WASHINGTON — A Pentagon official sat before a committee of the Washington State Legislature in January and declared that the U.S. military supported a bill that would allow voters in the state to cast election ballots via email or fax without having to certify their identities.

Virginia election officials have decertified an electronic voting system after determining that it was possible for even unskilled people to surreptitiously hack into it and tamper with vote counts.

The AVS WINVote, made by Advanced Voting Solutions, passed necessary voting systems standards and has been used in Virginia and, until recently, in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. It used the easy-to-crack passwords of "admin," "abcde," and "shoup" to lock down its Windows administrator account, Wi-Fi network, and voting results database respectively, according to a scathing security review published Tuesday by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. The agency conducted the audit after one Virginia precinct reported that some of the devices displayed errors that interfered with vote counting during last November's elections.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., which has racked up more than $36 billion in legal bills since the financial crisis, is rolling out a program to identify rogue employees before they go astray, according to Sally Dewar, head of regulatory affairs for Europe, who’s overseeing the effort. Dozens of inputs, including whether workers skip compliance classes, violate personal trading rules or breach market-risk limits, will be fed into the software.

Sen. Al Franken is urging the FBI to more quickly and aggressively pursue and respond to reports of revenge porn, marking a rare burst of attention on a controversial topic about which Congress has typically been quiet.

In a letter to FBI Director James Comey, the Minnesota Democrat asked for more information about the agency's authority to police against revenge porn, or the act of posting explicit sexual content online without the subject's consent, often for purposes of humiliation and extortion. Its popularity has ballooned in recent years, and victims are disproportionately women.

“Under the proposed schedule, [Hatch and Wyden] would introduce the trade promotion authority bill on April 13, the day lawmakers return from their two-week recess” [National Journal]. “Hatch expressed worry as late as last week that if he and Wyden couldn’t strike a deal in April the fast-track bill might not get passed at all this year.” Be sure to visit your Congress critter’s office and share your views. If possible, put together a group across the political spectrum, which TPP’s anti-sovereignty ISDS provisions should make easy to do. And see Vatch’s handy contact list here.

On August 26th of last year, David L. Cohen, a Comcast Executive Vice President, joyously announced that the cable giant’s controversial proposed merger with Time Warner had generated a frenzy of supportive letters to the Federal Communications Commission from nearly 70 mayors and dozens of other state and local officials. In particular, Cohen singled out a letter from one of the country’s most high-profile mayors.

“We’re proud to have the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who praised Comcast’s acclaimed Internet Essentials program and the increased investment and faster Internet speeds that the transaction will bring in his letter,” Cohen wrote, referring partly to Comcast’s discounted services for low-income customers.