June 2013

Lower Broadcast Prices Hikes Could Send A Signal to Cable

Now that media buyers have pushed the broadcast networks to accept smaller upfront price increases than last year, they may be expecting the same thing from the cable networks.

CBS, the broadcaster expected to get the most upfront advertising dollars as well as the biggest price hikes, did about the same $2.65 billion in upfront deals as it did last year, getting 7.5% to 8.5% price increases on a cost-per-thousand viewers (CPM) basis. That’s on the low end of what CBS CEO Les Moonves told Wall Street analysts to expect and a percentage point down from last year. The slower pace of deal making suggested that buyers had an advantage in this year’s negotiations and the decision to take more reasonable price increases rather than dig in its heels for gains closer to double digits was done quietly and surprised at least some rival sales executives.

Nonprofit Journalism – A Growing But Fragile Part of the US News System

The growing nonprofit news sector is showing some signs of economic health, and most leaders of those outlets express optimism about the future, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center.

But many of these organizations also face substantial challenges to their long-term financial well-being. The report finds that large, often one-time seed grants from foundations help many of these nonprofit news outlets get up and running. But as those grants expire, many organizations do not have the resources or expertise necessary for the business tasks needed to broaden the funding base. More than half of the nonprofit news organizations surveyed by the Pew Research Center in late 2012 (54%) identified business, marketing and fundraising as the area of greatest staffing need, compared with 39% who said the top need was for more editorial employees. In addition, nearly two-thirds of the nonprofits (62%) cited "finding the time to focus on the business side of the operation" as a major challenge-compared with 55% who cited "increasing competition for grant money."

When Artworks Crash: Restorers Face Digital Test

Paintings fade; sculptures chip. Art restorers have long known how to repair those material flaws, so the experience of looking at a Vermeer or a Rodin remains basically unchanged over time. But when creativity is computerized, the art isn’t so easy to fix. For instance, when a Web-based work becomes technologically obsolete, does updated software simply restore it? Or is the piece fundamentally changed?

Google highlights India bandwidth threat

Google’s growth in India is being hampered by poor technological infrastructure that is unable to keep pace with the demands of hundreds of millions of new internet users, says the US-based search group’s Indian head.

Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data

The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analyzing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.

The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks. The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message. The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, "What type of coverage do we have on country X" in "near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure." An NSA factsheet about the program, acquired by the Guardian, says: "The tool allows users to select a country on a map and view the metadata volume and select details about the collections against that country."

President Obama orders US to draw up overseas target list for cyber-attacks

President Barack Obama has ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks, a top secret presidential directive obtained by the Guardian reveals.

The 18-page Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued in October last year but never published, states that what it calls Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) "can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging". It says the government will "identify potential targets of national importance where OCEO can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power". The directive also contemplates the possible use of cyber actions inside the US, though it specifies that no such domestic operations can be conducted without the prior order of the president, except in cases of emergency. The aim of the document was "to put in place tools and a framework to enable government to make decisions" on cyber actions, a senior administration official told the Guardian.

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell. The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said. Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organizations – the NSA.

President Obama defends NSA surveillance programs as 'right balance'

President Barack Obama defended a pair of recently disclosed surveillance programs as striking the “right balance” between national security and civil liberties following a speech June 6 in California.

“You can't have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a government,” President Obama said. “You can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance.” Obama stressed that every member of Congress had been briefed on the phone monitoring program and that the relevant Intelligence committees were aware of PRISM — the code name of the NSA's secret program to monitor Internet traffic. He also noted that federal judges had to sign off on data-gathering requests. “If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure we're abiding by the Constitution, then we're going to have some problems here,” President Obama said.

The President went on to say that the White House believed the programs played an important role in preventing terror attacks. “My assessment and my team’s assent was they help us prevent terrorist attacks, and the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved … on net, it was worth us doing. Some other folks may have a different assessment of that,” he said. On the collection of phone data, President Obama stressed that the government agency was only “looking at phone numbers and durations of calls; they're not looking at people.” He said that to listen in on calls, investigators would need to obtain new authorization from a federal court. “I want to be very clear: Some of the hype that we've been hearing over the last day or so, nobody's listening to the content of people's phone calls,” President Obama said.

In regard to Internet data, the President noted the surveillance “does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the U.S.” The President also said he had a personal interest in the controversy because when he left office, he could be a prime target for surveillance. “I suspect that on a list of people who might be targeted so that someone could read their emails or listen to their phone calls, I'd probably be pretty high on that list,” President Obama said. But, the President said, he had confidence in the checks and balances installed in the system, and that those involved in the program were worried about the constitutional questions at hand.

White House Plays Down Data Program

The Obama Administration tried to marshal new evidence in defense of its collection of private Internet and telephone data, arguing that a secret program called Prism is simply an “internal government computer system” designed to sort through court-supervised collection of data, and that Congress has been briefed 13 times on the programs since 2009.

After rushing to declassify some carefully selected descriptions of the programs, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, conceded for the first time that the Prism program existed. But in a statement, after denouncing the leak of the data to The Guardian and The Washington Post, Clapper insisted it was “not an undisclosed collection or data mining program.” Instead, he said it was a computer system to “facilitate” the collection of foreign intelligence that had been authorized by Congress. Clapper also insisted that the government “does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers” of telephone and Internet providers, saying that information is turned over only under court order, when there is a “documented, foreign intelligence purpose for acquisition” of the data. He appeared to be attempting to push back against early reports that the government had direct access to the huge computer servers at Google, Microsoft, Facebook and similar companies. Those firms have denied they give the government a “back door” to their systems.

How the U.S. Uses Technology to Mine More Data More Quickly

When American analysts hunting terrorists sought new ways to comb through the troves of phone records, e-mails and other data piling up as digital communications exploded over the past decade, they turned to Silicon Valley computer experts who had developed complex equations to thwart Russian mobsters intent on credit card fraud. The partnership between the intelligence community and Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto (CA) company founded by a group of inventors from PayPal, is just one of many that the National Security Agency and other agencies have forged as they have rushed to unlock the secrets of “Big Data.”

Today, a revolution in software technology that allows for the highly automated and instantaneous analysis of enormous volumes of digital information has transformed the N.S.A., turning it into the virtual landlord of the digital assets of Americans and foreigners alike. The new technology has, for the first time, given America’s spies the ability to track the activities and movements of people almost anywhere in the world without actually watching them or listening to their conversations. New disclosures that the N.S.A. has secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans and access to e-mails, videos and other data of foreigners from nine United States Internet companies have provided a rare glimpse into the growing reach of the nation’s largest spy agency. They have also alarmed the government: Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said that “a crimes report has been filed by the N.S.A.”

Benton

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