December 2013

Several Western journalists facing expulsion from China were given renewed press cards by the Chinese government, allowing them to apply for visas to remain in the country. The move appears to end a weeks-long standoff between the government and journalists that included a personal appeal by Vice President Joe Biden to China’s president.

Journalists from the New York Times, Bloomberg News and other organizations were facing the loss of their Chinese visas around the end of December, at which point they and their families would be forced to leave the country. While most reporters at the Times and Bloomberg still do not have visas, receiving their press credentials removes a main impediment to their applications. All of Bloomberg’s foreign staff in China but only some at the Times received press cards, members of both organizations said. A handful of Times journalists have not received press cards and thus continue to face the prospect of being forced to leave, according to journalists in Beijing working on their behalf.

Seeking to allay potential newsroom concerns about the introduction of a digital product called native advertising, the publisher of The New York Times said that features like a color bar and the words “Paid Post'’ would enable readers to identify material as advertising content.

In a letter to employees, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr, also said there would be “strict separation between the newsroom and the job of creating content for the new native ads.'’ Native advertising, also known as branded content, is information provided by marketers that is designed to look more like the articles it appears alongside. It has led to controversy in the journalism industry because it blurs the line between editorial content and advertising. But it has also been viewed as a valuable new source of revenue for news organizations struggling to compensate for the decline of print advertising. The platform is “relatively new and can be controversial,” Sulzberger said in his letter, but is necessary to help “restore digital advertising revenue to growth.” The advertisements will appear digitally only and will start in January, said Meredith Kopit Levien, executive vice president for advertising at The Times. They will appear first on the newspaper’s website, placed on the home page and on the front pages of particular sections, in small numbers at first. The advertisements will take all of the forms that editorial content does, she said, “like narrative, video, data visualization.” Kopit Levien said the paid pages would have a blue border, and “visually, through design cues, it will be made clear that this is not coming from the newsroom.” In his letter, Sulzberger said the ads would also display the relevant company logo and a different typeface. The ads will be created by members of the advertising staff.

AT&T has been poking and prodding small cells in its labs and out in the wild. The tiny little base stations will allow AT&T to surgically insert capacity into its HSPA and LTE networks in high-traffic areas like malls, stadiums and public areas where its customers are using their smartphones the most.

Those cells will bring a lot of benefits for consumers. They’ll offer up to greater speeds to customers in dense areas such as downtown financial districts and other high-traffic zones. They’ll bring stronger signals to the dead zones between cells on AT&T’s network. And they’ll bring greater coverage and capacity in difficult-to-penetrate indoor locations. Finally they’ll free up room on the macro network, giving customers in between small cells a better experience. But first AT&T has to work out the kinks. It’s a tricky business, AT&T Associate VP of Small Cells Gordon Mansfield said in a recent interview, because AT&T can’t just plop down a small cell anywhere. Since AT&T is using the same frequencies for small cells it’s using for its umbrella macro-network, interference becomes an issue. If the signal clash between the big and small networks is too great, customers won’t get faster connections. Instead, their phones would only see white noise.

The Report and Recommendations of The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies is absolutely stuffed with references to the privacy considerations owed to non-US citizens.

And while some of this is of course a mere damage control exercise in the face of world outrage, the rhetoric does at least occasionally rise to striking heights. "There are sound, indeed, compelling reasons to treat the citizens of other nations with dignity and respect," the report says in an entire chapter devoted to surveillance of non-US persons. This is due in part to self-interest, since "if we are too aggressive in our surveillance policies under section 702 [allowing non-FISA warrantless collection and targeting of non-US persons], we might trigger serious economic repercussions for American businesses, which might lose their share of the world’s communications market because of a growing distrust of their capacity to guarantee the privacy of their international users. Recent disclosures have generated considerable concern along these lines."

But the report takes a more principled position, too. “Perhaps most important, however, is the simple and fundamental issue of respect for personal privacy and human dignity -- wherever people may reside.” In other words, the report calls for an international right to digital privacy.