Politico

Amid a major public and press furor over National Security Agency surveillance, federal surveillance orders and demands for national-security related information declined slightly in 2013, according to statistics made public by the Justice Department.

The Obama Administration said it filed 1,655 applications with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2013, down from 1,856 the previous year. The court maintained its controversial record of virtually never rejecting a government surveillance request, doing so zero times in 2013. The last rejection of such an application was in 2009. The court did modify 34 applications for surveillance and/or physical searches, the Justice Department said in a letter sent to leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees.

The government made 178 applications last year for business records under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act -- the mechanism used to authorize the NSA's now-famous telephone metadata program. That's down from 212 such applications in 2012.

All requests for 215 orders made in 2013 were granted, but judges made changes to the vast majority of those -- with 141 modifications reported by the Justice Department. The FBI's issuance of National Security Letters -- administrative subpoenas for certain types of information from telephone companies, Internet firms and other utilities -- also ratcheted back a bit in that year. There were 14,219 requests in 2013 covering 5,334 Americans or legal residents, DOJ said. That's down from 15,299 NSL's in 2012, covering 6,223 individuals.

[Commentary] The news business will be 10 or even 100 times the size it is today. That doesn’t mean a $60 billion business grows into a $6 trillion business, but the audience, the number of news outlets -- and yes, the financial opportunities -- will grow massively. Here’s how it happens.

• The news business should be run like a business.
• The end of monopolistic control doesn’t mean that great news businesses can’t get built in highly competitive markets. They just get built differently than before. Now, with everyone on the Internet, three things are happening simultaneously:
• Distribution is going from locked down to completely open. Anyone can create and distribute. There is no monetary premium for control of distribution.
• Formerly separate industries are colliding on the Internet. It’s newspaper vs. magazine vs. broadcast TV vs. cable TV vs. wire service. Now they all compete. Both No. 1 and No. 2 drive prices down.
• The market size is dramatically expanding—many more people consume news now vs. 10 or 20 years ago. Many more still will consume news in the next 10 to 20 years. Volume is being driven up, and that is a big, big deal.

There are many ways to make money off journalism, but only if you abandon the race to the bottom.
News organizations are also going to have to mix and match revenue models. I see eight obvious ones: advertising, subscriptions, premium content, events, cross-media promotion, crowdfunding, micropayments and philanthropy. The total global expense budget of all investigative journalism is tiny, in the neighborhood of tens of millions of dollars annually. We can solve this one easily via crowdfunding, philanthropy and subsidization by otherwise healthy news businesses -- a combination that should easily cover the global tab of investigative journalism, and even increase the money available.

[Andreessen is co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz]

[Commentary] Venture capitalists believe that, with the hard work of laying those digital pipes now behind us, there’s an enormous opportunity waiting for those who can figure out how to create an endless stream of content to flow through them.

Ken Lerer compares it to the content revolution he watched unfold in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cable television, at first little more than a punch line to the gatekeepers of the big three broadcast TV networks, had by this time built out its distribution pipes across the country. Soon, ABC, CBS and NBC were joined by dozens, then hundreds, of new channels.

The need for content exploded. New channels -- TNT, TBS, Bravo, National Geographic Channel and hundreds of others -- flowed into the vacuum, satisfying niche audiences and generating billions of dollars in profits.

Talk to some of the foremost practitioners of the dark arts of web journalism, and they'll all tell you the same thing: There's no secret formula for making a story go viral on the Internet.

It's a mix of informed guesswork, innate sensibility and trial and error. And as these three titans of traffic show, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

House Republicans will take up several 2015 spending bills in the coming weeks but have no plans to move forward on immigration reform or a minimum-wage increase -- key priorities for President Barack Obama and Democrats. In a memo sent to all House Republicans, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) also said the full House will take up a contempt resolution against former IRS official Lois Lerner.

Lerner is the center of an alleged scheme by IRS employees to target conservative non-profit groups for special scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status. Lerner has refused to testify before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. That panel has already voted to hold her in contempt.

The House is currently scheduled to be in for three weeks - a total of 12 legislative days - during May, according to the official calendar maintained by Cantor’s office. Cantor said that House Republicans will move forward on bills allowing states to use federal funds for charter schools, as well as six legislative initiatives designed to combat human sex trafficking, and issue with huge bipartisan support. In addition, Cantor said the House would move on a tax extenders package that includes a permanent extension of a research and development tax credit.

The Obamacare website may work for people buying insurance, but beneath the surface, HealthCare.gov is still missing massive, critical pieces -- and the deadline for finishing them keeps slipping.

As a result, the system’s “back end” is a tangle of technical workarounds moving billions of taxpayer dollars and consumer-paid premiums between the government and insurers. The parts under construction are essential for key functions such as accurately paying insurers. The longer they lag, experts say, the likelier they’ll trigger accounting problems that could leave the public on the hook for higher premium subsidies or health care costs.

It’s an overlooked chapter in the health care law’s story that has largely escaped scrutiny because consumers aren’t directly affected. Yet it bolsters the Republican narrative that the government has mishandled the implementation of Obamacare.

Former CIA and NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden will write a bimonthly column called "Inside Intelligence" for the Washington Times.

“Gen Hayden is known as a broad-minded and independent thinker on military and intelligence matters. His columns will be must-reads inside and outside the Beltway,” Washington Times Editor John Solomon said. “We’re thrilled to have him as part of our growing team of columnists. His topics go to the heart of our mission as a newspaper.”

A new directive issued by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper prohibits employees of certain government agencies from discussing any intelligence-related matter with the media, classified or not.

“[Intelligence Community] employees … must obtain authorization for contacts with the media” on intelligence-related matters, and “must also report… unplanned or unintentional contact with the media on covered matters,” the directive says.

DNI spokesperson Shawn Turner said that after the "damaging leaks in 2012," Clapper ordered a review to determine if there were a "consistent baseline requirement" for the intelligence community for engaging the media.

"The review demonstrated that baseline requirements were not consistent across the IC, but that there were best practices within the Community that could inform a consistent approach. That approach took shape as IC Directive 119," Turner wrote in an email. "This policy is being issued together with IC Directive 120 to ensure that members of the Intelligence Community are made aware of the protections provided them as whistleblowers who make protected disclosures. As with ICD 119, ICD 120 was initiated before Edward Snowden stole NSA property and leaked it to the media.”

FreedomWorks has paid more than $6 million in recent years to have Beck promote the group, its initiatives and events.

The FreedomWorks-Beck relationship is just one example of a powerful and profitable alliance between the conservative movement’s most aggressive groups and the most popular radio hosts. The details of the arrangements are little-known, but they have been lucrative for the recipients, and, in turn, have helped ensure that the groups get coveted airtime from hosts with a demonstrated ability to leverage their tens of millions of listeners to shape American politics.

It’s an alliance that helped spawn the anti-establishment tea party and power Republicans to landslide victories in the 2010 midterms. It’s also exacerbated congressional gridlock by pushing a hard line on the budget, immigration and Obamacare, and it is roiling the Republican Party headed into critical midterm elections.

It’s Comcast vs. Sen Al Franken -- Round Two.

The Minnesota Democrat, who pilloried the telecommunications giant and its plans to purchase Time Warner Cable at a congressional hearing, continued his attack a day later -- stressing in an interview that the $45.2 billion megadeal threatens competition and could spike consumers’ cable rates.

Asked during the interview what he’d do with Comcast’s merger, the senator added, “The first thing I would do is not let the largest cable TV company buy the second-largest cable TV company.”

Sen Franken also repeated his criticism that Comcast hadn’t kept some of the promises it made to federal regulators during the company’s 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal. Specifically, Sen Franken said that Comcast hadn’t done enough to market its standalone broadband service to consumers. And he charged that Comcast had tried to shaft programmers like Bloomberg, which competes with Comcast’s own business offering, CNBC.