June 2014

Three senators are doubling down on their call for a sweeping end to the National Security Agency’s “dragnet surveillance.” Sens Rand Paul (R-KY), Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) pledged to fight against “limited” and “watered down” legislation to reform the spy agency, which they said includes the bill that passed the House in May.

“This is clearly not the meaningful reform that Americans have demanded, so we will vigorously oppose this bill in its current form and continue to push for real changes to the law,” they wrote in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. “This firm commitment to both liberty and security is what Americans -- including the dedicated men and women who work at our nation's intelligence agencies -- deserve," they added. "We will not settle for less.”

The three senators, who have been among the most vocal critics of the NSA in the upper chamber, said that any reform bill must end a “loophole” allowing the government to snoop on some Americans’ emails without a warrant, add a special advocate to the federal court overseeing the intelligence community and clearly prevent bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.

The world's largest Internet companies and thousands of average Internet users are trying to hide their private information from government snooping. The goal is to set up technological barriers to the National Security Agency's sweeping surveillance programs.

Rather than waiting for Congress to rein in the agency, many people want to take privacy into their own hands. But the truth is, efforts to improve online encryption and security can't totally thwart the NSA. Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the idea of becoming "NSA-proof" is "just silly."

"If they want it, they can get it," he said of the NSA's expert spies. The agency can hack or bypass many security measures if it is determined enough, Hall said. And it doesn't matter how heavily encrypted an email is in transit if the NSA just forces the email provider to turn the message over.

While the NSA collects some of its data by surreptitiously tapping into communications, much of the surveillance is done through court orders to Internet and phone companies.

Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said tech companies such as Google could hamstring the NSA if they just stopped collecting so much information about their users. If a company doesn't have information on a person, there's nothing to turn over to the government.

[Commentary] With the decision to transition away from US control, addressing Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)’s longstanding accountability and "legitimacy" issues becomes even more pressing. If ICANN is not accountable to the US government or to other governments, to whom will it be accountable?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a non-profit, places a great deal of emphasis on obtaining input from the Internet "community," but in the end, it is ICANN's board that makes the decisions. That board has no external entities to which it is accountable. Meaningful accountability requires meaningful external checks, and virtually all major organizations are structured so as to be externally accountable. ICANN has no shareholders, members, or donors. The most direct way for ICANN to be externally accountable is to modify its governance structure so that board members, or at least a significant number of them, are accountable to external groups.

Our research shows that many organizations with coordination functions that are similar to ICANN's are governed by their direct users, who have a strong interest in the organization doing its job effectively. The direct users of ICANN include:

• "Registries," which are companies that coordinate gTLDs, such as .com, .edu and .org;
• "Registrars,” which register the second-level domain names that we all use, such as aol.com; and
• Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), which are responsible for distributing numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that are needed for the Internet to work.

In sum, as part of this transition, the issue of ICANN external accountability urgently needs to be addressed. We believe that our suggested system of accountability to ICANN's direct users would be the best way to move to the next phase of Internet governance.

[Lenard is president and senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute; White is a professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business]

AT&T will be the exclusive carrier for Amazon.com 's new smartphone, which is expected to be unveiled soon, according to people familiar with the plans.

The arrangement extends Amazon's relationship with AT&T, which also provides wireless service to Kindle tablets and e-readers. The move could help AT&T attract new subscribers at a time of intense competition among wireless carriers. Apple and Samsung Electronics have a tight grip on the smartphone market in the US with a combined 60% share in the first quarter, according to comScore.

Rival devices from makers like BlackBerry and Nokia have seen their market share shrivel as they failed to keep up with technology. Amazon hopes to distinguish its phone in a crowded market with a screen capable of displaying seemingly three-dimensional images without special glasses, according to a Wall Street Journal article citing people briefed on the plans.

The phone would employ retina-tracking technology embedded in four front-facing cameras, or sensors, to make some images appear to be 3-D, similar to a hologram, according to the story. Amazon is expected to introduce the device at an event in hometown Seattle and has demonstrated versions of the handset to developers in San Francisco and Seattle.