Russell Brandom

Google tentatively agreed to a series of changes in the way it collects data from Gmail, as part of a proposed settlement in Northern California District Court. If the court approves the settlement, Google will eliminate any collection of advertising-specific data before an email is accessible in a user’s inbox.

The result likely won’t be noticeable to users, but it represents a real change to the way Google’s systems work, brought about after a voluntary settlement rather than a legal ruling. The case, called Matera vs. Google, began in September 2015, when plaintiffs alleged the email scanning violated California and federal privacy law, calling it “the twenty-first-century equivalent of AT&T eavesdropping on each of its customers’ phone conversations, or of the postal service taking information from private correspondence.” The suit was specifically brought on behalf of non-Gmail users, who haven’t agreed to have their emails scanned under Google’s Terms of Service.

The US intelligence agencies are among the most powerful forces to ever exist, capable of ingesting and retaining entire nations’ worth of data, or raining down missiles on targets thousands of miles away. As of January 20th, all that power will be directly answerable to President-elect Donald Trump.

It’s still early, but a picture is starting to emerge of how the president-elect could use those powers — and it’s not a pretty sight. Since the September 11th attacks, the US government gives the president almost unlimited discretion in matters of national security, with few limitations or mechanisms for oversight. That includes National Security Agency surveillance, as well as the expanding powers of the drone program. And from what President-elect Trump has said on the campaign trail, his targets for using those powers may cut against some of America’s most important civil rights. The crown jewel of that system is the NSA, and there’s reason to think it will grow even more secretive and voracious in the Trump Administration. President-elect Trump’s current transition team includes two of the NSA’s foremost defenders — Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA) and former congressman Mike Rogers — a move that suggests the agency will be moving toward more invasive collection and less transparency than ever before.

This weekend saw one of the biggest corporate acquisitions in years as AT&T reached a deal to purchase Time Warner for more than $80 billion. If approved, the deal would create a massive new joining of the telecom and media business, along the lines of AOL-Verizon (combined in May of 2015 ) and Comcast-NBCUniversal.

But AT&T's new conglomerate has a unique combination. Comcast has a bundle of cable channels and a fiber network — a scary combination for many — but it doesn't have a wireless business (at least not yet). Verizon has a wireless business and a web empire, but it doesn't have any TV channels. The newly formed AT&T conglomerate would be the only company with the means to build a direct pipeline from Game of Thrones to your smartphone — which could be a powerful and frightening force in the years to come. If the future of the media business is mobile video, zero-rating could give carriers frightening new powers — and no one would benefit more than the newly joined AT&T-Time Warner conglomerate. For now, content companies are holding most of the cards — but that only means AT&T’s new powers are more likely to appear as a bonus rather than a restriction.

AT&T Labs announced a new wireless technology called Airgig, designed to transmit data at gigabit speeds over existing power infrastructure. The system would move the data between routers at the top of utility poles, transmitting data wirelessly over the millimeter waveband, also known as "gigabit wifi." AT&T expects the first field trials of the system to begin 2017.

The announcement comes after a number of major investments in millimeter wave systems. Google is actively exploring the technology as a last-mile replacement for Google Fiber, and Facebook is planning to deploy its own version of the technology in San Jose (CA) later in 2016. In January, Aereo founder Chet Kanojia revealed a system called Starry that would use the same technology to provide home Internet at gigabit speeds. Unlike Starry or Terragraph, AirGig is entirely linear, offering little to no redundancy if one of the links goes down. That’s a problem for millimeter waveband signals, which can be absorbed by rain or other atmospheric moisture. Airgig plans to mitigate that effect by transmitting close to the lines themselves, with wire-bound devices to regenerate the signal — but without field testing, it’s difficult to say how reliable the fix will be.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket explosion will be a major setback for Internet.org’s ambitions in sub-saharan Africa. The satellite destroyed this week, called Amos 6, was set to be used in an entirely different project. Amos 6 would have provided backhaul for Internet.org’s Express Wi-Fi system, which connects rural internet providers to the broader internet. Anyone connecting to an Express Wi-Fi provider will experience the same, full internet as anyone else, with no limitations or favored apps. As a result, it’s been able to operate even in countries that rejected Free Basics, including India. Free Basics typically focuses on areas where internet infrastructure is available, but access is too expensive for much of the population. By restricting access, Free Basics can provide more people with access to basic services, even as it runs the risk of creating a multi-tiered internet. Express Wi-Fi tackles a different problem. Instead of focusing on areas that are already connected, Express Wi-Fi looks to build out back-end infrastructure to areas too poor and remote for a conventional telecom to justify the investment. Once the backhaul connectivity is available, local entrepreneurs take on the work of bringing it to the average consumer — but it’s only possible because of the infrastructure provided by Internet.org.

There's a new cybersecurity bill making its way through Congress, sponsored and written by Sen Diane Feinstein (D-CA), and critics are already calling it a new backdoor for surveillance by the National Security Agency.

The Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing Act of 2014 (CISA) was just approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee, putting it on track for a Senate vote soon. But like its controversial predecessors, the bill is coming under fire as a step backwards in the fight for surveillance reform.

The bill's primary effect would be a new requirement for sharing information on "cyber threat indicators," a vague term that could refer to anything from an ongoing hack to a vulnerability in commercial software. Once a company makes a report to the government with information about a threat indicator, CISA would require broad sharing across federal agencies, including with the NSA, which would be given a more central role in threat management under the new scheme.

Advocacy groups have seized on the reporting requirements as a troubling expansion of NSA access to private networks. The Center for Democracy in Technology says the provision "risks turning the cybersecurity program it creates into a back door wiretap." CDT also notes the bill lacks many crucial privacy protections that were included in previous cybersecurity acts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the bill "fatally flawed," and raised concerns that it would create a new pipeline of data from independent companies to the NSA.

If you're worried about Big Brother and computerized facial recognition, you’ve had plenty of reason to be scared. Law enforcement has been toying with facial recognition for a while, but the FBI is getting set to deploy its own system, called Next Generation Identification (NGI for short), planned to be fully operational soon.

NGI will bring together millions of photos in a central federal database, reaching all 50 states by the end of the year. After years of relative anonymity, it's easy to think 2014 is the year that law enforcement will finally know you by face. B

t here's an inconvenient fact about the FBI's shiny new system: Thanks to extensive work by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we actually know quite a bit about NGI, and the numbers suggest it isn't very good at recognizing faces. Given a suspect's face, NGI returns a ranked list of 50 possibilities, and only promises an 85 percent chance of returning the suspect's name in the list. To put it another way, even when you give NGI 50 guesses, it still lets one in seven suspects off the hook.

Compare that to Facebook's DeepFace system, recently presented at the IEEE Computer Vision conference, and it looks even worse. Give Facebook two pictures, and it can tell you with 97 percent accuracy whether they're the same person, roughly the same accuracy as a human being in the same spot.

To be fair, Facebook has a whole network's worth of data on its side, so it ends up comparing each face to a smaller number of possibilities. It isn’t an exact comparison, but the overall impression is hard to deny: the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency is getting outgunned by a social network.

More than a month after Turkey lifted its Twitter block, the country's government is still keeping a close eye on any potentially embarrassing tweets.

In a single week, Turkish courts have filed five separate takedown motions to Twitter Headquarters, requesting the removal of over a hundred tweets.

Most of the tweets are still available to US users, but it seems likely that Twitter has blocked them for users registered within Turkey, in accordance with its policy of compliance with local laws and court orders.

@ThinkAgain_DOS doesn't have many followers (just 1,552 at press time), but it's not designed for people to actually follow it.

It's a disruptor, replying to accounts that don't follow it and breaking up hashtags like #ISIS or #BokoHaram, the names of designated terrorist groups in Iraq and Nigeria. As a former State Department adviser described it to Mother Jones, "it's targeted at blunting the recruitment pitches." That means busting up the conversation.