Archive: Category: TechPresident

Decay After unanimously clearing the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees two weeks ago, the USA Freedom Act surveillance reform bill looks like it's in trouble, after being weakened by the Rules Committee in response to pressure from the White House on House leaders. The Open Technology Institute has withdrawn its support, with its policy counsel Robyn Greene noting that the amended bill "may still allow data collection on a dangerously massive scale" and its policy director Kevin Bankston decrying the watering down of the bill's transparency reporting provisions. The Internet freedom group Access also pulled its support for the bill. A federal court has ruled that a 50-year-old secret CIA history on the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation can remain classified and exempt...

Disruptors The Intercept's Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras report that the NSA records and archives the audio "of virtually every cell phone conversation" in the Bahamas, retaining them for playback for up to a month. They note that "nearly five million Americans visit the country every year, and many prominent U.S. citizens keep homes there, including Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey." The NSA program apparently uses "lawful intercept" access obtained by the Drug Enforcement Administration, piggybacking on equipment used to tap suspected drug kingpins, to obtain this country-level data. Why the Bahamas, a country that poses little threat to the US? "The country's small population," they write, "provides a manageable sample to try out the surveillance...

Undermining Most Americans don't know what net neutrality is, but of those who think they do, a majority favor it, according to a Google Consumer Survey of American adults conducted by Gregory Ferenstein. Cisco's top brass is speaking out about NSA overreach. First came a blog post on May 13 from its general counsel, and now a letter from its CEO John Chambers to President Obama says that if it is true the agency is physically intercepting its products in order to install tracking tools on them, "these actions will undermine confidence in our industry." Asked about the NSA's interception of computer hardware for export, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the program "does not sound familiar." The US Justice...

On the Home Front Traffic to the NY Times home page dropped by half in the last two years, prompting several "home page is dead" posts, from Quartz's Zachary Seward and the Atlantic's Derek Thompson Ken Auletta continues to lead the pack with his New Yorker coverage of Jill Abramson's firing from the New York Times. Don't miss Rachel Sklar's reflection in Medium on Jill Abramson's power. TechDirt's Mike Masnick says recent filings from the Obama Justice Department make clear, Americans apparently have no 4th Amendment protections when they communicate with foreigners. Our Miranda Neubauer rounds up how net neutrality activists are gearing up for the upcoming comment period on the FCC's proposed new rules. Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan are "not masters of their...

Throne Games, Phone Games As the FCC takes up Chairman Tom Wheeler's controversial proposal to allow paid prioritization (i.e. fast-lane) services online today, stop and read Ben Popper's story "Game of Phones: How Verizon Is Playing the FCC and Its Customers" in The Verge. Popper draws heavily on a new report from NY's Public Utility Law Project, written by New Networks, showing that Verizon told state regulators it was building its FIOS (high-speed fiber to the home) service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, which allowed it to build on top of existing telephone infrastructure and, crucially, to justify huge increases in "plain old telephone service" bills--some 84% between 2006 and 2009. But Verizon has used the billions it thus raised...

In addition to three dozen fantastic main hall keynoters, Personal Democracy Forum 2014 (#PDF14) is proud to offer the following amazing array of breakout speakers. Breakout sessions take place after lunch on both days of PDF, back-to-back from 2:00 to 3:00pm and then, after a coffee break, from 3:30-4:30pm. They will be held upstairs from NYU's Skirball Hall in the Kimmel Center on the 8th and 9th floors. In keeping with this year's bifurcated conference theme of "Save the Internet | The Internet Saves," we've developed a variety of sessions that will allow you to drill down on either theme, or, if you prefer, to focus on a particular track. The tracks are Organizing, Political Tech, Civic Tech, Ideas, and Activism...

Our Surveillance Society Senators Mark Udall (D-CO) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) are charging that the Justice Department has been misleading the Supreme Court about how the NSA has been implementing its surveillance programs, referring to a recent case where the Court dismissed Amnesty International's challenge to the agency's warrantless wiretapping program, saying they couldn't prove their communications had been intercepted, Charlie Savage reports. The two Senators wrote the Justice Department's solicitor general, saying "We are concerned that the executive branch's decade-long reliance on a secret body of surveillance law has given rise to a culture of misinformation, and led senior officials to repeatedly make misleading statements to the public, Congress and the courts about domestic surveillance." As Josh Gerstein and Stephanie Simon...

Having It All "The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers," reports Glenn Greenwald, in an exclusive excerpt from his new book on Edward Snowden, No Place to Hide, which hits bookstores today. One NSA slide reprinted in Greenwald's book read, "Sniff it all, Know it all, Collect it all, Process it all, Exploit it all, Partner it all." That's from Ed Pilkington's lengthy and colorful profile of Greenwald in The Guardian. Also, this revealing comment about why First Look Media is still in its early stages: "Putting together a new media organisation is more difficult than I'd anticipated. Which makes sense, as...

Nerds Biting Back The net neutrality debate is shifting fast. Late Friday, Mike Masnick of TechDirt wrote that it was significant that the FCC Chair Tom Wheeler, in a written reply to leaders of last week's tech industry letter to the agency, was now saying that this week's vote of the commission will include a request for public comment on whether the Title II of the Telecommunications Act should be invoked to reclassify broadband service. According to Gautham Nagesh's story in Sunday's Wall Street Journal, Wheeler is revising his planned rulemaking draft with more language promising to prevent broadband providers from slowing down their services to customers, while still allowing paid prioritization deals. Also in the Journal, Tim Wu and Berin Szoka debate...

Beware The Ides of May Nearly 100 advocacy, consumer and media organizations rallied by Free Press (including us here at PDM) have sent a letter to the FCC urging the rejection of any rules allowing Internet service providers to start discriminating among content providers. Free Press has also launched an online hub, may15.savetheinternet.com, to coordinate protests around the commission's next upcoming meeting. We also hear that net neutrality activists are hard at work on developing a throttling tool that would allow websites to give visitors a taste of what their browsing experience might be like in a future without net neutrality. Meanwhile, the "most open and transparent administration in US history" has a new policy in the works that would prohibit current as...