Battle Lines
The New York Times Peter Baker and Charlie Savage preview President Obama’s Friday speech on NSA reformreporting that he “trying to straddle a difficult line in hopes of placating foreign leaders and advocates of civil liberties without a backlash from national security agencies.” If their report proves accurate, Obama’s changes will probably satisfy no one, least of all the civil liberties community.
On the storage of bulk data, Obama is reportedly going to leave it in NSA hands for now, but ask Congress to weigh in. Worse, he is considering reducing the number of “hops” that the NSA can take when examining the connections and records of a target, from three to…two.
Since the NSA argues that storing Americans phone records can’t be done efficiently unless held by one party rather than several, and no independent entity to do so currently exists, Baker and Savage report that “he will ask Congress to work with him to determine the best way to store the data.”
This should go about as well as the plan to close Guantanamo.
Also roiling the waters, a former chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wrote to the congressional oversight committees to express opposition to the creation of an independent public advocate that could argue against the Justice Department in secret proceedings (which are currently completely one-sided.).
Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser and member of his NSA review panel, responded, “We respectfully disagree with that one, on the ground that the judge sometimes is not in the ideal position to know whether a particular view needs representation and that in our tradition, standardly, the judge doesn’t decide whether one or another view gets a lawyer.”
Members of President Obama’s NSA review panel testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday questioning the justification for the mass collection of phone metadata.
The NSA has bugged 100,000 computers around the world and devised methods to use radio to spy on computers not connected to the Internet, the New York Times David Sanger and Thom Shanker report. Their story expands on Dutch and German reporting on the NSA spy program and the hardware it uses.
Notably, Sanger and Shanker reveal that the Times “withheld some of those details, at the request of American intelligence officials, when it reported, in the summer of 2012, on American cyberattacks on Iran.”
Edward Snowden is joining the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, formally aligning himself with fellow board members Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Daniel Ellsberg.
Whither Net Neutrality
Ruling for Verizon, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected the FCC’s “open internet” rule.
Is “sponsored data” the future post-net-neutrality? That is, you get “free” data services but only because certain providers of content are subsidizing the cost in exchange for preferential treatment by the pipe owners? BuzzFeed’s John Herrman explains.
On Reddit, net freedom advocates Josh Levy, Tim Wu, Susan Crawford and Marvin Ammori explained what the DC court’s decision in the Verizon case means for the future of net neutrality. What’s needed next? They say the FCC needs to assert its authority and reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service (not an information service) under Title II of the Communications Act and insist that common carrier rules apply.
In Slate, Ammori blames former FCC chair Julius Genachowski for the loss in court, comparing him to the coward Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter novels, who makes a deal with Voldemort.
Columbia law professor Tim Wu, author of the term “net neutrality”