Washington Post

For global messaging sensation WhatsApp, the privacy brouhaha that followed its sale to Facebook came as a rude surprise. Soon after the $19 billion deal was announced, consumer privacy groups asked federal regulators to investigate the merger for potential consumer harms and possibly block the deal.

Some users are threatening to leave the service. WhatsApp founders tried to deflate concerns that user data may be used for advertising. But it will be hard for the messaging service to convince users who thought they had signed up to service that would never use data for targeted advertising, privacy advocates say. Any deal with Facebook comes with the baggage of the social networking giant's troubled history on privacy.

"They took Facebook's money, and now one of them has a seat on their board," said Jeff Chester, head of Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy group that along with the Electronic Privacy Information Center recently filed a complaint against the merger to the Federal Trade Commission. Jan Koum, who co-founded WhatsApp with Brian Acton, will join Facebook's board once the deal closes.

Facebook has repeatedly changed privacy policies on users, having the effect of a slow boil that constantly pushes the comforts of users who are at this point too reliant on the network to leave, some consumer groups say. The merger of Facebook and WhatsApp brings together two companies with diametrically opposing business models and philosophies on consumer data. Facebook's success is tied directly to how much data it collects about its users and sells for advertising.

For half a century, television ads have been the staple of political campaigns, the preferred, if costly, vehicle for communicating a candidate’s message to the voters. What happens when people stop watching live television?

That day hasn’t arrived yet and probably never will. But the outlines of the new world of television watching habits -- and their implications for political campaigns -- were highlighted in a survey released at a conference hosted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics and the Internet Association.

The survey, presented by Robert Blizzard of the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies and Julie Hootkin of the Democratic firm Global Strategy Group, concluded that the country has reached “a tipping point” in the competition for viewers between traditional live television and other forms of viewing content. “That means, for political campaigns, reaching younger, more diverse, swing voters through live TV advertising alone is problematic,” the authors wrote in their analysis.

A team of former congressional investigators is calling for a new inquiry into the Central Intelligence Agency -- not unlike one they performed nearly four decades ago.

The officials -- who helped lead a months-long study in 1975 to assess allegations that the CIA had improperly spied on US citizens -- say Congress should convene a special panel to determine whether America's intelligence agencies have overstepped their bounds.

In a letter sent to the White House and top lawmakers, the officials drew parallels between recent allegations of overreach and their work on the Church committee, the investigative body chaired by the late Sen. Frank Church (D-IH) that resulted in a two-feet-thick report on the intelligence community's secret activities.

"There is a crisis of public confidence," they wrote. "Misleading statements by agency officials to Congress, the courts, and the public have undermined public trust in the intelligence community and in the capacity for the branches of government to provide meaningful oversight." Among those who signed the letter are the Church committee's chief counsel, Frederick AO Schwartz; top committee staffer and University of Georgia professor Loch Johnson; and more than a dozen others.

Federal regulators may have approved AT&T's bid to merge with Leap Wireless, aka Cricket -- a deal that will add 5 million customers to AT&T's rolls.

But fans of Cricket's service may have a reason to be wary of their new corporate overlords. That's because prepaid customers on AT&T are routinely being billed extra for minutes they don't appear to be using. If true, that means their available credit is being drained at unexpected rates -- often without their knowledge -- requiring that they buy more credit, more often.

Critics allege the practice amounts to a subtle program of consumer fraud that, in the aggregate, delivers big bucks to wireless carriers. According to a formal complaint lodged with federal regulators, wireless companies are reporting longer call times than what a customer's device will show. In the case of one AT&T subscriber, the network added as many as 33 seconds to his call after he hung up, allowing AT&T to bill him for an additional minute of usage.

[Commentary] Should people be banned from registering domain names that end in ".sucks"? It's easy to see how this could get out of hand.

A politician might take out his opponent's name and put .sucks at the end. Cyberbullies might use the suffix to torment teens and young children. In the wrong hands, a .sucks domain could do real damage. But maybe clamping down isn't the best move.

The .sucks domain isn't available yet; ICANN still needs to decide whether to approve the pending application. But that hasn't stopped three companies from asking for permission to sell the rights to .sucks domains.

In the case of one registrar, Vox Populi, trademark holders would have to pay as much as $25,000 a year just to hang onto their own domain. Most reasonable people would probably agree the .sucks domain doesn't "serve the public interest," as Sen Rockefeller put it. Yet at the same time, the case for banning the domain doesn't seem all that strong, either.

A Q&A with Frederick A.O. (“Fritz”) Schwarz, Jr, chief counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. In the 1970s, Schwarz served as the chief counsel for the Church Committee -- a US Senate committee chaired by Sen Frank Church (D-IH) -- which investigated overreach by the intelligence community and provided close oversight of their activities following the Watergate scandal.

The Switch spoke to Schwarz about his time on the Church Committee and the parallels between the post-Watergate era and the post-9/11 era. Asked about his commentary in the Nation that it is “time for another Church Committee,” Schwarz elaborated: “I think periodically you need a methodical, deep investigation of secret government. And I think it's time for another major one.

He added, “I think it's particularly important now because new technology makes government have even greater power than it always has had. I think the Snowden leaks are a good example of what the government can do with their new technological powers.”

[Commentary] President Barack Obama’s foes have been trying for years to uncover scandal in his administration. But the most damning allegation of wrongdoing was leveled on the Senate floor -- by a friend.

Sen Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, has been an ally of President Obama and a staunch defender of the administration during the controversy over the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. So her credibility could not be questioned when she went public, reluctantly, to accuse President Obama’s CIA of illegal and unconstitutional actions: violating the separation of powers by searching the committee’s computers and intimidating congressional staffers with bogus legal threats. Sen Feinstein is owed much more than an apology.

The White House needs to cough up documents it is withholding from the public, and it should remove the CIA officials involved and subject them to an independent prosecutor’s investigation. If the White House wishes to repair the damage, it would declassify without further delay the report done by Feinstein’s committee -- along with the Panetta Review. If the White House won’t, Sen Feinstein’s panel and others would be justified in holding up CIA funding and nominations and conducting public hearings.

A quarter-century ago, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his colleagues at CERN that outlined his vision for what would become the World Wide Web. Now, he wants to make sure that it's growing up the right way. He's taken his call for an online Magna Carta to the people, working with the "Web We Want" campaign to encourage people around the world to draft and submit copies of an online bill of rights for each country: “The Web We Want Campaign will build support for national and regional campaigns to create a world where everyone, everywhere is online and able to participate in a free flow of knowledge, ideas, collaboration and creativity over the open Web.

We’ve come together in support of the following principles:

• Affordable access to a universally available communications platform
• The protection of personal user information and the right to communicate in private
• Freedom of expression online and offline
• Diverse, decentralized and open infrastructure
• Neutral networks that don’t discriminate against content or users”

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) made waves when she publicly accused the Central Intelligence Agency of spying on Senate computers in an alleged attempt to thwart her committee's investigation into Bush era interrogation and detention practices.

The senator even suggested that the agency had violated the Constitution and federal law. But while Sen Feinstein is up in arms about the intelligence agency's search of her staff's computer system and network, she has been an avid defender of National Security Agency surveillance programs.

"It’s called protecting America," she said shortly after the news broke that the NSA was collecting domestic phone records in bulk. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Sen Feinstein further suggested that the 9/11 terrorist attack likely would have been prevented if the phone metadata program was in place. And when it came to reform, many privacy advocates and journalists have suggested that her proposal for changes to the spy agency's programs amounted to codifying certain powers and expanding others.

China’s Great Firewall, as the world’s most sophisticated Internet censorship system is known, is facing a new challenge as Google begins to automatically encrypt searches there as part of its global expansion of privacy technology.

Google and other technology companies responded to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with major new investments in encryption worldwide, complicating relations between the companies and governments long accustomed to having the ability to quietly monitor the Web. Googling the words “Dalai Lama” or “Tiananmen Square” from China long has produced the computer equivalent of a blank stare, as that nation’s government has blocked Web sites that it deemed politically sensitive.

But censors spying on Google’s search queries in China increasingly are seeing only gibberish, undermining the government’s ability to screen them. China -- and other nations, such as Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, that censor the Internet on a national level -- will still have the option of blocking Google search services altogether. But routine, granular filtering of content will become more difficult, experts say. It also will become more difficult for authorities to monitor search queries for signs that an individual Internet user may be a government opponent, experts say.