“Amazon said President Trump exerted ‘improper pressure’ on the Pentagon to keep a lucrative cloud-computing deal from going to his perceived political enemy, company founder Jeff Bezos,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Microsoft won the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract, which is valued at up to $10 billion over the next decade. Amazon had long been considered the favorite.”
President Trump hosted a previously undisclosed dinner with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook board member Peter Thiel at the White House in October, NBC News reports.
It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg and Thiel discussed.
“The Saudi government recruited two Twitter employees to get personal account information of their critics,” the AP reports.
“A complaint unsealed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco detailed a coordinated effort by Saudi government officials to recruit employees at the social media giant to look up the private data of thousands of Twitter accounts.”
“The accounts included those of a popular journalist with more than 1 million followers and other prominent government critics.”
“House Republicans’ campaign arm is still relying on CrowdStrike to protect its sensitive data, even as the cybersecurity firm has become embroiled in a bizarre conspiracy theory promoted by President Trump and his GOP allies,” the Washington Post reports.
“The California company, which Trump and some House Republicans have accused without evidence of conspiring with Democrats in the 2016 election, is still helping the National Republican Congressional Committee protect its networks.”
NBC News: “Less than a month after he was named President Trump’s cybersecurity adviser in 2017, Rudy Giuliani walked into an Apple store in downtown San Francisco. He wasn’t looking for a new gadget. Giuliani was looking for help.”
“He was locked out of his iPhone because he had forgotten the passcode and entered the wrong one at least 10 times.”
A new biography of former Defense Secretary James Mattis reports President Trump personally got involved in who would win a $10 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Pentagon, according to Task & Purpose.
Trump specifically called Mattis and directed him to “screw Amazon” out of the contract.
That contract was awarded to Microsoft last night over Amazon.
President Trump offered some unsolicited advice to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Twitter: “To Tim: The Button on the iPhone was FAR better than the Swipe!”
Perhaps he’s worried about accidental butt-dialing?
An internal memo on cybersecurity, obtained by Axios, warns that “the White House is posturing itself to be electronically compromised once again.”
“That’s after at least a dozen top- or high-level officials have resigned or been pushed out of a cybersecurity mission that was established under Barack Obama to protect the White House from Russian hacking and other threats.”
Vanita Gupta: “After Facebook was implicated in the 2016 election wreckage, the company made strides to shore up the platform against future harms to our democracy. But now, Facebook is sabotaging its own efforts through a new policy: the explicit exemption of politicians’ speech from its community standards.”
“Since 2016, Facebook has maintained a ‘newsworthiness’ exemption, meaning content that violates community standards—including hate speech and harassment—can still be posted when the public interest in viewing the content outweighs the risk of harm. With its new policy, Facebook will automatically presume speech from politicians to be newsworthy.”
“Simply put: While major news organizations are strengthening fact-checking and accountability, Facebook is saying: If you are a politician who wishes to peddle in lies, distortion and not-so-subtle racial appeals, welcome to our platform. We will not fact-check. You are automatically newsworthy. You are automatically exempt from scrutiny.”
Wall Street Journal: “When Donald Trump took the stage last month in Fayetteville, N.C., to support Republican candidate Dan Bishop in a special election, thousands of people showed up.”
“Unknown to the crowd, the Committee to Defend the President, a Republican political-action committee that supports Mr. Trump, had hired a company to collect unique identification numbers from attendees’ smartphones that evening, based on location data those phones were sending to third parties. The goal was to target ads at people it could drive to the polls the next day. Mr. Bishop won by about 3,800 votes.”
“The PAC now plans to use the technique, which is called geofencing, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election in about half a dozen swing states to find people who may not be registered to vote, said its chairman, Ted Harvey.”
“A campaign believed to be tied to the Iranian government attempted to identify, attack and breach email addresses belonging to a U.S. presidential candidate, government officials and journalists, according to new data unveiled by Microsoft, highlighting the continued global security threats that loom over the fast-approaching 2020 election,” the Washington Post reports.
American Bridge 21st century, a pro-Democrat super PAC, launched a Google Chrome browser extension that replaces “Mitch McConnell” With “Moscow Mitch” on web pages.
Amazon is rolling out a new feature — Alexa Political Contributions — that’ll enable Alexa customers to support their chosen candidates monetarily, according to Venture Beat.
As an aside: Amazon is offering a limited time deal on the Echo Show, a device I’ve found very useful.
“Attorneys general for 50 U.S. states and territories on Monday officially announced an antitrust investigation of Google, embarking on a wide-ranging review of a tech giant that Democrats and Republicans said may threaten competition, consumers and the continued growth of the web,” the Washington Post reports.
“Only California and Alabama have not signed onto the probe.”
“As political ad spending for 2020 ramps up, Facebook is tightening its rules to make sure that groups running political or issue ads are legitimate and aren’t gaming the system,” Axios reports.
“With some high-profile examples of such evasion already emerging, the changes will make it harder for groups to dodge Facebook’s political advertising review program.”
“Startup Caucus, which is billing itself as a Republican venture capital effort, will announce on Tuesday that it will give $25,000 in seed funding to six early-stage tech companies. It also plans to provide the startups with a 12-week training and support program,” Politico reports.
“The fund is intended to provide Republicans with an answer to Higher Ground Labs, a Democratic tech incubator that has helped to bankroll a wave of liberal startups. Higher Ground Labs, whose financial backers include LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, supplied more than $5 million in seed funding during the 2018 midterms and recently announced plans to invest over $10 million during the 2020 campaign.”
President Trump on Tuesday stepped up his accusations against Google, claiming without offering evidence that the technology company worked to subvert his 2016 presidential campaign and warning he was watching it “very closely,” Reuters reports.
“Facebook said it had found evidence of something cyber security and national security experts have long suspected: people tied to the government of Saudi Arabia have been running covert campaigns on Facebook and Instagram in a bid to prop up support for the kingdom and attack its enemies,” CNN reports.
“Thursday’s announcement is Facebook’s first public disclosure of its having found and taken down a covert influence campaign linked to the Saudi government. The people behind the campaign — who Facebook did not name but said were linked to the Saudi government — ran an expansive operation involving hundreds of Facebook pages and accounts.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.