The Washington Post Closes a Window on Hackers and Big Government
The Washington Post is pushing back against government surveillance, hackers and other nosy folks trying to get a peek at you and your data.
Starting Tuesday it will begin to encrypt parts of its website to make it more difficult to track the reading habits of visitors. The encryption will apply to the Post’s homepage, stories on the site’s national security page and The Switch, its technology policy blog.
A display icon of a small lock in the web address bar will signal readers that pages are encrypted. In addition, the secure pages will start with the letters “https,” rather than the standard “http.”
The encryption also has the potential to make it tougher for governments to censor content. If censors are monitoring website traffic, they can see only the domain a person is visiting, not the specific page. A country would have to block the entire website if it wanted to block content.
The Post acknowledges that the additional security measures could make online advertising less attractive to companies. Advertisers might also be driven away by having to make sure their content is also secure, an extra step some companies might not be willing to take.
The Post is the first major news organization to introduce such security measures. Last fall, The New York Times published a blog post imploring websites to implement secure connections, but it has yet to follow through on its own challenge.
However, other smaller news sources, such as the Intercept and TechDirt, use https technology by default.
Encrypted traffic is becoming increasingly common for many sites, including online banking and web-based email services. Earlier this month, the Obama administration ordered all public federal websites to begin using https technology by the end of 2016.
The social media giant Facebook announced in early June that users could encrypt notifications sent from the website to a user’s personal email address, protecting potentially sensitive emails. Facebook – as well as hackers, spies and others -- will be denied access to the user’s private encryption key.
This move prevents hackers who have accessed a user’s email inbox from being able to understand emails from Facebook without knowing their private key. While a user’s activity on the actual site will not be encrypted, this announcement could be the first in a series of moves to protect Facebooks’ user privacy.
Apple and Google have also implemented more security measures for user privacy over the last year.
Marco Rubio Says There’s No Proof Tax Cuts Are Helping American Workers
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told The Economist that his party’s defense of the massive tax cuts passed last year may be off base: “There is still a lot of thinking on the right that if big corporations are happy, they’re going to take the money they’re saving and reinvest it in American workers,” Rubio said. “In fact they bought back shares, a few gave out bonuses; there’s no evidence whatsoever that the money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.”
For Richer or Poorer: An Updated Marriage Bonus and Penalty Calculator
The Tax Policy Center has updated its Marriage Bonus and Penalty Calculator for 2018, including the new GOP-passed tax law. The tool lets users calculate the difference in income taxes a couple would owe if filing as married or separately. “Most couples will pay lower income taxes after they are married than they would as two separate taxpayers (a marriage bonus), but some will pay a marriage penalty," TPC’s Daniel Berger writes. “Typically, couples with similar incomes will be hit with a penalty while those where one spouse earns significantly more than the other will almost always get a bonus for walking down the aisle.”
Trump Administration Wants to Raise the Rent
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson will propose increasing the rent obligation for low-income households receiving federal housing subsidies, as well as creating new work requirements for subsidy recipients. Some details via The Washington Post: “Currently, tenants generally pay 30 percent of their adjusted income toward rent or a public housing agency minimum rent not to exceed $50. The administration’s legislative proposal sets the family monthly rent contribution at 35 percent of gross income or 35 percent of their earnings by working 15 hours a week at the federal minimum wage -- or approximately $150 a month, three times higher than the current minimum.” (The Washington Post)
New Push for Capital Gains Tax Cut
Anti-tax activists in Washington are renewing their pressure on lawmakers to pass new legislation indexing capital gains taxes to inflation. The Hill provided an example of such indexing that Grover Norquist recently sent to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin: “Under current policy, someone who made an investment of $1,000 in 2000 and sold it for $2,000 in 2017 would pay capital gains taxes on the $1,000 difference. But if capital gains were indexed, the investor would only pay taxes on $579, since $1,000 in 2000 would be equivalent to $1,421 in 2017 after adjusting for inflation.” Proponents of indexing say it’s just a matter of fairness, but critics claim that it would be just another regressive tax cut for the wealthy. Indexing would cost an estimated $10 billion a year in lost revenues. (The Hill)
Bernie Sanders to Propose Plan Guaranteeing a Job for Every American
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is preparing to announce a plan for the federal government to guarantee a job paying $15 an hour and providing health-care benefits to every American “who wants one or needs one.” The jobs would be on government projects in areas such as infrastructure, care giving, the environment and education. The proposal is still being crafted, and Sanders’ representative said his office had not yet come up with a cost estimate or funding plan. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) last week tweeted support for a federal jobs guarantee, but Republicans have long opposed such proposals, saying they would cost too much. (Washington Post)