April 2015

David Ensor Stepping Down as VOA Director

Voice of America Director David Ensor announced his resignation after nearly four years leading the nation’s international state broadcaster. During Ensor’s tenure, VOA’s radio, television, and online audience grew by 49 million people to 172 million a week, according to survey data prepared for the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America and four other media organizations funded by the US government. “I am honored to have had the opportunity to work alongside so many fine journalists,” Ensor said during a meeting with VOA staff. “You have made VOA a social-media leader in South East Asia and an affiliate-model innovator in Latin America.” Under his leadership, VOA has launched new television programs in Russian, Ukrainian, Persian, Mandarin, Burmese, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashto, Somali, Dari, Creole, English and many more. Ensor initiated a “digital first” reorganization of VOA’s central newsroom and a boost in programming to Africa.

Fortune bulks up on technology coverage, hires 6 Gigaom veterans

Fortune has long valued its technology coverage, and it’s no secret in our industry that the team behind it is tight-knit. In that spirit, we’re announcing that we’ve hired six more talented journalists, all formerly of the well-regarded tech site Gigaom: Stacey Higginbotham, whose coverage has focused on the so-called Internet of things; Barb Darrow, who specializes in cloud computing; Katie Fehrenbacher, who covers energy technology; Mathew Ingram, who covers media and the social web; Jeff John Roberts, who focuses on technology law and policy; and Jonathan Vanian, who focuses on business technology.

US secretly tracked billions of calls for decades

The US government started keeping secret records of Americans' international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed. For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said.

The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America. Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels' distribution networks in the USA, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers. They also used the records to help rule out foreign ties to the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City and to identify US suspects in a wide range of other investigations. The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to "designated foreign countries." But the history and vast scale of that operation have not been disclosed until now.

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA's intelligence arm, was the government's first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of US citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans' privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.

Foreign Tech Firms Seemingly Unfazed By NSA Surveillance Revelations

Edward Snowden’s revelations of widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency don't appear to have discouraged most international customers from doing business with US technology firms, a new survey suggests. About 26 percent of foreign firms -- based in the Asia Pacific, Canada, Europe and Latin America -- said they stopped or reduced spending with US-based firms for Internet-based services because of security concerns, according to a new survey from Forrester Research.

About 34 percent said these concerns were because of fears that the US intelligence community might spy on them. The remainder cited other factors, including wanting to support businesses within their home countries and data sovereignty rules preventing them from storing data abroad. The survey was administered over the phone and online between June and July 2014 to more than 3,000 businesses.

FBI would rather prosecutors drop cases than disclose stingray details

Not only is the FBI actively attempting to stop the public from knowing about stingrays, it has also forced local law enforcement agencies to stay quiet even in court and during public hearings, too. An FBI agreement, published for the first time in unredacted form on April 7, clearly demonstrates the full extent of the agency’s attempt to quash public disclosure of information about stingrays. The most egregious example of this is language showing that the FBI would rather have a criminal case be dropped to protect secrecy surrounding the stingray. The new document, which was released April 7 by the New York Civil Liberties Union in response to its March 2015 victory in a lawsuit filed against the Erie County Sheriff’s Office in Northwestern New York, includes this paragraph:

"In order to ensure that such wireless collection equipment/technology continues to be available for use by the law enforcement community, the equipment/technology and any information related to its functions, operation and use shall be protected from potential compromise by precluding disclosure of this information to the public in any manner including but not limited to: press releases, in court documents, during judicial hearings, or during other public forums or proceedings."

In the version of the document previously obtained in Minnesota, the rest of the sentence after the phrase "limited to" was entirely redacted. Mariko Hirose, a NYCLU staff attorney, said that she has never seen an agreement like this before. "This seems very broad in scope and undermines public safety and the workings of the criminal justice system," she said.

FCC asked whether phone companies can do more to block 'robocalls'

The Federal Communications Commission has been asked to consider the question of whether phone companies could do more to stop the onslaught of "robocalls," the automated phone calls favored by scammers. Since the convergence of Internet and phone lines, it has become easy to blast out hundreds of thousands of calls in a matter of minutes to see who takes the bait. The question of whether these calls can be blocked has never been more pressing than around tax season, when many pretend to come from the Internal Revenue Service.

The phone companies say they worry that automatic call blocking might run afoul of laws requiring them to connect phone calls and have asked the FCC to clarify that it doesn't. Many carriers offer call blocking services to consumers, sometimes for a fee. But they also don't want regulators to create any hard-and-fast rules, which they say could be difficult to implement. Consumer groups counter that the phone companies are dragging their feet for no good reason and that, once given the green light from the FCC, could block most robocalls if they wanted. "It is time for AT&T to provide free, effective solutions to this problem immediately, so that unwanted robocalls are stopped before they reach us," wrote Tim Marvin of Consumers Union in a recent letter to AT&T. The group, which has organized an online petition at EndRobocalls.com, sent similar letters to Verizon and CenturyLink.

FCC Announces Update to PSAP Text-To-911 Readiness and Certification Registry

The Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission announces that it is updating the FCC's Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) Text-to-911 Readiness and Certification Registry listing PSAPs that are ready to receive text-to-911 messages. This public notice provides notices to Commercial Mobile Radio Service providers and other providers of interconnected text messaging services of the effective readiness date of those PSAPs for which the Bureau has received the updated information. Pursuant to the FCC's text-to-911 rules, covered text providers must begin routing 911 text messages to requesting PSAPs within six months of this notice date.

US Commerce Department Announces Digital Millennium Copyright Act Multistakeholder Forum Results

The US Department of Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force, through the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), released a document developed by stakeholders containing a set of agreed upon practices aimed at improving the operation of the notice and takedown system under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The document known as DMCA Notice-and-Takedown Processes: List of Good, Bad and Situational Practices was developed by the participants in the multistakeholder forum established as a result of the Commerce Department's Green Paper on Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy, released in 2013. The document identifies a number of “good”, “bad” and “situational” practices to improve the efficiency of the handling and processing of DMCA notices by both senders and recipients. The goal of the multistakeholder forum was to identify best practices and/or produce voluntary agreements for improving the operation of the DMCA notice and takedown system without the need for legislative change.

YouTube’s copyright system has taken Rand Paul’s presidential announcement offline

If you're looking for Rand Paul's presidential announcement on YouTube, bad news. The video has been blocked by the video streaming site, thanks to a copyright claim from Warner Music Group. Why? YouTube has a system called "Content ID," which allows the owners of copyright on material to automatically censor unlicensed use of said material. YouTube automatically matches videos against a big database of copyrighted material, including music, when the video is submitted. Then, copyright owners can, if they wish, block a video from being viewed. During his announcement, Rand Paul entered and left to the song, "Shuttin' Detroit Down". The song is a twangy lament about the state of the economy that dates back a few years; the copyright stamp on the YouTube video reads "(c) 2009 WMG." WMG, of course, is Warner Music Group.

President Obama holds private meeting with journalists on Iran

Apparently, President Barack Obama held a private meeting with reporters and liberal columnists at the White House to discuss the Obama Administration's Iran policy. The meeting, one of many such off-the-record meetings President Obama has held with members of the media during his tenure, came just days after the United States, five other major powers and Iran struck a tentative deal to limit Tehran's nuclear program. Present at the meeting: The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib, The New York Times' Carol Giacomo, The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins, The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim and The Washington Post's David Ignatius, Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus and Greg Sargent. In recent days, President Obama also held on-the-record interviews with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and NPR host Steve Inskeep, in which he discussed his views on the nuclear agreement at length.

Benton

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