July 2014

Officials Defend NSA After New Privacy Details Are Reported

The Obama Administration sought to play down new disclosures that the National Security Agency has swept up innocent and often personal e-mails from ordinary Internet users as it targets suspected terrorists in its global surveillance for potential threats.

Administration officials said the agency routinely filters out the communications of Americans and information that is of no intelligence value. The statements came in response to a report by The Washington Post, based on a trove of conversations intercepted by the NSA. Robert Litt, the general counsel to the director of national intelligence, said that The Post’s article cites “figures that suggest foreign intelligence collection intercepts the communications of nine ‘bystanders’ for every ‘legally targeted’ foreigner.” “These reports simply discuss the kind of incidental interception of communications that we have always said takes place under Section 702,” he said, referring to the law that governs the collection of information on foreigners. “We target only valid foreign intelligence targets under that authority, and the most that you could conclude from these news reports is that each valid foreign intelligence target talks to an average of nine people.”

Fight over network neutrality goes to Congressional Black Caucus

Color of Change called out 10 members of the Congressional Black Caucus for opposing efforts to keep the Internet a level playing field for all.

“For communities of color -- who are often disadvantaged and don’t start off at the same point -- being able to have a level playing field on the Internet, being able to have our information seen just as quickly as big corporations is critical,” said Color of Change Executive Director Rashad Robinson. “So for us, protecting that is important.” Robinson said it isn’t easy to call out members of the Congressional Black Caucus, many of whom the organization supports. “It is a tough choice,” Robinson said. “It’s certainly not fun to call out members of Congress where your members live, and who you want to be on your side, and who you believe should be doing the right thing. But our job is not to serve members of Congress, their job is to serve us.”

Scammers, hackers and spies hit campaign trail

Political campaigns are uniquely vulnerable to hackers, criminals and ideological foes, campaign operatives and cybersecurity experts say.

At the same time, a top-notch data mining operation is essential to modern political operations, and candidates and parties are collecting and keeping more personal information on every voter than ever before. Recent years have seen more and more mischief in cyber-campaign land. Data breaches and misplaced donor or voter information can fall into the wrong hands. Foreign intelligence services have reportedly found their way into campaign servers. Hackers looking to embarrass politicians have altered campaign websites. And credit card scammers have found that making small donations are a great way to test stolen MasterCard and Visa numbers.

Prince, Facebook and Van Jones unite to bridge digital divide

Prince headlined the 20th annual Essence Festival in New Orleans -- but he only agreed to do so if the organizers held a hackathon to call attention to the digital divide. And making sure Prince’s wishes were realized is a roster of Bay Area heavyweights from the technology and nonprofit worlds, including Facebook, Google, Black Girls Code, the Kapor Center for Social Impact and Bay Area ex-pat Van Jones’ Rebuild the Dream project #YesWeCode, which aims to train 100,00o low-income youth to become coders.

Is Silicon Valley Funding the Wrong Stuff?

[Commentary] Social networks that allow you to send only the message "Yo" to your contacts. Food-delivery services valued at $400 million. Startups that deliver rolls of quarters to your home (just $27 for $20 in change!). It isn't hard, looking at a lineup like this, to conclude that Silicon Valley has jumped the shark. The entire Bay Area appears to have given up on solving anything but its own problems: those afflicting the same 20-somethings who are building these startups. That's a pretty cynical take on what's going on in technology. And what about Google or Facebook or Uber, all of which have transformed or probably will transform entire industries?

A New Media Landscape in Sun Valley

Investment bank Allen & Co.'s annual gathering of media and technology executives kicks off July 8 in Sun Valley, Idaho, against the same mountainous backdrop that has framed hobnobbing moguls since 1983. But the business landscape they will be discussing has shifted radically since last year's conference.

Two monster deals -- cable company Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable and AT&T 's proposed purchase of DirecTV -- would significantly consolidate pay-television distribution in the US if approved by regulators. Now, the titans of entertainment companies who sit across the negotiating table from those distributors are wondering: Do we need to get bigger, too? The conference offers as good a venue as any for moguls who own TV channels and studios to float big transactions and even have substantive talks.

Participant Index Seeks to Determine Why One Film Spurs Activism, While Others Falter

For the last year Participant Media, an activist entertainment company that delivers movies with a message, has been quietly working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism to answer a question vexing those who would use media to change the world. That is, what actually gets people moving? Do grant-supported media projects incite change, or are they simply an expensive way of preaching to the choir? Ultimately, the answers may help determine which projects get financed, which formats are favored and how stories are structured.

Tight Script of Soccer Isn’t Hostage to Advertisers

The World Cup has shown again that soccer is very kind in its brevity. A 90-minute game takes less than two hours to finish. With its constant action and lack of natural in-game stoppages, soccer avoids the bloated commercial breaks of other sports; timeouts that turn the final minute of NBA games into dreary, real-time marathons; clock stoppages for first downs in college football; fidgeting pitchers and dawdling batters who should be on a clock; and video reviews. Soccer has its problems but the length of its matches is not one. Would ESPN and ABC have seen an average of 4.1 million viewers for the World Cup’s first 56 games -- a 44 percent leap from 2010 -- if there were timeouts and breaks that stretched the broadcasts by 30 or 45 minutes.

Tighter Security for Cellphones at Overseas Airports

Passengers boarding U.S.-bound flights at "certain overseas airports" may be asked to turn on electronic devices including cellphones, and won't be allowed to bring on the plane any devices that are out of battery power, the Transportation Security Administration said. The directive covers more than a dozen airports in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, said a person familiar with the directive.

‘Right to be forgotten’ opens can of worms for Google

Google has run into a barrage of sniping and suspicion over its first attempts to comply with Europe’s new “right to be forgotten” online, including claims in some quarters that it has deliberately set out to sabotage the court ruling behind the idea. The complaints by some EU officials, academics and media industry sources follow the first suppression of links on Google’s search engine to comply with a May court ruling from the European Court of Justice. Google is required to hide links to personal information elsewhere on the web that the people involved claim is embarrassing and out of date.

Benton

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