National Journal

The Obama Administration's decision to bring criminal charges against members of the Chinese military is already showing signs of straining the US relationship with China.

Shortly after the Justice Department accused five Chinese officers of hacking US companies, China announced that it is withdrawing from a joint cybersecurity working group.

The US and China launched the working group to try to reach agreements over the use of cyber espionage. Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Chinese government, said China will announce more retaliations "as the situation evolves."

According to the indictments, the five men were members of a hacking group that stole trade secrets from major US companies including Westinghouse, United States Steel, and Alcoa.

[Commentary] In the Gilded Age, wrenching economic and technological change hardened life for the vast majority of Americans while an elite few prospered.

Innovators like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt disrupted old industries, creating news ones, and cemented their fortunes via government-approved monopolies. The most pernicious of these were railroad trusts.

In our times, wrenching economic and technological change hardens life for the vast majority of Americans while an elite few prosper. Innovators like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg disrupt old industries, create news ones and … We know how the Gilded Age ended -- in a populist uprising against monopolies, sparked by muckraking journalists and harnessed by a trust-busting president named Teddy Roosevelt.

Who will be our era's TR? Well, a leader needs a cause. A better question might be, what will be the modern-day trust -- a force so destructive and distant and deeply engrained that a sleepy public is stirred to revolt?

If history is a guide, our generation's Standard Oil, the populists' boogeyman, may be Comcast, Verizon and/or AT&T -- the sprawling Internet providers who, like Rockefeller and his railroad co-conspirators, could monopolize the price and quality of indispensable goods. Yes, network neutrality could be the issue that inspires a Tech Age political revolution.

Mozilla is urging the Federal Communications Commission to enact new rules to bar Internet service providers from charging websites for faster service.

In a filing with the FCC, the nonprofit foundation that makes the Firefox Web browser outlined a new legal path to enact tough network-neutrality regulations. Chris Riley, a senior policy engineer for Mozilla, said the group's proposal is "grounded in a modern understanding of technology and markets" and would "help ensure that the Internet continues to be an innovative and open platform."

The filing introduces a new angle to the debate over regulation of Internet access, but it's unclear how interested the FCC will be in Mozilla's proposal. The FCC would classify Internet access as a Title II telecommunications service but only for the relationship between websites and ISPs, not the relationship between consumers and ISPs, the group said. T

he proposal would allow the FCC to bar ISPs from charging websites for fast lanes while still using the current light regulatory regime for other Internet issues that affect consumers, the group said. Mozilla argued that its proposal is not "reclassification" because the FCC has never explicitly defined the relationship between ISPs and Web companies.

"With our proposal, the FCC would be able to shift its attention away from authority questions once and for all, and focus instead on adopting clear rules prohibiting blocking and discrimination online," Riley wrote.

A bill that would effectively end one of the National Security Agency's most controversial spy programs is finally getting its day in congressional court.

The House Judiciary Committee will hold a markup of an amended version of the USA Freedom Act, a surprising and sudden move that would essentially nullify the government's ability to collect bulk metadata of Americans' phone records. The maneuver may also be a counter to plans the House Intelligence Committee has to push forward a competing bill that privacy advocates say would not go far enough to curb the government's sweeping surveillance programs.

The Freedom Act is sponsored by Rep Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the one-time mastermind behind the post-9/11 Patriot Act, from which both the Obama and Bush Administrations have derived much of the legal authority for their surveillance programs.

Rep Sensenbrenner has vocally condemned NSA spying since Edward Snowden's leaks surfaced last June. The bill has long been supported by privacy and civil-liberties groups who view it as the best legislative reform package in Congress.

Edward Snowden told a crowd of fans that the US government's surveillance programs collect more data on Americans than it does on any other country.

"Do you think it's right that the NSA is collecting more information about Americans in America than it is about Russians in Russia?" Snowden said. "Because that’s what our systems do. We watch our own people more closely than we watch any other population in the world."

Snowden also took several shots at the National Security Agency and its top officials, and criticized the agency for wearing two contradictory hats of protecting US data and exploiting security flaws to gather intelligence on foreign threats.

"US government policy directed by the NSA ... is now making a choice, a binary choice, between security of our communications and the vulnerability of our communications," Snowden said, suggesting the government was biased toward the latter activity.

Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) urged the Federal Communications Commission to enact strong network neutrality rules to ensure that all websites receive equal service.

"Reports that the FCC may gut net neutrality are disturbing, and would be just one more way the playing field is tilted for the rich and powerful who have already made it," she wrote. "Our regulators already have all the tools they need to protect a free and open Internet -- where a handful of companies cannot block or filter or charge access fees for what we do online. They should stand up and use them."

Bolstering the nation’s defenses against hackers has been one of the Obama Administration’s top goals.

Officials have warned for years that a sophisticated cyberattack could cripple critical infrastructure or allow thieves to make off with the financial information of millions of Americans.

President Barack Obama pushed Congress to enact cybersecurity legislation, and when it didn’t, he issued his own executive order in 2013. But critics argue that the National Security Agency has actually undermined cybersecurity and made the United States more vulnerable to hackers.

At its core, the problem is the NSA’s dual mission. On one hand, the agency is tasked with securing US networks and information. On the other hand, the agency must gather intelligence on foreign threats to national security.

Collecting intelligence often means hacking encrypted communications. So in many ways, strong Internet security actually makes the NSA’s job harder. “This is an administration that is a vigorous defender of surveillance,” said Christopher Soghoian, the head technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Surveillance at the scale they want requires insecurity.”

Consumer-advocacy groups and liberal lawmakers are going ballistic over news that the Federal Communications Commission plans to advance watered-down network neutrality rules.

The new regulations would allow Internet service providers to charge websites for special "fast lanes" in at least some cases. But the truth is that the FCC is boxed into a corner without many good options. Commission officials argue the stronger rules that advocates want probably wouldn't survive in court.

Consumer groups have a simple solution for the FCC's dilemma: reclassify broadband providers as common carriers. That move would likely allow the FCC to just reinstate the old rules and ban websites from paying for faster service. But reclassification has much bigger implications than just net neutrality.

The FCC would be applying a massive regulatory regime currently used for phone companies on broadband providers. It's debatable whether it's a politically viable option. Congressional Republicans and business groups would launch an all-out war, warning the FCC could kill the Internet economy.

Reclassification could derail the other items on Chairman Wheeler's agenda, such as an auction of airwave licenses, a network technology transition, and the president's proposal to improve Internet access in schools. But consumer groups argue that protecting an open Internet is worth the fight.

Oregon is set to become the first state to switch over to the federal Obamacare exchange.

The state exchange, Cover Oregon, has been such a failure that moving to the once broken HealthCare.gov seems preferable to trying to salvage its system.

An advisory panel just recommended the decision. An exchange official said that repairing the existing system would cost about $78 million and take a long time to implement. He estimated that switching to HealthCare.gov would cost between $4 million and $6 million, according to the Associated Press.

The full board that oversees the state exchange will vote on the decision, but officials say state and federal representatives have already agreed that shifting the system to the federal marketplace in 2015 is the best approach, The Washington Post reports, Oregon being the most extreme example.

Cover Oregon has yet to sign up a single resident through the website since the exchange launched at the beginning of October. The state has instead relied on paper applications and in-person assistors. About 64,000 residents have enrolled in private coverage through the exchange thus far.

For some period of time, Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security and didn't alert anyone in the government.

Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed" -- a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL -- sometime in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services -- such as email, search, and YouTube -- before the companies publicized the bug on April 7.