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  2. April 2016

April 2016

Sen Wyden rallies opposition to new fed hacking powers

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) is trying to block the Justice Department's request to expand its remote hacking powers, after the Supreme Court signed off on the proposal April 28. “These amendments will have significant consequences for Americans’ privacy and the scope of the government’s powers to conduct remote surveillance and searches of electronic devices,” warned Sen Wyden, a prominent digital privacy advocate and member of the Intelligence Committee.

The proposed alteration to the little-known criminal procedure rules would allow judges to grant warrants for electronic searches in multiple locations or even when investigators don’t know the physical location of a device. The Justice Department, which has been working for years on getting the change, insists the revision to what’s known as Rule 41 is a necessary update to match the realities of modern digital investigations. But tech companies such as Google, computer scientists and privacy advocates have decried the potential update, which they believe would give the FBI the authority to hack computers with little oversight. The Supreme Court OK'd the change April 28 and passed the request along to Congress for final approval. If lawmakers give the thumbs-up, or do nothing, the change would go into effect in six months. Sen Wyden said he will soon introduce legislation that would block the revision. “Under the proposed rules,” Sen Wyden said, “the government would now be able to obtain a single warrant to access and search thousands or millions of computers at once.” “And the vast majority of the affected computers would belong to the victims, not the perpetrators, of a cybercrime,” he added.

Sen Markey Eyeing TV Ratings System Complaints

Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) could be weighing back in to the kids TV content and ratings fray. A group of academics—from Harvard to New Mexico—has written Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler and the other commissioners asking them to look into the TV ratings system and how it could be improved given what they say is the documented impact of TV, including violent content, on children. They also want Congress to get involved.

Sen Markey was a driving force behind the TV ratings/V-chip system as a member, including chair and ranking member, of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee and has continued to advocate for protecting kids on-air and online ever since. Both broadcasters and cable operators use the system. A spokesperson for the senator said they were aware of the letter and had been "holding meetings with various groups on it" and the concerns raised, adding: "More to come." "Ratings can be effective only if they (1) indicate content that can be beneficial or harmful and (2) are useful for parents," they wrote FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in a letter dated April 26. "A great deal of valid scientific research has shown that ratings can indicate such content, but to date such valid content rating systems have not been implemented in a way that is useful for parents. For this reason, we are asking for the FCC and Congress to hold hearings on the ratings and how they could be changed to be valuable for the public." The Parents Television Council, which posted the letter on its website, has also called for a remake of the ratings system and industry board that oversees it.

T-Mobile Accused of Fighting a Real Union by Creating a Fake One

For more than a decade, the Communications Workers of America has been trying to unionize T-Mobile, the US subsidiary of German giant Deutsche Telekom, which is now the third-largest US wireless carrier. The campaign has so far won only two union contracts, covering about 30 of T-Mobile’s roughly 45,000 employees. Now CWA is alleging to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that T-Mobile has adopted an anti-union tactic that’s been illegal since 1935: creating a company-controlled union to drain support for an independent one.

“It’s a little bit flattering,” says CWA organizer Josh Coleman, a former employee. “We have momentum; the company’s trying to stop it by copying our union.” CWA says that in June 2015, Brian Brueckman, a T-Mobile senior vice president, sent employees an e-mail announcing “another big step to ensure your voice is heard” by management—the nationwide rollout of a group called T-Voice, composed of employee “representatives” from each call center, selected every six months by the company. “T-Voice is your voice,” Brueckman wrote in his e-mail, the first of several messages to employees that CWA contends contradict federal labor rules. T-Mobile didn’t respond to interview requests for this story. But in an e-mail last December, a company manager in Missouri described T-Voice as “a direct line for Frontline feedback to senior leadership” and said that T-Voice representatives would be bringing “pain points” from workers to management and “tracking and communicating resolution back to the team.” T-Mobile also has cited T-Voice’s input in e-mails to workers announcing perks such as spa days for longtime employees, free Wi-Fi, and cell phone charging station

Don’t Panic (For Now) About ISIS Hacking

In the nearly two years since ISIS declared itself a caliphate, the group has leaned heavily on technology to recruit, communicate, and attack foreign targets—each with varying degrees of success. Twitter and Facebook have scrambled to head off ISIS recruiters who spread propaganda on their platforms, and top intelligence officials have bemoaned the group’s alleged use of encryption to communicate. But barring a few low-impact operations, ISIS hasn’t successfully launched a meaningful cyberattack on the West. And according to new research from Flashpoint, a cybersecurity company, it probably doesn’t have the tools or the know-how to launch one anytime soon. To date, most of the group’s offensive moves have been “attacks of opportunity” that grasp at low-hanging fruit, the researchers said. The highest-profile ISIS cyberattacks targeted Twitter accounts: In January 2015, a group calling itself the “Cyber Caliphate” took over the Twitter handle that belongs to the US Central Command, and the next month, the same group appeared to take over Newsweek’s handle. At most, the attacks amounted to digital graffiti, although it can be hard to measure their psychological and morale-boosting effects. For now, the Flashpoint researchers wrote, ISIS’s “overall capabilities are neither advanced, nor do they demonstrate sophisticated targeting.” . But on April 4, Telegram accounts belonging to two of the five main groups that Flashpoint studied announced the creation of a “united cyber caliphate,” merging those groups with two others. The researchers said the unified group could lead to expanded scope and resources for hacking, and an increased focus on training other jihadis to defend themselves online.

Census Bureau hopes to use data from other government agencies in 2020

Anyone who has filed a US tax return, applied for a Social Security number or signed up for Medicare has given personal data to the government. So when the Census Bureau counts the American public, can it use the information that other federal agencies have already collected? The Census Bureau would very much like to do that.

For the 2020 census, the bureau is testing whether government records could supply basic details about 6 million hard-to-count households, and be used to identify another 6 million vacant homes so door-to-door enumerators can save time by skipping them during follow-up on homes that did not send in census forms. The agency also is researching whether such records could be a substitute for some questions, especially about sensitive topics such as income, on the American Community Survey, which replaced the census long form in 2010. The Census Bureau has been studying how to make use of well-vetted government records for decades, and today does so in a limited way – to count overseas military and federal employees in the decennial census, for example. But the agency now says it is serious about doing more, and acting quickly. One reason is that it is under pressure from Congress to hold down costs for the 2020 census. Another is that it has promised to look into dropping questions from the American Community Survey that have provoked complaints from respondents. Another potential obstacle: Will Americans, only about a third of whom are confident their government data will remain private and secure, accept the idea of increased sharing of their personal information across different agencies?

Distorting the Snallygaster Market

[Commentary] If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the Federal Communications Commission’s recent privacy rulemaking, you’ve probably heard its opponents claim that any regulation (no matter how minor, apparently) will create “distortions in the market” that would put broadband Internet service providers (or BIASes) at a disadvantage. What market is that, you ask? Yeah, we’re not sure either.

Much of the “market distortion” angle seems to come from one of two different places. First, commentators who advance the distortion argument want to treat the entire internet ecosystem as one massive, unified market, in which any player--no matter their role, apparently--can be substituted for another. A BIAS is no different, they say, from Google or Facebook or Netflix or any other number of edge providers or services. The end result is a market cryptid, a mythical beast akin (both figuratively and geographically) to DC’s fabled Snallygaster. And while the vaunted snallygaster sported the head of a lizard, wings of a bird, and tentacles of an octopus, the Internet Eco-Monster appears to have the body of an Internet Service Provider, the head of an advertising company, the arms of a search engine, and the legal rights of an individual. And while we here at Public Knowledge have debunked this myth elsewhere, it bears repeating: BIASes are unique. They are gatekeepers. Whatever other business a BIAS wants to enter, if it provides broadband Internet access, it’s a BIAS, and its BIAS-ing is subject to the same laws and regulations as its peers in that realm.

The second source of the “market distortion” argument comes from the idea that a BIAS, if banned from leveraging its dominant position in Internet access provision, would be unfairly edged out of the advertising markets vis-a-vis Google, Facebook, AOL, and the like. Again, this relies on the idea that companies are not only able, but entitled to abuse their market power in search of vertical dominance in other markets--an idea that the FCC (not to mention the courts, and Congress) have flatly rejected in previous CPNI privacy proceedings. Lest we forget, part of the impetus behind the creation of privacy rules in 1996 was AT&T’s abuse of its market power to squeeze competition in a separate market--home alarm systems.

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