The Wall Street Journal - 09.08.2019

A2| Friday, August 9, 2019 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

and now potentially finds itself

caught between competing im-

peratives from different arms

of the government.

Facebook routinely cooper-

ates with warrants, subpoenas

and emergency requests from

law-enforcement agencies for

information about user ac-

counts, and it reports child

abuse, suicide attempts and

other major public-safety

threats to the police when its

staff or users flag them.

The company draws a line at

the collection of large amounts

of user data by law enforce-

ment that can be analyzed

U.S. WATCH

agency’s decision to demote and

fire him, and to find that those

actions weren’t legally autho-

rized. Mr. McCabe also asked the

court to award him the retire-

ment benefits he lost.

“It was Trump’s unconstitu-

tional plan and scheme to dis-

credit and remove DOJ and FBI

employees who were deemed to

be his partisan opponents be-

cause they were not politically

loyal to him,” the complaint says.

The White House referred

questions to the Justice Depart-

ment, where a spokeswoman

declined to comment.

—Aruna Viswanatha

ECONOMY

Forecasters Say Rate

Cut Now More Likely

Economists’ expectations for

a September Federal Reserve

rate cut rose sharply this month,

along with their expectations for

a recession in the next year.

Private-sector economic fore-

casters surveyed in recent days

by The Wall Street Journal on

average saw a 63.9% probability

for a rate cut at the Fed’s Sept.

17-18 meeting, up from 49.8% in

the prior month’s survey.

Economists’ expectations for

a recession rose. On average,

they saw a 33.6% probability of

a recession in the 12 months,

up from 30.1% in July and the

highest level in the Journal sur-

vey going back to 2011. The av-

erage probability was 18.3% a

year ago.

—Harriet Torry

CALIFORNIA

Four People Stabbed

In Deadly Rampage

Investigators believe a docu-

mented gang member stabbed

four people to death and

wounded two others as he tar-

geted his victims at random dur-

ing a bloody rampage across

two Southern California cities,

authorities said.

Zachary Castaneda, 33, of

Garden Grove, was “full of an-

ger” when he carried out violent

attacks and robberies at busi-

nesses and killed two men at his

own apartment complex during

the two-hour wave of violence

Wednesday, police said.

Public defenders who repre-

sent Mr. Castaneda in other

cases didn’t return messages

seeking comment.

—Associated Press

SWAN DIVE: Rubber ducks fall into the Chicago River for the 14th Annual Ducky Derby, which raises money for Special Olympics Illinois.

SOUTHERN BORDER

Arrests for Illegal

Crossings Fell in July

The number of people appre-
hended while illegally crossing
the U.S.-Mexico border dropped
in July, according to new statis-
tics released by the Trump ad-
ministration on Thursday.
U.S. Customs and Border Pro-
tection officials said they ar-
rested 71,999 people at the bor-
der between official entry points
last month, a nearly 25% de-
crease from June, when 94,
people were apprehended. Offi-
cials said 42,566 people were
traveling in families and an addi-
tional 5,561 were unaccompanied
children in July. A further 10,
people were deemed inadmissi-
ble after presenting themselves
at a port of entry, Border Pro-
tection officials said.
Mark Morgan, the acting Cus-
toms and Border Protection
commissioner, attributed the de-
crease to the Trump administra-
tion’s efforts to work with Mex-
ico and Guatemala to help stem
the flow of migrants attempting
to enter the U.S.
—Andrew Restuccia

FBI

Ex-Official McCabe

Sues Over His Firing

Former Deputy FBI Director
Andrew McCabe, who was fired
by the Trump administration on
the eve of his retirement last
year over allegations of mislead-
ing investigators, sued the Jus-
tice Department, claiming his
termination was unlawful and
driven by a political plot.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in
federal court in Washington,
asked the court to review the

KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

ers and track their social lives.

The FBI and other law-en-

forcement agencies are under

increasing pressure to con-

front the challenges of mass

violence and domestic terror-

ism. Many of the recent at-

tacks were perpetrated by men

who discussed their hateful

ideologies on message boards

and social media, and in some

cases displayed warning signs

ahead of time.

Meanwhile, Facebook, in

particular, is being pushed to

better safeguard user data after

a series of privacy-related mis-

steps over the past few years,

without permission from the

company or its users. Facebook

has tightened access to user

data in recent years in an effort

to prevent abuse of user pri-

vacy, along with other steps to

better police its platform.

The potential for unauthor-

ized surveillance on Face-

book’s platforms is an espe-

cially sensitive matter for the

company because of its recent

privacy settlement with the

Federal Trade Commission,

which resolved an investiga-

tion into a series of privacy vi-

olations and breaches involv-

ing the company.

Money-market fund assets

rose 2.2% in July, according to

Crane Data. A Banking and Fi-

nance article on Thursday

about aFidelity Investments

cash-sweep program incor-

rectly said the assets rose 30%

last month.

CORRECTIONS

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news outlets by splitting ad

revenue with them as opposed

to paying them money up-

front.

Facebook does pay licens-

ing fees for other content.

The company doles out up-

front payments for the right

to show videos in its Face-

book Watch section, which is

U.S. NEWS

tal advertising revenue in the

U.S. last year, according to

eMarketer.

The news-licensing deals

between Facebook and news

outlets would run for three

years, some of the people said.

Facebook is planning to launch

the section sometime in the

fall, the people said. It isn’t

known whether any news out-

lets have agreed to license

their content to Facebook.

The social-media company

has proposed giving news out-

lets discretion over how their

content would appear in the

news tab, according to people

familiar with the matter.

News outlets would be al-

lowed to choose between host-

ing their stories directly on

Facebook or including head-

lines and previews in the tab

that would send readers to

their own websites, the people

said—in which case the news

tab would be a generator of

web traffic for news outlets in

addition to a source of licens-

ing revenue.

A person close to Facebook

said it plans to gather feed-

back from news organizations

to help improve the news tab.

Google, one of Facebook’s

biggest rivals, has been criti-

cized for not compensating

news organizations for the

headlines and story previews

surfaced by its search engine.

News CorpExecutive Chair-

man Rupert Murdoch and

BuzzFeed Chief Executive Jo-

nah Peretti have both called

on Facebook and Google to

pay organizations that pro-

vide quality news. Google

didn’t respond to a request to

comment. News Corp is the

parent company of Dow

Jones.

Facebook’s still-in-develop-

ment news tab is separate

from “Today In,” a section on

the social-media site that

serves users stories from

news organizations in their

area, one of the people said.

The proposal represents a

departure from the financial

terms offered by Facebook for

Instant Articles, another high-

profile news feature on the

social network. For that pro-

gram, Facebook compensated

home to original shows and

popular clips. It also previ-

ously paid publishers upfront

to create content for Face-

book Live, its live-video fea-

ture.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuck-

erberg addressed the possibil-

ity of creating the news sec-

tion earlier this year during a

conversation with Axel

SpringerCEO Mathias Döpf-

ner. During that conversation,

Mr. Zuckerberg said he was

committed to surfacing “more

high-quality news” and creat-

ing a “business model and

ecosystem to support it.”

Some publishers remain

skeptical of Facebook’s latest

attempt to fund content, espe-

cially in light of its history of

backing initiatives such as

Facebook Live only to scrap

funding plans when such

products fail to take off. “It’s

asking a whole lot of publish-

ers in terms of asking us to

commit to something that

none of us have any idea if it’s

going to work,” according to

another one of the people fa-

miliar with the matter.

Facebook, like other big

tech companies, is under scru-

tiny from government regula-

tors conducting antitrust in-

vestigations. The Federal

Trade Commission is examin-

ing whether Facebook made

acquisitions as part of a plan

to head off potential competi-

tive threats.

FacebookInc. is offering
news outlets millions of dol-
lars for the rights to put their
content in a news section that
the company hopes to launch
this year, according to people
familiar with the matter.
Representatives from Face-
book have told news execu-
tives they would be willing to
pay as much as $3 million a
year to license headlines and
previews of articles from news
outlets, the people said.
The outlets pitched by Face-
book on its news tab include
Walt DisneyCo.’s ABC News,
Wall Street Journal parent
Dow Jones, the Washington
Post and Bloomberg, the peo-
ple said.
Facebook’s plans come as
the company is facing growing
criticism for its role in the
news industry’s struggles by
sucking up much of the adver-
tising revenue that used to go
to newspapers. Combined,
Facebook andAlphabetInc.’s
Google earned 60% of all digi-

BYBENJAMINMULLIN
ANDSAHILPATEL

Facebook Looks to Bolster News Content

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to surface more

high-quality news and create a business model to support it.

The deal requires the com-

pany to adhere to a “compre-

hensive data security pro-

gram.” That includes

preventing the misuse of even

publicly viewable data of the

sort that the FBI wants to cap-

ture from Facebook, Instagram

and Twitter.

An FTC spokesman said

that Facebook’s consent de-

cree requires it to prevent that

type of data from being gath-

ered without its users’ autho-

rization and that the agree-

ment isn’t limited to

information “that is subject to

a privacy setting or that is set

to be nonpublic.”

The FBI proposal ratchets

up a long-running feud be-

tween law enforcement and

civil-liberties advocates over

how social media should be

used to detect and investigate

potential criminal activity.

In late 2016, following an

investigation by the American

Civil Liberties Union into so-

cial-media monitoring done by

outside developers on behalf

of law enforcement, Facebook

and Twitter cracked down on

those services and explicitly

banned the use of their data

for surveillance purposes, ac-

cording to a recent research

paper by Rachel Levinson-

Waldman of the Brennan Cen-

ter for Justice’s Liberty and

National Security Program.

Facebook’s ban allowed

law-enforcement agencies to

look at public profiles manu-

ally but not use software de-

signed for large-scale collec-

tion and analysis of user data.

Many of the companies pro-

viding such services shut

down as a result, she said.

In an interview, Ms.

Levinson-Waldman said the

restrictions reflect a growing

understanding that even infor-

mation posted to a public so-

cial network can be misused

when gathered in large quanti-

ties and paired with outside

data sources.

The possibility of an out-

side entity using public data to

build detailed profiles of indi-

viduals contains echoes of the

Cambridge Analytica contro-

versy, in which the political-re-

search firm illicitly purchased

Facebook data harvested from

a personality quiz app. Much

of the data collected by Cam-

bridge Analytica was already

viewable to other Facebook

users, and even the informa-

tion that some users protected

with privacy settings—such as

what they liked and what they

shared with friends—wasn’t

deeply revealing when viewed

on an account-by-account ba-

sis.

That same material, col-

lected on tens of millions of

users, was used to build psy-

chological profiles that were

viewed by many as invasive

and caused outrage in both

the U.S. and U.K.

The Cambridge Analytica

episode was the impetus for

Facebook’s landmark $5 billion

settlement with the FTC.

—Deepa Seetharaman

contributed to this article.

The FBI declined to com-
ment about the potential pro-
gram, citing standard practice
to not comment on pending
procurements. It states in its
contracting request, which is
posted on the agency’s website,
that it believes the data can be
collected “while ensuring all
privacy and civil liberties com-
pliance requirements are met.”
A Facebook spokeswoman
declined to comment on the
proposal, including whether
the company has contacted
the FBI to discuss the matter.
A Twitter spokeswoman
cited the company’s policy
prohibiting the use of its data
“by any entity for surveillance
purposes, or in any other way
that would be inconsistent
with our users’ reasonable ex-
pectations of privacy. Period.”
The FBI contract seeks to
gather publicly available data.
That wouldn’t include private
messages and posts but would
allow the agency to collect in-
formation such as people’s
names, user IDs and photos,
which privacy experts said
could be utilized in combina-
tion with outside data sources
to build detailed profiles of us-

ContinuedfromPageOne

Tech Giant

Nears Spat

With FBI

A scroll of Facebook’s settlements, violations and breaches posted at a House Financial Services

Committee hearing in July. The company is being pushed to better safeguard user data.

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS