December 2015

[Commentary] On Dec 14, prominent human-rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang went on trial for writing seven social-media posts criticizing Chinese policies and government officials. Supportive online messages posted during the trial were swiftly taken down. At the same time, China’s Internet began to fill with images of Wuzhen, a scenic southern river town that is playing host to China’s biggest annual Internet conference. And on Dec 15, China President Xi Jinping, in the presence of leaders of several Central Asian countries and a who’s who list from China’s biggest and richest online companies, laid out his vision for an Internet where governments like Beijing’s could regulate the Web how they see fit.

Wuzhen represents its effort to sell that approach abroad. The danger now, some human rights advocates argue, is that China is trying to get foreign firms to comply with its censorship rules while exporting this filtered and policed Internet model to other countries. Since the inaugural World Internet Conference in 2014, China has been promoting its notion of “Internet sovereignty” for global Internet governance -- each country should have ultimate power to determine what online traffic flows in and out of its territory. This model of closely monitored and censored Internet appeals to a lot of governments, said Roseann Rife, East Asia Research Director at Amnesty International. “The big fear is this becomes an accepted way to operate.”

The Government Accountability Office was asked to examine the reliability of the nation’s communications network in an IP environment during times of crisis. GAO examined (1) the potential challenges affecting IP networks in times of crisis and how the challenges may affect end users, and (2) the actions the Federal Communications Commission, the Department of Homeland Security, and other stakeholders have taken to ensure the reliability of IP communications. GAO reviewed FCC and DHS documents as well as FCC proceedings and comments filed with FCC on the IP transition and emergency communications. GAO assessed FCC’s efforts to collect data on the effect of the IP transition. GAO interviewed officials from FCC and DHS, and representatives from the three largest telecommunications carriers, industry associations, and public interest and consumer advocacy groups.

What GAO Recommends:
FCC should strengthen its data collection efforts to assess the IP transition’s effects. FCC did not agree or disagree with the recommendation and stated it has a strategy in place to oversee the IP transition. However, GAO continues to believe FCC should strengthen its data collection efforts.

Republican presidential candidate Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL) tried to score national security points off his rivals over their support for ending the government’s bulk collection of phone metadata, suggesting that the country lost “a valuable tool” in its fight against terrorism. But the legislation that ended the National Security Agency’s mass storage of phone records did not leave counterterrorism officials in the lurch. In fact, during the GOP debate, as Sen Rubio was attacking Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) over his vote for the USA Freedom Act, NSA Director Michael Rogers was telling a group of industry and intelligence officials that the new program “is working well so far.”

So what did the legislation change? Rather than the NSA gathering from phone companies each day millions of records about Americans’ phone calls -- the vast majority of whom are not suspected of terrorism activity -- the agency must now obtain a court’s permission to obtain data on each phone number it suspects of links to a terrorist group. Whether the new program, which is only three weeks old, will work better than the old is an open question. A presidentially appointed commission and an independent executive-branch privacy watchdog concluded that the bulk collection program did not thwart a single terrorist plot. Still, the GOP debate revealed a split in the party over government surveillance tools.

[Commentary] In the past week alone, thousands of Facebook users have publicly promised to unfriend each and every Donald Trump supporter in their network, regardless of -- in the words of one Trump critic -- “how long I’ve known you or how close we are.” Political scuffles aren’t unusual among friends and acquaintances, of course -- it’s part of the reason the topic is typically never raised in polite conversation. But in an era where Americans are both more polarized than ever and more able to tailor their environments to their preexisting views, standard disagreements have veered in an ugly, intolerant direction: one that’s inconsistent, critics argue, with our most fundamental democratic values.

In the era of News Feeds and content-blockers, however, avoiding discourse and dissent has never been so easy. Geographically and socially speaking, people have always clustered with other people who share their background and views: If you’re a Republican, or an atheist, or a member of the middle class, then it’s likely that your best friend and next door neighbor are, too. But thanks to the proliferation of partisan media and the rise of intermediaries like Facebook and Google News, it’s now also possible to tailor the information you get to your preexisting politics. And while activists have long championed the Internet as a means to encounter more diverse and “cross-cutting,” or opposite, views, experience suggests that hasn’t happened quite the way we thought it would.