Microsoft called on Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr to give the company permission to talk about how it handles government surveillance requests.
The move represents an escalation of Microsoft’s campaign to speak more freely about the national security orders it receives for e-mails, Internet phone calls and other communications by users of Microsoft services. Secrecy laws severely limit what Microsoft and others can say about those orders, particularly the surveillance requests issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Microsoft and other companies have been frustrated by government limits on how they can respond to news stories about government surveillance orders. In a letter that Bradford Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, sent to AG Holder, Smith said the company had not made “adequate progress” in its discussions with the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation and other members of intelligence agencies about sharing more details about its compliance with surveillance orders. Microsoft petitioned the government on June 19 to let it publish how many national security requests it has received. The company says the government has not yet responded to the request.
Level 3 Communications and Comcast have come to terms over their much publicized interconnection dispute, but did not reveal the terms of their agreement. "Level 3 and Comcast have resolved their prior interconnect dispute on mutually satisfactory terms," the companies said in joint statement. "Details will not be released." The debate between the two service providers dates back to November 2010 when Level 3 challenged Comcast's request that it had to pay the cable MSO a fee to deliver Netflix movies to its residential customers. Netflix is one of Level 3's content delivery network (CDN) customers.
[Commentary] Despite public, political, and business interest in greater broadband deployment, not every American has high-speed internet access yet (let alone a choice of provider for really fast, high-capacity service). So who’s really to blame for strangling broadband competition? While popular arguments focus on supposed “monopolists“ such as big cable companies, it’s government that’s really to blame.
Companies can make life harder for their competitors, but strangling the competition takes government. Broadband policy discussions usually revolve around the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), yet it’s really our local governments and public utilities that impose the most significant barriers to entry. Before building out new networks, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must negotiate with local governments for access to publicly owned “rights of way” so they can place their wires above and below both public and private property. ISPs also need “pole attachment” contracts with public utilities so they can rent space on utility poles for above-ground wires, or in ducts and conduits for wires laid underground. The problem? Local governments and their public utilities charge ISPs far more than these things actually cost. So the real bottleneck isn’t incumbent providers of broadband, but incumbent providers of rights-of-way. These incumbents — the real monopolists — also have the final say on whether an ISP can build a network. They determine what hoops an ISP must jump through to get approval.
[Berin Szoka, Matthew Starr and Jon Henke are with TechFreedom, a non-profit technology policy think tank. TechFreedom is supported by foundations as well as web companies and broadband providers (including Google).]
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Adrianne Benton Furniss Becomes the Executive Director, Amina Fazlullah Director of Policy
The Benton Foundation today announced the reorganization of leadership to strengthen the organization’s core work advocating for universal, affordable broadband and begin a transition to a new generation of Benton stewardship.
A host of activist organizations sued to end the National Security Agency's massive phone record collection program.
Unlike other suits which have focused on privacy rights, this suit argues that the spying violates the constitutional right to free association. "The principles of our faith often require our church to take bold stands on controversial issues. We joined this lawsuit to stop the illegal surveillance of our members and the people we serve," Rev. Rick Hoyt of the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles said. "This spying makes people afraid to belong to our church community." The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Northern California, argues that the phone records reveal personal information about the political and religious groups that people belong to and chills free association. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, TechFreedom, the California chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, Students for Sensible Drug Policy and the Council on American-Islamic Relations also joined the lawsuit.
Health and fitness apps are blowing up. But before you download one, you might want to do a little digging into its privacy and security policies. According to a study released by the San Diego, California-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, many of the most popular wellness apps carry privacy risks for users.
The report, which evaluated 43 free and paid apps, found that many apps lack privacy policies, send information without encryption and transmit user data to third-parties (like advertisers, ad networks and analytics companies) without informing users. “Data security and privacy – from a technical standpoint – is abysmal,” said Beth Givens, founder and director of the privacy-focused non-profit.
When two warring sides can't even agree on what "tracking" means, it's not surprising that little progress has been made toward launching a single browser button that prevents advertisers from tracking your online behavior.
Nearly two years after the Obama administration, digital advertisers, browser makers and privacy advocates agreed in principle to create a "Do Not Track" mechanism for Web browsing, the various parties still have not agreed on a basic framework for the tool. In an effort to salvage Do Not Track, leaders of the working group shepherding the agreement put their collective foot down on July 15. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is moderating this increasingly fractious and seemingly endless debate, said that it has chosen a foundation upon which all other discussions about Do Not Track will be based.
Kimberley Harris has been named executive vice president and general counsel at NBCUniversal.
She comes to NBCUniversal from Davis Polk & Wardwell, where she served as a partner in the firm's litigation department. Prior to that, Harris served as deputy counsel and deputy assistant to President Obama in the office of the White House counsel. She also worked as the senior counsel to the assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's criminal division. In her new role, Harris will advise the NBCUniversal senior management team and oversee the media company's law department, which handles legal matters for its various business units. Harris will also be responsible for coordinating NBCUniversal's global regulatory and legislative agenda.
The price of mobile data in India is plummeting. Some of India’s leading telecom operators—Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, and Idea Cellular—recently slashed their mobile data rates by as much as 90%. Under the new schemes, customers can access the internet over 2G connections for as low as 1 paisa (less than 1 US cent) per 10 kilobytes.
What’s driving the dramatic price war?
In 2008, lawyers for Web company Yahoo sought to avoid becoming part of the National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillance program by fighting it in a case before the secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
On July 15, that court ruled that it would unseal documents related to the case so Yahoo could prove that it objected to participating in the notorious PRISM program, disclosed last month by former NSA employee Edward Snowden and later confirmed by the U.S. government. The three-page order requires the government to review the case and say which documents from the docket can be declassified by July 29. The order says that government lawyers took “no position” over whether or not the documents should be disclosed. There was a clear understanding that the documents would be subjected to a declassification review, implying that the resulting disclosures will probably contain several redacted sections.
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