Timothy Lee

An effort to protect Americans' browsing and search histories from warrantless government surveillance failed by a single vote in the Senate on May 13. The privacy measure, sponsored by Sens Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Steve Daines (R-MT) got 59 votes, one vote fewer than was needed to overcome a filibuster. The vote was over a section of federal surveillance law that was originally part of the USA Patriot Act in 2001. That provision, known as Section 215, gave the FBI the power to obtain "any tangible thing," including "books, records, papers, documents, and other items," without a warrant.

Ethos Capital voluntarily committed to limit price hikes on .org registrations for the next eight years. Ethos framed this as a concession to the public, and strictly speaking, a 10 percent price hike limit is better for customers than completely uncapped fees. But 10 percent annual increases are still massive—far more than inflation or plausible increases in the cost of running the infrastructure powering the .org registry. Ethos Capital's proposed limits are also much more than historical increases in the .org fee.

Earlier in 2019, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) sought public comment on a new contract for the Public Interest Registry, the non-profit organization that administers the .org top-level domain. The results were stark; more than 3,200 individuals and organizations submitted comments to ICANN, and most of them focused on a proposal to remove a cap on the price customers could be charged for .org domains. The existing contract, signed in 2013, banned the Public Interest Registry from charging more than $8.25 per domain.

After April 15, inmates at the Adult Detention Center in Lowndes County (MS) will no longer be allowed to visit with family members face to face. Newton County (MO) implemented an in-person visitor ban in March. The Allen County Jail in IN phased out in-person visits earlier in 2019. All three changes are part of a nationwide trend toward "video visitation" services. Instead of seeing their loved ones face to face, inmates are increasingly limited to talking to them through video terminals. These services are ludicrously expensive.

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley's victory over Sen Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is an ominous sign for one company in particular: Google. Hawley campaigned as an antagonist to big technology companies in general and Google in particular. In 2017, as MO's attorney general, Hawley launched a wide-ranging investigation into Google's business practices. "There is strong reason to believe that Google has not been acting with the best interest of Missourians in mind," Hawley said in a Nov 2017 statement.

A strict new real-time disclosure law has forced Google to suspend political advertising in the Washington state. "Ads related to ballot measures and state and local elections in the state of Washington, U.S.A., will not be accepted," a new Google policy says. The new rules were enacted by Washington state's Public Disclosure Commission to implement provisions of new campaign finance legislation that was passed in March. The rules require ad brokers like Google to provide information to the public about who is funding political ads and how those ads are being targeted.

The Podesta leak hasn’t just been embarrassing for John Podesta, it has also been embarrassing for many other Hillary Clinton campaign staffers who communicated with him. Also exposed were numerous other people in the progressive movement who either included Podesta in e-mail chains or had their e-mails forwarded to Podesta after the fact. So even if you’re extremely careful with your own online security, your private messages could still be exposed if anyone you correspond with is careless.

Your e-mails could also become public if, say, a former colleague becomes disgruntled and decides to deliberately leak embarrassing private e-mails to the press. Another danger is that your e-mail provider itself could be hacked. In Sept, we learned that hackers broke into Yahoo’s e-mail servers, gaining access to 500 million accounts. So far, it doesn’t appear that the culprits have released any of that information to the public, but whoever was responsible for the leaks likely has a great deal of juicy information they could release in the future. If you’re a prominent person — and especially if you’re a senior adviser to a presidential candidate or world leader — you should take the possibility of getting hacked very seriously. That partly means doing everything you can to lock down your e-mail service — by enabling two-factor authentication and ensuring everyone in your workplace or organization gets thorough training on e-mail security. But it also means you should be careful about what you write in an e-mail. Because there’s a very real risk that anything you write down and send over the Internet will eventually become available to the whole world.

[Commentary] There’s growing concern on both the right and the left that major media conglomerates are becoming too concentrated. In particular, there’s a high level of resentment against incumbent telecommunications providers, which are seen as charging high prices and offering poor service. That makes opposing the deal good politics.

Luckily for AT&T, antitrust decisions are supposed to be made based on the law rather than on political considerations. AT&T’s fate will rest in the hands of whoever runs the Justice Department’s antitrust division in the next administration. But in making the case for the deal, the company has a big problem: The most compelling business arguments for the deal — that the new megacompany can boost profits by giving Time Warner content favorable treatment on AT&T’s wired and wireless networks — are also the arguments that are most likely to attract skepticism from regulators. Because of that conundrum, AT&T executives have effectively been forced into telling a somewhat self-contradictory story, talking vaguely about synergies the deal will allow while simultaneously insisting they won’t exploit those synergies so much that it could damage competition.

[Commentary] We have gotten our first taste of the practical consequences of the June landmark decision from the Supreme Court restricting patents on software. The Federal Circuit Appeals Court, which hears appeals in all patent cases, invalidated a software patent for being overly abstract.

And the reasoning of the decision could lead to a lot of other software patents going down in flames, too.

The legal scholar Robert Merges has argued that the Supreme Court's June ruling, the first time the Supreme Court has weighed in on software patents since 1981, could endanger a lot of existing software patents. The Federal Circuit ruling underscores that conclusion.

Here's a handy guide to the most significant ways the National Security Agency spies on people in the United States and around the world:

1. The NSA collects every American's phone records
2. The PRISM program lets the NSA access private user data on leading online services
3. The NSA engages in offensive hacking operations
4. The NSA taps long-distance Internet connections
5. The NSA intercepted data flowing within Google and Yahoo data centers
6. The NSA spies on foreign leaders
7. The NSA spies on millions of ordinary people overseas
8. The NSA tracks cell phone locations around the world
9. From 2001 to 2011, the NSA collected vast amounts of information about Americans' Internet usage
10. The NSA has undermined the security of encryption products
11. The NSA uses tracking cookies to choose hacking targets
12. The NSA has cracked a popular standard for encrypting cell phone communications
13. The NSA can record every phone call in a certain, unspecified, country and store it for 30 days