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November 2015

E-mail privacy bill gets long-awaited hearing

An e-mail privacy bill with more than 300 cosponsors will get a hearing in the lower chamber on Dec 1, but plans for a markup or vote on the legislation are still unclear. The House Judiciary Committee appears poised to cover much of the same ground as its Senate counterpart did during a hearing in September, when many of the same witnesses testified.

The E-mail Privacy Act -- led by Reps Kevin Yoder (R-KS) and Jared Polis (D-CO) -- has failed to move in the past two and a half years despite having support from a supermajority of the chamber. Supporters have opted against attempting to force a vote through a discharge petition. The legislation would close a loophole in the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) that lets the government use a subpoena, rather than a warrant, to force companies such as Google and other service providers to hand over customers' electronic communications if they are more than 180 days old. The provision is a holdover from an era in which it would have been largely impractical for an e-mail service provider to store e-mails for more than six months and cloud storage was not yet available.

Trump would ‘err on side of security’ in NSA debate

Donald Trump is aligning himself with GOP Presidential rivals Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL) and former Florida Gov Jeb Bush in the Republican Party’s divide over federal surveillance powers. The billionaire said he would “err on the side of security," a day after new National Security Agency (NSA) reforms went into place. “Every time I pick up a phone, I assume people are listening to my conversations,” added Trump, the GOP front-runner. “I don’t like it, but I have to make that assumption. I would really much err on the side of security. As a lot of people would agree with me on that." “I've been there from the beginning,” Trump insisted. “I’ve been there from before the Paris attack. After every attack, everybody says exactly this, but I err on the side of security."

WhatsApp is blocking links to a competing messenger app

On Nov 30, Telegram users on WhatsApp noticed something strange. The chat app was blocking any links to Telegram.me, a rival chat app that grew popular in the wake of earlier WhatsApp outages. The URLs still appeared as messages, but they did not register as hyperlinks and users were blocked from copying them to paste into another app -- effectively treating them like malware or spam.

The behavior wasn't exhibited on every device but it was consistent within devices, blocking both usernames and links to individual messages or chat rooms. Telegram confirmed the activity, which seems to have begun with a silent update pushed earlier on Nov 30. The update has the same version number as a previously deployed update, but a Telegram volunteer confirmed that a new 367 update was deployed Nov 30. That update likely hasn't reached every device using WhatsApp, which may explain why the block is not consistent across different devices. Testing revealed that the block also includes Telegram.com, an unrelated URL owned by a newspaper in Worcester (MA).

The Internet Isn't Available in Most Languages

Indigenous and under-resourced cultures face a number of obstacles when establishing their languages on the Internet. English, along with a few other languages like Spanish and French, dominates the web. People who speak these languages often take for granted access to social-media sites with agreed-upon vocabularies, built-in translation services, and basic grammar and spell-checkers. For Gaelic, a minority language spoken by only two to three percent of the Irish population, it can be difficult to access these digital services. And even languages with millions of speakers can lack the resources needed to make the Internet relevant to daily life.

At the moment, the Internet only has webpages in about five percent of the world's languages. Even national languages like Hindi and Swahili are used on only .01 percent of the 10 million most popular websites. The majority of the world’s languages lack an online presence that is actually useful. Despite its reputation as the so-called information superhighway, the Internet is only legible to speakers of a few languages; this limit to the web’s accessibility proves that it can be as just as insular and discriminative as the modern world at large.

Cable broadband penetration and pricing both set to rise, bullish analyst says

Count NewStreet Research's Jonathan Chaplin as a cable industry bull. In his latest report to shareholders, the analyst predicted that cable broadband penetration into US homes, and pricing for broadband services, will both rise markedly in the near future. For one, Chaplin noted that cable operators added a large number of new broadband customers in the third quarter -- around 790,000, according to Leichtman Research. "Our long-term penetration forecast is well ahead of consensus and calls for an acceleration in broadband subscriber growth," he said. "We saw this play out in 3Q15 with cable companies reporting their best third quarter broadband adds in four years, with growth accelerating and beating consensus expectations."

Meanwhile, the analyst downplayed anxiety among his peers that regulators will seek to control broadband pricing, armed with Title II authority. "We think this view is misguided," Chaplin added. "Regulators have neither the desire nor the ability to regulate retail rates. We will know if we are correct soon enough: Comcast is steadily expanding usage-based pricing to new markets. If the new pricing takes hold, and if there is no regulatory reaction, we expect ARPU growth to accelerate over time; however, before that, we would expect Cable multiples to rise towards that of other infrastructure companies in the US and Europe."

NSA Ends Sept 11-Era Surveillance Program

The United States National Security Agency has stopped the bulk collection of the metadata from Americans' phone calls. The bulk collection program was undertaken by the NSA after the attacks of September 11th. The surveillance program was thrust into the spotlight in the summer of 2013, after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information with details of the program. One of the key documents leaked by Snowden was an order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requiring Verizon to hand over all those records. His revelations sparked a heated congressional debate, which ultimately resulted in the USA Freedom Act. The law still gives the US government access to the information. Except, the massive database of call records now remains with service providers and the government can seek court orders to access specific records.

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), who led the charge to end the program, hailed its demise, saying, “This is a victory for everyone who believes in protecting both American security and Americans’ constitutional rights. Today the NSA is shutting down a mass surveillance program that needlessly violated the privacy of millions of Americans every day, without making our country any safer. This program’s very existence was concealed from the American public for over a decade. Across two administrations, senior officials from US intelligence agencies and the Justice Department repeatedly made false and misleading statements that concealed the truth about what they were doing....I am grateful to every American who stood up and made his or her voice count on this issue, and to all of my colleagues who listened to them."

California Broadband Workshop Shows Work Still Needed to Close Digital Divide

The National Telecommunications & Information Administration hosted a broadband workshop at the Computer History Museum in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. And the take-away was this: the state that gave us semiconductor chips, Internet search engines and smartphones faces the same digital divide challenges as the rest of the nation.

The workshop brought together more than 100 local, state and federal leaders, industry representatives, community activists and other stakeholders to explore broadband challenges and opportunities across California. The workshop showcased innovative digital inclusion programs such as the Youth Policy Institute, which offers Internet access and training in Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP)-funded public computer centers in low-income Los Angeles (CA) neighborhoods, and the Stride Center, a BTOP subgrantee that provides technical training for the chronically unemployed and operates a call center to help people get online. Despite the success stories, State Rep Jim Wood (D-Eureka) stressed that there is still more to be done.

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