New America

On Jan 11, the House of Representatives will likely vote on a stand-alone measure to reauthorize and expand Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is set to expire on January 19, 2018. The bill to be voted on is a modified version of the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017 (H.R. 4478; now S. 139), which was reported out of the House Intelligence Committee on a party line vote, with at least four members voting “no” because of privacy concerns. The Open Technology Institute and a coalition of dozens of leading privacy groups strongly oppose the bill.

The Federal Communications Commission has taken a series of worrying actions since former FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai ascended to the role of chairman in January 2017. On Feb 3, the FCC abruptly rescinded the glowing E-rate report that had just been released two and a half weeks prior.

Reflections from a variety of representatives from startups, small businesses, and established companies that began as startups who say they have open internet protections to thank for their prior and continued success. 

A Q&A with Sarah Morris, director of Open Internet Policy and senior policy counsel at the Open Technology Institute. 

A broad-based coalition of nonprofit groups [including the Benton Foundation] filed a letter calling on the Federal Communications Commission to reject a proposal from the cellular industry, filed by CTIA on June 16, to re-open and revise the rules finalized more than a year ago for a new Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) that opens a large frequency band of unused Navy spectrum for small area, high-capacity broadband innovation. The coalition represents consumers, public institutions and small business users of broadband, and includes the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition, Next Century Cities, Engine, the R Street Institute, the American Library Association and the National Hispanic Media Coalition. The coalition asks the FCC to instead move rapidly to complete implementation of this historic innovation in spectrum policy, which opens unused military spectrum for sharing with Priority Access Licenses that are available for small areas (census tracts) and short terms, thereby making them more useful and affordable to smaller operators and to venues for indoor use.

Increasingly, the library is the place where people trust—and use—not just the librarian at the help desk, but also the search engine, online catalogs, digital archives, and electronic databases. So when patrons come into the library to find out about a sexually transmitted disease, for example, they will likely find themselves interacting with the online library—a messy mixture of library-specific digital tools and broader Internet resources that create all sorts of privacy risks for patrons.

Here’s how the library encounters privacy risks. Increasingly, the library contracts with a number of third parties to run various services, for example, OverDrive for e-book services, Bibliocommons for interactive catalogs, and ProQuest for electronic and magazine databases. Companies like these have the power to set their terms of service. That includes protecting the details of what patrons do when they use such tools or not. Not too long ago, library professionals caught Adobe Digital Editions transmitting patrons’ e-reading information in an unencrypted manner. Designed to seamlessly integrate with a library’s website, most services don’t make it obvious to a patron that a private company makes choices about her user data.