Online privacy

After controversy over a broad search warrant that could have identified visitors to an anti-Trump website, the Justice Department says it’s scaling back a demand for information from hosting service DreamHost. Recently, DreamHost disclosed that it was involved in a legal dispute with the department over access to records on the website “disruptj20.org,” which organized protests tied to Donald Trump’s inauguration.

In a legal filing Aug 22, the Justice Department argues that the warrant was proper, but also says DreamHost has since brought up information that was previously “unknown.” In light of that, it has offered to carve out information demanded in the warrant, specifically pledging to not request information like HTTP logs tied to IP addresses. The DOJ says it is only looking for information related to criminal activity on the site, and says that “the government is focused on the use of the Website to organize, to plan, and to effect a criminal act — that is, a riot.” Peaceful protestors, the government argues, are not the targets of the warrant.

Rep Darrell Issa (R-CA) wants us to get real about how much faith we should put in encryption. Rep Issa argued on an Internet of Things panel that it’s high time for a straight-talk discussion about how secure popular encryption protocols actually are. ‘The former FBI director [James] Comey came before Congress and swore under oath that he had no ability to get what he needed from the San Bernardino bomber [sic] except by forcing Apple to create an active remote backdoor into the problem,’ Issa said. ‘Now a matter of weeks later, an Israeli company for a million dollars gave him the data he wanted.’ And, Issa pointed out, a few weeks after that, a University of Cambridge professor appeared to crack it again. Said Issa, ‘We have to have a real debate about whether encryptions and protections are real and unbreakable.’

Shortly after Aug 12’s white nationalist march through Charlottesville, outraged internet users took to social media to call out some of the participants in the march. Internet vigilantism is nothing new—experts point to a case in China from 2006, when internet users tracked down a woman captured on video crushing a kitten to death, as one of the first examples. Police around the world have warned this form of publicly administered retribution can in some cases actually hinder the legal pursuit of justice. They say they need the public’s assistance in catching criminals, but warn that amateur assistance can go too far, notifying suspects of evidence against them and possibly endangering lives if cybersleuths step out from behind the keyboard. Observers have also raised questions about the ethics of exposing people’s identities they mean to keep secret—what both online activists and trolls often call “doxing”—though many feel this is less of an issue in situations like the Charlottesville march, where participants did little to hide their identities.

[Commentary] The disturbing implications of abolishing internet privacy rules go far beyond how the internet is used. By selling customer data, larger internet service providers could capture more of the market, albeit unfairly, leaving smaller ISPs in the dust and harming what little competition exists. A decrease in internet access competition will be bad for consumers, as competition is what drives companies to provide the best possible service to consumers at the lowest possible price. T

he bottom line is that private information should be kept private, both for the good of the consumer and for the overall health of the internet ecosystem. With Congress stripping away consumer privacy protections, it’s up to states push back against the repeal of federal policies that protect basic consumer rights. California and other states have already taken the first step toward making that a reality. Now the question remains: Will other states follow?

[Dane Jasper is the CEO and cofounder of Sonic, the largest independent ISP in northern California]

AnonOps, a group affiliated with the online activist group known as Anonymous, posted what it says are the private cell phone numbers and email addresses for 22 Republican members of Congress in a bid to push for President Trump's impeachment, reigniting the use of hacked information in US political battles.

Rob Pfeiffer, chief editor of online publication The Anon Journal, said that the move was spurred by Trump's contentious reaction to violent clashes in Charlottesville. He did not know how the information was obtained, whether it was a leak or an online hack. He said some of the cell phone numbers, for example, had been verified as real. Among the politicians on the list were Sens. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Charles Grassley of Iowa. The goal, said Pfeiffer, is for people to contact these members of Congress to more forcefully condemn the president and call for Trump's impeachment. Pfeiffer said more GOP lawmakers could see their personal contact information released soon.

The current network neutrality fight is really a wide-ranging power struggle between internet service providers and internet activists, between Republicans and Democrats. The battle is only partly about the ends—a free internet—and much more about the means: potential heavy regulation of ISPs as monopolies. Classifying ISPs as “common carriers,” under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act, means they could be regulated like monopolies.

That could go as far as setting rates for broadband, like public utilities commissions do for electricity, according to ISPs and other critics. Tom Wheeler’s FCC promised not to go this far, by forbearing, or refraining, from utilizing most of Title II. ISPs aren’t buying it. “Even if the FCC decides to forbear from regulating [ISPs] from certain or many provisions of Title II in the near term, the fact that at any time it could implement additional rules under Title II jurisdiction creates uncertainty in the industry,” says Comcast. Verizon and Comcast now advocate Section 706 regulations almost identical to what they fought against because they are so spooked by the prospect of Title II monopoly regulation—and perhaps because they know they can beat it in a lawsuit.

In arguing against the FCC’s net neutrality regulations, ISPs, Republicans in Congress, and the FCC chairman are saying that Title II is overkill. The previous FCC majority’s goal was to set some standards for equal access to the internet. Those who oppose the decision say it went overboard by pulling out a big club used to smash 19th- and 20th-century monopolies, not to nurture and fine-tune modern tech providers. But what if those modern tech providers are, in fact, acting like monopolies from 100 years ago?

Fourteen of the biggest US tech companies filed a brief with the Supreme Court on Aug 14 supporting more rigorous warrant requirements for law enforcement seeking certain cell phone data, such as location information. In the statement, the signatories—Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft among them—argue that the government leans on outdated laws from the 1970s to justify Fourth Amendment overreach. One perhaps surprising voice in the chorus of protesters? Verizon.

Verizon's support means that the largest wireless service provider in the US, and a powerful force in Silicon Valley, has bucked a longtime trend of telecom acquiescence. While carriers have generally been willing to comply with a broad range of government requests—even building out extensive infrastructure to aid surveillance—Verizon has this time joined with academics, analysts, and the company’s more privacy-focused corporate peers. Carpenter v. United States is “one of the most important Fourth Amendment cases in recent memory,” wrote Craig Silliman, Verizon’s executive vice president for public policy and general counsel. “Although the specific issue presented to the Court is about location information, the case presents a broader issue about a customer’s reasonable expectation of privacy for other types of sensitive data she shares with any third party.… Our hope is that when it decides this case, the Court will help us better apply old Fourth Amendment doctrines to an evolving digital era.”

Computer companies are standing with a web hosting company that is facing a search warrant obtained by the Department of Justice to 1.3 million IP addresses of an anti-Trump protest web site. The Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Amazon, Facebook, Google, and eBay, came to the company's defense.

“CCIA supports DreamHost and calls on DOJ to revise this request, and reassess its search warrant practices to respect the First and Fourth Amendments," said CCIA President Ed Black. “U.S. tech companies are often compelled to resist sweeping dragnets aimed at political dissent from foreign regimes. The U.S. government itself has criticized countries that target political dissent with criminal process. We would urge DOJ to consider the consequences of such requests both in terms of emboldening countries like China and in the message this sends to democratic allies.”

A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution. “What we have is a sweeping request for every single file we have” in relation to DisruptJ20.org, said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost, which hosts the site. “The search warrant is not only dealing with everything in relation to the website but also tons of data about people who visited it.”

The request also covers e-mails between the site’s organizers and people interested in attending the protests, any deleted messages and files, as well as subscriber information — such as names and addresses — and unpublished photos and blog posts that are stored in the site’s database, according to the warrant and Ghazarian. The request, which DreamHost made public Aug 14, set off a storm of protest among civil liberties advocates and within the tech community. “What you’re seeing is pure prosecutorial overreach by a politicized Justice Department, allowing the Trump administration to use prosecutors to silence critics,” Ghazarian said.

[Commentary] Today, faced with serious economic and political dysfunction, we are in need of another round of deep institutional renewal: a Third Republic. We need to coalesce around how best to create shared prosperity. This necessitates increasing productivity — the growth of which has been weak of late — and creating more well-paid jobs as well as finding better ways of redistributing the gains from new technologies and globalization in the fairer way.

Redesign antitrust for the era of big data: The role of large, dominant corporations in the U.S. economy has reached alarming proportions. The conventional commercial doctrine is that data are proprietary to the companies that collect them. This needs to change profoundly and completely since the playing field can only be leveled by making data available to all potential competitors. One way of achieving this is to ensure data belong to the people who generate the information, i.e., to individuals who drive cars, surf the internet, and buy goods. Enforcing this principle will ensure that data can be accessed by all, but also that individuals are compensated for the activities that generate information, at the same time as receiving a strong degree of privacy protection. The American Third Republic needs to clean up the influence industry and strengthen the institutional foundations of our democracy.

[Daron Acemoglu is a co-author with James A. Robinson of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. imon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management.]