Timothy Lee

The House of Representatives voted to bar the Obama Administration from engaging in a controversial surveillance practice that insiders call a "backdoor search."

A letter from the Obama Administration gives some hints about how common the practice is. The letter, addressed to Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), admits that the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation all conducted backdoor searches in 2013. At least 198 searches -- and possibly many more -- were seeking the contents of Americans' private communications. Here's how often government agencies engaged in the controversial practice in 2013:

• The NSA brass approved searches for the contents of the communications of 198 Americans. Such content searches could include the audio of phone calls or the body of e-mails.
• The NSA conducted approximately 9,500 searches for Americans' metadata -- information such as phone numbers dialed, email recipients, and the length of calls.
• The CIA conducted "fewer than 1,900 queries" for information about Americans, of which 27 percent were duplicate searches for the same American.
• The letter says the FBI doesn't keep track of how many queries it has performed, but "the FBI believes the number of queries is substantial." On the other hand, the FBI "only requests and receives a small percentage" of the NSA's collection of data acquired under the FISA Amendments Act.

A Q&A with Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist.

Bitcoin has enjoyed a meteoric rise. The value of one unit of the cryptocurrency has soared from $13 at the beginning of 2013 to $600. Investors have poured millions of dollars into Bitcoin-based startups. Yet Bitcoin still faces widespread skepticism. The payment system's many critics argue that it doesn't have any compelling advantages over the conventional financial system. And they say Bitcoin is hampered by security concerns, extremely volatility, and unsavory ties to the criminal underworld.

These criticisms give Andreessen a sense of deja vu. In 1994, he was an early adopter of another technology that was widely dismissed as an impractical fad: the Internet. He describes the "massive wall of negativity" he encountered when, as the co-founder of the browser company Netscape, he tried to convince major American companies to take the internet seriously.

Andreessen believes that Bitcoin has the same kind of disruptive potential that the internet had two decades ago. “Bitcoin could basically reconstruct the financial industry in an untrusted peer-to-peer environment. This is why all the technologists look at it and get excited,” Andreessen said.

The Supreme Court decision of Riley v. California isn't just a landmark ruling on cell phone privacy. It also represents a dramatic shift in the high court's attitude toward technology and privacy.

The Supreme Court's new attitude is best summarized by a single sentence in the opinion. The government had argued that searching a cell phone is no different from searching other items in a suspect's pocket. That, the court wrote, "is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon." The government has typically pursued a simple legal strategy when faced with digital technologies.

First, find a precedent that gave the government access to information in the physical world.

Second, argue that the same principle should apply in the digital world, ignoring the fact that this will vastly expand the government's snooping power while eroding Americans' privacy. In all legal precedents, the government wants the courts to ignore the huge practical differences between the technologies that existed when old precedents were established and the technologies Americans use today.

This most recent ruling suggests that when these issues reach the nation's highest court, the justices won't be so credulous. They'll recognize that cell phone tracking is as different from a bank deposit slip as a ride on horseback is from a flight to the moon.

A lot of people expected Aereo to lose its Supreme Court case. The real question has always been whether a ruling against Aereo would have implications for other online services.

Many of the arguments broadcasters made against Aereo could just as easily be made against conventional cloud storage services such as Google Music and Dropbox, which also transmit copyrighted content to consumers.

A legal scholar whose work was heavily cited by Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion says that the case will have cloud storage and consumer electronics companies "looking over their shoulders." "The court is sending a very clear signal that you can't design a system to be the functional equivalent of cable," says James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar at the University of Maryland. "The court also emphasizes very strongly that cloud services are different. But when asked how, it says, 'They're just different, trust us.'"

Cloud storage services have relied on this "volitional conduct" principle to avoid copyright liability. If you upload a pirated movie to your Dropbox account or fill your Google Music account with pirated music, you might be guilty of copyright infringement.

But Dropbox and Google don't have to worry. It's probably not a coincidence that cloud music services blossomed a couple of years after the 2008 decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to protect Cablevision from copyright liability, letting it rest on the customer when storing selected programs on a remote DVR cloud storage system. Now, Grimmelmann says, "the reasoning of Cablevision is dead."

Columbia University's Tim Wu has only been a law professor for 12 years, but he's accomplished a lot during that time. He has contributed frequently to Slate, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and the New York Times, written an influential book, and advised the Federal Trade Commission on Internet policy. Oh, and he coined the term network neutrality. Now he's hoping to add another item to his resume: Lieutenant Governor of New York.

Wu is running alongside Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham University, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor. In May, Teachout sought the endorsement of New York's Working Families Party.

New York's unusual election system allows a candidate to appear on more than one party's line on the ballot, and Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) ran on both the Democratic and Working Families lines in 2010. If Wu wins, he won't be able to do much about the tech policy issues he has focused on over the last decade.

Telecom regulation is primarily a federal issue, as are copyright and patent policy. But Wu has hinted that cracking down on Comcast could be on his agenda.

In 2013, Americans started learning about the true extent of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency. Now, a coalition of technology companies and civil liberties groups are taking matters into their own hands.

The one-day campaign is called Reset the Net, a campaign to encourage the use of technologies that make the Internet more resistant to NSA snooping. What does Reset the Net recommend I do to protect my privacy?

• For your cell phone, Reset the Net recommends ChatSecure, TextSecure, and RedPhone. As the names suggest, these products enable users to communicate securely over instant messaging, text messaging, and voice calling. Reset the Net also encourages users to set a password on their phone so its contents can't easily be accessed by criminals or the police.
• For your Mac or PC, the bundle includes secure instant messaging software (Adium for Mac or Pidgin for PC) as well as Tor, software that helps preserve your anonymity by allowing you to browse your address without revealing where you're browsing from.
• Finally, Reset the Net has tips for improving password security. You should avoid re-using the same password on multiple sites. Instead, keep track of your passwords with a password manager or just write them down on paper.

[Commentary] In the coming months, federal regulators need to decide on two big mergers: Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable and AT&T's proposed purchase of DirecTV. The deals are similar in size and both involve big pay-television companies getting even bigger. But the deals have produced strikingly different reactions.

The Comcast deal attracted immediate condemnation from a broad range of left-leaning groups such as Public Knowledge, which quickly condemned the merger and called on regulators to stop it. Public Knowledge's reaction to AT&T's proposed purchase of DirecTV also sounded a skeptical note, but it was much more muted.

What explains the difference? A big factor is the different ways the two deals would reshape the Internet. Comcast and Time Warner Cable are two of the nation's largest broadband providers, and the combined company would control a third of all home broadband subscriptions.

Given the way Comcast has been throwing its weight around in recent interconnection disputes, there's reason to worry about the nation's biggest broadband provider getting even bigger. AT&T is also a fairly big broadband provider -- it has 16 million subscribers compared with Comcast's 20 million.

But DirecTV has is not a significant broadband provider, so combining the two firms won't increase AT&T's leverage in negotiations with the rest of the Internet. And 5 million of AT&T's subscribers are on low-speed DSL connections, not the kind of connection consumers are likely to use for video streaming.

When someone leaked a copy of a New York Times report on innovation (that was shockingly good), it clearly identified the major problems facing the newspaper in an increasingly digital world, and it made some smart recommendations for transforming the Times into a "digital first" publication.

If the Times were to follow them, it would have a large and positive impact on the paper.

Nevertheless, translating the report's recommendations into action will be very difficult. As Ezra points out, the report includes an excellent summary of Clay Christensen's concept of disruption. The report correctly observes that publications like Buzzfeed are posing exactly the kind of disruptive threat Christensen wrote about.

But what the report doesn't mention is the sobering conclusion of Christensen's research: companies faced with disruptive threats almost never manage to handle them gracefully. And the reality is that most businesses threatened by disruptive innovation don't survive. So even if the senior leadership of the Times accepts the findings of the Times innovation report, they're going to find it a huge challenge to make the kind of dramatic changes that will be required for the Times to master the web.

[Commentary] The debate surrounding the net neutrality vote at the Federal Communications Commission has been all about "fast lanes." Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler says his proposal would prohibit them.

Critics on his left say that stronger rules are needed to prevent them. The FCC's Republican commissioners say that the specter of fast lanes is largely imaginary, and that net neutrality rules are a solution in search of a problem.

They're all wrong. Fast lanes are real. They exist now. And none of the rules the FCC proposed are going to prevent them.

So why is the FCC focusing on hypothetical fast lanes while ignoring the ones that already exist? One factor is inertia. Comcast's current business strategy, in which it charges almost everyone to deliver traffic to its own customers, only dates to about 2010. This kind of dispute wasn't even on the radar of policymakers when the term network neutrality was coined a decade ago.

So a lot of network neutrality advocates are still fighting the last war, not noticing that the open internet is coming under attack on a new front. The other reason is that regulating the terms of interconnection on the internet is even more complex than regulating classic network neutrality. It's relatively straightforward to say that a network provider can't prioritize one type of traffic over another on its network.

But writing rules to govern when two networks must connect with each other and how much they can charge is really difficult. So FCC policymakers may have decided to tackle the easier problem first.

Not everyone thinks this stronger network neutrality rules and broadband reclassification are a good idea. Incumbent telecom companies, free-market advocates, and a number of members of Congress have all urged the Federal Communications Commission to retain the low-regulation "information service" category.

Here are the three biggest problems that, opponents claim, could be created by reclassification.

Gus Hurwitz, a legal scholar at the University of Nebraska College of Law, says that reclassifying could give the FCC the power to regulate broadband prices, connection and disconnection of service, and interconnection with other Internet companies.

Reclassification opponents say broadband providers will be less willing to open their wallets when there's a lot of uncertainty about when and how they'll be allowed to profit from their networks.

Also, if the FCC reclassifies, that decision is almost certain to trigger a lawsuit.

"If we do see reclassification, we're probably looking at another 2 to 4 years of just litigating questions of the commission's basic authority," Hurwitz says.

And politically, there are two ways opponents of reclassification could make life difficult for Chairman Tom Wheeler if he reclassifies. First, members of Congress can haul Chairman Wheeler before Congress to grill him about his policies. And second, telecom companies could mount more legal challenges to FCC decisions, forcing the agency to spend more time defending itself in court, leaving it with less time to pursue other initiatives.