Hasta La Gadget!

In a world of mass shootings, Brexit, and a looming dramatic presidential election, the deliberations of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), in a nondescript meeting room at the DoubleTree Crystal City in Arlington, VA,  would hardly seem to matter.

But, yesterday, it did matter. By the scheduled 8:30 am start time, the room was hot and packed, with seemingly more people, at least, than at any 2016 Jeb Bush event. At stake were billions of dollars that for-profit colleges want to keep getting, the integrity of federal aid programs, and the futures of countless Americans seeking to build better lives through higher education.

And at least for one day, after almost eleven grueling hours of debate, the underemployed, deep-in-debt former students who were deceived and abused by predatory for-profit colleges won a victory over the entitled, cynical operators of bad schools.

The issue on the table was whether NACIQI should recommend to the Department of Education that it continue to recognize as a college accrediting agency an organization called the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS). Such recognition is required in order for schools accredited by ACICS to continue receiving federal student grants and loans.

ACICS currently accredits 243 institutions exclusively or primarily, and most of those are for-profit colleges. $4.76 billion in taxpayer dollars went from the Department of Education to ACICS schools last year.

But ACICS has been the accreditor of some of the most notorious bad actors in the for-profit college sector, including Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, Kaplan, EDMC (the Art Institutes), Career Education Corporation (Sanford-Brown), Alta Colleges (Westwood), Globe, FastTrain, and Daymar. All these companies have been under investigation by law enforcement for deceptive practices. Some of those companies have, like Corinthian, shut down under the weight of abusive and reckless business practices. FastTrain’s CEO has been convicted of federal crimes and sentenced to eight years in prison. Others, like ITT, Kaplan, EDMC, and CEC, continue to receive billions in taxpayer dollars.

In advance of the NACIQI meeting, a number of advocates for students had sent reports or letters highlighting the dismal failures of ACICS to monitor college quality and abuses and calling on the Department to end its recognition of this body. Those opposing ACICS included thirteen state attorneys general; Ben Miller of the Center for American Progress; nine veterans groups including Student Veterans of America and Vietnam Veterans of America; a coalition of 23 groups that advocate for students, consumers, and educators; and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who two weeks ago issued a blistering report that criticized ACICS for its weak oversight of colleges, and also took the Education Department to task for its weak oversight of accreditors.

Finally, last week, the staff of the Education Department issued its report and recommendation that ACICS be terminated. A Department official told reporters that ACICS failures to police for-profit college abuses “were not just narrow misses, these were quite severe, quite egregious, irreparable.” He said that “some schools provide extremely poor outcomes for students or even commit fraud but nevertheless still maintain accreditation.”

NACIQI was the next stop in the process. The panel’s recommendation would be attached to the Department staff’s negative recommendation and then submitted to a designated senior official, in this case Secretary of Education John King’s chief of staff, Emma Vadehra.

The 18-member NACIQI panel includes six appointees of the Education Department, six appointees of congressional Democrats, and six appointees of congressional Republicans (with one of the GOP seats currently vacant).

The day seemed to begin badly for the Department of Education staff members who were urging termination, with GOP-appointed NACIQI panelists suggesting that ACICS was being made a scapegoat.

The Perry Mason leading this charge was GOP-appointed member Arthur Keiser. Keiser argued that the blame for the Corinthian debacle belonged to the Department of Education for limiting the troubled company’s access to taxpayer dollars, rather than ACICS for failing to detect abuses. He also asserted that it was inappropriate to infer that an ACICS-accredited school was a bad actor simply because it had paid cash to settle a law enforcement investigation. This was an interesting perspective, given that Keiser is the owner of a Florida-based chain of colleges that last year paid $335,000 cash to settle a law enforcement investigation, specifically fraud claims brought by a whistleblower and joined by the U.S. Justice Department.

Responding to an analogy about the accreditation system, Keiser seemed to open a window into his wealth, if not his oversight skills. “I had termites once,” he said, “in one of my houses.”

Keiser’s chain was for-profit, but he converted it to a non-profit in a troubling transaction that enriched him so much that it was the subject of a front-page New York Times story. Keiser is also the long-dominant figure in the for-profit colleges’ trade association, APSCU, which has harbored as members many of the same predatory schools that ACICS has accredited.

In light of that record, one had to wonder why the government had empowered Keiser to judge this issue in the first place.

Another of the GOP-appointed NACIQI members, Arthur J. Rothkopf, suggested that the Education staff report might have been dictated or ghost-written by Secretary King’s office. A third GOP appointee, Anne Neal, the long-time head of the Lynne Cheney-founded group the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, expressed concerned that ACICS wasn’t being given “a fair shake.”

When the Education staff members at first appeared defensive and struggled to quell these suggestions of conspiracy, the many for-profit college lobbyists in the room offered loud oohs and aahs of outrage. They also hissed when NACIQI’s student member, Simon Boehme, compared the now notorious ACICS-approved scam school Northwest Polytechnic University to Trump University.

Eventually, however, Herman Bounds, director of the Accreditation Group, silenced the lobbyists with a strong retort: We acted on the evidence, and there was tons of it.  The Department’s student aid program manager, Gail McLarnon, added, “To not terminate their agency would be to sanction egregious behavior.”

In the days and hours leading up the hearing, a desperate ACICS announced a series of reforms, a temporary halt to new accreditations, and a “Blue Ribbon” outside panel to oversee its changes. ACICS also told the panel yesterday that it had recently issued show cause orders to ITT Tech, Education Management Corporation, Delta Career Education Corporation, and Zenith, the non-profit that took over many of the former Corinthian-owned Everest College campuses.

Anthony Bieda, the new head of ACICS, barely attempted to appear contrite, but he kept stressing that his organization was ready to reform, and to right itself within a year. He offered that ACICS’s tolerance for college abuses “has gotten very, very low.” There were vague efforts by the ACICS delegation to throw Bieda’s predecessor, Albert Gray, under the bus. (After I broke the story in April that Gray was getting pushed out, Bieda sent me a kind note: “Thanks David. As always I appreciate your respectful objectivity. Please stay in touch!”)

But Bieda has been at ACICS for eight and a half years, as the agency built the record that has now been exposed as deplorable, and there appeared to be little reason to believe his team could or would promptly implement the kind of changes they were promising. It was, plainly, too little, too late.

Bieda had an ally in the room urging that the accreditor be spared: GOP former congressman Steve Gunderson, the head of APSCU, whose membership has included many of the worst ACICS-accredited schools. But Gunderson did not make much of a case. 

Gunderson, whose disastrous confrontational strategy has hastened the decline of his industry and his organization, has as his mantra the claim that efforts to hold bad for-profit colleges accountable are rooted in “ideological” opposition to his sector. It’s still not clear to me what ideology he has in mind, other than a common sense aversion to waste, fraud, and abuse with taxpayer dollars (many of his members of have been receiving around 90 percent of their revenue from the federal government) — an approach should be appealing to many, including conservatives. 

In the wake of the public meltdown of his industry, Gunderson last year offered a suggestion of reform, but a disturbing one. In admitting that his schools had enrolled too many students who were unlikely to succeed in their programs, Gunderson said, “We’re the first ones to say we should’ve been more careful. We were thinking with our hearts, not our heads…” Although I can tell you that there are kind-hearted sincere school operators who have admitted students because they wanted to give them a chance, most of these for-profit college owners have been thinking with their wallets. The risk of student failure did not fall on the school but on the taxpayers and, especially, the student. And many for-profit college programs are just not designed, are just not strong enough, to help many of the students whom these schools aggressively recruit.  Gunderson told the NACIQI panel that things had changed, “I see very few career schools, if any, that still have open enrollment.” But my sources in the for-profit college boiler rooms say that big companies, desperate to stay alive amid declining revenues, continue to recruit and enroll anyone with a pulse.

Gunderson also offered that some of the APSCU member schools (including, of course, Arthur Keiser’s) have converted to nonprofit status. He added, I guess intending to reassure, that “their academics haven’t changed one bit.”

In sharp contrast, advocates for students presented a strong case to the NACIQI panel. CAP’s Ben Miller delivered the findings of his blockbuster report on the failings of ACICS schools. He noted that when he attended the ACICS annual meeting last month, he hardly saw a new spirit; industry lawyers made a presentation about how to beat state attorney general investigations, telling school operators they could take advantage, for example, of the fact that state prosecutors often leave the office at 5 pm.

Tariq Habash of the Century Foundation presented the invaluable work that he and his colleague Robert Shireman did to unearth and analyze ACICS reports documenting their reviews of schools — just bare-bones checklists, with no narratives and no indication of real evaluations.

Sara Nolan Collins and Carrie Wofford of Veterans Education Success presented the cases of numerous vets abused by ACICS-approved schools like ITT Tech. Wofford argued that it was immoral that vets who pay for their G.I. Bill eligibility with their service often have it stolen by deceptive, low-quality schools. She brought to the session veteran Matthew Mitchell of Louisiana, a former recruiter for ITT who discussed predatory practices there. He also told of being a student who was deceived by ACICS-accredited, EDMC-owned Brown Mackie College regarding the accreditation of its nursing degree. Wofford also read a statement from a former ITT student and veteran, Howard Toller, who had to drive home to Raleigh, NC, when the NACIQI session on ACICS went well beyond its scheduled noon adjournment. Toller wrote that he received a totally subpar education at ITT, with teachers who didn’t know the material and couldn’t answer his questions. Later he learned, as many students do, that ITT credits would not transfer to a community college.

A number of other ITT Tech students, flown in by the industry, expressed satisfaction with the quality of their educations and their careers. I have no doubt that some students have benefitted from programs at ITT Tech and at other troubled schools. But the mountain of evidence of predatory and deceptive practices at ITT, and the many student complaints on file, tell the story of an institution that does more harm than good.

Meanwhile, from a distant office, Trace Urdan, a long-time for-profit college market analyst now at Credit Suisse, was playing embittered wise man via Twitter.  He asked whether many of the people attending the meeting were there “to gloat.” But there was nothing to gloat about. The advocates for students in the room have all met numerous people, like Matthew Mitchell, who were lied to and had their finances ruined by for-profit schools — single mothers and veterans and immigrants who owe tens of thousands, sometimes more than $140,000 in debt, whose degrees did nothing for their careers and earnings, who are depressed and ashamed. This is a mess. No one is happy about any aspect of it.

Urdan also insisted that no one had ever demonstrated that for-profit schools offered poor-quality instruction. “Classroom instruction never credibly impugned,” he tweeted, “only sneered at by those that never saw a campus.” But many advocates, journalists, and government investigators have been to campuses, and many of us have spoken with countless students and instructors who have testified to low-quality programs and to instructional budgets cut as classrooms were literally converted into additional call-center space for relentless recruiters seeking to sign up new students.

Urdan even tweeted that he was “sure” that one NACIQI member’s comments about Northwest Polytechnic were “thanks” to me.  But Urdan, whose intel has not always panned out, was wrong on this one, too. (I’ve never communicated with any of the NACIQI members.)

At last, as the clock moved past 7 pm and the crowd had thinned substantially, NACIQI was ready to vote on a motion to end recognition of ACICS. Before the vote, Arthur Keiser, the school owner, warned that terminating ACICS would create “havoc” in high education, causing schools to close. In other words, that ACICS was too big to fail.

Keiser lost. The motion passed by a vote of 10-3. GOP appointees Keiser, Anne Neil, and Hank Brown (a lawyer whose firm, Brownstein Hyatt, lobbies for the biggest for-profit college, the University of Phoenix), voted to protect ACICS. A fourth GOP appointee, Rothkopf, apparently had gone home. The fifth, Rick O’Donnell, a long-time education executive from Colorado, voted against ACICS.

Even if Ms. Vadehra of the Education Department, who must act within 90 days, accepts the NACIQI and Education staff recommendations and decides to drop ACICS, the accreditor can appeal to Secretary King and then to the federal courts. This battle could take years, and it does nothing to make whole the many students already abused by predatory colleges while ACICS turned a blind eye. If ACICS loses its recognition, there will be a hard road ahead to transfer to better programs for students at ACICS-approved schools that cannot find a new accreditor within 18 months and thus would lose access to student aid dollars. And there are many other fronts in the battle to reform the career college sector so that taxpayer money and student time goes only to those honest, skilled operators who are truly training students for careers.

But this was a step, spurred especially by the inspiring efforts of students to stand up for themselves, to push the Department of Education to act, at last, as if their paramount obligation is to students, not college operators. In this random hotel conference room across the river from the Lincoln Memorial and Dr. King’s statue, the moral arc of the universe just bent slightly toward justice.

This article also appears on Republic Report.

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As technology continues to advance and become increasingly data-centric, many business processes that were once manual and arduous are now fully automated to the extent that they have become transparent and assumed. This emergence of fluid, algorithmic machine-to-machine interaction is fundamentally changing the IT landscape, forcing the business and IT to collaborate more closely and is becoming a primary source of competitive advantage (Gartner predicts by 2018, over half of large organizations globally will compete using advanced analytics and proprietary algorithms).

The lure of achieving even the slightest, crucial competitive edge has propelled certain industries, such as high frequency electronic trading, into leading the charge toward this algorithmic, machine-to-machine future. But the road ahead is not so clearly delineated, and we are still learning about the risks and uncovering the “unknown unknowns.”

So is this brave new algorithmic world free of cyber risk?

Despite rapid technological advances and increased automation of defenses, cyber threats will undoubtedly continue to be a challenge. Why? Here are the main reasons I propose and thoughts on expected traits of cyber attacks in a M2M world:

• Cyber criminals follow the money: Wherever business is being transacted and data with a monetary value flows, you can be sure there are cyber criminals not too far away (assessing how they can tap in to get a slice, or two, of the action). Data is the new gold, silver, and platinum and its value in the new ecosystem (including to attackers) cannot be overstated.
• Entire attacks will occur in microseconds, or less: This will be achieved through end-to-end attack automation and will quickly expose that log data alone will be insufficient to provide visibility into such attacks due to its lack of detail, dependance on machine generation and rear view mirror perspective (vs true real time).
• Automation not exclusively for the good guys: Cyber criminals have a habit of adopting the technologies and techniques utilized by legitimate business (but in most cases, more rapidly, since they have less constraints), and are no stranger to leveraging automation to conduct their illicit activities in as efficient and profitable manner as possible (whether it be Exploit kits as a service, Shodan vulnerability scanning en masse or server-side polymorphism manifesting itself as part of ransomware). Automation can also have the unfortunate consequence of lowering the bar for who can try their hand at being a profitable cyber criminal.
• Perimeter-based checkpoints are less relevant: Modern environments are more dynamic in nature e.g. interacting workloads distributed across hybrid cloud based infrastructure and a plethora of smart devices and IoT enabled machines communicating over open 5G networks (By 2020, there will be 50 billion connected ‘things’, each of which is a potential backdoor). This means there is no single set of reliably defined entry/exit points for traffic inspection.

So how to even begin tackling such algorithmic attack tactics?

In order to effectively detect and mitigate such attacks, the ability to pervasively monitor, understand and analyze business transactions will be critical. Here are five critical capabilities that I believe will be essential for any solution providing such monitoring:

1. Live visibility [with nanosecond level resolution] : Far from trivial to achieve, reliably and at scale. This is something that cannot be added as an afterthought and without it, the horse may have bolted and damage done before you realise. Actually, the nirvana state is complimentary live and retrospective visibility and threat detection, since it is also common to find out about an attack weeks after it first gained a foothold on your network.
2. Seamless interoperability: The solution should come with robust, value rich point to point integrations with the likes of threat intel, upstream security analytics, host-based detection tools and identity management systems, to enable automated M2M detection, triage and investigative workflows.
3. Community powered: No one organization will have all the answers (threat indicators) and the threat landscape evolves and morphs each hour. Solutions that provide open API access and facilitate intra organization collaboration and knowledge sharing will be best positioned to provide true value.
4. Entity centric attack tracking: An attacker will hop from machine to machine as they conduct their coordinated activity. Viewing attack activity solely from a src/dst IP or host standpoint will be inadequate. The ability to easily pivot data exploration to be focused on users, applications and file, as well as IP/host, will be critical.
5. Machine learning based anomaly detection : As attackers seek to obscure their tracks within the data, monitoring solutions will require the smarts necessary to consider a large range of variables to determine if specific entities are at risk or indeed the source of risk. Practically speaking, this will involve the ability to baseline normal on a per entity basis, in order to aid location of suspect outliers.

Perhaps the most startling point in all of this is that this depicted brave new algorithmic world is already here, and if you want to position yourself and your organization for success, and perhaps even lean toward being more proactive in how you run your security operations, make sure you choose a strategic partner that has the necessary expertise, experience and foresight to enable you to do it right.

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SAO PAULO, June 24 – The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has suspended the credentials of a testing laboratory in Rio de Janeiro that didn’t conform with international standards, just over a month before the city hosts the Olympic Games.

The decision, announced on Friday, adds to concerns about Rio‘s readiness to host the global sporting event in August as public services suffer amid a crisis in state finances.

“The suspension will only be lifted by WADA when the laboratory is operating optimally,” Olivier Niggli, the incoming director general of the agency, said in a statement, without providing details about the problems at the lab.

“The best solution will be put in place to ensure that sample analysis for the Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games is robust,” the statement said.

Doping is high on the agenda ahead of the Rio Games, the first Olympics to be held in South America, after the Russian team was suspended from athletics events there because of doping allegations in track and field.

The Rio lab’s six-month provisional suspension is subject to an appeal during a 21-day window that started on Wednesday, when WADA first informed the laboratory of its decision.

Samples intended for analysis at the premises will be redirected to another WADA-accredited laboratory, the agency said, without saying where.

The laboratory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro declined to comment immediately on the decision.

WADA representatives did not immediately respond to questions about irregularities at the Rio lab or the location of the nearest alternative. (Reporting by Tatiana Ramil and Brad Haynes; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Bernadette Baum)

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This blog originally appeared on Afro.com.

You learn a lot about the character of an organization when things go wrong. For the team at Airbnb, hearing the outcry from African American travelers who were denied lodging because of discrimination was one of these moments. I know, because I met with them in San Francisco in early June to discuss this challenge. Everyone I spoke with, including CEO Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s legal, engineering and policy team, and the leadership of the Black employees group, made clear that they are willing to do all they can to tackle this problem. What they said to me in private matches what they’ve said in public: Airbnb has zero tolerance for bias or racial discrimination.

After spending more than four decades fighting for equality at the ACLU and in other organizations, I’ve seen companies pay lip service to these issues before. But Airbnb leaders have shown a willingness to be transparent and have expressed to me a sincere desire to ensure that its policies, technology and platform are not facilitating discrimination. Towards that end, Airbnb has hired me to help them lead a 90-day review process to address discrimination issues. In working with them, I plan to hold them accountable.

I will begin that process by spending the summer meeting with technology experts, civil rights leaders, housing advocates and members of the Airbnb community to solicit their ideas. Those conversations will be guided by three principles and objectives.

The first is identifying and fixing structural problems with the platform. Airbnb should be less focused on fixing one-off examples of individual discrimination than on understanding how the platform and underlying technology itself may contribute to possible systemic problems. Airbnb has already tapped its best engineers and product team members to lead this effort, and I’m excited to work with them to make real improvements.

The second step is to improve its processes so it can rapidly identify racial discrimination and deal with these matters quickly and decisively. That includes putting in policies and processes that will set the model for the industry and which will reflect the company’s commitment to fighting discrimination and acting quickly if something goes wrong. It will be important for Airbnb, like any company committed to taking on this issue, to continually educate staff and community so that the entire community understand these rules and processes so that responses are quick and appropriate.

Finally, Airbnb must build broader and enduring relationships with diverse travel, civil rights, grass roots, small business, social science and educational institutions. The brilliant staff at Airbnb cannot make its way in this increasingly diverse world, unless they are a more diverse company and are active in communities that will support them in this effort. One meeting in the middle of a crisis won’t do it. They need relationships with experts that last. Discrimination in the sharing economy is not going away anytime soon, and if Airbnb wants to be in the forefront of tackling this problem it will be mutually beneficial to be a part of a sustained dialogue with individuals and organizations.

These steps are just beginning. Airbnb understands that there’s no single solution to the problem of deeply entrenched biases and discrimination in the travel industry or in our society as a whole. It will need to engage in an enduring effort to ensure that every single member of its community is treated equally. At its core, Airbnb is about helping people feel like they can belong anywhere, no matter who they are, what they look like, or where they’re from. They take that mission very seriously, and I will do whatever I can to help them to get it right.

Laura W. Murphy recently retired as director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office after 17 years. She was also Washington, DC’s director of tourism under Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly in the 1990’s.

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Damaging Hollywood beauty standards strike again!

Chloë Grace Moretz might be all about body positivity these days (the non-nude-selfie-taking kind anyways), but just a few years ago she considered undergoing major plastic surgery to address insecurities about her body. 

In a new interview with Elle Magazine, Moretz gets candid about her struggle for self-acceptance in the entertainment industry and how she fights every day to set a better example for her followers. 

“When I was 16. I wanted a boob job,” she explained. “I wanted the fat pad under my chin to be removed. I wanted a butt reduction, or whatever. And my mom said, ‘Absolutely not, you’re not allowed to have plastic surgery.’ And because of that, I found a lot of power within my insecurities. They’re what make me who I am now.”

One of the ways Moretz has chosen to combat the unrealistic expectations many young girls face day in and day out is by being outspoken on social media. Instead of maintaining the exhausting facade of 24/7 perfection, the “Kick Ass” actress prefers a more natural online presence. 

“I try to not post Instagrams where I Facetune my face and I wear a ton of makeup. I want to be as natural as can be,” she said. “And I want to break it down for young women so they understand that you’re not just ‘born’ like this.”

But Moretz also wants to be transparent about what it takes to be in the limelight. Red-carpet-ready hair and a bikini body do not appear out of thin air, and Moretz says that it’s important to show the world what it takes to achieve the celebrity look. 

“Yes, I have had hair extensions,” she said. “Yes, the reason I have this body is because I work out seven times a week. Yes, I eat really clean — even though I don’t always want to, and I definitely cheat. But you’re not just born with this. Sometimes you have to fight for and work for things, and be happy with who you are at the same time. And that’s a really hard balance but I want to show it to young women.”

Ugh, working out seven times a week? That sounds exhausting. 

To hear more from Chloë Grace Moretz head over to Elle for the full interview. 

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