April 2015

The secrecy surrounding the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 warrantless surveillance and bulk data collection program hampered its effectiveness, and many members of the intelligence community later struggled to identify any specific terrorist attacks it thwarted, a newly declassified document shows.

The document is a lengthy report on a once secret NSA program code-named Stellarwind. The report was a joint project in 2009 by inspectors general for five intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and it was withheld from the public at the time, although a short, unclassified version was made public. Shortly after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush secretly told the NSA that it could wiretap Americans’ international phone calls and collect bulk data about their phone calls and emails without obeying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Over time, Stellarwind’s legal basis evolved, and pieces of it emerged into public view. The report amounts to a detailed history of the program. While significant parts remain classified, it includes some new information.

The collapse of Comcast’s plan to buy Time Warner Cable, which played out in public over the course of a week, was months in the making.

When Comcast announced its $45.2 billion bid 14 months ago, Chief Executive Officer Brian Roberts promised the new company would transform how Americans experience entertainment. But opponents stepped up their offensive in recent months. Government officials told executives they worried the new cable giant could stifle competition on the Internet.

While the chances of getting the deal past regulators were narrowing, Comcast executives still held out hope when they met April 22 with officials from the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission. As regulators set out firm objections to the deal, Comcast envoys quietly took notes. A Justice Department staffer invited them to come back soon to see a more senior antitrust official. Comcast never set up the meeting and Roberts’s audacious bid to gain control of more than 50 percent of US broadband was dead. Descriptions of the unraveling of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal, provided by several people familiar with the negotiations, suggest there was no single turning point that doomed the merger of the two biggest US cable companies. Justice Department officials began telling Comcast of their reservations about the deal early in 2015.

"Once you get through the hysteria, [this transaction] is pro-consumer, pro-competitive and strongly in the public interest," Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen told reporters in February 2014 when the nation’s biggest cable TV and broadband service provider announced it would purchase Time Warner Cable, the number 2 provider. Fourteen months later -- hysteria duly subsided -- and it appears regulators may not agree. On the morning of April 24, 2015, Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian L. Roberts said, “Today, we move on. Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn’t agree, we could walk away.” And, with that, the deal was dead.

With Comcast's announcement, we are and will be seeing lots of post-game analysis on why an army of 128 lobbyists couldn't sell this deal to regulators. Pro Publica's Leticia Miranda pointed to: 1) TV program stifling; 2) Monopoly on broadband Internet service; and 3) Comcast's broken promises in the NBCUniversal transaction. The real issue in Comcast + Time Warner Cable was broadband, just as Om Malik called it when the deal was first announced and GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham highlighted back in November 2013.

Tom Wheeler came to the Federal Communications Commission in 2013 with a resume featuring stints as the top lobbyist in Washington for both the cable and wireless industries. Consumer advocates weren’t amused. Now, almost two years later, FCC Chairman Wheeler is confounding his former allies and winning praise from public interest groups. He recently pushed for strong net-neutrality rules, and scrutiny by FCC staff helped push Comcast to abandon its yearlong effort to buy Time Warner Cable. “It’s like Nixon going to China,” said Gene Kimmelman, president of the Washington-based policy group Public Knowledge, which opposes the Comcast merger. “He’s used his industry background not to favor his old friends in industry but to take that knowledge and apply it towards strong public interest protections.”

With the cable industry facing its stiffest challenge yet from Internet-based video providers such as Netflix, a central issue for the agency is how to promote innovation as well as protect competition, according to a person familiar with the Comcast case. The FCC’s net neutrality decision and its resistance to the Comcast deal both recognize that the FCC needs to keep up with a world that is changing rapidly. “This is exactly why I thought he was good for the job,” said Andrew Schwartzman, senior counselor at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation in Washington. “He’s been around the block, he’s made his money” and he knows the issues, he said.