Benton RSS Feed

Europeans, take note: The U.S. government has granted itself authority to secretly snoop on you. That’s according to a new report produced for the European Parliament, which has warned that a U.S. spy law renewed late last year authorizes “purely political surveillance on foreigners' data” if it is stored using U.S. cloud services like those provided by Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

Europeans were previously alarmed by the fact that the PATRIOT Act could be used to obtain data on citizens outside the United States. But this time the focus is a different law—the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Amendments Act—which poses a “much graver risk to EU data sovereignty than other laws hitherto considered by EU policy-makers,” according to the recently published report, Fighting Cyber Crime and Protecting Privacy in the Cloud, produced by the Centre for the Study of Conflicts, Liberty and Security.

Facebook, Google, and Microsoft may face stricter privacy rules requiring them to let users shift data to competitors in the European Union under proposed changes to a draft law. People need control over their personal data, according to a report recommending amendments to the rules proposed by the Brussels-based European Commission.

Social networks should let users move information “from one platform to another” and get precisely what sort of details companies have on them, free of charge, said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green Party politician leading the effort in the European Parliament. EU data-protection watchdogs for the first time would be empowered to fine companies as much as 2 percent of yearly global sales for “intentionally or negligently” violating the rules under the commission proposal. “Data protection is a fundamental right” that needs to be protected, so “if you want my data, ask me for consent,” Albrecht said. His proposal would create “more transparency” on individual rights, what data processing is and the duties of companies that handle data.

Vint Cerf, co-creator of the Internet, said today he is troubled by the prospect of companies like AT&T avoiding government regulation after the transition from traditional phone technology to all-IP networks. Already, he said, competition was decimated when the Internet moved from dial-up providers to cable companies and telcos.

Cerf’s remarks came just one day after AT&T described its plans to retire the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network and become an all-IP telco. AT&T wants to make this transition without being subject to what it calls "monopoly-era regulatory obligations," which AT&T thinks are unjustified in the Internet age. On AT&T’s plan he said, “My first observation is that it is vital that we maintain openness and neutral access to the Internet's capabilities… The fact that you can carry voice over the Internet is almost incidental to the fact that you can carry any digital content over the Internet. I would not wish to see the question of regulation turn on the notion that Voice over IP is PSTN or is a replacement for PSTN. It is a replacement for almost everything we can do, all of the old network functions can be done on the Internet. If no regulation leads to your loss of choice of access to applications and content, then that is not an acceptable outcome. If that's what the telcos are trying to accomplish, I am opposed. If all they're trying to accomplish is to make sure the Internet stays as widely open as possible, and they are willing to provide competitive access and give us choice, that's another story.”

The Internet community is getting its lobby act together, sort of. At the very least, it has more associations than ever before representing its interests in Washington. But more won’t necessarily turn the minds of lawmakers and regulators. And unlike last year when the community rallied around potential piracy laws that could have harmed the Internet, there is no single flash point around which to organize. For the most part, the Internet community is still fixated on that victory.

Some of the same Internet leaders that spearheaded the fights against the piracy laws are looking to a video titled Silicon Prairie to help galvanize the online community and convince lawmakers that the Internet is more than Silicon Valley. The premiere of the 22-minute documentary at the opening of the International Consumer Electronics Show chronicled a bus tour from Denver to Danville (KY) organized by Reddit, to showcase how the Internet was bringing innovation to the heartland, the Silicon prairie. Comprised mostly of talking-heads testimonials with shots of small business owners and farmers heaping platitudes on how the Web saved and grew businesses, the documentary is modest but authentic. As Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian put it, “This is the real story" of the Internet.