January 2015

The Federal Communications Commission will vote on new proposed network neutrality rules in February. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told fellow FCC commissioners before the holidays that he intends to circulate a draft proposal internally in February with an eye toward approving the measure weeks later, said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agency's deliberations are ongoing.

The agency is scheduled to hold its monthly meeting on Feb. 26. The rules are meant to keep broadband providers such as Verizon and Comcast from speeding up or slowing down some Web sites compared to others. Analysts and officials close to the agency say that momentum has been building recently for far more aggressive regulations than Chairman Wheeler had initially proposed.

The United States says its new round of sanctions against North Korea is just the opening salvo in its response to an unprecedented cyberattack on Sony.

Yet there may be little else the US can do to further isolate a country that already has few friends in the world. Even the latest sanctions, handed down by President Barack Obama in an executive order, may not sting quite as badly as US would have hoped. After all, North Korea is already under a strict sanctions regime imposed by the US over the North's nuclear program. The new round of sanctions unveiled Jan 2 hit three organizations closely tied to the North's defense apparatus, plus 10 individuals who work for those groups or for North Korea's government directly. Any assets they have in the US will be frozen, and they'll be barred from using the U.S. financial system. But all three groups were already on the US sanctions list, and officials couldn't say whether any of the 10 individuals even have assets in the US to freeze.

The leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee are pressing the Obama Administration for more information about a program that collects Americans’ cellphone data using technology that mimics cellular towers.

Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-IA) revealed that the FBI recently changed its legal policy when seeking court approval to deploy the technology. "We are concerned about whether the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have adequately considered the privacy interests of other individuals who are not the targets of the interception," they wrote in the letter addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Department Secretary Jeh Johnson. While the updated policy now requires a search warrant, both Senators expressed concern about exceptions to that rule. The letter does not outline the previously legal policy or when, specifically, it changed. The FBI does not need a warrant to deploy the technology, the Senators noted, if the case involves imminent danger, a fugitive or if the technology is used in public places where there is "no reasonable expectation of privacy."

[Dec 31]

[Commentary] 2014 was in many ways a mixed bag for the Internet. It showed the Internet at its strongest, reaching more people, more ways than at any point in the past. But at the same time, it has also never been more threatened by everything from hackers to censors to autocrats newly attuned to the power of the online world.

Some key pieces of information: 32 of 65 countries surveyed in 2014 had declines in their Internet freedom. Even democracies abused the Internet, revealing a global "schizophrenic attitude" towards surveillance according to a report from the group Reporters Without Borders. However, the number of regular Internet users grew by about 250 million people in just the last 12 months. Overall, the fact that people seemed to have never been more passionate about the fate of the Internet is, perhaps, the one main lesson from this past year in the Internet's life.

[Dec 31]