Civil Liberties

Governments around the world are using cybersecurity and other fears to "cloak" efforts to crack down on political speech, Vint Cerf, known as one of the fathers of the Internet, said on Monday.

The tendency among tech advocates to highlight the role the Internet played in the Arab Spring has instilled fear of the Internet in regimes that are now taking a harder line, said Cerf, now a vice president at Google. Speaking at the Freedom to Connect conference, organized by Google, Mozilla, and the New America Foundation, among others, Cerf noted a contradiction between American officials' efforts to promote Internet freedom overseas, and domestic law enforcement and legislation aimed at cyberthreats and online piracy.

He pointed to proposed laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act, which faltered in Congress in January, and the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which passed the House last month.

While those bills may have been drafted with good intentions, Cerf said CISPA, for example, did not include strong enough privacy protections, and the restrictions on cybersecurity information sharing in the bill "felt very unconstrained."

While CISPA made it past the House, the Internet community mobilized to block SOPA, which would have increased way the government and companies could go after pirated content on foreign websites. But the pressure that undermined support for SOPA can't be expected to work on every law seen to threaten Internet freedom, Cerf said.

"Part of the reason that the SOPA campaign was successful because this was an election year," he said. In 2013, or any other off-year, the "leverage" needed to pressure lawmakers will be different, Cerf said.

Civil liberties groups are back actively opposing a cybersecurity bill that the House is scheduled to consider on Thursday.

The Center for Democracy and Technology and the Constitution Project never really dropped objections to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, but after discussions with the bill's sponsors, the groups said on Tuesday they would not actively oppose the bill and focus on amendments instead.

But on Wednesday, the House Rules Committee shot down 22 of 43 submitted amendments to the bill, known as CISPA. All but one Republican amendments were made in order, while four out of 19 Democratic amendments and four with 10 bipartisan support made the cut. Five amendments were withdrawn.

"In issuing a rule excluding amendments on two of the major privacy and civil liberties issues remaining in CISPA--the flow of information to the National Security Agency and the authority to use information for non-cybersecurty purposes--the House leadership has squandered an opportunity to achieve balanced cybersecurity legislation," CDT said in a statement.

On Tuesday CISPA's sponsors said they had resolved many of the privacy concerns over the bill, which would give businesses incentives to share cyberthreat information while freeing government agencies to give companies access to classified information.

Critics have pushed to increase privacy protections as well as add additional cybersecurity measures, such as giving Homeland Security officials more oversight over some private networks.

With bipartisan support and the backing of House leadership, CISPA is expected to pass the House, although key members of the Senate oppose it and the White House has threatened a veto.

House debate is scheduled to begin around noon on Thursday. In addition to CISPA, the House will be considering as many as three other bills designed to increase government information security, and encourage cybersecurity R&D and education.

A "disturbing" number of law enforcement agencies track cell phones without a warrant, the American Civil Liberties said on Monday, citing documents gathered from across the United States.

"The overwhelming majority of law enforcement agencies that responded engage in at least some cell phone tracking," the ACLU said in a summary of information it gathered. "Even those that have not tracked cell phones in the course of a criminal investigation have tracked cell phones in emergencies, for example to locate a missing person."

Civil liberties advocates have said they believe law enforcement concerns have prevented Congress from updating privacy laws to reduce warrantless tracking and searches.

Of the more than 200 law enforcement agencies that responded to the ACLU's requests, 10 reported that they had never used cell phones to track anyone.

Most police organizations sought the data from phone companies, although some cities, like Gilbert, Ariz., have purchased their own tracking technology, the ACLU reported.

"The government should have to get a warrant before tracking cell phones," ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump said in a statement. "The fact that some law enforcement agencies do get warrants shows that a probable cause requirement is a completely reasonable and workable policy, allowing police to protect both public safety and privacy."

A patchwork of different laws has created "chaos" for citizens and phone companies, the Center for Democracy and Technology's Jim Dempsey said.

"The report documents what we've suspected all along: Cell phone tracking is widespread and, while some police departments are doing the right thing and getting a warrant, many are not," he told National Journal by e-mail. "The law simply hasn't kept up."

New Justice Department rules allowing the government to retain domestic intelligence for up to five years not only infringe privacy, they could end up endangering national security, civil liberties advocates warned on Friday.

On Thursday Attorney General Eric Holder and intelligence officials approved new rules that allow the National Counterterrorism Center to store private information about Americans, even if they aren't suspected of being terrorists, The New York Times reported.

The idea is to give law enforcement and intelligence officials time to revisit information, but the American Civil Liberties Union says the rules could return the U.S. to the days of discredited Bush-era proposals.

"The decades-old rules limiting the collection and retention of U.S. citizen and resident information by the intelligence community and the military existed for a very good reason: to ensure that the powerful tools designed to protect us from foreign enemies are not turned against Americans," ACLU senior policy counsel Michael German said in a statement. "Authorizing the 'temporary' retention of non-terrorism-related citizen and resident information for five years essentially removes the restraint against wholesale collection of our personal information by the government, and puts all Americans at risk of unjustified scrutiny."

Beyond the privacy implications, by expanding the amount of information retained, officials could find themselves overwhelmed with data, he said. "Making the haystack bigger will only make it harder to find the needle, endangering both privacy and security."

But national security officials told the New York Times that the changes only streamline a process for managing information that the government already has access to.

The Bush administration proposed using databases of electronic records to identify terror groups within the United States. An outcry over the plans, dubbed "Total Information Awareness" after a British television miniseries, led Congress to partially reject them in 2003.

The Federal Trade Commission has subpoenaed Apple as part of the commission's ongoing antitrust probe of Google, All Things D reports.

A former Yahoo board member says the company's patent lawsuit against Facebook is "pathetic," Bloomberg reports.

Under fire from authors and free-speech advocates, PayPal is backing off its refusal to process payments for controversial e-books dealing with rape, bestiality or incest, according to Reuters.

AOL has laid off more than 40 workers from its AIM division and more job cuts are expected in the coming weeks, according to The New York Times.

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The Federal Communications Commission is asking for comments on government agencies that intentionally block cellphone service.

Last year public transit officials in San Francisco sparked an outcry when they shut down wireless service in train stations during protests. After those protests in August, the FCC said it would look into the issue. Now the agency has formally launched a fact-finding effort.

"Any intentional interruption of wireless service, no matter how brief or localized, raises significant concerns and implicates substantial legal and policy questions," the FCC said in a public notice on Thursday. "We are concerned that there has been insufficient discussion, analysis, and consideration of the questions raised by intentional interruptions of wireless service by government authorities."

The FCC is asking people to weigh in on a range of questions, including the potential authority of government agencies to shut down wireless service; and the reasons and risks behind intentional outages.

Blocking access to wireless networks raises serious legal and policy issues, said Harold Feld, legal director for Public Knowledge, which joined other advocacy groups in asking the FCC to rule on the outages last year.

"The same wireless network that police see as a tool for rioters to coordinate is the same wireless network used by peaceful protesters to exercise our fundamental freedoms," he said in a statement. "More than that, in any event, the network will be necessary for people in the area to call for help or to let family members know they are not harmed."

TechFreedom's Larry Downes and Berin Szoka, however, took a much dimmer view.

"Regulatory agencies move far too slowly. Here, it took the FCC six months just to open an inquiry," the pair in a statement. Courts, not new regulation, are best suited to protect First Amendment rights, they said.

The controversial advocacy group Demand Progress can't get enough of Lamar Smith.

After working to torpedo the Texas Republican's Stop Online Piracy Act, Demand Progress is taking aim at another of Smith's bills.

The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act (HR 1981), which cleared Smith's House Judiciary Committee 19-10 last year after a hotly contested markup, would require Internet service providers to keep some user information on file to help track pedophiles and child pornographers. The bill's supporters say it does not require the collection of content and most ISPs already retain the data.

Still, the measure drew attention from critics who see a potential to undermine privacy and civil liberties.

House aides say the bill is effectively dead for now, but that hasn't stopped opponents from reigniting the debate after SOPA and its Senate companion bill were shelved. The issue also resurfaced on the link-sharing website Reddit, where users organized opposition to SOPA.

Demand Progress, which claims a following of more than one million, is asking supporters to send letters to Congress opposing the bill.

"We taught Congress a lesson last month: We need to do to HR 1981 what we did to SOPA, and make it clear to Lamar Smith and the rest of Congress that they can't run roughshod over Internet freedom," the group's executive director, David Segal, said in a statement.

Smith's spokeswoman, Kim Hicks, said child pornography is one of the fastest growing crimes in the U.S. "The Internet can be a force for good or bad," she said. "But it should not be used to facilitate crimes against our children."

During the fight over anti-piracy legislation the U.S. Chamber of Commerce accused Demand Progress of using scare tactics to distort the issue.

A group of House and Senate lawmakers want the State Department to investigate whether some telecom companies,including the Chinese tech firm Huawei, may have violated a U.S. law barring companies that export sensitive telecommunications technology to Iran from doing business with the U.S. government.

They wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, pointing to an October story from the Wall Street Journal that identifies Huawei's dealings with Iran given that the State Department has yet to identify any companies that might be violating the 2010 Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Accountability and Divestment Act. The article claims that Huawei has supplied to Iranian mobile phone companies sensitive technology covered by the law that allows Iranian police to track users.

The letter, dated Dec. 22 and signed by Reps. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., and Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Sens. James Inhofe, R-Okla., Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., also notes that the Journal article and other news stories have identified other companies that may have supplied sensitive telecom technology to Iran.

"We ask you to expeditiously investigate whether Huawei and other telecommunications
firms have violated section 106 of CISADA by providing sensitive technology to the Iranian government that is or has been used to restrict the speech of the Iranian people and the free flow of unbiased information in Iran, and that you ensure taxpayer funds are not being used to support companies engaged in such activity," they wrote.

A federal judge has ruled that the Justice Department can access Twitter accounts connected to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks, CNet reports.

T-Mobile reported a boost in subscribers for the first time in a year and profits that beat expectations even as it fights to gain regulatory approval of a deal to sell itself to AT&T, according to Bloomberg.

MSNBC reports that demand for Amazon's new Kindle fire could pose a threat to the iPad's dominance of the tablet market.

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Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Thursday that by the end of the year he will mark up legislation to update a 25-year old law dealing with law enforcement access to electronic communications.

Leahy's legislation would overhaul the 1986 law he authored known as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant to get access to all forms of electronic communications and geo-location data.

"When I led the effort to write the ECPA 25 years ago, no one could have contemplated the many emerging threats to our digital privacy," Leahy said in a statement one day before the 25th anniversary of ECPA's enactment.

Tech companies, privacy advocates and other supporters of updating ECPA say the law is out of date and provides different legal standards for different types of electronic communications such as e-mail and stored electronic data. They argue that the law's differing legal protections are hampering the growth of some new technologies such as cloud computing.

"As technology has advanced, the checks and balances limiting government surveillance have not kept pace; the changes proposed by Senator Leahy's bill will provide important protections for today's online communications," Center for Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Gregory Nojeim said in a statement. His group helped launch a coalition last year pushing Congress to update ECPA.