Karen Gullo

Gigi Sohn, a leading public advocate for the concept that broadband Internet should be open, affordable, and competitive, has joined the board of directors of the Electronic Fronteir Foundation. A lawyer and innovator who has both counseled and stood up to the Federal Communications Commission—albeit not always at the same time—Sohn has fearlessly worked for over 30 years to make US communications networks accessible to all consumers and protective of user privacy. 

As students across the United States are handed school-issued laptops and signed up for educational cloud services, the way the educational system treats the privacy of students is undergoing profound changes—often without their parents’ notice or consent, and usually without a real choice to opt out of privacy-invading technology. Students are using technology in the classroom at an unprecedented rate. One-third of all K-12 students in US schools use school-issued devices. Google Chromebooks account for about half of those machines. Across the US, more than 30 million students, teachers, and administrators use Google’s G Suite for Education (formerly known as Google Apps for Education), and that number is rapidly growing. Student laptops and educational services are often available for a steeply reduced price, and are sometimes even free. However, they come with real costs and unresolved ethical questions. In short, technology providers are spying on students—and school districts, which often provide inadequate privacy policies or no privacy policy at all, are unwittingly helping them do it.

The National Security Agency was blocked by a judge from carrying out plans to begin destroying phone records collected for surveillance after a privacy group argued they are relevant to lawsuits claiming the practice is unconstitutional.

US District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the agency to retain the records and scheduled a hearing for March 19 on whether they can be destroyed. The NSA had planned to dispose of the records following a March 7 ruling by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy and civil liberties group based in San Francisco, asked White for a temporary restraining order, saying the records may be used as evidence in its lawsuits challenging NSA surveillance and are covered under preservation orders in those cases. NSA is prohibited from destroying “any telephone metadata or ‘call detail’ records,” White said. The surveillance court, in its ruling, barred the NSA from keeping the records for more than five years because the privacy rights of the people whose phone data was swept up in the agency’s database trump the need for the information in litigation.

[March 10]