Adrianne Jeffries

The New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) has released a copy of proposed "codes, rules, and regulations" for companies that buy and sell bitcoin and other virtual currencies roughly a year after the agency announced an inquiry into regulating bitcoin.

The proposal, which outlines requirements for a special "BitLicense" (truly), will be entered into the record on July 23. The proposed rules apply to businesses that buy, sell, transfer, store, or maintain custody or control of customers' bitcoins, as well as companies that convert fiat currency to virtual currency on behalf of merchants.

Admiral Michael Rogers, the relatively new head of the National Security Agency, has been on the job for about three months, and he’s been exceedingly diplomatic and measured.

n addition to serving as the face of public relations for the Defense Department's "silent service," Admiral Rogers has taken on two formal roles that come bundled with the NSA director position: head of the Central Security Service, another arm of the US’ 17-tentacled intelligence apparatus, and commander of US Cyber Command, the hub of the military’s cyber efforts. That means one man is in charge of the NSA’s domestic and foreign surveillance, along with defending US government networks, coordinating cyberattacks against enemies, and supervising what is essentially the security IT department for the rest of the Defense Department. So, who is he?

The broadcast industry can breathe again: Aereo -- the startup that streamed broadcast TV over the Internet for cheap -- is dead. Or at least, the incarnation of Aereo that wasn’t paying copyright fees is dead, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling. So what happens now?

A decision in favor of Aereo would have changed things quite a bit for the television industry, but the ruling means back to business as usual. While some have raised fears that the opinion will impact cloud computing services, the court intended for the ruling to apply narrowly to Aereo. "It just means you can expect more of the same," says Michael Greeson, president of The Diffusion Group, a research firm focused on the future of TV. "The broadcasters won the case. There were no caveats, except for that this is a limited case. It would be untenable to extend this decision beyond its limited scope."

Reacting to the news, Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia said that "our work is not done," and that it will "continue to fight for our consumers." Realistically, though, the company is unlikely to survive. "Aereo will go out of business immediately," Greeson says. The fees Aereo is now required to pay broadcasters, which can range from a few cents to a few dollars for every channel, for every subscriber, every month, will make it impossible to continue charging only $8 to $12 a month.

For consumers, the ruling means no change in the high prices from cable companies and limited options for watching TV online or on mobile devices. Cable companies have started to offer streaming online options and mobile apps like Time Warner’s TWC TV app and Comcast’s Xfinity streaming service, but those offerings are expensive, slow to roll out, and tend to be poorly designed.

If you want to use the Internet and you don’t want the National Security Agency to see what you’re doing, you basically only need one tool: Tor, a network that anonymizes web traffic by bouncing it between servers.

The NSA has been working on ways to get around "the Tor problem" for years without much success. "It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets’ use of technologies to hide their communications," the agency told BusinessWeek back in January. The NSA says Tor is now used by "terrorists, cybercriminals, [and] human traffickers," so you’d think the Pentagon might consider that investment a mistake. Not so.

The military has been working on a new generation of even bigger and better anonymity tools to supplement and replace Tor. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, the Pentagon’s high-tech research lab, started working on anonymity roughly four years ago through the Safer Warfighter Communications program, a collection of tools designed to thwart blacklisting, redirection, and content filtering.

It’s been almost a year since the nation learned that the government has been heavily surveilling Americans using a web of programs that potentially violate the Constitution or at least some laws.

The legality of those programs has yet to be definitively challenged. Even if the programs are legal, many feel the government is at least obligated to be transparent about them.

There have been at least 25 major lawsuits have been filed against the National Security Agency, President Barack Obama, telecommunications companies that facilitated data collection, and others involved in the government’s surveillance programs since Edward Snowden’s first revelations on June 6th, 2013, according to investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica.

There have been various rulings by lower courts and appeals courts, some of which contradict each other. So far, only one case has been dismissed. The lack of consensus suggests that some part of the NSA program should eventually come before the Supreme Court.

There are arguably three cases closest to reaching the Supreme Court, all challenging section 215 and the phone-record surveillance. Two were filed after the Snowden revelations, and one was filed back in 2006 but just recently cleared a legal hurdle: Klayman v. Obama et. al., ACLU et. al. v. Clapper et. al., and Jewel et. al. v. National Security Agency.

There’s some evidence that the government is trying to head off future IT disasters by calling in the crack team first.

In October, General Services Administration (GSA) administrator Dan M. Tangherlini recruited 11 Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) graduates to start 18F, a 15-person digital services agency within the GSA that just launched.

The rhetoric is lofty: the agency plans to prove that rapid prototyping, live testing, and other elements of the speedy "lean startup" methodology will work for the government, delivering better products to taxpayers and saving money.

"This is about building real IT services," says Greg Godbout, one of 18F’s cofounders. "It wouldn't be fair of me to say that we would build Healthcare.gov in the future, but it might be done differently."

18F is still oblique about exactly what it will be doing, but Godbout says it is already booked to build projects for four government agencies that will be announced this summer. Eventually, 18F also wants to encourage agencies to use open-source software and work with contractors outside the Beltway.