March 2012

House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights is scheduled to vote on a bill on March 27 that aims to prevent U.S. companies from helping foreign regimes crack down on Internet freedom.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) has been pushing the Global Online Freedom Act for several years, but the issue has gained more attention after countries including Egypt and Syria began shutting down Internet access and blocking websites to quell popular uprisings. An aide to Rep Smith said he expects the subcommittee will approve the bill and that the full Foreign Affairs Committee will take up the measure in "the near future." The bill has also been referred to the House Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.

The bill would bar U.S. companies from exporting technologies to "Internet restricting countries" if the products could be used to censor the Web or spy on people's Internet activity. The measure would also require Internet providers and search engines to disclose their policies for cooperating with censorship requests from restrictive foreign regimes. The State Department would have the authority to decide which countries receive the designation of an "Internet restricting country."

After Facebook privacy chief Erin Egan originally wrote a stern reaction to employers requesting Facebook passwords of prospective employees, a decidedly more conciliatory approach was later by a Facebook spokesperson. They went from "initiating legal action" to a "engaging with policy makers and other stakeholders."

Here's the statement: "We don’t think employers should be asking prospective employees to provide their passwords because we don’t think it’s right the thing to do. While we do not have any immediate plans to take legal action against any specific employers, we look forward to engaging with policy makers and other stakeholders, to help better safeguard the privacy of our users."

A controversial attempt to expand Internet addresses far beyond the likes of .com, .org or .net has provoked a rare threat from the U.S. government to withdraw a key license from the body that runs the Internet's core functions.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) depends on its U.S. government contract to coordinate the unique addresses that tell computers where to find each other, without which the global Internet could not function. But this month the government warned that the non-profit body's rules against conflicts of interest were not strong enough and only temporarily extended ICANN's contract - which it has held since its formation in 1998 - instead of renewing it as many in the industry had expected. A failure to secure the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) contract would severely damage ICANN's ability to implement its address expansion program, the most radical move in the organization's history.

New Justice Department rules allowing the government to retain domestic intelligence for up to five years not only infringe privacy, they could end up endangering national security, civil liberties advocates warned.

"The decades-old rules limiting the collection and retention of U.S. citizen and resident information by the intelligence community and the military existed for a very good reason: to ensure that the powerful tools designed to protect us from foreign enemies are not turned against Americans," ACLU senior policy counsel Michael German said in a statement. "Authorizing the 'temporary' retention of non-terrorism-related citizen and resident information for five years essentially removes the restraint against wholesale collection of our personal information by the government, and puts all Americans at risk of unjustified scrutiny." Beyond the privacy implications, by expanding the amount of information retained, officials could find themselves overwhelmed with data, he said. "Making the haystack bigger will only make it harder to find the needle, endangering both privacy and security."