April 2016

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is none too happy that the executive branch is asking them to reauthorize two key surveillance programs next year without answering the single most important question about them.

The programs, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are called PRISM and Upstream. PRISM collects hundreds of millions of Internet communications of “targeted individuals” from providers such as Facebook, Yahoo, and Skype. Upstream takes communications straight from the major US internet backbones run by telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon and harvests data that involves selectors related to foreign targets. But both programs, though nominally targeted at foreigners overseas, inevitably sweep up massive amounts of data involving innocent Americans. The question is: How much? The government won’t answer. Fourteen members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper asking for at least a rough estimate.

The financial decisions of telecom companies have put rural students at a disadvantage, leaving some without basic digital abilities that many in America take for granted. Federal regulators are working toward a fix for these out-of-reach of schools, but it’s unclear to what extent these efforts will solve the problem.

The schools with sub-par Internet are scattered around the country, spanning from the far-flung communities of Alaska to the desert towns of New Mexico. The danger is that students who attend these schools will struggle for years with the critical tasks that now require online fluency: applying to colleges, researching papers, looking for jobs. “This is essentially the definition of the digital divide in education,” said Evan Marwell, EducationSuperHighway founder and chief executive. “Students on the wrong side don’t have the same opportunity to compete.” Marwell added that “the providers are kind of done building to all the areas they can rationalize on their own. So we need to figure out how to get it to those last places.”

Over the past seven years, Google has created a remarkable partnership with the President Barack Obama White House, providing expertise, services, advice, and personnel for vital government projects. The Intercept teamed up with Campaign for Accountability to present two revealing data sets from that forthcoming project: one on the number of White House meetings attended by Google representatives, and the second on the revolving door between Google and the government.

Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of President Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his Administration. No other public company approaches this degree of intimacy with government. According to an analysis of White House data, the Google lobbyist with the most White House visits, Johanna Shelton, visited 128 times, far more often than lead representatives of the other top-lobbying companies — and more than twice as often, for instance, as Microsoft’s Fred Humphries or Comcast’s David Cohen. Google’s dramatic rise as a lobbying force has not gone unnoticed. The company paid almost no attention to the Washington influence game prior to 2007, but ramped up steeply thereafter. It spent $16.7 million in lobbying in 2015, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and has been at or near the top of public companies in lobbying expenses since 2012.