Privacy under attack: the NSA files revealed new threats to democracy
Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know the apparatus of repression has been covertly attached to the democratic state. However, our struggle to retain privacy is far from hopeless.
May 2014
NSA reform to be ‘fight of the summer’
Civil libertarians who say the House didn’t go far enough to reform the National Security Agency are mounting a renewed effort in the Senate to shift momentum in their direction.
After compromises in the House bill, the NSA’s critics are buckling down for a months-long fight in the Senate that they hope will lead to an end to government snooping on Americans. “This is going to be the fight of the summer,” vowed Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. If advocates are able to change the House bill’s language to prohibit NSA agents from collecting large quantities of data, “then that’s a win,” he added. “The bill still is not ideal even with those changes, but that would be an improvement,” Rottman said.
Tech: DC’s biggest loser?
Silicon Valley just can’t win in Washington.
A surveillance reform bill easily survived a House vote, but it barely resembles the measure that Google, Facebook and others once touted as a way to restore Americans’ trust. Quick changes to patent law now seem impossible after the Senate shelved the issue days earlier. And immigration reform and the industry’s pursuit of more high-skilled visas long ago had devolved into a war of words between congressional Democrats and Republicans. As tech companies join the ranks of other big Beltway business interests -- tapping power lobbyists, recruiting hired guns and cozying up to lawmakers with more donations than ever before -- the setbacks only serve as a reminder that even major players still lose the Washington game sometimes.
Technology Firms Press Congress to Tighten Privacy Law
A Reagan-era law that allows the government to read email and cloud-stored data more than six months old without a search warrant is under attack from technology companies, trade associations and lobbying groups, which are pressing Congress to tighten privacy protections.
Federal investigators have used the law to view content hosted by third-party providers for civil and criminal lawsuits, in some cases without giving notice to the individual being investigated. Nearly 30 years after Congress passed the law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, cloud computing companies are scrambling to reassure their customers, and some clients are taking their business to other countries. Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Twitter and Google say they will no longer hand over their customers’ data without a search warrant. But smaller web hosting and cloud computing companies may be outmuscled by law enforcement officials as they try to protect their customers, said Ron Yokubaitis, the co-chief executive officer of Data Foundry, a data center company based in Texas.
Court Approves FCC Plan to Subsidize Rural Broadband Service
A federal appeals court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s effort to convert its $4.5 billion program that pays for telephone service in rural parts of the country into one that subsidizes high-speed Internet service in high-cost areas.
The program, known as Connect America, is the largest portion of the $8 billion Universal Service Fund, which pays for a variety of efforts to provide telecommunications links to schools, low-income families and others. In October 2011, the FCC approved an overhaul of the fund. Soon after its approval, however, the effort was challenged in court by dozens of phone companies. Many were small carriers that provided service in rural areas and that stood to lose annual subsidies because of the changes. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, in Denver, rejected the phone companies’ arguments because their claims were “either unpersuasive or barred from judicial review.”
National Advertising Division: Makers Must Also Follow Native Ad Disclosure Rules
Third-party publishers of headlines and images at the bottom of news articles that link to "recommended stories" must more clearly label "sponsored content," the National Advertising Division said.
The NAD's recommendation focused on Taboola, one of several companies that place headlines and images on publishers' websites -- usually below or next to news stories -- that link to a combination of advertising and editorial content on that site or other sites. Companies like Taboola get paid when a reader clicks on a link; they share that money with the publisher. These links are part of a "recommendation widget," which adopts the look of the site where it appears. For that reason, the Interactive Advertising Bureau considers such widgets a form of native advertising. Taboola's widget carries one of two labels in small, light gray font: "promoted content" when all the stories are editorial in nature and "sponsored content" when they're a mix of promotional and editorial. Above the widgets, an additional -- and indeed bolder -- label might say "Recommended Videos," "More in the News," "We Recommend," "You Might Also Like" and so on.
House Committee Puts NSA on Notice Over Encryption Standards
An amendment adopted by a House committee would, if enacted, take a step toward removing the National Security Agency from the business of meddling with encryption standards that protect security on the Internet.
The amendment adopted by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology would remove an existing requirement in the law that National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) consult with the NSA on encryption standards.
The amendment’s sponsor, Rep Alan Grayson (D-FL), quoted our story on the NSA from 2013. “NIST, which falls solely under the jurisdiction of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, has been given ‘the mission of developing standards, guidelines, and associated methods and techniques for information systems,’” Rep Grayson wrote. “To violate that charge in a manner that would deliberately lessen standards, and willfully diminish American citizens’ and businesses’ cyber-security, is appalling and warrants a stern response by this Committee.”
Rep Grayson’s amendment, which is part of a bill that funds NIST, was approved by a voice vote.
Federal Regulators Seek to Stop Sale of Students’ Data
ConnectEDU, a popular college and career planning portal in Boston that had collected personal details on millions of high school and college students, filed for bankruptcy. Now federal regulators want to stop the company from selling off students’ names, email addresses, birth dates and other intimate information as assets.
Jessica Rich, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, argued that such a sale would violate ConnectEDU’s own privacy policy, a potentially deceptive practice. The company’s privacy policy states that, in the event of a sale of the company, it “will give users reasonable notice and an opportunity to remove personally identifiable data from the service.”
“Information about teens is particularly sensitive and may warrant even greater privacy protections than those accorded to adults,” Rich wrote. “These users, as well as their parents, would likely be concerned if their information transferred without restriction to a purchaser for unknown uses.”
Rich recommended either that ConnectEDU give each student who had registered for its sites the choice to remove his or her personal records from company databases in advance of a sale -- or that the company destroy the entirety of the personal details it had collected.
Senate appropriators: No plans for FCC rider
Republicans in the Senate aren’t thinking about using the appropriations process to block the Federal Communications Commission from issuing new regulations on Internet service providers.
The top GOP senators on the Appropriations Committee and the subcommittee overseeing the FCC both told The Hill that they don’t expect a rider preventing the commission from moving forward with the effort.
T-Mobile is quickly closing in on No. 3 Sprint
Counterpoint Technology Market Research reported that T-Mobile was the third-largest US purchaser of smartphones in the first quarter, overtaking Sprint.
T-Mobile bought 6 million smartphones for itself and its mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) during the period, according to Counterpoint analyst Neil Shah, outpacing Sprint’s 5 million units. T-Mobile recently posted its best quarter ever, adding 2.4 million subscribers to claim the lion’s share of the US market’s core subscriber growth.
T-Mobile has made big strides with its infrastructure lately, too: it launched voice-over-LTE in Seattle on three handsets, and has been using a technology dubbed 4×2 MIMO to improve signal strength and connection speeds on its LTE network.