National Journal

Several lawmakers want to apply utility-style regulations to Internet service providers. Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) collected signatures for a letter urging the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the Internet like the telephone system. Sens Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Al Franken (D-MN), and Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have signed on.

The lawmakers have planned a press conference with Internet advocacy groups. In the letter, the senators argue that stronger authority is necessary to enact strong network neutrality rules to prevent broadband providers such as Comcast from manipulating Internet traffic to favor giant corporations.

"Broadband is a more advanced technology than phone service, but in the 21st century, it performs the same essential function," the senators write. "Consumers and businesses cannot live without this vital connection to each other and to the world around them. Accordingly, it would be appropriate for the FCC to reclassify broadband to reflect the vital role the Internet plays in carrying our most important information and our greatest ideas."

Just when the National Security Agency looked as though it had finally scored a victory for its maligned surveillance programs, Edward Snowden again crashed the party.

The newest leak, reported by The Washington Post, claims that the vast majority of accounts scooped up in a foreign-intelligence program are not those of actual overseas targets but ordinary Internet users whose communications with those targets are incidentally collected. While revealing on its face, Snowden's latest revelation also arrived just days after the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent watchdog agency, deemed spying under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legal and effective.

Whether intentional or not, the timely Post article -- the culmination of a four-month investigation of 160,000 email and instant-message conversations -- serves in part as a rebuke to the privacy board's conclusions, civil-liberties groups say, and calls into question the completeness of its review, which stands in stark contrast to the board's critical review of the spying on domestic phone records under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.

"There definitely seem to be discrepancies" between the reports, said Liza Goitein, codirector of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "It appears that, in the Snowden documents [American] information is collected deliberately in far broader circumstances than what the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board discussed."

Privacy groups are sounding the alarm that a new Senate cybersecurity bill could give the National Security Agency access to even more personal information of Americans.

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act would create a "gaping loophole in existing privacy law," the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and dozens of other privacy groups wrote in a letter to senators.

"Instead of reining in NSA surveillance, the bill would facilitate a vast flow of private communications data to the NSA," many of the same privacy groups warned in a second letter to lawmakers.

The goal of the bill, authored by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein and ranking member Sen Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), is to allow the government and private sector to share more information about attacks on computer networks. Privacy groups are worried that the legislation could encourage a company such as Google to turn over vast batches of emails or other private data to the government.

[Commentary] A Democratic bill to ban "fast lanes" on the Internet isn't going to become law. Republicans have long opposed network neutrality regulations, and as long as they control the House, they'll block legislation that would restrict the business choices of Internet service providers.

But the Online Competition and Consumer Choice Act, introduced by Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Rep Doris Matsui (D-CA), isn't really about changing the law. It's about sending a message to the Federal Communications Commission.

"We put forth the bill to put increased pressure on the FCC to ban paid-prioritization agreements," an aide to a bill supporter explained. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler expected to take criticism from Republicans, who are skeptical of the government telling broadband providers how to manage their networks. But the growing opposition to his proposal from Democrats could leave the FCC chief in a tenuous political position. Even the White House has offered little support, noting that the FCC is an "independent agency."

Chairman Wheeler needs the votes of both Democrats on the five-member commission to enact his proposed regulations. But those commissioners, Jessica Rosenworcel and Mignon Clyburn, might not be eager to help the chairman if he's all alone on the issue.

The Online Competition and Consumer Choice Act, which also has the support of Sen Al Franken and Reps Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA), would instruct the FCC to enact rules banning paid prioritization within 90 days of the bill becoming law. The bill would also call for rules banning Internet providers from favoring content they own or are affiliated with.

Talking cars will one day be mandatory, but in the meantime, some think they're holding back the airwaves for much-needed Wi-Fi.

As Internet access grows, more and more frequency is needed to support Wi-Fi devices. Some of that frequency -- the 5.9 GHz band -- has been set aside for talking cars.

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication, which the Transportation Department says will one day be mandatory, allows cars to alert one another to their presence and to warn drivers if a wreck is imminent. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates talking cars could eliminate 80 percent of wrecks not involving driver impairment.

For now, though, the 5.9 GHz band is spectrum that can't be used for Wi-Fi devices. Some see a middle ground in which the frequency is still used for talking cars but shared for some Wi-Fi purposes.

The world's largest Internet companies and thousands of average Internet users are trying to hide their private information from government snooping. The goal is to set up technological barriers to the National Security Agency's sweeping surveillance programs.

Rather than waiting for Congress to rein in the agency, many people want to take privacy into their own hands. But the truth is, efforts to improve online encryption and security can't totally thwart the NSA. Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the idea of becoming "NSA-proof" is "just silly."

"If they want it, they can get it," he said of the NSA's expert spies. The agency can hack or bypass many security measures if it is determined enough, Hall said. And it doesn't matter how heavily encrypted an email is in transit if the NSA just forces the email provider to turn the message over.

While the NSA collects some of its data by surreptitiously tapping into communications, much of the surveillance is done through court orders to Internet and phone companies.

Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said tech companies such as Google could hamstring the NSA if they just stopped collecting so much information about their users. If a company doesn't have information on a person, there's nothing to turn over to the government.

A federal judge in Idaho upheld the National Security Agency's controversial phone surveillance program. But Judge B. Lynn Winmill seemed to invite the Supreme Court to overturn his decision.

He suggested that the program, which collects data on millions of US phone calls, likely violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

Judge Winmill upheld the program because he concluded that his hands were tied by current Supreme Court precedent. He pointed to the Supreme Court's 1979 decision in Smith v. Maryland, which held that people don't expect privacy in the phone numbers they dial.

The high-profile US indictments against five Chinese military officers will not encourage China to stop hacking American businesses to steal valuable trade secrets, virtually all of National Journal's National Security Insiders said.

It was the first time the US brought a criminal case against a foreign government for cyberspying, but 91.5 percent of NJ's pool of security experts downplayed the move, calling the charges "simply silly" and "an empty gesture."

"China will continue to pursue its interests in acquiring access to US secrets at any cost," one Insider said. China will meet the indictments, another Insider added, "with a big yawn (and lots of self-serving rhetoric) and continue business as usual." The legal action might instead encourage China to try harder to avoid detection, Insiders said. "The door to the bank vault is still open."

The real solution, one Insider said, "is to stop complaining and start developing robust widespread encryption to protect everyone from China and the NSA." One Insider said China "won't stop until the US finds an effective sanctions mechanism -- and we don't have that yet." A slim 8.5 percent minority said the cyberespionage indictments might make an impact on China. "It will infuriate them, but it will also underscore to them the potential costs associated with what they have assumed, up until now, is risk-free (and potentially very profitable) behavior," one Insider said.

[Commentary] Federal regulators are trying to leave themselves plenty of power to oversee the Internet -- they're just not willing to get too specific about what they plan to do with it.

The Federal Communications Commission is moving ahead with a network neutrality proposal, but no one knows exactly what business practices it would ban. And for the FCC, that's all part of the strategy. The commission wants a vague standard to allow Internet companies to experiment with new business models, while giving the agency authority to step in when it sees abuses.

A senior FCC official argued that "putting rigid rules in place" would not let the Internet "evolve in a natural way." But the official added that "the government has to be in a position to oversee the Internet and intervene if it needs to."

Vague rules could allow future FCC chairmen (especially Republicans) to be lax on enforcement, letting Internet providers get away with a host of abuses. The next administration could essentially ignore net neutrality if the regulations don't specify which particular business practices are illegal.

Scores of filing cabinets containing thousands of patient medical records are disappearing into the cloud.

Use of electronic health records systems in doctors' offices has doubled in recent years, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2012, 72 percent of office-based physicians reported using electronic health records, up from 35 percent in 2007, the CDC says. The report finds that adoption of electronic health records was higher among younger physicians compared with older physicians, among primary-care physicians rather than specialty doctors, and among larger practices than smaller.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is helping guide implementation of the Hitech Act reforms. Led by Karen DeSalvo, the office is currently navigating the process of getting different electronic health systems to talk to each other -- a process known as interoperability.