John Oliver Takes On Government Surveillance With Help From Ed Snowden And... Some Dick Pics

from the put-it-in-terms-of-your-junk dept

Once again, it seems that John Oliver is doing a show on topics that we regularly talk about in these parts. And he's pretty damn good at it. Last night's episode was all about government surveillance, focused mainly on Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and the fact that it's set to sunset on June 1st if Congress doesn't renew it (and, of course, there's been no debate at all on it, meaning that late in May you'll see a frantic, crazed and fact-free "debate" in which fearmongers will insist that we're all going to die if it's not extended). Oliver actually flew to Moscow and interviewed Ed Snowden as part of the episode: Believe it or not, Oliver actually challenged Snowden a lot more than most of Snowden's interviews, which is pretty interesting (but perhaps not that surprising -- given that Oliver also gave former NSA boss Keith Alexander his most challenging interview in Oliver's very first episode). Oliver challenged Snowden on whether or not journalists could do a good enough job keeping some of the information in the documents secret (pointing to one particular fuck up in which there was a bad redaction). He also questioned how carefully Snowden reviewed all of the info before handing it over.

But, much more of the interview (and the rest of the show) actually focused on getting the public to actually care about what was going on. Oliver used the late night talk show TV trope of asking people on the street what they knew about Ed Snowden and what he revealed (the answer: basically nothing), and then flipped it around to ask them how they would feel if photos they or their loved ones took of their penises should be collected by the NSA. Then, suddenly, they were worried about the government's surveillance capabilities. That leads to Oliver coaxing Snowden into explaining the power of government surveillance -- including Section 215, Executive Order 12333, the PRISM program and even (barely) the upstream collection program under Section 702 of the FISA Act (not named in the show, though the others are) -- about how it allows the government to collect "dick picks" (which Snowden will only call "photos of your junk.")

It's an amusing segment, but I'm not convinced it's as powerful as it could have been (or as Oliver has been on other topics), in which he has been able to get people really motivated to be angry and speak out about certain injustices. And that's too bad, because this is a huge issue. I recognize it's a lot to ask of a primarily comedy show, but Oliver has been so successful at getting people worked up on issues like net neutrality, that it's almost a disappointment that he's not able to create the same level of outrage over government surveillance. In fact, most of the news coverage of Oliver's interview seems to be about the mundane aspects of his interview with Snowden, such as whether or not he misses "hot pockets."

Filed Under: ed snowden, government surveillance, john oliver, nsa, patriot act, section 215, surveillance

Google Releases Latest Transparency Report On Gov't Censorship Requests, As Verizon Finally Agrees To Release A Transparency Report

from the kicking-and-screaming dept

Google, which kicked off the trend of tech companies issuing "transparency" reports concerning requests for information on users as well as requests to takedown content, has now released its latest data on government requests to take down info, noting that there was a pretty big increase in attempts to take down information:

From January to June 2013, we received 3,846 government requests to remove 24,737 pieces of content—a 68 percent increase over the second half of 2012.

Over the past four years, one worrying trend has remained consistent: governments continue to ask us to remove political content. Judges have asked us to remove information that’s critical of them, police departments want us to take down videos or blogs that shine a light on their conduct, and local institutions like town councils don’t want people to be able to find information about their decision-making processes. These officials often cite defamation, privacy and even copyright laws in attempts to remove political speech from our services. In this particular reporting period, we received 93 requests to take down government criticism and removed content in response to less than one third of them. Four of the requests were submitted as copyright claims.

Google notes that Turkey and Russia, in particular, had a massive influx of requests to take down information. The overall trend is kind of startling: Thankfully, Google appears to refuse to obey the crazier requests. As it details in the report, it turned down a variety of requests, including things like removing an autocomplete entry that had the name of an Argentinian politician and an "illicit drug," a request to remove three YouTube videos that involved "profane language" in reference to an Armenian politician, a bogus copyright claim on a blog post critical of the Bolivian legislative assembly, an order in Brazil to remove some blog posts that were critical of corrupt hiring practices by local government officials, a request from a judge to remove a blog post critical of him, a request from French law enforcement to remove images found via Google Image Search of certain court decisions, a bogus copyright request from law enforcement in Maldives who were trying to takedown a video critical of the police, a request from a Taiwanese parliament member who did not want a search result to link to an article that he claims defames him, and a request from Turkey to avoid linking to information about a politician involved in a sex scandal.

Meanwhile, in slightly related news, we've noted that while a whole bunch of tech companies, now including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter, Apple and more, release similar transparency reports, attempts to get the telcos to do the same had not gone well. It appears that, unlike AT&T, Verizon is actually planning to release a transparency report concerning requests for government information.

The press release on this notes that the company is "working with the U.S. government regarding the detail the company can report," so the end result is likely to be fairly opaque. Already, the government has denied the rights of the tech companies to disclose how often it gets FISA court requests, so that will likely continue here. Additionally, for national security letters, the government has only allowed the reporting of ridiculously broad "ranges" of numbers. Still, kudos to Verizon for at least taking a small step in the direction of transparency.

Filed Under: censorship, government surveillance, takedowns, transparency reports
Companies: google, verizon