Across Europe, love -- or at least acceptance -- often wins out in the love-hate relationship with American tech companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google. Despite their often vocal criticism of these behemoths, people in the region are some of the most active and loyal users of American social networks, search engines and e-commerce websites. They are often even more hooked on the services than Americans are.
Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from US digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to US citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to US citizens or US residents. The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages -- and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama Administration has not been willing to address. Among the most valuable contents -- which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations -- are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into US computer networks.
[Commentary] The latest Edward Snowden disclosures show that the National Security Agency vacuumed up far more data on far more Americans. In fact 9 out of 10 of people whose accounts were caught up in the data dragnet were not targets of any investigation.
Now we’ll wait for the reactions to roll in from US tech companies that are trying to paint themselves as worthy stewards of customer information.
Industry execs ranging from Cisco CEO John Chambers, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and HP EVP Bill Veghte have all said that US government data collection has put tech vendors behind the eight-ball as they try to sell technology -- from networking hardware to cloud computing.
Google, Facebook and other companies are pressuring the government to be more transparent -- or let them be more transparent -- about what customer data intelligence agencies ask for.
But let’s face it: People who are surprised by the latest Snowden disclosures should not be. Previous NSA whistleblowers already told the world that the NSA has been collecting their email and phone conversations for a quite some time.
It’s crunch time for reining in the National Security Agency. If lawmakers are going to finalize the USA Freedom Act to reform government surveillance in 2014, privacy advocates warn they need to pick up the pace.
“I think there’s a lot of pressure on the Judiciary Committee to act on USA Freedom before the August recess,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “Everyone knows that bills that aren’t yet out of committee by the end of July are really hard to get done because appropriations occupy so much time and attention,” he added. “I wouldn’t want to be a Judiciary Committee staffer responsible for this issue and have Fourth of July vacation plans.”
The Senate will return after the July Fourth holiday weekend for four straight weeks of work in Washington before the month-long August recess. After that, government funding and the November elections are likely to take center stage, clouding the outlook for any controversial measures on Capitol Hill.
Educators are threatening to derail the Obama Administration’s proposals to boost wireless Internet in schools over fears districts could be left with inadequate funds or cuts to other services.
A new plan from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler would funnel $5 billion for Wi-Fi over the next five years through the agency’s E-Rate program.
The FCC is set to vote on the plan at its monthly meeting on July 11, but sources now say it’s unclear if it has the votes to pass. Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel and Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai have advocated for reforms to the E-Rate program, but it's unclear if either will support Wheeler's proposal as currently written.
Sources said the plan’s specifics are in flux as Chairman Wheeler works to rally support from other commissioners and advocacy groups ahead of the vote. “There are still some Commissioners who are listening to educators in the field, and we hope their voices ring loudly in next week’s meeting,” said an education advocate opposed to the proposal.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services intends to eliminate the exclusion for continuing medical education in the Open Payments program, more commonly known as the Sunshine Act, which requires drug and device companies to disclose payments to physicians.
The reversal was included in the proposed Physician Fee Schedule for 2015, which also would make changes that would benefit primary-care medicine at the expense of payments to specialties.
The regulations also include a variety of changes to the Shared Savings Program for accountable care organizations, the Physician Quality Reporting System and the incentive program for electronic health records. And it would expand the array of telehealth services that qualify for Medicare reimbursement.
Google’s efforts to carry out a European court order on the “right to be forgotten” took another twist as the company restored search-engine links to several newspaper articles from The Guardian whose delinking had stirred a public furor only a day earlier.
As Google once again declined to explain its decision-making, the episode underscored the potentially bewildering complexities of trying to remove information from the Internet when people request it.
Analysts and public officials, many critical of the way Google is carrying out the court order, say the tumult could have far wider implications. That is because the order, issued in May by the European Court of Justice, dealt with a right to be forgotten that would be much more broadly interpreted in a sweeping digital privacy law that is now the subject of discussions involving the European Parliament, the European Commission and leaders of the 28 member countries of the European Union.
The company told The Guardian that several links to its articles had been reinstated in Google’s European search service after the newspaper complained. Some of the articles were from 2010 about a soccer referee, now retired, who had been accused of lying about why he had awarded a penalty kick in a match in Scotland.
Google declined to explain why it had removed the links, or its reasons for honoring The Guardian’s request to restore them. Critics said the episode highlighted a lack of transparency about how Google is carrying out the court order as it works through requests it has received for removing information, a number that has reached 70,000 and continues to grow.
[Commentary] There are plenty of good intentions with the EU’s Right To Be Forgotten mandate, as well as Google’s attempt to meet new obligations under it. Things are still going to hell regardless.
To date, according to new stats Google gave the Guardian, Google says it has received more than 70,000 requests to remove about 275,000 individual listings, with most requests coming from France, Germany, the UK, Spain and Italy, in that order. Currently, about 1,000 requests per day are coming in.
The European Court felt that anyone in the EU should have the right to ask for material to be removed if they consider it to be “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive,” to cite the EU’s fact sheet about the ruling. Those simple criteria belie some difficult decisions. How exactly does someone decide what’s inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive? How do you make this determination balanced against another fundamental EU right, the public’s right for access to information?
Make no mistake. Google didn’t want to have to the type of censorship now being imposed upon it by the EU. It fought the initial case. But Google has been complying with the new right, and faster than its competitors. Where Google has gone wrong, in my opinion, is in complying with the right by actually making decisions itself about whether something should be removed. It didn’t have to do that. It could be -- and should be -- rejecting every one of these requests as a judgment call that it shouldn’t be making.
[Commentary] Facebook’s 2012 newsfeed experiment has recently attracted the ire of users and even European regulators, who are investigating a possible breach of users’ privacy.
Although Facebook’s tinkering with its users’ emotions was part of a minor sociological experiment, many online companies are dedicated to using personalization to enable serendipity or “accidental discovery” of content by web users.
The Internet has provided the setting for the grandest and perhaps most controversial of experiments in “engineered” serendipity. Search engines, e-commerce and online news publications are all using personalization to enhance user experience by providing the most relevant content.
But is it actually possible to embed serendipity into user experience online? “The notion of ‘designing for serendipity’ is an oxymoron because once we try to ‘engineer’ it into a system, users may no longer perceive the experience as serendipitous,” says Dr. Stephann Makri, a lecturer in Information Interaction at City University in London. “Designers of interactive systems shouldn’t try to offer serendipity on a plate. Instead, they should design tools that create opportunities for users to have experiences they might perceive as serendipitous.”
Nonetheless this reworked notion of serendipity is here to stay on the web. With the rise of machine learning, a growing number of online publishers are using complex algorithms to learn from readers’ viewing habits and provide people with what they want to know before they know they want it. In essence, we get more of the information we want to see.
[Patani is an analyst for EC1 Capital, a venture capital investor in mobile and web companies in the United Kingdom]
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