Archive: Year: 2014

Too Big to Read Our Mail Security expert Bruce Schneier writes an oped for CNN arguing that the NSA should be broken up. Diverging from some anti-surveillance activists, he praises the agency's "Tailored Access Operations" group for its ability to secretly break into "the enemy's computers," but blasts NSA's dragnet collection of domestic and foreign civilians communications data and its "deliberate sabotaging" of once-thought-to-be-secure commercial encryption systems and the like, which "destroys our trust in the Internet…and makes us more vulnerable." The most interesting part of of Schneier's piece is his suggestion that instead of focusing on breaking online security (the "signals intelligence" gathering role) it instead emphasize communications security. He writes: Computer and network security is hard, and we need the NSA's...

Heat List The FCC is proposing new rules to keep Internet service providers from providing two tiers of online service, in a bid to protect net neutrality that, at least initially, stops short of reclassifying broadband as a communications service. In addition, the agency said it will look closely at current laws that restrict "the ability of cities and towns to offer broadband services to consumers in their communities," earning the praise of Christopher Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Speaking of which, Google Fiber is moving into 9 more metro areas. Matt Stroud examines the Chicago police department's new experiment in predictive modeling for The Verge, asking whether its focus on creating a "heat list" of people theoretically most likely to be...

Journoterrorism? The London police lawfully employed the British Terrorism Act of 2000 when they detained and interrogated journalist David Miranda last summer, a lower court has ruled. It said that while his detention was "an indirect interference with press freedom," it was still justified by "very pressing" issues of national security, Ryan Devereaux reports for The Intercept. The police claim that he was subject to the anti-terror law because he was "likely to be involved in espionage activity." Miranda's partner, Glenn Greenwald, zings the British government for equating the release of the Edward Snowden documents--which he drily notes "the free world calls award-winning journalism" with terrorism. AT&T reports that it provided user information to US authorities more than 300,000 times in 2013, along...

Fingerprints and Fire Insurance A new report from Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher in The Intercept details how the NSA and GCHQ went after WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and Pirate Bay. The IP addresses of visitors to WikiLeaks.org--including those of Americans--were collected by GCHQ. They also report that NSA analysts considered designating WikiLeaks a "malicious foreign actor," which would have allowed far greater levels of surveillance, including the capture of information about Americans visiting the site, but say it is unclear whether the designation was actually made. The NSA's Office of General Counsel also advised that if an analyst discovered that they had been surveilling an American, the incident had to be mentioned in a quarterly report "but it's nothing to worry about." Among...

Triple Play Special Apropos of the Comcast-Time Warner merger news, former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps pens an open letter to journalists in the Columbia Journalism Review, attempting to connect the interests of working reporters (a shrinking population) with his fight against media concentration and for a much more robust open internet. Tony Romm and Anna Palmer lay out the details in Politico of Comcast's big lobbying push for the Time Warner deal. Memory lane: In 2011, another former FCC Commissioner, Meredith Atwell Baker, went to work as a top lobbyist for Comcast after voting for its purchase of NBC, leaving the agency before her term expired. After an employee of a Seattle nonprofit wrote a tweet critical of that move, Comcast cut off...

Today's Big Disaster The big news this morning is cable giant Comcast's $44 billion bid to gobble up the number two giant Time Warner Cable, creating a behemoth that would utterly dominate the cable AND Internet service business in America. "Through canny skill, dogged persistence, and political heft, Comcast has put itself in a position to squeeze all the other players," writes Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford in her seminal book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. From page 68: Everyone, media conglomerates and small cable companies alike, has to work with Comcast on its terms. This allows Comcast to reap the rewards of dominance in the form of ever-increasing prices for data access and content...

Which Half a Glass? Nicole Perloth of The New York Times details the ways "the Internet Didn't Fight Back" yesterday: "Wikipedia did not participate. Reddit — which went offline for 12 hours during the protests two years ago — added an inconspicuous banner to its homepage. Sites like Tumblr, Mozilla and DuckDuckGo, which were listed as organizers, did nothing to their homepages. The most vocal protesters were the usual suspects: activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and Greenpeace." She does note that more than 70,000 calls and 150,000 emails to Members of Congress were tallied. Our Jessica McKenzie reports on the debate inside Wikipedia about what, if anything, the site should do about NSA...

Fight Club It's "The Day We Fight Back" for more than 6,000 websites, advocacy groups and Internet companies today, all banding together to protest the National Security Agency's mass surveillance programs, oppose Senator Dianne Feinstein's FISA Improvements Act, and support the USA Freedom Act. That bill, cosponsored by Senate Judiciary Chair Pat Leahy and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, would limit the collection of phone metadata, create a public advocate in the FISA court, and force more transparency to that court. As our Jessica McKenzie reports, the groups participating include the EFF, ACLU, Reddit, Upworthy, Tumblr, Mozilla, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Free Press and Freedom Works. The Reform Government Surveillance coalition, which includes Google, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo,...

Interception The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill's new digital magazine, is up with its first stories today: A Scahill-Greenwald jointly bylined report on how the NSA uses its ability to zero in on cell phone SIM cards in real-time to help the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) target lethal drone strikes--and how their failure to use human intelligence on the ground to confirm metadata about presumed terrorist targets is "an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people." The story relies heavily on a new anonymous whistleblower from inside the drone targeting program, along with testimony from Brandon Bryant, a former "stick monkey" turned antiwar activist, and supporting documents from the Snowden Files. Spectacular new photos...

Realizations The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is building a data-driven targeting effort for the 2014 mid-term elections, relying in part on Civis Analytics, the number-crunching firm launched by Obama 2012 chief analytics officer Dan Wagner. Their efforts, reports Ashley Parker in the New York Times, will focus on mobilizing base voters, not swing independents. Sasha Issenberg, the author of The Victory Lab, told her, “Campaigns are realizing that the smartest way to win the next vote is by mobilizing a nonvoter than by trying to win over a voter.” Ro Khanna, the upstart candidate backed by many tech industry moguls who is challenging incumbent Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) for his congressional seat, is profiled in the Times today. You can read our...