New York Times

Even as Washington grapples with the diplomatic and political fallout of the Snowden leaks, the more urgent issue, companies and analysts say, is economic.

It is impossible to see now the full economic ramifications of the spying disclosures -- in part because most companies are locked in multiyear contracts -- but the pieces are beginning to add up as businesses question the trustworthiness of American technology products. Despite the tech companies’ assertions that they provide information on their customers only when required under law -- and not knowingly through a back door -- the perception that they enabled the spying program has lingered.

Media General said that it would acquire LIN Media for $1.6 billion in a cash and stock deal that will create the second-largest local television broadcasting company.

Both Media General and LIN Media operate local television stations that act as affiliates to the big broadcast networks like ABC, CBS and NBC. The combined company will own 74 stations in 46 markets and reach 26.5 million households, or 23 percent of the market in the United States. It will rank behind only Sinclair Broadcast Group in terms of number of stations operated.

As the messaging wars heat up, security seems to be the big differentiator -- the levels of security range from “military grade” to lightweight, depending on the app. But all of them have one thing in common, said the cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier: You shouldn’t use them if your life is on the line.

How should we think about balancing civil liberties and national security? It may depend on what a speech later this year tells us about how a modern war really ends.

At the end of 2014, most of the United States military forces should be out of Afghanistan (some may remain, depending on a number of Afghan and American factors). When they do, according to a former American diplomat, President Barack Obama is likely to make a speech that marks the closing of a military conflict that began soon after the Sept 11 attacks in 2001. What he says may set a future context for what propelled both the Afghanistan conflict and the legal justifications for widespread data-gathering.

“In the legislative framework, are we still a nation at war? Is that conflict temporary or permanent? What tools do we want the government to have?” said Philip Crowley, the former United States assistant secretary of state for public affairs, and currently a professor at George Washington University. “If the Authorization to Use Military Force does still hold, you’re in permanent conflict. If it doesn’t, you go to an old or a new ‘normal.’”

A full month after the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal was struck, Charter is still hanging around.

Most notably, Charter has not withdrawn the full slate of directors that it nominated to Time Warner Cable’s board just one day before Comcast swooped in. Putting forward 13 directors to replace Time Warner Cable’s existing board was Charter’s boldest move to date, and paved the way for a nasty proxy fight.

So why hasn’t Charter withdrawn its slate? Charter says it is simply keeping its options open. After all, Time Warner Cable still hasn’t announced a date for its annual meeting, Charter notes, and the Comcast deal has yet to be approved by shareholders or regulators.

“There’s no rush in withdrawing it,” said Justin Venech, a company spokesman. “We’re going to leave it there.” It wasn’t the strongest slate to begin with, and did not include any close allies of John Malone, whose Liberty Media has a large stake in Charter. And Charter says it is not lobbying Time Warner Cable shareholders to vote for its preferred directors.

All of the major combat commands in the United States military will soon have dedicated forces to conduct cyberattacks alongside their air, naval and ground capabilities, President Barack Obama’s nominee to run the National Security Agency ,Vice Admiral Michael Rogers, told the Senate. He said the activation of the long-discussed combat units would help counter the perception around the world that the United States is “an easier mark” for cyberattacks because it did not “have the will to respond.”

Ten months after the Sept 11 attacks, the nation’s surveillance court delivered a ruling that intelligence officials consider a milestone in the secret history of American spying and privacy law.

Called the “Raw Take” order -- classified docket No. 02-431 -- it weakened restrictions on sharing private information about Americans, according to documents and interviews. The administration of President George W. Bush, intent on not overlooking clues about Al Qaeda, had sought the July 22, 2002 order. It is one of several still-classified rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court described in documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

The leaked documents that refer to the rulings, including one called the “Large Content FISA” order and several more recent expansions of powers on sharing information, add new details to the emerging public understanding of a secret body of law that the court has developed since 2001. The files help explain how the court evolved from its original task -- approving wiretap requests -- to engaging in complex analysis of the law to justify activities like the bulk collection of data about Americans’ emails and phone calls.

The Raw Take order significantly changed that system, documents show, allowing counterterrorism analysts at the NSA, the FBI and the CIA to share unfiltered personal information.

[Commentary] Companies like Intel post disappointing earnings reports and others like Snapchat turn down billion-dollar offers.

The rapid consumer-ification of tech, led by Facebook and Google, has created a deep rift between old and new, hardware and software, enterprise companies that sell to other businesses and consumer companies that sell directly to the masses.

On their face, these cleavages seem to be part of the natural order. As Sanjit Biswas, co-founder of Meraki, which sold to Cisco for $1.2 billion, pointed out, “There has always been a constant churn of new companies coming in, old companies dying out.” But the churn feels more problematic now, in part because it deprives the new guard as well as the old -- and by extension, it deprives us all. In pursuing the latest and the coolest, young engineers ignore opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like semiconductors, data storage and networking, the products that form the foundation on which all of Web 2.0 rests.

[Yiren Lu is a graduate student in computer science.]

[Commentary] Over the next decade, approximately five billion people will become connected to the Internet. While the technologies of repression are a multibillion-dollar industry, the tools to measure and assess digital repression get only a few million dollars in government and private funding.

Of course, detection is just the first step in a counterattack against censorship. The next step is providing tools to undermine sensors, filters and throttles. For example, software using peer-to-peer algorithms lets users route an Internet connection through another computer without having to go through a VPN, helping to address the trust and scalability issues.

Today it’s possible to use networks like Facebook or Google Hangouts to verify one another’s identities similarly to how we do offline. Obfuscation techniques -- when one thing is made to look like another -- are also a path forward. A digital tunnel from Iran to Norway can be disguised as an ordinary Skype call. Deep packet inspection cannot distinguish such traffic from genuine traffic, and the collateral damage of blocking all traffic is often too high for a government to stomach. Finally, advances in user-experience design practices are a big, if not obvious, boon. The Internet is becoming easier to use, and the same goes for circumvention technologies -- which means that activists will face less of a challenge getting online securely.

[Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, are the authors of “The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses and Our Lives.”]

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents that revealed a vast network of surveillance by American government agencies, wants the technology industry to become serious about protecting the privacy of its customers. Snowden, speaking at the South by Southwest festival via videoconference, said the early technology adopters and entrepreneurs who travel to Austin every year for the event are “the folks who can fix this and enforce our rights.”

The Washington Post cited Snowden’s appraisal of the NSA: “They’re setting fire to the future of the Internet,” Snowden said. “We need public advocates. We need public oversight. Some way [to have] trusted figures, sort of civil rights champions to advocate for us, to protect the structure. How do we fix our oversight? How do we structure an oversight model that works? The key factor is accountability.”

On stage while Snowden spoke were Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project and Snowden’s legal adviser. All three men said that they wanted to raise a call to arms to developers and activists to build better tools to protect the privacy of technology users. Snowden said that even the companies whose business models rely on collecting data about their users “can still do this in a responsible way.”

“It’s not that you shouldn’t collect the data,” he said. “But you should only collect the data and hold it as long as necessary.” Hundreds of people sat quietly as Snowden spoke.

The technology community should pressure those companies to introduce security measures that are stronger and easier to use, Soghoian said. “We need services to include security by default,” he added.

[March 10]