Global Digital Download - North America News

The FBI has some strange ideas about how to “update” federal surveillance laws: They’re calling for legislation to penalize online services that provide users with too much security. I’m not kidding. The proposal was revealed in The Washington Post last week — and a couple days ago, a front-page story in The New York Times reported the Obama administration is preparing to back it. Why? Federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI have long feared their wiretap capabilities would begin “going dark” as criminals and terrorists — along with ordinary citizens — shift from telephone networks, which are required to be wiretap-ready under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), to the dizzying array of online communications platforms available today.

The Obama administration, resolving years of internal debate, is on the verge of backing a Federal Bureau of Investigation plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services, according to officials familiar with the deliberations. The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, has argued that the bureau’s ability to carry out court-approved eavesdropping on suspects is “going dark” as communications technology evolves, and since 2010 has pushed for a legal mandate requiring companies like Facebook and Google to build into their instant-messaging and other such systems a capacity to comply with wiretap orders.

Washington DC was awash this weekend with some of the biggest names in journalism, technology, civil society and government — and not just for the star-studded White House Correspondents’ Dinner. On Friday, Google hosted its first Big Tent event in DC with co-sponsor Bloomberg to discuss the future of free speech in the digital age. Each panel was guided by hypothetical scenarios that mirrored real current events and raised interesting free speech questions around offence, takedown requests, self-censorship, government leaks, national security and surveillance.

Blue Coat Systems, Inc., a market leader in Web security and WAN optimization, today commended U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) for its enforcement action against Computerlinks FZCO in connection with the unlawful diversion of Blue Coat ProxySG appliances to Syria. BIS previously penalized Wassim Jawad and Infotech in 2011 for their involvement in this unlawful transfer.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) demanded to know why the FBI wasn’t tracking the Boston bombing suspect’s web traffic during an appearance on Fox News this morning, possibly validating civil liberties activist fears that the attack would lead to calls for further digital surveillance: “If you Google terrorists you will find the older brother on the web, Youtube videos of him declaring war on us, saying we’re a Christian nation. We’re infidels. How could the FBI after the interview in 2011 not pick up that traffic where this guy is visiting radical web sites?“

The cofounder of the popular social news site Reddit has called on the leaders of Google, Facebook and Twitter to help defeat a controversial cybersecurity bill that would compromise the privacy of their users if passed by lawmakers. “I’m hoping that all of these tech companies take the stand that their privacy policies matter, their users’ privacy matters, and no legislation like CISPA should take that away,” Alexis Ohanian, former owner of Reddit (Wired’s parent company Conde Nast currently owns Reddit), said in a video posted yesterday.

The First Amendment protects anonymous speech, but the scope of that protection has been the subject of much debate. This Article adds to the discussion of anonymous speech by examining anti-mask statutes and cases as an analogue for the regulation of anonymous speech online. Anti-mask case law answers a number of questions left open by the Supreme Court. It shows that courts have used the First Amendment to protect anonymity beyond core political speech, when mask-wearing is expressive conduct or shows a nexus with free expression. This Article explores what the anti-mask cases teach us about anonymity online, including proposed real-name policies. It closes by returning to the real world of real masks, addressing the significance of physical anonymity in an age of remote biometric identification and drone use.

Today, thirty-four civil liberties organizations sent a joint letter to Congressional Representatives urging them to continue to oppose the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). CISPA is a misguided "cybersecurity" bill that would provide a gaping new exception to privacy law. The House of Representatives is likely to vote on it on Wednesday or Thursday of this week. This means that there's little time remaining to speak out against this bill.

In the last three months alone, the House has released three different cybersecurity bills and has held over seven hearings on the issue. In addition, the House Judiciary Committee floated changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the draconian anti-hacking statute that came to public prominence after the death of activist and Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz. Politicians tout this legislation as necessary to protect against foreign threats every single time they introduce a bill with “cyber” somewhere in the text.

Choose an acronym — SOPA, ACTA, TPP. Whether a legislative proposal or a trade agreement, Internet rights groups are framing the issues in much the same way: a global threat to free speech and privacy. They’ve cast content providers as repeat players in a battle over the future of intellectual property. The current manifestation is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiations with 11 Pacific Rim nations meant to revolutionize digital trade and set the tone for future agreements.

A Congressional debate over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, set for next week will take place out of public view. CISPA, which was reintroduced to the House of Representatives earlier this year, is set to undergo a markup session next week. During the session, members of the House Intelligence Committee will debate the bill and offer amendments before voting whether or not to move it to a full vote in the House — but it will be closed to the public and to press.

The President Barack Obama administration is informing a federal judge that if it’s forced to disclose a secret court opinion about the government illegally spying on Americans, the likely result could be “exceptionally grave and serious damage to the national security.”

The House Judiciary committee is reportedly circulating a discussion draft that would amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in precisely the wrong direction. In the wake of the tragic death of activist Aaron Swartz, US Internet freedom advocates have devoted much time and energy to pushing sensible reforms to narrow the scope of the CFAA, under which Swartz was being aggressively prosecuted at the time of his death. This draft flies in the face of those efforts, as it would dramatically enhance the already heavy penalties for violations of what Internet scholar Tim Wu recently called “the Worst Law in Technology," while appearing to expressly overturn existing case law to say that violating terms of service or other agreements can indeed be prosecuted as a felony.

Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a “top priority” this year. Last week, during a talk for the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann discussed some of the pressing surveillance and national security issues facing the bureau. 

Under CISPA, companies can collect your information in order to "protect the rights and property" of the company, and then share that information with third parties, including the government, so long as it is for "cybersecurity purposes." Companies aren't required to strip out personally identifiable information from the data they give to the government, and the government can then use the information for purposes wholly unrelated to cybersecurity – such as "national security," a term the bill leaves undefined.

Since the untimely death of activist Aaron Swartz in January, EFF has been pushing for Congress to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the law that hands out wildly disproportionate penalties for computer crimes, chills innovation, and potentially turns every computer user into a criminal. And new examples of the CFAA’s dangerous reach continue to make headlines.

Last week, Edith Ramirez, the newly named chair of the Federal Trade Commission, participated in her first public appearance as chairwoman at the International Association of Privacy Professionals conference. Her comments there bode well for the future of domestic privacy protection, especially when paired with the FTC’s recent settlement with HTC concerning the mobile device maker’s unfair and deceptive trade practices.

Why is CDT opposed to a House bill intended to promote sharing of information about cyberthreats? And why do we prefer a Senate proposal on information sharing? The reasons for our opposition to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) are well-illustrated by this opening sentence from an article yesterday in Government Computer News: Continuous monitoring is the order of the day for federal IT systems, and automated tools are generating more data about the status and behavior of agency networks. The next challenge, analysts, vendors and government officials say, is making use of all that data.

Before his planned retirement from Congress at the end of next year, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat, intends to give American consumers more meaningful control over personal data collected about them online. To that end, Mr. Rockefeller on Thursday introduced a bill called the “Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2013.” The bill would require the Federal Trade Commission to establish standardized mechanisms for people to use their Internet browsers to tell Web sites, advertising networks, data brokers and other online entities whether or not they were willing to submit to data-mining.

One of the Internet’s founding fathers is set this week to revive a heated cybersecurity debate over whether to preserve anonymity and the use of pseudonyms in online chat forums and social networks like Twitter. Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, is expected to make the case for keeping people’s identity anonymous — particularly on certain Web services — when he delivers the keynote address at the RSA cybersecurity conference here on Wednesday.

Start asking security experts which powerful Washington institutions have been penetrated by Chinese cyberspies, and this is the usual answer: almost all of them. The list of those hacked in recent years includes law firms, think tanks, news organizations, human rights groups, contractors, congressional offices, embassies and federal agencies. The information compromised by such intrusions, security experts say, would be enough to map how power is exercised in Washington to a remarkably nuanced degree. The only question, they say, is whether the Chinese have the analytical resources to sort through the massive troves of data they steal every day.

It's official: The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act was reintroduced in the House of Representatives yesterday. CISPA is the contentious bill civil liberties advocates fought last year, which would provide a poorly-defined "cybersecurity" exception to existing privacy law. CISPA offers broad immunities to companies who choose to share data with government agencies (including the private communications of users) in the name of cybersecurity. It also creates avenues for companies to share data with any federal agencies, including military intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA).

Not every media company is as tempting a target for hackers as The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal. Not every company can afford high-priced computer security consultants, either. Is there anything that everyday reporters and their editors can learn about protecting themselves, based on the revelatory details the Times and other targets made public last week? As we wrote at the time, the cyber-attacks on the Times, the Post, and the Journal came as no surprise to foreign reporters working in China or elsewhere who repeatedly face fake emails, custom malware, and hacking attacks on their webmail. But the level of access that the hackers obtained at the Times' main offices, and the publication of details by their technical advisers, can be instructive.

Union County, N.J., prosecutors demanded Tina Renna give them “the names of 16 government officials who she accused online of misusing county generators after Hurricane Sandy,” Lilly Chapa reports. Renna claimed privilege, and Superior Court Judge Karen Cassidy has ordered a hearing “to further discuss whether Renna is a journalist as defined under the state shield law,” Chapa writes.Renna’s blog The County Watchers chronicles county employees who make six-figure incomes, challenges the county’s finances and posts videos from meetings. Prosecutors, Chapa writes, “have argued that Renna cannot be defined as a journalist because she was involved in politics in the past and the blog is biased and often critical of the Union County government.”

Last year, we saw more battles in Congress over Internet freedom than we have in many years as user protests stopped two dangerous bills, the censorship-oriented SOPA, and the privacy-invasive Cybersecurity Act of 2012. But Congress ended the year by ramming through a domestic spying bill and weakening the Video Privacy Protection Act. In 2013, Congress will tackle several bills—both good and bad—that could shape Internet privacy for the next decade. Some were introduced last year, and some will be completely new.

Chinese hackers believed to have government links have been conducting wide-ranging electronic surveillance of media companies including The Wall Street Journal, apparently to spy on reporters covering China and other issues, people familiar with the incidents said. Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. said Thursday that the paper's computer systems had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers, apparently to monitor its China coverage. New York Times Co. disclosed Wednesday night that its flagship newspaper also had been the victim of cyberspying. Chinese hackers for years have targeted major U.S. media companies with hacking that has penetrated inside newsgathering systems, several people familiar with the response to the cyberattacks said. Tapping reporters' computers could allow Beijing to identify sources on articles and information about pending stories. Chinese authorities in the past have penalized Chinese nationals who have passed information to foreign reporters.

There are two Bills that are floating through the corridors of power on the Hill that could potentially change the course of civil and political rights within the United States and the world. One was introduced through the House of Representatives and the other through the Senate. The two Bills touch on a common thread that are premised on "national security" however there are interesting challenges that will surface should the Bills be passed that affect global public interest that require further examination, introspection and discussion.

Yahoo demands probable-cause, court-issued warrants to divulge the content of messages inside its popular consumer e-mail brands — Yahoo and Ymail, the web giant said Friday. The Sunnyvale, California-based internet concern’s exclusive comments came two days after Google revealed to Wired that it demands probable-cause warrants to turn over consumer content stored in its popular Gmail and cloud-storage Google Drive services — despite the Electronic Communications Privacy Act not always requiring warrants.

AT&T took some heat last fall for imposing limits (some of which have since been removed) on which subscribers can use FaceTime, Apple’s video calling service, over its cellular network. This week, the FCC Open Internet Advisory Committee published a report on the subject that I helped to author. Its technical analysis is well worth a look. The OIAC report recognizes that mobile networks have limited bandwidth and that a high-bandwidth application like FaceTime can cause substantial performance problems on the network. But does that mean that network management techniques need to target particular applications? One view represented in the report, as well as in CDT’s most recent blog post on the subject, is that it would be much better for application developers and consumers if network management were to be application-agnostic. 

One year ago today, Internet users of all ages, races, and political stripes participated in the largest protest in Internet history, flooding Congress with millions of emails and phone calls to demand they drop the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—a dangerous bill that would have allowed corporations and the govenrment to censor larger parts of the Web.

You might call Hillary Clinton the ur-diplomat of the digital age. Under her guidance, the U.S. State Department embraced new technology in a way no secretary of state has done since the fax machine. For better or worse, Clinton added a new dimension to the way Washington engages with the rest of the world.With rumors that John Kerry may be tapped to take Clinton's place when she departs the agency this month comes rising speculation over how the current chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee might handle State's technological mandate.

Navigating the Internet requires using addresses and corresponding names that identify the location of individual computers. The Domain Name System (DNS) is the distributed set of databases residing in computers around the world that contain address numbers mapped to corresponding domain names, making it possible to send and receive messages and to access information from computers anywhere on the Internet. Many of the technical, operational, and management decisions regarding the DNS can have significant impacts on Internet-related policy issues such as intellectual property, privacy, Internet freedom, e-commerce, and cybersecurity.  

The Senate on Friday reauthorized for five years broad electronic eavesdropping powers that legalized and expanded the President George W. Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. The FISA Amendments Act, (.pdf) which was expiring Monday at midnight, allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States. The communications may be intercepted “to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

The Senate late Thursday forwarded legislation to President Barack Obama granting the public the right to automatically display on their Facebook feeds what they’re watching on Netflix. While lawmakers were caving to special interests, however, they cut from the legislative package language requiring the authorities to get a warrant to read your e-mail or other data stored in the cloud.

The Internet, long viewed as a tool to expand freedom, is an equally effective tool for repression. That is just as true in the United States as anywhere else. Security guru Bruce Schneier noted in a recent blog post, citing Evgeny Morozov's book, "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom," that, "Repressive regimes all over the world are using the Internet to more efficiently implement surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. And they're getting really good at it."

Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) accused the Obama administration on Wednesday of hypocrisy for advocating for Internet freedom on a global level but supporting Internet regulation domestically. U.S. delegates are currently attending a conference in Dubai to update a global telecommunications treaty. The Obama administration and lawmakers in both parties oppose efforts that would expand the treaty to allow for international regulation of the Internet.

If you left a letter on your desk for 180 days, you wouldn’t imagine that the police could then swoop in and read it without your permission, or a judge’s. But that’s just what law enforcement officers can do with your e-mail. Using only a subpoena, government agents can demand that service providers turn over electronic communications they have stored, as long as those communications are more than six months old. Protections are even weaker for opened e-mail or documents stored in the “cloud.” The advertisements that the Postal Service piles into your mailbox every day are legally sacrosanct; the medical notifications your health-insurance company sends to your Gmail account are not.

Secret, undemocratic trade agreements that put shackles on our free speech online are nothing new. Civil society organisations have been fighting the passage of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) for the past six years. But some bad ideas never die. The same year that ACTA was defeated in the European Union, a new agreement was forged behind closed doors: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

A teen convicted of molestation can't be kept off social media, according to a court ruling, in a case that raises questions about the Internet's role in crime and punishment. Some argue social media is a First Amendment right, and it should be treated like other forms of freedom of speech, which can't be taken away.

Longtime opponents to Internet censorship were glad to see the Obama Administration enforce new human rights rules involving Iran last week. The State Department announced sanctions against four individuals and five entities, including Iran's communications and technology minister Reza for actions that censored access to the Internet and other actions that blocked freedom of expression. The sanctions mean these individuals and entities will have their U.S. assets frozen and U.S. entities can't do business with them. Designated individuals and members of designated entities cannot travel to the U.S.

Is MetroPCS the publisher of your tweets? Is Verizon’s FiOS Internet service a newspaper? They seem to think so. In their pending challenge to the FCC’s Open Internet Rules, Verizon and MetroPCS argued that the Rules violate their purported First Amendment right to exercise “editorial discretion” over their customers’ Internet access. Yesterday, CDT and other friends of the court (not to mention friends of the Internet) filed briefs rebutting this dangerous assertion.

The unfolding scandal that led to the resignation of Gen. David Petraeus, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, started with some purportedly harassing emails sent from pseudonymous email accounts to Jill Kelley. After the FBI kicked its investigation into high gear, it identified the sender as Paula Broadwell and, ultimately, read massive amounts of private email messages that uncovered an affair between Broadwell and Petraeus (and now, the investigation has expanded to include Gen. John Allen's emails with Kelley). We've received a lot of questions about how this works—what legal process the FBI needs to conduct its email investigation. The short answer? It's complicated.

The Homeland Security Department has commissioned Accenture to test technology that mines open social networks for indications of pandemics, according to the vendor. The $3 million, yearlong “biosurveillance” program will try to instantaneously spot public health trends among the massive amount of data that citizens share online daily, company officials said in announcing the deal Thursday.

Now that the election is over, Congress can get back to work doing the people’s business. And if that work is going to affect online expression, innovation, and/or privacy, it should start with a simple proposition: bring in the nerds (aka experts) and Internet users who care deeply about protecting their digital rights.

AT&T’s internet traffic in San Francisco runs through fiber-optic cables at an AT&T facility located at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco. Using a device called a “splitter” a complete copy of the internet traffic that AT&T receives – email, web browsing requests, and other electronic communications sent to or from the customers of AT&T’s WorldNet Internet service from people who use another internet service provider – is diverted onto a separate fiber-optic cable which is connected to a room, known as the SG-3 room, which is controlled by the NSA. The other copy of the traffic continues onto the internet to its destination. 

When it comes to big tech spenders in Washington, no one tops Google. This third quarter, the Internet giant shelled out $4.18 million to influence political decision-makers in a 76 percent increase over last year during the same period. So far in 2012, Google has spent $13.13 million to influence political decision-makers, already topping the 2011 total of $9.68 million. Facebook also continues to spend more. Though steadily increasing, the social network's outlay pales in comparison to Google. The leading social network spent $980,000 in the third quarter, marking a two percent increase over the previous quarter for a 2012 total of $2.59 million.

We reach certain points in time, what the critical media scholar Robert McChesney calls "critical junctures," or that the sociologist and media historian Paul Starr calls "constitutive moments." Now is one such moment, and choices and decisions made now could tilt the evolution of the network media ecology in Canada toward a more closed, surveilled and centralized regime instead of an open one that strives to put as much of the internet's capabilities into as many people's hands as possible. The latter approach maximizes the diversity of voices and is essential to any free press -- digital, networked, or otherwise -- and to the role of communications media in a democracy.

The nation’s major internet service providers by year’s end will institute a so-called six-strikes plan, the “Copyright Alert System” initiative backed by the Obama administration and pushed by Hollywood and the major record labels to disrupt and possibly terminate internet access for online copyright scofflaws.

SOPA and PIPA were a major threat to the Internet. Only those in the entertainment industry denied the claim as they pushed for stricter control of the Internet. The two bills eventually spurred the single largest Internet protest as countless Web sites, including Wikipedia, went dark. The bills were soundly defeated, but do they ever have a chance of coming back? MPAA CEO Chris Dodd was a speaker at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club on Tuesday night where he spoke at length about SOPA, PIPA, and what Hollywood’s doing to help combat piracy. He also spoke at length with Wired after the talk to further clarify what he thought about the Internet movement against the two anti-piracy bills from earlier this year, and other subjects.

Today is Banned Websites Awareness Day – a designated day within Banned Books Week – which is sponsored by our friends at the American Association of School Librarians and designed to raise awareness of the overly restrictive blocking of legitimate, educational websites and academically useful social networking tools in schools and school libraries. At the ACLU LGBT Project, this is a subject near and dear to our hearts, and today we’re releasing a new report about our work to fight back against banned websites. 

The American Civil Liberties Union released a tranche of law enforcement records on the use of two increasingly popular surveillance methods that don’t require a warrant: pen registers and trap and trace devices. The names are a bit misleading. In the past, these were, in fact, devices — little boxes that law enforcement affixed to phone lines to covertly record incoming and outgoing phone numbers. But now the interception capabilities are built in the phone companies’ hardware.

The chief executive of Twitter, Dick Costolo, has said the company will continue to fight legal challenges brought against its users by officials who want access to their archived tweets. Costolo said Twitter found itself in an invidious position in the case of Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protester whose tweets were sought by prosecutors in New York.

The US Senate today strongly indicated how unwilling it is to allow for United Nations (UN) control of the Internet. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted as one on a resolution in opposition to the idea. If this excercise sounds familiar, it should be. In early August the House, the lower chamber of the US Congress, voted and passed a resolution that, to quote the National Journal, “aimed at preventing any efforts to hand the United Nations more power to oversee the Internet.”

Campaign strategists and pundits are always trying to predict the newest or most important political demographic groups. For a long time, it was seniors. That was followed by the dawn of the "soccer mom" and lately there has been a lot of talk about "NASCAR dads." But the strongest untapped political factor these days is rarely mentioned, despite representing a force central to the lives of nearly every American -- the Internet.

Twitter has relented in its fight with New York prosecutors to hand over three months worth of messages from an Occupy Wall Street protester ahead of the activist's criminal trial. Twitter had argued that the posts belong to Malcolm Harris and as such it would be violating fourth amendment privacy rights if it were to disclose the communications. But having lost a legal appeal against a subpoena, Twitter faced the prospect of steep fines if it did not comply with the judges order to turn over the tweets to the Manhattan district attorney's office.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement ("TPP") is a free trade agreement currently being negotiated by nine countries: The United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Although the TPP covers a wide range of issues, this site focuses on the TPP's intellectual property (IP) chapter. The TPP suffers from a serious lack of transparency, threatens to impose more stringent copyright without public input, and pressures foreign governments to adopt unbalanced laws.

Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s chief lawyer, says that fighting for free speech is more than a good idea. He thinks it is a competitive advantage for his company. That conviction explains why he spends so much of Twitter’s time and money going toe to toe with officers and apparatchiks both here and abroad. Last week, his legal team was fighting a court order to extract an Occupy Wall Street protester’s Twitter posts.

There was a fight earlier this year about Internet freedom and privacy as Congress attempted to create legislation (SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA) that would give government more control over the Internet. When Internet companies and the public expressed disdain for such a measure, legislators backed down.

GOP adopts Internet freedom plank: Part of the platform the Republican party adopted Tuesday night included language to protect Internet freedom, something that lawmakers and interest groups on both sides of the aisle have been calling for in recent months.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews is expected to be appointed to the Manitoba Court of Appeal. The Toews appointment is among the worst kept secrets in Ottawa, with the move causing a domino effect that will lead to a new minister and an opportunity for a fresh start on Internet surveillance legislation, one of the government's biggest political blunders to date.

Every day, Syrians are risking their lives to broadcast pictures and videos of the uprising -- but because of U.S. sanctions on Syria, they don't have access to essential technologies that would protect them from being spied on and tracked down by the Syrian government - often with the use of computer viruses. By easing current sanctions, the U.S. can help Syrian activists share information more safely.

A new documentary by Fault Lines on Al Jazeera English called “Controlling the Web” succinctly explains the connection between key issues in the struggle for digital liberties in the United States, including copyright, surveillance and cybersecurity. The documentary opens in early 2012 with the fight against two bills in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) respectively. The battle, which pitted free expression and privacy activists against proponents of tougher copyright law, featured the largest online protest in U.S. history. 

It sounds like something from the film Minority Report: a CCTV surveillance system that recognises people from their face or walk and analyses whether they might be about to commit a terrorist or criminal act. But Trapwire is real and, according to documents released online by WikiLeaks last week, is being used in a number of countries to try to monitor people and threats.

Facebook has agreed to tighten its privacy policies after it settled a long-running dispute with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The social network was accused by the regulator last year of introducing "unfair and deceptive" changes to its privacy policies in 2009, including settings that made users' confidential profile information public without their consent. Facebook also shared personal information including status updates, geographic location and marital status with advertisers and third-party applications without telling users, the FTC said.

Twitter officials have complied with a court order to turn over account information to help New York police investigators identify who threatened to carry out an attack like the Colorado movie theater shooting at a Broadway theater where Mike Tyson is appearing in a one-man show, the police said Tuesday. The compliance came three days after the social media company, based in California, denied an emergency request from the Police Department to provide the account holder’s registration information and computer network address.
 

Despite warnings that hackers could shut down critical infrastructure with the click of a mouse, the Senate voted down landmark legislation on Thursday to protect the nation's vital computer networks from the rising threat of a cyberattack. The bill fell eight votes shy of the 60 votes needed to move past a Republican filibuster. Its defeat, coming just days before the Senate recess and months before the election, means that key national security legislation will likely not be addressed until next year.

The Senate is poised to take up comprehensive cybersecurity legislation as soon as this week, after years of discussion among lawmakers and a compromise that critics allege undercuts the effort to prevent a crippling cyberattack against the nation.

Senate Homeland Security Committee leaders Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) introduced a revised version of their cybersecurity bill on Thursday. The revised bill proposes to establish a multi-agency council, called the National Cybersecurity Council, that would assess the risks and vulnerabilities found in computer systems of critical infrastructure. The council would be chaired by the Homeland Security Secretary and include members from the Pentagon, Department of Commerce, Justice Department, intelligence community and federal regulatory agencies that oversee critical infrastructure for specific sectors.

In the first public accounting of its kind, cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations. The cellphone carriers’ reports, which come in response to a Congressional inquiry, document an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the companies turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests.

Public Safety Canada has been in close consultation with telecommunication companies over the logistics of Ottawa's so-called Internet "snoop and spy" legislation – talks that dealt with who will shoulder the costs of pricey "intercept capabilities," and whether it will even be feasible to monitor user behaviour in an increasingly complex "cloud-computing" environment.

DO machines speak? If so, do they have a constitutional right to free speech? This may sound like a fanciful question, a matter of philosophy or science fiction. But it’s become a real issue with important consequences. In today’s world, we have delegated many of our daily decisions to computers. On the drive to work, a GPS device suggests the best route; at your desk, Microsoft Word guesses at your misspellings, and Facebook recommends new friends. In the past few years, the suggestion has been made that when computers make such choices they are “speaking,” and enjoy the protections of the First Amendment.

Executives were urged to join the fight to keep the Internet free from centralized control, ahead of a conference later this year where U.S. government officials fear countries will vote to give the United Nations more power over the Web. "Get your company involved. Work to get likeminded countries involved. What is at stake here is just that important," Assistant Secretary of Commerce Lawrence Strickling told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's telecom committee on Friday. U.S. officials have expressed concerns that U.N. involvement could empower efforts by developing nations to tax large technology companies such as Google Inc and Facebook Inc.

Tomorrow, the President will sign an Executive Order to make broadband construction along Federal roadways and properties up to 90 percent cheaper and more efficient. Currently, the procedures for approving broadband infrastructure projects on properties controlled or managed by the Federal Government—including large tracts of land, roadways, and more than 10,000 buildings across the Nation—vary depending on which agency manages the property. The new Executive Order will ensure that agencies charged with managing Federal properties and roads take specific steps to adopt a uniform approach for allowing broadband carriers to build networks on and through those assets and speed the delivery of connectivity to communities, businesses, and schools.

State Department counter-propaganda has been met with accusations of hypocrisy in the wake of persecution of Anonymous.

Over the past four years, digital media have been transforming both the premises and the practices of U.S. government funding in media development. While Congress is cutting back on foreign aid budgets, resources to launch new digital media programs continue to grow. Media development professionals agree that some aspect of digital technology is now embedded in virtually every government-funded media project. Many highly technical programs, such as those addressing Internet security and circumvention, have proliferated. At the same time, traditional media development programs, including some that stress creation of quality content, face new challenges.

US officials, lawmakers and technology leaders voiced firm opposition Thursday to efforts to bring the Internet under UN control, saying it could hurt free expression and commerce. At a congressional hearing, the comments were united in opposition to place the Internet under the jurisdiction of the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations agency which governs telecom systems.

Mike Rogers and Rebecca MacKinnon debate over protecting civil liberties online.

Sometimes it's called "information security." Other times, it's called "Internet management," or a "hate-free Internet." Whatever the code-name for it, too many foreign governments, including Syria, Iran and China, restrict Internet as a tool for suppressing free speech, free assembly and a free press. Though the United States has invested tens of millions of dollars in defending Internet freedom around the world in recent years -- including by equipping censored populations with technologies to evade digital repression -- we can and must do more to ensure Internet freedom remains a fundamental tenet of U.S. foreign policy.

Why, despite wide-spread use of mobile tech for social change around the world, has the U.S. social sector been so slow to adopt mobile technologies? What do funders need to understand to support grantees' efforts to harness the power of the mobile phone? What strategies can help service organizations realize the potential of mobiles? Since phones are ubiquitous for most demographics but particularly so for young people and communities of color who use phones more intensively, this is becoming a critical question for the social sector in the US.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, rejecting increasingly vocal arguments from critics that it would do more to endanger Americans' privacy than aid cybersecurity. By a vote of 248 to 168, a bipartisan majority approved CIPSA, which would permit Internet companies to hand over confidential customer records and communications to the National Security Agency and other portions of the U.S. government.

Internet users and activists have been raising alarm bells over “cybersecurity” legislation pending in Congress. That’s because some lawmakers declared this week to be “cyber week,” promising votes on four different security-related bills. The most prominent and most controversial of these proposed law is the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA.