

A U.S. flag flies outside the J. Edgar Hoover Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) building in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Aug. 8, 2013. The FBI is a governmental agency as a division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) established in 1908. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Published every weekday, the Switchboard is your morning helping of hand-picked stories from the Switch team.

Facebook unveils plans to work on open-source software. Bloomberg reports: "Google Inc., Twitter Inc., Square Inc. and other companies are joining the effort to develop programs that can be shared for free, called //TODO for 'talk openly, develop openly.' ... The //TODO project fits into a broader strategy by Facebook to offer its technology to other companies in an attempt to reduce development expenses and connect more people to the Internet."

How Silicon Valley spends its money on Capitol Hill. "A nonprofit organization called MapLight recently released a tool for tracking the lobbying activity of any company since 2008," writes Gigaom's Derrick Harris, "so I decided to see where some of the biggest internet companies and legally entangled startups are trying to garner influence."

The FBI just finished building its facial recognition system. The Verge reports: "The facial recognition system has come under fire from privacy groups for mixing traditional mug shot photos with non-criminal faces pulled from employment records and background check databases. The system is expected to collect as many as 52 million faces in total."

With tech taking over in schools, worries rise. Technology companies are collecting a vast amount of data about students, touching every corner of their educational lives — with few controls on how those details are used," the New York Times reports. "Now California is poised to become the first state to comprehensively restrict how such information is exploited by the growing education technology industry."

AT&T's fascinating third-way proposal on net neutrality. "Imagine an Internet with fast lanes that you — not your cable company — controlled. That's what AT&T is proposing to the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to bridge the gap between regulation-wary industry groups and net neutrality advocates who want strong government protections for the open Internet."