November 2015

Military, Intelligence and Homeland Security officials briefed a group of senators on Nov 18 on reports of Russia’s potential threat to underseas fiberoptic cables that make up the backbone of the world’s Internet. The classified briefing came at the request of Sen Roger Wicker (R-MS) after it was reported that US officials were worried that Russia could be planning to sever some of the cables that run along the ocean’s floor. There is no evidence that any of the cables had been intentionally cut, but it has been reported Russian ships and submarines are operating near the cables with increased intensity. While the US has figured out ways to tap the cables to glean data flowing across them, the worry is that Russia could cut them to sabatoge communications flow. Those officials who briefed senators were from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security and the Joint Operations Division for US European Command.

Sen Wicker provided no details from the top-secret briefing but said he would work “in the coming weeks” to provide military and intelligence agencies with tools they need to protect American interests. “Undersea cables are critical to our economy, our communications, and our national security,” he said in a statement. “The United States needs to take seriously the growing Russian threat to these cables.”

In a pair of public appearances, CIA Director John O. Brennan made clear that he blames leaks by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden for enabling terrorists to evade detection. “Because of a number of unauthorized disclosures, and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists,” Brennan said, the CIA and others agencies have lost use of critical tools needed “to find these terrorists.” But drawing a line from Snowden to the Paris tragedy is problematic, according to some analysts, because even two years after the leaks it is difficult to isolate the extent to which they caused terrorist networks to change the way they communicate.

The revelations that were the source of greatest controversy involved programs that would likely have been of little value in disrupting the Paris plot, experts said. The National Security Agency’s collection of data about the times and durations of billions of domestic phones calls was not designed to pick up calls entirely outside the United States. A second program that relied heavily on cooperation from companies including AOL, Microsoft and Google was aimed at intercepting e-mail and phone calls between foreign operatives and individuals in the United States. Nothing has changed since that revelation to restrict the NSA’s ability to sweep up communications exclusively among foreigners, as was apparently the case for the plot in France.

Mark Zuckerberg, who has made global Internet access a top priority through Facebook’s Internet.org project, is now using some of his personal wealth to expand high-speed Internet access in the United States. On Nov 16, a nonprofit group that helps kindergarten through 12th-grade schools tap federal funds to acquire and improve high-speed Internet connections announced that Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, had agreed to donate $20 million to its work. The nonprofit group, called EducationSuperHighway, had received a gift of $3 million from Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan in 2013.

Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, supports the group’s goals as a means to his ultimate goal of spreading “personalized learning” -- the idea of using online platforms to help tailor education to the needs and interests of individual students. He and his wife are hoping to accelerate school district adoption of the telecommunications infrastructure needed to support those kind of customized digital education programs. “Mark and Priscilla believe that equipping K-12 classrooms with Internet connections is essential for students to thrive in the knowledge economy,” Jen Holleran, the executive director of Startup:Education, a nonprofit that oversees the Zuckerberg family’s educational giving, said in a statement. “Fast, reliable broadband is the foundational infrastructure that is needed to bring personalized and digital learning to every child and teacher in America."

Univision Communications has jumped into the Internet streaming service market by offering its own $5.99-a-month service called Univision Now. The company joins a growing field of major networks, including HBO, CBS, Showtime, NBC, the Tennis Channel and Smithsonian Channel, in experimenting with stand-alone streaming services to enable viewers to watch programming on their cellphones, tablets and computers.

Univision's new service provides live streams of its two over-the-air broadcast TV networks -- Univision and UniMás -- but not the company's popular cable TV channels. "Our target audience is over-the-air viewers who have never subscribed to pay-TV," said Tonia O'Connor, president of content distribution for Univision. Univision recognizes that a majority of its Latino viewers watch its main broadcast networks, which are accessible for free with an antenna. Univision also did not want to undercut the efforts of its distribution partners, the pay-TV companies, which have introduced so-called TV Everywhere apps to enable customers to watch a full complement of programming on mobile devices. TV Everywhere users must certify that they subscribe to pay-TV to access the content on their phones and tablets.