Washington Post

Unsealed court documents show Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft are arguing that government gag orders that stop them from disclosing the number of national security requests they receive violate the companies' First Amendment right to free speech.

Leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that revealed how the government uses tech firms in its surveillance efforts have damaged their bottom lines and public reputations -- particularly overseas.

The companies have begun to push back against some government orders to stay silent. The gag orders, called "national security letters," compel Web and telecommunication companies to share information with the government while simultaneously prohibiting them from speaking about the request. Since the Snowden leaks, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft have fought to include more information about national security requests in regular reports they release on how much data the government requests from their servers.

In the court documents, filed in April with the 9th Circuit Court in California, the tech giants argue that the government is infringing on their First Amendment rights -- a form of prior restraint. The government has argued that companies have no First Amendment right to share information gained from participation in a secret government investigation, according to the filing. The case is now on appeal.

Days after the Department of Justice announced the indictment of five Chinese military employees for crimes related to economic cyber-espionage, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation that would punish the people that benefit from such spying where it hurts: In the pocketbook.

The Deter Cyber Theft Act -- introduced by Sens Carl Levin (D-MI), John McCain (R-AZ), John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) -- is a revised version of a proposal introduced in 2013. Foreign companies and individuals would be subject to a new category of sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The bill also would require the director of national intelligence to publish an annual report of which foreign nations are contributing to commercial cyberspying against the United States -- be it by actively engaging in the practice themselves or by failing to prosecute it domestically. The report would include a watch list of countries actively using the Internet for economic or industrial espionage and identify which US technologies or trade secrets are being targeted by hackers among other things.

The House passed the USA Freedom Act, a bill aimed at reforming the National Security Agency's bulk collection of domestic phone records. But the version of that bill was different from the one that was recently approved by the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees.

The new version from the House Rules Committee, privacy advocates say, significantly weakened the reform and included loopholes that could potentially allow bulk data collection on US citizens to continue.

Privacy advocates weren't the only ones upset about the changes. Many co-sponsors of the original version were also concerned. In fact, a Washington Post analysis of the votes shows that 76 of the 152 co-sponsors of the earlier version voted against passage of the altered version on the House floor. So, half of the co-sponsors ended up voting against what was supposed to be their own NSA reform bill. That includes Rep Jared Polis, (D-CO), who released a press statement about his change of heart after the vote.

“Unfortunately, the USA Freedom Act, which I cosponsored as introduced, has been watered down and co-opted to the point that it creates the possibility that NSA could misuse the bill- contrary to the legislative intent- to conduct broad searches of communication records," Rep Polis said.

Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley investor and the creator of the first widely used Web browser, thinks it won't be long until most places have three, four or even five ways to connect to the Internet.

You've got your traditional broadband providers in the cable companies. Then you've got your other traditional providers in the telecom industry. You've got your wireless companies, some of whom envision serving mobile data to you at speeds comparable to fixed wireline cable.

And then you've got new entrants like Google Fiber, which has the luxury of having seen how all the other providers approached the problem and can now think of ways to do it differently. In fact, Google Fiber could become so good at rethinking the broadband industry that it winds up being a global phenomenon, says Andreessen. Still, despite the prospect of Google someday becoming another connectivity behemoth like Comcast or Verizon, one thing sets it apart.

For now, at least, it has no interest in creating Internet "fast lanes" or signing paid interconnection agreements with companies like Netflix. As Google Fiber spreads, chances are it will try to promote those values as a way of standing out from the crowd.

A Q&A with Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape. The investor and Web browser pioneer thinks we'll all look back in 20 years and conclude that Bitcoin was as influential a platform for innovation as the Internet itself was.

He says that tech companies think their meetings with President Barack Obama on privacy are a waste of time. And he calls net neutrality a "lose-lose."

In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post, Andreessen painted a picture of a future that's distributed, messy and fraught with tension and the “balkanization of the Internet.” He added that Bitcoin originally came from the fringes, but is being mainstreamed today. And regulators are still trying to catalog it. “You've got people at the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department and IRS that are figuring it out,” he said.

When something goes wrong on the Internet, monitoring firm Renesys is watching.

Since 2000 the firm has tried to be the first to notify customers when Internet transmission goes dark, whether it's because of political strife or an undersea cable malfunction. Earlier, the company noticed another service outage in Syria's embattled Aleppo region.

Renesys announced that it was being acquired by Dyn, which monitors and manages its customers' Internet traffic. The sale price was not disclosed. Both companies are privately held. The acquisition reflects Web companies growing concern about the instability of the Internet. Internet outages have become more noticeable: Entire countries sometimes go off the map -- or traffic gets mysteriously rerouted.

"The world has become very flat when it comes to Internet usage," says Jim Cowie, Renesys' head of research and development. And that means more demand for intelligence about the status of the global Web, which can be volatile, he said.

[Commentary] Sen Rand Paul’s (R-KY) strong libertarian principles have always differentiated him from many of his Republican colleagues. His outspokenness has many liberals and leftists asking a legitimate question: Why aren’t there more Democratic voices opposing the surveillance state?

Protecting civil liberties should be a critical piece of the progressive platform, but too many establishment Democrats and progressives have been silent on this issue simply because one of their own is in the White House.

Some Democrats in Congress have taken bold stands. Longtime civil-liberties champion (and former House Judiciary Committee chair) John Conyers has worked to limit the National Security Agency’s collection of bulk telephone data. Reps Keith Ellison of (D-MN) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) have probed the administration’s drone and surveillance programs. Rep Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) is pushing to prevent the NSA from weakening online encryption. In the Senate, Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has held oversight hearings questioning excessive surveillance. Even Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and normally a committed defender of the intelligence community, finally spoke out after discovering that the CIA spied on Senate staffers. And recently, Sens Mark Udall (D-NM) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent a letter to Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., strongly criticizing a “culture of misinformation” that has resulted in “misleading statements . . . about domestic surveillance.” And Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has proposed a bill limiting FBI and NSA spying.

Still, too many Democrats and even progressives are reluctant to challenge the Obama Administration, either because they don’t want to criticize a besieged president or because they’re focused on other priorities. As they stay silent, a host of troubling policies, including the assassination of US citizens without due process, the prosecution of record numbers of journalists and whistleblowers, the unaccountable growth of the surveillance state and the vast expansion of the drone program, are proliferating unchecked.

Almost a year after he released a flurry of documents showing the National Security Agency was collecting data on everyone from foreign leaders to US citizens, Edward Snowden is still the predominant Washington story in the minds of tech executives who believe the controversy has caused damage to their businesses.

That's according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who said in a wide-ranging interview that Silicon Valley's repeated meetings with the Obama administration were mostly for show and have produced "not even a little" progress on privacy and surveillance issues. Chief executives from leading companies including Netflix, Google and Facebook met with senior White House officials in December, and again in March. While the Obama Administration said at the time that the meetings helped clear the air on intelligence reforms, Andreessen argued that the White House has not done enough to mitigate the NSA's impact on tech companies' reputations, particularly overseas.

"The level of trust in US companies has been seriously damaged, especially but not exclusively outside the US," said Andreessen. "Every time a new shoe drops -- and there are 10,000 of them -- it serves a blow to the US." Some estimates suggest the news about the NSA's surveillance practices may have cost tech companies tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue.

In what seems certain to become a wider battle, Comcast is eyeing the wireless industry as a possible market for expansion.

Someday soon, Comcast might be counted among the likes of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, the businesses that now provide millions of Americans with mobile voice and data services. Thanks to a growing network of Wi-Fi hotspots, Comcast is arguing that it, or another company piggybacking off of its technology, could shake up the wireless industry by delivering cheaper cellular service to consumers and introducing another competitor to the market.

Comcast is already rolling out the infrastructure it would need for such a push; it operates 1 million Wi-Fi hotspots around the country and plans to expand that to 8 million by the end of 2014.

Comcast says that it has no imminent intention to launch a cellular service. But in April, the cable company raised that possibility as one of several arguments to support its Time Warner Cable purchase. "A ubiquitous Wi-Fi network built by Comcast could make a 'Wi-Fi-first' service, which combines commercial mobile radio service with Wi-Fi, a more viable alternative," Comcast wrote in its public interest filing to federal regulators.

[Commentary] What does the AT&T/DirecTV deal mean for consumers? Details are still rolling in, but here is what we know so far. First, be on the lookout for price increases.

AT&T has said DirecTV customers will continue to pay standard, nationwide prices -- but only for three years. After that, there are no guarantees. AT&T is also committing to offer a stand-alone broadband service, which caters to customers who only watch video content online, for three years after the deal closes.

AT&T and DirecTV don't compete for television customers in most of the country -- U-Verse only reaches about 25 percent of the country. But some consumer advocacy groups are concerned that AT&T could drop one of the services. Getting rid of any option for consumers could drive prices up, or trap customers into service that doesn't serve their needs because they simply don't have other services to run to.