Month: February 2020

States and Cities Could Use Billions of Unspent DHS Grants to #Protect2020

February 28, 2020 | Dan Lips

Federal and state officials recently told a Senate Committee that state and local governments need additional cybersecurity resources. Their testimony follows the gatherings of the nation’s state secretaries of state and election directors earlier this year in Washington, where cybersecurity and election integrity were a top focus. Congress is now considering legislation to create a

Congress Re-Empowered

February 27, 2020 | Wayne Brough

Why the legislative branch needs better science and technology policy advice—and how it can get it. This paper is part of Lincoln’s Technology Assessment Symposium, which was made possible with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The paper was authored by Dr. Wayne T. Brough, president of the Innovation Defense

A Fresh Start for OTA

February 27, 2020 | Robert Atkinson

Creating the lean, dynamic technology assessment agency Congress needs today. This paper is part of Lincoln’s Technology Assessment Symposium, which was made possible with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The paper was authored by Robert D. Atkinson. Dr. Atkinson is the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

February 27, 2020 | M. Anthony Mills

Learning from the founding and early history of OTA. This paper is part of Lincoln’s Technology Assessment Symposium, which was made possible with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The paper was authored by M. Anthony Mills. Mills is director of science policy at the R Street Institute. You can

February 27, 2020 | Chris Tyler

Lessons for the United States This paper is part of Lincoln’s Technology Assessment Symposium, which was made possible with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The paper was authored by Chris Tyler. Dr. Tyler is the director of research and policy in the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public

February 27, 2020 | Kathryn Wagner Hill

OTA doesn’t get enough credit for the variety, timeliness, and impact of its work. This paper is part of Lincoln’s Technology Assessment Symposium, which was made possible with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The paper was authored by Kathryn Wagner Hill and edited by Adam Keiper and Elizabeth Foz.

February 27, 2020 | Zach Graves

Eric Schmidt is right we need more R&D investment to beat China. But we also need more capacity to assess its efficiency and efficacy. Defense Innovation Board chairman and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has an excellent op-ed today in the New York Times (disclosure: Lincoln is a grantee of his foundation) making the case

Video: Protocols vs. Platforms

February 25, 2020 | Zach Graves

ABOUT THE EVENT The early Internet evolved around many different protocols. Email utilized Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), Post Office Protocol (POP), and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP); The web was accessed using Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), with data sent over Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP); and you could chat with

The Case Against Non-Competes

February 24, 2020 | Ryan Khurana

A recently introduced bill entitled the Workforce Mobility Act by a bipartisan coalition of Senators Todd Young (R-Ind) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn), and Representatives Scott Peters (CA-52), Mike Gallagher (WI-08), and Anna G. Eshoo (CA-18) offers the long overdue opportunity to limit the breadth and scope of non-compete agreements over American workers. Long has it

February 14, 2020 | Zach Graves

This article was authored by Lincoln Network head of policy Zach Graves and Fix the System co-founder Nilmini Rubin. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) usually works hard to avoid political controversy. But the agency’s recent legal decision vaulted the nonpartisan agency into the center of impeachment politics. The GAO asserted that the White House Office

Governance Over Ideology

February 12, 2020 | Zach Graves

Replying to Marco Rubio’s “American Industrial Policy and the Rise of China” Read the full article at the Claremont Institute’s American Mind.

February 11, 2020 | Lars Schönander

Machine learning is rapidly becoming a major part of the products we consume and how we interact with governments, from neural networks that improved Google Translate to automated decision systems using decision trees for detecting potential SNAP fraud in New York City. For machine learning to work, large datasets are required to be able

February 11, 2020 | Zach Graves

This one pager was written to compliment Zach Graves and Daniel Schuman’s recent paper with the Harvard Ash Center on building science and technology capacity in Congress.

February 3, 2020 | Dan Lips

Federal News Radio’s Tom Temin recently interviewed the Lincoln Network’s Dan Lips and the R Street Institute’s Tony Mills to discuss the Government Accountability Office’s 2020 budget: “Imagine an organization with the mission of finding fault with nearly everything everyone else does. In a nutshell, that’s exactly what the Government Accountability Office does. And it’s

February 3, 2020 | Jess Miers

How expanding copyright protections for APIs could undermine the future of the web Application programming interfaces (APIs) are the building blocks of modern software development. Programmers rarely write code from scratch. Instead, programmers start with APIs to automate traditional routine processes and basic functionality. But besides providing a basic standard for software developers, APIs do

Symposium on Technology Assessment

February 1, 2020 | Zach Graves

In July of last year, Lincoln Network announced a call for papers on the future of technology assessment and science advice for Congress. The following papers from the first round of this series are available below. “Legislative Science Advice in Europe and the United Kingdom,” by Chris Tyler, University College London “The Many Meanings of