Let Your Senator Know Right Now That You Are Watching If They'll Vote To Protect Privacy

from the speak-up dept

On Friday, we mentioned that this week is the week in which the Senate will wrangle over the new Cybersecurity bill. The current bill has some privacy safeguards, but not nearly enough. Senators Al Franken and Rand Paul have put together an amendment to strengthen the privacy safeguards even more -- and over the weekend, Senator Chuck Schumer agreed to co-sponsor the Franken/Paul amendment after talking to various folks in the tech industry and the civil liberties community. That adds more weight to the amendment. Unfortunately, Senators John McCain and Kay Bailey Huchison and a few others, who have been carrying water for the NSA throughout this fight, are looking to move the bill very far in the other direction, wiping out tons of privacy protections. It's really shameful.

Either way, this is the week to let your Senator know how you feel about all of this (and if you're a constituent of McCain or Huchison, please ask why they're so against protecting the privacy of the American public). The American Library Association has kindly set up a simple one-click tool to call your Senator and let them know how you feel.

The EFF has a page with some more info as well, noting that it's basically too late to email your Senators, so please call. If you want some more info, check out Fred Wilson's analysis of the situation, which matches almost exactly with mine. We still have not been given a compelling reason why any such legislation is needed. We keep hearing scare stories about mushroom clouds and planes falling from the sky if information can't be shared. But... what no one has done yet is explain which existing regulations block the necessary sharing of information. If they did that, we could look at fixing those laws. Instead, we're just told scare stories and given a massive 211-page bill that wipes out all sorts of previous laws, and adds all sorts of other things to the law. Given the length of the bill, it's quite likely there are some awful "easter eggs" in there that we'll only discover years down the road.

That said, if the bill is going to pass, it would be much better if it had very strong privacy protections in it, and the Franken/Paul amendment go a long way towards putting such protections in. The McCain/Huchison proposal do the opposite, and basically seek to take away privacy protections, while giving the NSA much more ability to access your data. Don't let the Senate trample your privacy rights. Go ahead and use the ALA's tool to contact your Senator today.

Filed Under: al franken, chuck schumer, cybersecurity, john mccain, kay bailey huchison, privacy, rand paul, senate

Next Week: The Senate Fights Over Whether It Can Take Away Your Online Privacy

from the pay-attention dept

If you haven't been keeping up on all the politics of the cybersecurity bill fight over the past few weeks, a new bill was recently introduced that at least had some improvements concerning privacy (though it still had lots of problems). Yesterday, the Senate basically made it clear that they're done with debating the issue, and will bring the new bill to a vote next week. But now the real fight begins: the fight over the amendments on the bill. A whole bunch of amendments have already been proposed, with a second batch expected to be filed on Monday.

Senator McCain is leading the charge with a whole slew of amendments which are designed to delete basically every last bit of privacy protection that is in the bill. Among many, many other things, McCain's amendments would take away the limitation that any information sharing not go directly to the NSA. As we've noted in the past, a lot of this is a turf battle over whether NSA or Homeland Security gets control of the info, and McCain has been "Team NSA's" biggest cheerleader all along. Furthermore, he wants to remove the limitation that the information can only be used for cybersecurity reasons, making the use of the information much, much broader. There are also all sorts of efforts to take away government liability if information is abused. Basically, everything that's useful or good in protecting privacy? McCain and a few other Senators seem to want to take that away.

On the flip side, there are a few good amendments to increase privacy. Senators Al Franken and Rand Paul are pushing an amendment to strengthen the privacy protections. Senator Wyden is pushing an amendment that basically includes his GPS Act, which basically says law enforcement can't track GPS data without a warrant.

Either way, next week is going to be quite a big fight in the Senate, and the "marginally better" Cybersecurity Act may quickly turn into somethinghorribly destructive to your online privacy. If you care about your privacy, now (and all next week) would be a good time to call your Senator and tell them that any attempt to weaken privacy protections is unacceptable, and that they should get behind the proposals to strengthen privacy protections.

Filed Under: al franken, cybersecurity, cybersecurity act, john mccain, privacy, rand paul, ron wyden, senate

Senator Franken Questions Legality Of DOJ Having Mobile Operators Reveal Where People Are

from the that-ol'-4th-amendment-thing dept

It's long been known that law enforcement relies heavily on mobile phone providers to give them data on where people are, based on the location info on their mobile devices. Back in 2009, a Freedom of Information Act request revealed, for example, that Sprint had provided law enforcement officials with GPS data a staggering 8 million times in the previous year. Now, it's important to note that many of those times were apparently multiple "pings" on the same person/device. But, still. You can bet those numbers have only gone up. Last year, Senator Wyden proposed legislation requiring that law enforcement get a warrant. He has also hinted strongly at the idea that part of the government's secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act involves access to location info on just about anyone with a mobile device.

It appears that others are taking some interest in the possibility of widespread government tracking without a warrant as well. Senator Al Franken has sent a letter to Attorney General Holder asking some pretty pointed questions about how frequently the government gets location data from mobile service providers, and what legal standards it uses. He points to the Jones ruling, which suggested there could be a 4th Amendment violation for placing a GPS device on a car, as one of the reasons for his concern.

I was very concerned to read recent reports suggesting that state and local law enforcement agencies may be working around the protections of Jones by requesting the location records of individuals directly from their wireless carriers instead of tracking the individuals through stand-alone GPS devices installed on their vehicles. I was further concerned to learn that in many cases, these agencies appear to be obtaining precise records of individuals' past and current movements from carriers without first obtaining a warrant for this information. I think that these actions may violate the spirit if not the letter of the Jones decision.

I am writing to ask you about the Department of Justice's own practices in requesting location information from wireless carriers. I am eager to learn about how frequently the Department requests location information and what legal standard the Department believes it must meet to obtain it. I would also like to know how the Department may have changed these practices since the Jones decision.

While I certainly appreciate this effort and line of inquiry -- I'm not sure that Jones really makes that much of a difference. As we said when it came out, the Justices really danced around the larger issues, with an extremely narrow ruling, which left open the question of how it applied to GPS devices that weren't put on the cars by law enforcement. That is, the ruling focused almost entirely on whether or not the placing of the device constituted a search -- not about the use of such a device. Still, the government's actions need much greater scrutiny here, as there's an awful lot of evidence suggesting that law enforcement is using the power to get people's locations from their mobile phone providers at an incredible rate, and with little to no oversight. I doubt that AG Holder will provide useful answers to this request, but it's still good that Senator Franken is asking.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, al franken, doj, eric holder, gps, patriot act, ron wyden, tracking
Companies: sprint

Senate Committee Recognizes That Violating Terms of Service Shouldn't Be A Crime

from the now-let's-get-this-through dept

As we recently noted in our coverage of the various attempts to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), with some plans to make it worse, there was one bright spot: Senators Grassley and Franken had introduced an amendment that would make it clear that merely violating a website's terms of service did not constitute exceeding authorized access, as some law enforcement (and courts) had interpreted the law to read. Thankfully, this amendment was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. That's no guarantee that it will become a part of the law -- and there's no guarantee that other changes might not make the CFAA even worse, but it's at least a step in the right direction. It's good to finally see Congress at least push back on the expansive interpretation of the CFAA that law enforcement has been using for too long.

Filed Under: al franken, cfaa, chuck grassley, terms of service

There's No Such Thing As 'Natural' Search Results; Search Results Are Inherently Biased

from the what-a-joke dept

The Senate hearings to tar and feather Google are still ongoing, but the first round grilling of Eric Schmidt didn't present many surprises. Basically, a lot of Senators who don't really understand technology are upset... because Google is big. Senator Franken even admitted that his concern was over the "bigness." Senator Blumenthal, bizarrely, talked about how Google was a wonderful story of American corporate success... before asking how best to dismantle that. For example, he even suggested that Google remove Google Maps results from searches on addresses. That's ridiculous. For folks like myself who like getting the Google Maps result at the top, that would make my life worse. But the most ridiculous comment may have been from Senator Lee, who complained about Google's own results messing up "natural search results." But as Rob Pegoraro points out, this seems to assume that there is such a thing as "natural" search. Everything that Google puts on a page is a choice, and if those choices harm consumers, we'll go elsewhere.

The other annoying thing was everyone kept pointing to "search" as if that's the entire market. Senator Kohl even suggested that when it came to news, the only places to find news are Google or Bing. He flat out claimed that if Bing went out of business, the only way to find news would be Google. Huh?!? As we've noted in the past, we actually get a smaller and smaller percentage of our traffic coming from Google these days. Instead, more and more is coming from social networks and other systems. StumbleUpon, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook have all taken significant referral share from Google -- and reports from other sites suggest the same thing.

Filed Under: al franken, antitrust, herb kohl, mike lee, politics, richard blumenthal, search, senate
Companies: google

Senator Franken Defends Censoring The Internet Because He Doesn't Think Hollywood Should Have To Change Biz Models?

from the really? dept

We were a bit surprised late last year to see that Senator Al Franken was supporting censoring the internet via COICA (which, yes, is about censoring the internet). After all, Franken has positioned himself as the "internet freedom" politician, and has spoken out repeatedly against attempts to limit speech on the internet. Ars Technica has an interview with Franken, where he delves into his support for COICA, noting that he's heard from those who worry about censoring the internet, but in the end, he thinks it's okay, because he's from the movie/entertainment world, and he doesn't seem to think they should have to adapt to the changing internet:

The other side of this, of course, is that this is about, essentially, stealing copyrighted material and selling counterfeit goods. This goes to tens of billions of dollars in theft. Some of the supporters of this were after the American Federation of TV and Radio Artists, the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild... I happen to belong to all three of those unions. This doesn't just affect the jobs of writers and directors and producers; when they're free to steal all this intellectual material, it changes the business model of a movie. So it really costs the jobs of the technicians and the crew and the craft services people. It changes the entire business model for the industry. It's not just movies and TV, it's everything.

This is pretty disappointing, on any number of levels. First of all, his repeated use of the technically and legally incorrect words "stealing" and "theft" are troubling. Second, his repeating the totally debunked claims that this is somehow costing "tens of billions of dollars." The GAO has already debunked those numbers as having little to no basis, and it's disappointing that Franken would repeat them. But the key point is that yes, of course it changes the entire business model for the industry. But that's what new technologies do. They change the business models for legacy companies and it's not our government's job to protect those legacy companies and their business models, even if our elected officials used to work for those companies.

That said, Franken does suggest that he's heard many of the concerns about COICA and is focused on narrowing its focus significantly, saying that he has "tried to tighten the definition of who could be targeted under the bill" and in the recent hearing on COICA asked a series of questions to make sure that the bill "is narrowly tailored and will not unwittingly lead to the blocking of legitimate speech that is protected by the First Amendment." The problem is that I'm not really sure there's a way to do that effectively -- especially when, prior to COICA passing, Homeland Security already seems to think it can seize domains without any First Amendment considerations, leading to plenty of perfectly legal speech being suppressed. Franken should know better than to think that a bill allowing internet censorship can be crafted to only take down speech of one kind.

Filed Under: al franken, business models, censorship, coica

Comcast CEO Argues Rules Will Protect Customers In Merger, While Comcast Lawyers Argue Rules Are Unconstitutional

from the how-it-works dept

Earlier, we had a story about NBC Universal boss Jeff Zucker being caught lying in his Congressional testimony on the Comcast/NBC merger. And a bunch of folks have now been sending in the news of Al Franken blatantly calling Comcast boss Brian Roberts for also being less than honest, specifically about the FCC rules to protect consumers:

"In other words, looking to get approval for this merger, you sat there in my office and told me to my face that these rules would protect consumers but your lawyers had just finished arguing in front of the Commission that it would be unconstitutional to apply these rules."

You can see the video here: Of course, this is nothing new for Comcast. It has been playing the same doubletalk game for a while now -- always insisting that it shouldn't be subject to more regulation because the FCC's rules keep it in line... while at the same time fighting the FCC in court and saying that those rules are unconstitutional.

All that said, I have to say that I'm not particularly concerned about Comcast and NBC merging. I'm all for it. If two companies that poorly run are getting together, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster. We've seen this game before, and it was called AOL-Time Warner. While it's difficult to think that anyone could screw up that badly again, if anyone can, it's the folks at NBC Universal.

Filed Under: al franken, brian roberts
Companies: comcast, nbc universal