January 2014

West Virginia will have to return to the federal government about $2.5 million in stimulus funds left over from a statewide broadband expansion project plagued by allegations of mismanagement and reckless spending.

"West Virginia must now reconcile its costs and return unused funds to the U.S. Treasury as required by law," said a spokeswoman for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the agency overseeing the stimulus funds. West Virginia had until Dec 31, 2013 to use the remaining funds, and state officials failed to "formally request" that the feds extend the deadline, according to a Jan 16 letter from the NTIA. Citynet, a Bridgeport-based Internet provider, had hoped to use the $2.5 million -- along with $7.2 million of its own money -- to set up nine "GigaPop" facilities in West Virginia that would funnel data and connect to the national Internet "backbone" in Columbus and Pittsburgh. The excess funds for the Citynet project would have come from a $126.3 million grant that the state received in 2010 to expand high-speed Internet statewide.

The Republican National Committee has formally renounced the “dragnet” surveillance program at the National Security Agency (NSA).

During its winter meeting in Washington, the committee overwhelmingly approved a measure calling for lawmakers to end the program and create a special committee to investigate domestic surveillance efforts. The resolution, which declared that “unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights,” among other condemnations, passed the committee on a voice vote with near-unanimous support. Only a small minority of the 168 RNC members dissented. The committee criticized the government’s bulk collection of records about all phone calls. That NSA effort “is in itself contrary to the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution,” the RNC said in the resolution. The RNC also called the NSA’s classified “PRISM” program, which mines data from the servers of major Internet companies, “the largest surveillance effort ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens.”

[Commentary] A new Pew poll reveals that President Barack Obama’s highly touted speech on proposed reforms of the National Security Agency had “little impact on skeptical public.” Half of those contacted said they had not heard of the speech; and of the 41 percent who had heard “a little bit,” the overwhelming view is that the president’s proposed changes will make little difference in privacy protection or on the ability of the government to fight terrorism. The White House has had over seven months to react to the drip, drip, drip of Snowden revelations.

Besides tasking the entire US security apparatus to review its practices and programs, the president established an outside commission (Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies) of supposed experts to evaluate NSA programs, and he had prior access to the just released findings of an independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Beyond that, for months, congressional proponents and opponents of NSA practices have bombarded the administration with demands. And finally, belatedly, the president took counsel from CEOs of top US high-tech companies. Tough groups and tough issues to mediate, right? But that’s what we pay presidents to do; and that’s what makes President Obama equivocation both deficient and dismaying.

For this essay, three issues will be taken up as illustrative of the larger copout theme:

• The future of the so-called metadata program -- The President announced in his speech that the metadata collection program plays a “vital role” in protecting the nation against terrorism. Still, he decided to end the program “as it presently exists.”
• Extension of privacy rights to non-Americans -- The same puzzling uncertainty emerges with regard to the president’s commitment to extend to non-Americans the same privacy rights enjoyed by US citizens. Thus, he promised that the NSA would no longer monitor communications of “heads of state and governments of our close friends and allies.” Seemingly a vital new commitment, this statement leads to a policy morass.
• Creation of an independent voice to appear before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) -- The President also endorsed a proposal to create a public advocacy role in the FISC appeal process. But once again, the details are fuzzy. His commission had recommended a single officer to provide an independent voice before the court -- something President Obama himself had seemed to advocate in earlier speeches. But his specific proposal was for a panel that would only take part in “significant” cases that present “novel issues of law.” Left unclear was who determines such circumstances and what authority such a body of lawyers would be given.

[Barfield is a resident scholar at AEI who researches international trade policy]

Some of the biggest names in cryptography and computer science just released an open letter condemning the surveillance practices of the US government.

"Media reports since last June have revealed that the US government conducts domestic and international surveillance on a massive scale, that it engages in deliberate and covert weakening of Internet security standards, and that it pressures US technology companies to deploy backdoors and other data-collection features," said a statement. "As leading members of the US cryptography and information-security research communities, we deplore these practices and urge that they be changed." Among the group that signed the letter are more than 50 experts in the field. Several are ex-federal employees, including Ed Felten, now the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton and who was the Federal Trade Commission's first chief technologist. The Federal Trade Commission's second chief technologist, Steve Bellovin, who is now a professor at Columbia University, also signed the letter.