Archive: Year: 2014

Signals While the FCC says it wants to bolster the ability of local municipalities to develop and market their own broadband offerings, Wednesday night, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) successfully inserted an amendment to a spending bill that would bar the FCC from taking such action, David Sirota reports for the International Business Times. He notes, "Blackburn’s top campaign donors include private telecommunications firms that do not want to have to compete with publicly owned ISPs." More than 1 million comments on the FCC's net neutrality proceeding--more than any other rulemaking--have now come in, with the deadline extended through today, reports Brian Fung for the Washington Post. Taking the temperature of the liberal base at the Netroots Nation convention in Detroit right now, Katie...

Disclosures Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) is in the Bay Area hunting for libertarian techie donors, reports Darren Samuelsohn for Politico. The odds of the USA Freedom Act making it through the Senate aren't high, meaning the chances of improving its privacy features also aren't very good, reports Alex Byers for Politico. The UN's human rights chief says Edward Snowden shouldn't be prosecuted because he helped disclose many human rights violations, reports the Agence France Press. In an exclusive interview with the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger and Ewen MacAskill, Snowden says if he ended up in Guantanamo, he could "live with that" but that he still wanted a jury trial in the United States with an opportunity to present a full defense. A Swedish judge upheld the...

Some Comments What we probably should just start calling "The Internet privacy coalition"--a network including Access, the ACLU, American Library Association, Credo, Duck Duck Go, EFF, Fight for the Future, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Free Press Action Fund, the Libertarian Party, Open Technology Institute, PEN American Center, Reddit, Silent Circle, Sunlight Foundation and TechFreedom--co-signed a letter to President Obama urging that he speak out against CISA (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act), which is heading to the Senate floor. The letter is also signed by digital security experts Jacob Applebaum, Matt Blaze, Matthew Green, Morgan Marquis-Boire and Eleanor Saitta. More than 100,000 additional comments on net neutrality streamed into the FCC today, reports Steve Lohr for the Times, making a total of about...

Headlining Tech mogul and self-styled savior of democracy Sean Parker, founder of Brigade, has started giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates, most of them quasi-moderates opposed by Tea Party challengers, reports Alexander Burns for Politico. The RNC's Data Trust project is rolling out a new feature allowing users to update and share voter information with each other in real time, Alex Roarty reports for National Journal. This ad's for you: ""Instead of sending a letter to a post box, we're sending a 30-second spot to a TV set," says one cable marketing executive about the new wave of hyper-targeted political ads rolling out across the electoral landscape, as reported by Patrick O'Connor for the Wall Street Journal. Republican tech start-up Lincoln...

New Bosses The emergency surveillance bill being pushed thru the UK Parliament this week would expand the government's power to force overseas companies to hand over user data, in addition to expanding the types of data covered, and privacy campaigners are worried, report Alan Travis and James Ball for the Guardian. Talking to Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian, Edward Snowden also questioned the rush to pass the legislation, saying it could have been written by the NSA. Here's a detailed critique of the proposed legislation from Open Rights Group and several other privacy organizations. MSNBC talker Ronan Farrow takes to the Washington Post to call on social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to police the speech of "violent terrorists" on their sites...

Unequal Relationships The proposed Data Retention and Investigation Powers (DRIP) Act, which is being rushed through the UK Parliament as we speak, is being attacked by the likes of the World Wide Web Foundation, the Open Rights Group and the Law Society for its draconian expansion of government powers over communications data, reports David Meyer for GigaOm. Google is sending some of its top executives, including chairman Eric Schmidt, on a multi-city tour of Europe later this year, along with an external group of advisors, to promote and explain its approach to online privacy, Mark Scott reports for the New York Times. Related: Google's top lawyer, David Drummond, says in a Guardian oped that the company erred in removing links to several Guardian...

Solely "It is entirely false that U.S. intelligence agencies conduct electronic surveillance of political, religious or activist figures solely because they disagree with public policies or criticize the government, or for exercising constitutional rights," the Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a joint statement responding the yesterday's story in The Intercept about the NSA and FBI's surveillance of Muslim-Americans. In a joint letter to President Obama organized by the ACLU, more than 40 civil rights, human rights, privacy rights and religious organizations asked for a "full public accounting" of the targeting of Muslim community leaders. One of Congress's sole two Muslim members, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), issued a statement expressing his concerns, calling The Intercept's report...

First They Came For the Muslims… This is quite a lede sentence from Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain, finally delivering the big story The Intercept has been working on from the Snowden files: "The National Security Agency and FBI have covertly monitored the emails of prominent Muslim-Americans—including a political candidate and several civil rights activists, academics, and lawyers—under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies." They add: "Given that the government’s justifications for subjecting [these] U.S. citizens to surveillance remain classified, it is impossible to know why their emails were monitored, or the extent of the surveillance. It is also unclear under what legal authority it was conducted, whether the men were formally targeted under FISA warrants, and what, if...

Seers in the Wall Street Journal, Obama political advisor and campaign guru David Plouffe says that in the future, campaigns will use candidate holograms to interact with voters door-to-door, online voter registration will become universal, and campaigns "will be increasingly personalized to the individual." Google co-founder Larry Page thinks the work week should be reduced so people can spend "more time with their family or pursue their own interests." Tomorrow, BRCK--the self-powered, mobile WiFi device designed for use in low-infrastructure parts of the world--has its launch in Nairobi, and co-founder Erik Hersman (of the Ushahidi team) explains its provenance here. “That idea of technology as an empowering force that can actually make peoples’ lives better I think is central to a government context,” Boston's...

Intercepted Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani broke a huge new story in the Washington Post Sunday, detailing how the NSA's dragnet surveillance program intercepts far more communications from Americans and other "ordinary" Internet users than they do of "legally targeted foreigners." They note that the "collateral harm to privacy" is "on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address." Their report was based on a trove of emails, photos, social network messages, chat records and instant messages--roughly 160,000 in all--that whistleblower Edward Snowden shared with the Post. (Until recently, US official denied that Snowden had access to this data.) Nine in ten of the 11,400 accounts swept up in those intercepts were of bystanders. Nothing to...