Vice

In a list of technical requirements for a smartphone recording app, the FBI says it doesn't need to use encryption. Encryption can protect data from all sorts of threats: it can stop sensitive information from being read after it is intercepted, or may thwart attackers from getting at data stored on a device. But according to a procurement document published by the FBI, the agency says it doesn't need to use encryption for protecting unclassified audio or video evidence. The snippet is included in a 2016 document laying out the technical requirements for a smartphone recording app that the FBI requested be developed. According to the document, the app would allow both overt and covert recording and streaming.

Asians in Silicon Valley, whether CEOs or undocumented workers, will be impacted by the new policies. In Silicon Valley, where 60 percent of foreign-born individuals hail from India, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and other Asian countries, the outcry against President Doanld Trump's anti-immigration stance has been especially high-profile. And the latest immigration rules, rolled out in the last few days, have many communities on edge.

On March 3, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency announced that it would suspend the H-1B visa program, one of the main routes to employment for immigrants sponsored by tech companies. Then Trump signed a new executive order on March 6 banning entry from six countries: Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. These new rules will weaken the Asian community in the US, and its powerful contribution to the technology industry in the US. Throughout 2015, Asians made up 27 percent of the workforce at Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn, and Yahoo (though they were underrepresented in managerial and executive-level positions). In recent years, they've also made gains in the C suite with Google's Indian-born CEO, Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft's Indian-born CEO, Satya Nadella.

Teletext, an information service for transmitting text and graphics to a television set, was, 30 years ago, slated to revolutionize information retrieval. Back then, when the average media consumer couldn't envision reading script on a screen, well-moneyed news services were exploring teletext as an ultramodern avenue for on-demand, 24/7 news delivery to living rooms across the globe. Immediate access to stock quotes and international headlines was a sci-fi caprice that has today become a law of nature. Absentminded Yelping and indifferent glances at New York Times push notifications may now be taken-for-granted byproducts of the digital revolution. But in 1974, this user-to-information proximity was practically unfathomable, an anomaly seven years before IBM introduced its Personal Computer, the first computer of a size and price that was attractive for individual use. Teletext, according to those who worked with it, struck technologists and journalists alike as a diviner of the tech utopia to come.

President Donald Trump's newly-installed Federal Communications Commission chief moved to halt a key policy protecting online privacy and data security on March 1, in what public interest advocates called the latest Trump-era attack on FCC consumer safeguards. The data security rule was approved in 2016 by the Obama-era FCC as part of a suite of privacy safeguards designed to give consumers more power over how Internet service providers use their personal information.

The full privacy package, which is now on the Trump FCC's chopping block, requires ISPs to obtain "opt-in" consent from consumers before they use or sell sensitive personal information, including browsing activity, mobile app data, and emails and online chats. Consumer advocates say the FCC's data security rule, along with the broader privacy policy, is necessary at a time of increasing cyberattacks against internet users. The FCC's action drew a strong rebuke from the agency's lone Democratic commissioner and other public interest advocates.

"Net neutrality is not simply about technology," said Steven Renderos, Organizing Director at the Center for Media Justice. "It's about the everyday people who use it and whether they will have the right to be heard online. Two years ago, the [Federal Communications Commission] affirmed that everyone, regardless of class or race, deserves access to a media platform that does not discriminate."

Without net neutrality, these corporate giants could slow down or even block rival services, not to mention the next generation of startups that depend on internet freedom. If these broadband titans are allowed the right to stifle online creativity and entrepreneurship, it could snuff out the very engine of innovation that has generated billions of dollars of US economic activity and created millions of jobs.

In a new report, Amnesty International details a prolonged phishing campaign against journalists, activists and campaigners who work with Qatari labor rights issues.

"Donald Trump is going to have to pry net neutrality from my cold dead hands," said Winnie Wong, a leading political organizer and co-author of the Women's March on Washington unity principles. "We will organize huge numbers of people to turn out in the streets to protect the open internet." For Wong, network neutrality means more than just commerce or inside-baseball DC intrigue. It's about free speech and the ability to reach her colleagues and constituents online to coordinate the movement of movements, and the delegation of distributed direct action across the country and around the world. "The architects of the internet and the defenders of net neutrality are the people who have created the conditions that allow progressive activists to organize and build our networks of opposition to Trump at scale," Wong said. "We will fight to defend the open internet."

The decade-long war over net neutrality has taken on new urgency with Trump's decision to appoint Republican Ajit Pai to lead the Federal Communications Commission. Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, has made clear that he intends to dismantle the legal basis underpinning net neutrality, in a move that will delight the nation's largest cable and phone companies.

It was just a few days ago that Sprint announced it had acquired a 33 percent stake in Jay-Z's streaming music service, Tidal. According to Billboard, the deal was worth approximately $200 million, almost four times what Jay-Z paid for the service in 2015. Why would Sprint pay so much to get a piece of the company?

Some speculate it's the original content. However, it's also possible that this is Sprint's chance to offer customers something else: free data for using content it owns, a process known as "zero-rating". It's a strategy AT&T is using with DirecTV NOW, its streaming television service, and it's a strategy that's raising concerns in respect to net neutrality. "There's a lot of evidence from other examples of how zero-rating really does change consumer preferences and behavior," said Ryan Clough, General Counsel at Public Knowledge. "That's precisely why there's so much concern here."

If you like your online privacy rights, can you keep them? Under President Donald Trump, the chances are grim. Federal regulations protecting consumers from broadband industry privacy abuses will soon be eliminated if the nation’s largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their Republican allies on Capitol Hill have their way.

The US broadband privacy safeguards, which were approved last year by the Federal Communications Commission, require ISPs like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to obtain “opt-in” consent before they “monetize” sensitive consumer data, including online browsing activity, mobile app data, and emails and online chats. As President Trump and GOP lawmakers move swiftly to remove regulations across large swaths of the economy, the nation’s biggest ISPs are working overtime to ensure that the FCC’s privacy policy is part of the regulatory rollback. The broadband industry is pursuing a dual-track strategy by pressuring the FCC to halt the privacy policy, while simultaneously lobbying Congress to rescind the rules outright. Under the recently-approved FCC policy, consumers must affirmatively give their ISP opt-in permission to use private information for marketing purposes. The big ISPs, not surprisingly, want the right to monetize such data by default, with the burden falling on the user to opt-out.

If you're a peaceful protester, but you don't necessarily want your participation in a demonstration to follow you around or lead to harassment online, what sort of steps can you take around your digital security?
Bring a clean phone: “They'll be, obviously, cell-site simulators,” said Matthew Mitchell, a founder of Crypto Harlem. These devices, otherwise known as IMSI-catchers or Stingrays, can record phones' geolocation, their phone number, and sometimes the content of texts and phone calls. "If everyone is texting a couple of organizers, or calling a bunch of friends, that one friend that connected to all people could be identified,” Mitchell said.
Or bring no phone at all: The simpler, and probably more effective approach for protecting privacy, is to not bring a cell phone at all and rely on more traditional methods of activist coordination.