Online privacy

Computer companies are standing with a web hosting company that is facing a search warrant obtained by the Department of Justice to 1.3 million IP addresses of an anti-Trump protest web site. The Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Amazon, Facebook, Google, and eBay, came to the company's defense.

“CCIA supports DreamHost and calls on DOJ to revise this request, and reassess its search warrant practices to respect the First and Fourth Amendments," said CCIA President Ed Black. “U.S. tech companies are often compelled to resist sweeping dragnets aimed at political dissent from foreign regimes. The U.S. government itself has criticized countries that target political dissent with criminal process. We would urge DOJ to consider the consequences of such requests both in terms of emboldening countries like China and in the message this sends to democratic allies.”

A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution. “What we have is a sweeping request for every single file we have” in relation to DisruptJ20.org, said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost, which hosts the site. “The search warrant is not only dealing with everything in relation to the website but also tons of data about people who visited it.”

The request also covers e-mails between the site’s organizers and people interested in attending the protests, any deleted messages and files, as well as subscriber information — such as names and addresses — and unpublished photos and blog posts that are stored in the site’s database, according to the warrant and Ghazarian. The request, which DreamHost made public Aug 14, set off a storm of protest among civil liberties advocates and within the tech community. “What you’re seeing is pure prosecutorial overreach by a politicized Justice Department, allowing the Trump administration to use prosecutors to silence critics,” Ghazarian said.

[Commentary] Today, faced with serious economic and political dysfunction, we are in need of another round of deep institutional renewal: a Third Republic. We need to coalesce around how best to create shared prosperity. This necessitates increasing productivity — the growth of which has been weak of late — and creating more well-paid jobs as well as finding better ways of redistributing the gains from new technologies and globalization in the fairer way.

Redesign antitrust for the era of big data: The role of large, dominant corporations in the U.S. economy has reached alarming proportions. The conventional commercial doctrine is that data are proprietary to the companies that collect them. This needs to change profoundly and completely since the playing field can only be leveled by making data available to all potential competitors. One way of achieving this is to ensure data belong to the people who generate the information, i.e., to individuals who drive cars, surf the internet, and buy goods. Enforcing this principle will ensure that data can be accessed by all, but also that individuals are compensated for the activities that generate information, at the same time as receiving a strong degree of privacy protection. The American Third Republic needs to clean up the influence industry and strengthen the institutional foundations of our democracy.

[Daron Acemoglu is a co-author with James A. Robinson of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. imon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management.]

More than a dozen high technology companies and the biggest wireless operator in the United States, Verizon, have called on the US Supreme Court to make it harder for government officials to access individuals' sensitive cellphone data. The companies filed a 44-page brief with the court Aug 14 in a high-profile dispute over whether police should have to get a warrant before obtaining data that could reveal a cellphone user's whereabouts.

Signed by some of Silicon Valley's biggest names, including Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Snap, and Alphabet's Google, the brief said that as individuals' data is increasingly collected through digital devices, greater privacy protections are needed under the law. "That users rely on technology companies to process their data for limited purposes does not mean that they expect their intimate data to be monitored by the government without a warrant," the brief said.

[Commentary] Today, US technology companies adhere to a wide array of requirements from repressive governments that undermine Internet freedom and privacy. These demands violate international law, including the right to freedom of expression. But the enormous benefits of market access outweigh the relatively low costs associated with accepting repressive governments’ demands.

Undoubtedly, there are circumstances in which requests for information or access to accounts are reasonable, such as when investigating terrorism and major crimes. But the misuse and abuse of this power by authoritarian governments are routine. Unless the U.S. government stands in support of companies that refuse to comply with wrongful requirements, authoritarian regimes will feel emboldened to make ever-increasing and unreasonable demands. And while U.S. technology companies should be able to invest in Internet-restricting countries, if their choices directly facilitate the persecution of these governments’ political opponents, then they should bear the costs.

[Jared Genser is an international human rights lawyer based in Washington.]

If the white nationalists and supremacists at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville (VA) were looking to be noticed, mission accomplished. A group of Twitter users — most notably the @YesYoureRacist account — have been publishing photos of the protestors on the social networking site and asking followers for help identifying them. One of the first to be identified on Aug 12 — a 20-year-old college student named Peter Cvjetanovic — told the Channel 2 news station in Reno (NV) that he “did not expect the photo to be shared as much as it was.” “I understand the photo has a very negative connotation,” he said. “But I hope that the people sharing the photo are willing to listen that I’m not the angry racist they see in that photo.” Cvjetanovic traveled to the “Unite the Right” march to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee, he said, because “the replacement of the statue will be the slow replacement of white heritage within the United States and the people who fought and defended and built their homeland.”

Months before social-media company Snap publicly disclosed slowing user growth, rival Facebook already knew.

Late in 2016, Facebook employees used an internal database of a sampling of mobile users’ activity to observe that usage of Snap’s flagship app, Snapchat, wasn’t growing as quickly as before. They saw that the shift occurred after Facebook’s Instagram app launched Stories, a near-replica of a Snapchat feature of the same name. Facebook’s early insight came thanks to its 2013 acquisition of Israeli mobile-analytics company Onavo, which distributes a data-security app that has been downloaded by millions of users. Data from Onavo’s app has been crucial to helping Facebook track rivals and scope out new product categories.

Many experts say lack of trust will not be a barrier to increased public reliance on the internet. Those who are hopeful that trust will grow expect technical and regulatory change will combat users’ concerns about security and privacy. Those who have doubts about progress say people are inured to risk, addicted to convenience and will not be offered alternatives to online interaction. Some expect the very nature of trust will change.

Palantir had been selling its data storage, analysis, and collaboration software to police departments nationwide on the basis of rock-solid security. “Palantir Law Enforcement provides robust, built-in privacy and civil liberties protections, including granular access controls and advanced data retention capabilities,” its website reads. The scale of Palantir’s implementation, the type, quantity and persistence of the data it processes, and the unprecedented access that many thousands of people have to that data all raise significant concerns about privacy, equity, racial justice, and civil rights. But until now, we haven’t known very much about how the system works, who is using it, and what their problems are. And neither Palantir nor many of the police departments that use it are willing to talk about it.

Lawyers representing a man convicted of six robberies in the Detroit area have now filed their opening brief at the Supreme Court in one of the most important digital privacy cases in recent years. This case, Carpenter v. United States, asks a simple question: is it OK for police to seize and search 127 days of cell-site location information (CSLI) without a warrant? Previously, lower courts have said that such practices are compatible with current law. But the fact that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case suggests that at least four justices feel that perhaps the law should be changed.

In Carpenter, as is the case in countless modern criminal cases, law enforcement was able to obtain the relevant records directly from the mobile phone provider with a court order that has less stringent requirements than a warrant. This is not a trivial distinction. A so-called "d-order" can be circumspect with how information is obtained by authorities. It does not, as the Fourth Amendment demands, require as much particularity. A warrant, unlike a d-order application, also mandates a signed and sworn affidavit ("on oath or affirmation"), as the Constitution requires, which describes the "places to be searched and the things to be seized." Carpenter's attorneys, many of whom are from the American Civil Liberties Union, argue in their filing that the current legal standard gives the government too much leeway. "If the Court were to accept this argument, the government could use this tool to monitor the minute-by-minute whereabouts of anyone—from ordinary citizens to prominent businesspersons to leaders of social movements," they wrote in their August 7 brief.