Washington Post

[Commentary] Sen Rand Paul’s (R-KY) strong libertarian principles have always differentiated him from many of his Republican colleagues. His outspokenness has many liberals and leftists asking a legitimate question: Why aren’t there more Democratic voices opposing the surveillance state?

Protecting civil liberties should be a critical piece of the progressive platform, but too many establishment Democrats and progressives have been silent on this issue simply because one of their own is in the White House.

Some Democrats in Congress have taken bold stands. Longtime civil-liberties champion (and former House Judiciary Committee chair) John Conyers has worked to limit the National Security Agency’s collection of bulk telephone data. Reps Keith Ellison of (D-MN) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) have probed the administration’s drone and surveillance programs. Rep Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) is pushing to prevent the NSA from weakening online encryption. In the Senate, Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has held oversight hearings questioning excessive surveillance. Even Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and normally a committed defender of the intelligence community, finally spoke out after discovering that the CIA spied on Senate staffers. And recently, Sens Mark Udall (D-NM) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent a letter to Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., strongly criticizing a “culture of misinformation” that has resulted in “misleading statements . . . about domestic surveillance.” And Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has proposed a bill limiting FBI and NSA spying.

Still, too many Democrats and even progressives are reluctant to challenge the Obama Administration, either because they don’t want to criticize a besieged president or because they’re focused on other priorities. As they stay silent, a host of troubling policies, including the assassination of US citizens without due process, the prosecution of record numbers of journalists and whistleblowers, the unaccountable growth of the surveillance state and the vast expansion of the drone program, are proliferating unchecked.

Almost a year after he released a flurry of documents showing the National Security Agency was collecting data on everyone from foreign leaders to US citizens, Edward Snowden is still the predominant Washington story in the minds of tech executives who believe the controversy has caused damage to their businesses.

That's according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who said in a wide-ranging interview that Silicon Valley's repeated meetings with the Obama administration were mostly for show and have produced "not even a little" progress on privacy and surveillance issues. Chief executives from leading companies including Netflix, Google and Facebook met with senior White House officials in December, and again in March. While the Obama Administration said at the time that the meetings helped clear the air on intelligence reforms, Andreessen argued that the White House has not done enough to mitigate the NSA's impact on tech companies' reputations, particularly overseas.

"The level of trust in US companies has been seriously damaged, especially but not exclusively outside the US," said Andreessen. "Every time a new shoe drops -- and there are 10,000 of them -- it serves a blow to the US." Some estimates suggest the news about the NSA's surveillance practices may have cost tech companies tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue.

In what seems certain to become a wider battle, Comcast is eyeing the wireless industry as a possible market for expansion.

Someday soon, Comcast might be counted among the likes of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, the businesses that now provide millions of Americans with mobile voice and data services. Thanks to a growing network of Wi-Fi hotspots, Comcast is arguing that it, or another company piggybacking off of its technology, could shake up the wireless industry by delivering cheaper cellular service to consumers and introducing another competitor to the market.

Comcast is already rolling out the infrastructure it would need for such a push; it operates 1 million Wi-Fi hotspots around the country and plans to expand that to 8 million by the end of 2014.

Comcast says that it has no imminent intention to launch a cellular service. But in April, the cable company raised that possibility as one of several arguments to support its Time Warner Cable purchase. "A ubiquitous Wi-Fi network built by Comcast could make a 'Wi-Fi-first' service, which combines commercial mobile radio service with Wi-Fi, a more viable alternative," Comcast wrote in its public interest filing to federal regulators.

[Commentary] What does the AT&T/DirecTV deal mean for consumers? Details are still rolling in, but here is what we know so far. First, be on the lookout for price increases.

AT&T has said DirecTV customers will continue to pay standard, nationwide prices -- but only for three years. After that, there are no guarantees. AT&T is also committing to offer a stand-alone broadband service, which caters to customers who only watch video content online, for three years after the deal closes.

AT&T and DirecTV don't compete for television customers in most of the country -- U-Verse only reaches about 25 percent of the country. But some consumer advocacy groups are concerned that AT&T could drop one of the services. Getting rid of any option for consumers could drive prices up, or trap customers into service that doesn't serve their needs because they simply don't have other services to run to.

The Justice Department accused five members of the Chinese military of conducting economic cyber-espionage against American companies, marking the first time that the United States has leveled such criminal charges against a foreign country.

Industries targeted by the alleged cyberspying ranged from nuclear to steel to solar energy, officials said. The hacking by a military unit in Shanghai, they said, was conducted for no other reason than to give a competitive advantage to Chinese companies, including state-owned enterprises.

Attorney General Eric Holder Jr said: “The range of trade secrets and other sensitive business information stolen in this case is significant and demands an aggressive response. . . . Success in the international marketplace should be based solely on a company’s ability to innovate and compete, not on a sponsor government’s ability to spy and steal business secrets.” Attorney General Holder added that the Obama Administration “will not tolerate actions by any nation that seeks to illegally sabotage American companies and undermine the integrity of fair competition in the operation of the free market.”

In response, China’s Foreign Ministry charged that the US government “fabricated facts” in the indictment, which it said “seriously violates basic norms of international relations and damages Sino-US cooperation and mutual trust.” It said China lodged a “protest” with the United States, urging it to “correct the error immediately and withdraw its so-called prosecution.”

Q&A with to Lynne Bradley, the director of government relations at the American Library Association's Washington office.

The Internet's eyes turned to the Federal Communications Commission, as the panel approved a plan to consider allowing Internet service providers to charge Web sites like Netflix for higher-quality delivery of their content to consumers.

Another group who cares deeply about this issue is the library community. The Switch spoke to Bradley about how network neutrality affects libraries, the people who rely on them and public institutions at large.

“Net neutrality is really important for libraries because we are, first of all, in the information business. Our business now is not just increasingly, but dramatically, online, using digital information and providing services in this digital environment. That means that we need to have solid and ubiquitous Internet services,” she said.

As to the impact network discrimination could have on libraries, Bradley added: “And what we as librarians and as educators in our communities see is that subtle differences in these speeds can make a great difference in how a user receives and uses the information. Even slight slowdowns will have an impact and can potentially limit public access to public schools, to public libraries, to public education.”

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission just agreed to consider a set of proposed rules that would tacitly allow Internet providers to speed up some types of Web traffic at the expense of other types.

If adopted, it could fundamentally change how the Web works at a basic level.

Naturally, people have a lot of questions about what's going to happen. For one thing, Netflix could become more expensive. If it keeps signing deals with broadband companies like Comcast, just so that it can provide you with smoother service, it might consider jacking up your subscription fee to cover any extra expense it incurs.

The longer analysis is that the Netflix deal is not exactly the same as the types of deals we might see under the FCC's proposed rule, because its agreement with Comcast is about bringing data to Comcast's door -- not how Comcast routes that traffic to the end user over "last-mile" pipes.

As for how the Internet itself could change, it seems inevitable that Internet providers could speed up some traffic. However, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler did say that under the proposal (which is just a proposal!) broadband providers would not be allowed to slow down traffic to below what a user has bought and paid for. So if you have a 75 Mbps connection at home, for example, services should always be delivered at that speed.

Because of the potentially higher costs to Web-based businesses that may arise from the proposed rules, some smaller companies may languish in the slow lane because they can't afford to pay the fees assessed on large companies to reach broadband providers' subscribers. So, yes, small startups could be harmed by this outcome.

And while Chairman Wheeler has a connection to cable industry and brings an industry perspective into his thinking, it's probably unfair to say that he's been bought and paid for.

As for municipal networks, there are about 20 states with laws on the books that hinder cities from competing with big Internet providers by offering their own, public Internet service. The FCC has indicated, along with its net neutrality proposal that it wants to start preempting some of these state laws.

Q&A with George Takei, famous for playing Captain Hikaru Sulu on "Star Trek," now host for the award-winning Web series "Takei's Take," a show underwritten by AARP meant to help introduce technology to seniors, youngsters and everyone in between.

Asked if there policy debates that he's into, such as network neutrality, he said that issues like policy and privacy are complex.

Takei also said that his audience was not built by Internet service providers. Instead, it came about “by our efforts, by our creativity. And once we have that audience built, they want to charge us for it? […] They can't unilaterally say, 'All right, it's our platform, we're going to charge you for it.'”

The Federal Communications Commission split along partisan lines in its vote on net neutrality rules: All three Democrats voted for the proposal, while the two Republicans opposed it.

That may be not be surprising, considering the issue at hand pits large businesses against grass-roots consumer advocates. But the vote is also evidence of the internal frictions between the FCC's Democratic majority and Republican minority.

The nation's top telecommunications regulator is composed of five members, each nominated by the president and approved by Congress.

Generally, the only time we get to see those members interact is when they appear before the public at the commission's monthly open meeting. In recent weeks, though, we've had brief glimpses of their behind-the-scenes relationship, thanks to unusually public statements about the inner workings of the agency.

Republican commissioner Ajit Pai complained that the Democrats recently sent him a revised draft of a proposal at the last minute, forcing him to compare both drafts in the wee hours of the night to see what had changed. There apparently are divisions within the majority party, too. Democratic commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel opened her remarks by flatly: "I support the open Internet, but I would've done this differently."

Minnesota passed the nation’s first law requiring smartphones to have the ability to be remotely disabled. The law requires smartphone manufacturers to introduce so-called “kill switches” in devices to allow users to make lost or stolen phones unusable.

In so doing, the state hopes to remove the incentive for such robberies, which are on the rise.

A Consumer Reports survey released in April month found that 3.1 million Americans had cellphones stolen in 2013, nearly double the 1.6 million thefts reported the previous year. Some of those robberies can become violent, as was the case for a Minneapolis mayoral candidate who received nine stitches after being assaulted by teenage thieves in December.

“This law will help combat the growing number of violent cellphone thefts in Minnesota,” Gov. Mark Dayton said in a statement to announce the bill’s signing. Minnesota is the first state to pass such a law. A similar measure is working its way through the California legislature.