Archive: Year: 2014

It's time to announce our theme for Personal Democracy Forum 2014. Although last year, it was "Think Bigger," and in 2012, it was "The Internet's New Political Power," the Snowden revelations and recent events around the world have made it hard for us to be so aspirational. To be honest, it feels like we are living in both the best of times and the worst of times. So this year's theme may at first glance appear to be a contradiction: "Save the Internet | The Internet Saves." To many observers, 2014 feels like the year when we could lose the battle for the open Internet. On top of longstanding threats to net neutrality and the continuing challenge of the digital...

Collective Hallucination The Obama administration is proposing legislation to end the NSA's collection of bulk phone records and instead have phone companies hold that data, while requiring individual orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain specific metadata. The government could also seek information on callers up to two "hops" from the number under suspicion. The number of Americans with a security clearance has risen, for the fourth consecutive year, to 5.1 million, reports Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. That's more than 28 of the 50 states. Jonathan Zittrain explains in The New Republic why the US government's decision to give up its Commerce Department contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) does not equal...

Role Models Among the tech execs who met with President Obama Friday to get an update on his NSA reforms: Google's Eric Schmidt, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix's Reed hastings, Box's Aaron Levie, DropBox's Drew Houston and Palantir's Alexander Karp, “While the U.S. government has taken helpful steps to reform its surveillance practices, these are simply not enough,” Facebook said in a statement released after the meeting, Bloomberg's Roger Runningen and Chris Strohm report. “People around the globe deserve to know that their information is secure and Facebook will keep urging the U.S. government to be more transparent about its practices and more protective of civil liberties.” George Washington University--a school that attracts a lot of students interested in politics and government service--asks...

Circumlocution and Circumvention We're watching the Sources and Secrets conference live online this morning; it's streaming at www.cuny.tv/sourcesandsecrets until 1pm ET. Among the speakers: Bob Woodward, Jeffrey Toobin, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Bart Gellman, Jill Abramson, Bill Keller, Quinn Norton, Katrina vandal Heuvel, Robert Litt. Richard Ledgett, the NSA's deputy director, appeared at TED yesterday via Skype (but not via robot) to respond to Edward Snowden's talk the day before, but judging from the audience's tweets, he didn't do all that well. Sen. Harry Reid has stepped into the battle between his colleague Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the CIA, ordering a "forensic examination" of the Intelligence Committee's computers to determine whether its staff hacked the agency's network. The German Parliament has formally launched...

Take Me To the Moon Larry Page, Google co-founder, who is known for his interest in "moon shot" scale projects, offered a bit of his vision of the future at TED. "In technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change," he said. The incongruity of saying this to interviewer Charlie Rose was presumably not discussed. Page also said, "We need to know what surveillance the government is doing. We need to debate that, or we can't have a functioning democracy." And he added, "For me it's tremendously disappointing that the government did this without telling us first." The NSA's top lawyer says US tech companies "were fully aware" of the agency's data collection program, Spencer Ackerman writes for The Guardian. This contradicts many...

Weird Nerds Starting in 2009, the NSA has been collecting, recording and saving 100% of some foreign country's phone calls, keeping them for a month so they can be played back in full when needed, Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani report for the Washington Post. At least six countries are being targeted by the program, code-named RETRO. They add, "Present and former U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide context for a classified program, acknowledged that large numbers of conversations involving Americans would be gathered from the country where RETRO operates." Edward Snowden appeared at TED via a two-way robot simulcast, and renewed the call he made at SXSW for tech companies to make encryption a standard feature of their...

Sympathy for the Developer Code for America's Catherine Bracy argues that the latest controversy over gender discrimination at a tech workplace (this time at GitHub) is connected to the naive belief in "holacracy"--or organizational structures without hierarchy. She writes: I’m starting to think all of the problems we’re seeing with Silicon Valley these days—the ineptitude at politics, the clumsiness with handling inequality in SF, the lack of gender and racial diversity in the industry—are actually rooted in a systemic failure to understand how power works. As we move to an era where tech is central to our culture and economy, smart founders and investors will come to realize that stacking their companies full of people who understand politics and can create...

Openly Closed It's Sunshine Week, and the AP's Ted Bridis and Jack Gillum reports that the Obama administration censored or denied access to government files at a greater pace in 2013 than in any previous year. They note that, "Citizens, journalists, businesses and others last year made a record 704,394 requests for information, an 8 percent increase over the previous year. The government responded to 678,391 requests, an increase of 2 percent over the previous year. The AP analysis showed that the government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them, in 244,675 cases or 36 percent of all requests. On 196,034 other occasions, the government said it couldn't find records, a person refused to...

One of the highlights of this year's Personal Democracy Forum Poland-Central/Eastern Europe (PDF PL-CEE) conference* last Thursday and Friday in Warsaw was the talk by Szitlana Zalischuk, the founder of Ukraine's Center UA civic group. "Democracy is weak," she warned the 300-plus attendees, who had come from 25 countries around the world to learn from each other about the potential of technology to enable positive social change. The "EuroMaidan" movement may have forced Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych out of office, but it was far from clear that non-violent civic activism was going to win the day in the face of an invasion of Crimea and more not-so-veiled threats of force from Russia. At the same time, she reminded everyone of the...

The Senator Protests Taking the simmering fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee to a whole new level, yesterday Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) publicly accused the agency of violating federal law and undermining Congress' ability to oversee its actions. At issue: the agency's interference with the committee's investigators, who have been reviewing its detention and torture programs, and which appears to have included snooping on the computers being used by Senate staffers in their investigation. Feinstein used her floor speech (full text here) to reveal for the first time that in 2010 the CIA had also removed documents from the computer system being used by her staff. It's worth recalling that one of the triggers behind this whole fight is...