growing animus toward “Big Tech” companies and generalized opposition to technological innovation engenders support for policies that are expressly designed to inhibit it. That is deeply problematic for future progress, prosperity, and competitiveness.

The California State Senate is considering a bill to make it illegal for law enforcement to use facial recognition technology in officer-worn body cameras. The bill, AB 1215, has passed the State Assembly. It should not pass the Senate because it is based on a number of fallacies concerning facial recognition technology and would undermine beneficial uses of it by law enforcement.

As Daniel Castro and Michael McLaughlin write for Irish Tech News, the European Union needs a plan to stay competitive in artificial intelligence after Brexit.

The United States leads the race for global advantage in artificial intelligence, at least for the time being, with China coming in second and the EU lagging behind. But China is poised to challenge U.S. dominance in coming years as it undertakes bold AI initiatives.