Defying Washington to Save the Internet

Co-authored by S. Derek Turner

It’s a rarity in Washington to see a communications bill that actually serves the public.

But a bill Sen. Jay Rockefeller introduced last week is a direct challenge to the communications cabal that controls much of our media in the United States.

For that the Consumer Choice in Online Video Act faces very long odds. But Rockefeller’s bill does so much for Internet users and video watchers that it deserves everyone’s support.

Sen. Rockefeller, who is serving out his final term in Congress, has clearly been emboldened by the open Internet movement. Over the past decade, millions of people have spoken out to preserve Net Neutrality, stop online censorship and protect our rights to connect and communicate. We recognize the power of free speech and access to information that the Internet enables, and we’re using the Internet in growing numbers to protect these rights against corporate and governmental abuse.

Self-Censorship from Beijing to the Bay Area

Online news organization ProPublica on Friday launched a special feature documenting censorship on social media in China.

China's Memory Hole focuses on censorship of users of Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, which filters out "undesirable" content from the more than 100 million items that are posted there daily.

A team of ProPublica writers, technicians and translators combed through deleted items after gaining access to and monitoring Sina Weibo's network over a five-month period.

ProPublica is vague -- perhaps intentionally -- about the actual mechanics of their monitoring.

We do know that China has assigned the task of blocking social media content to the privately held companies that run the services. It’s a comprehensive self-censorship approach that keeps the companies guessing on the limits of appropriate public discourse.

What Ted Cruz Doesn't Want You to Know

Originally published at Bill Moyers & Company

By now it seems pretty clear that Sen. Ted Cruz has a plan to occupy the White House. But he doesn't want people to know too much about it.

And he definitely doesn't want you to know about the special interests that have already begun to bankroll his political ambitions.

That's why the Texas senator's latest crusade targets the Federal Communications Commission -- and its efforts to better identify the funders of political ads.

Hacking Partisanship

Washington likes to talk bipartisanship.

 During the 16-day government shutdown, elected officials from both parties clogged the airwaves with rhetoric about crossing over, finding common cause with political foes and ending the standoff.

But sincerity was in short supply as few took real action, cheesy photo-ops notwithstanding. The agreement struck last Thursday night was more a delaying tactic than a genuine effort to resolve longstanding disputes.

This isn’t the first time reckless politics have ground Washington to a halt. Congress’ inability to agree on a budget mimics its recent failures to address climate change, income inequality and gun violence.

But there’s a new issue that seems to defy this pattern of dysfunction. It’s the subject of a hopeful new book, which documents the bipartisan (some would say “post-partisan”) organizing that in 2012 led to the defeat of two copyright bills that threatened the open Internet.

Telling the Non-Story

David Guttenfelder. Images from North Korea.

Photography defies narrative.

And it's those photographers who try without irony to control photographic detail -- to lock everything within the frame into some preconceived story -- who often fail.

When we look at images we often see something other than what the subject (and even the photographer) is trying to show.

Internet Freedom: A Disturbing View from the Trenches

Is the Internet freedom movement a thing? That depends on whom you ask, and where you live.

In the United States, more than two million people rallied to demand Net Neutrality in 2010. Our ranks swelled to the tens of millions in the 2012 fight to kill legislation that would have let Hollywood wreak havoc on the open Internet in its heavy-handed hunt for copyright pirates.

Globally, we’ve come together to protest any treaty or multinational agreement, like theTrans-Pacific Partnership, that threatens online speech and privacy.

We’ve formed international coalitions in support of the Declaration of Internet Freedom, and recently presented the U.N. Human Rights Council with international principles designed to protect our rights to free speech and privacy in the face of international mass surveillance of communications.

Found Photography and What of It

So, This Happened

Verizon's Plan to Break the Internet

Verizon has big plans for the Internet. And if that doesn’t worry you, it should.

The company is trying to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order, which prevents Internet service providers from blocking, throttling or otherwise discriminating against online content.

And in court last Monday, Verizon lawyer Helgi Walker made the company’s intentions all too clear, saying the company wants to prioritize those websites and services that are willing to shell out for better access.

She also admitted that the company would like to block online content from those companies or individuals that don’t pay Verizon’s tolls.

In other words, Verizon wants to control your online experience and make the Internet more like cable TV, where your remote offers only the illusion of choice.

Internet S.O.S.

Is the Internet on life support?

Last week we learned that U.S. and British intelligence agencies have broken the back of digital encryption — the coded technology hundreds of millions of Internet users rely on to keep their communications private.

Over the weekend, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA and its British counterpart are also hacking into smartphones to monitor our daily lives in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before the age of the iPhone.

This news, just the latest revelations from the files of Edward Snowden, only heighten our sense that we can no longer assume anything we say or do online is secure.

Telco Market Research Gone Awry

Your Rights: Gone with a Click

What do you give up every time you "agree" to a website's terms of service?

These online agreements are as ubiquitous as the sites that use them. In exchange for using Google to search the Web or Facebook to connect and share information with friends, we surrender much more than we think.

In his new documentary, Terms and Conditions May Apply, Cullen Hoback pores over the terms of service offered by these and other online companies. Buried in the fine print that few read he finds evidence that we're living in a new age of total surveillance, one that most of us unwittingly opted into with a click.

Mining China's Snapshot Memories

Story originally posted at Tumblr.

Where do old negatives go to die?

Frenchman Thomas Sauvin knows well the life-span of color film. For years he has scoured China for cast off snapshots from the local population.

But it wasn't until he saw an ad placed in a local newspaper that he found out.

Mr. Xiao Ma is a silver-nitrate recycler based in the suburbs of Beijing. Mr. Xiao places local ads offering to buy used film from Chinese citizens. The film is destined for a vat of acid, where negatives are disintegrated and separated into their base elements, one of which -- silver nitrate -- has resale value.

Sauvin buys them in bulk from Xiao instead, rescuing hundreds of thousands of Kodak "memories" from oblivion. He then painstakingly "mines" the negatives for images to be included in a series called Beijing Silvermine.

Obama's NSA Reforms Off to a Bad Start

President Barack Obama's decision late Friday to suggest reforms to the government's surveillance programs caught many data protection and free speech advocates by surprise.

Is he serious about plans to check the government's massive spying operation and uphold the rights of everyday Americans?

EFF's Rainey Reitman responded with caution: "We take Obama's promises today with a healthy dose of skepticism ... [T]he devil will be in the details when it comes to whether his proposals will be effective."

On Monday, one devilish detail emerged when the White House instructed James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, to form the "high-level group of outside experts," that President Obama had promised to Americans on Friday.

Are You Ready to Dump Cable?

As CBS and Time Warner Cable remain locked in a three-week battle over retransmission fees, you have to wonder when their millions of viewers will throw in the towel and abandon cable altogether.

This latest dispute is nothing new. Media giants often grapple over retransmission fees, which cable companies pay to broadcasters for the right to include their channels in cable offerings.

News Corp and Time Warner Cable were in a standoff over fees in 2009. In 2011, DirecTV and News Corp engaged in a similar dispute.

Retransmission fees have increased more than 13-fold over the past seven years, from $215 million in 2006 to an estimated $3 billion by the end of 2013, according to SNL Kagan. The money has given a boost to the broadcast and production companies on the dial, but cable companies don't want to foot the bill. They solve this problem by passing these fees on to their subscribers.

Obama's Four Reforms to U.S. Government Surveillance Programs

Transcribed from video of President Obama's Aug. 9 press conference:

1. "I will work with Congress to pursue appropriate reforms to section 215 of the Patriot Act."
   
2. "I will work with Congress to improve the public’s confidence in the oversight conducted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court … To build greater confidence I think we should consider additional changes to the FISC. One of the concerns that people raised is that a judge reviewing a request from the government to conduct programmatic surveillance only hears one side of the story… assuring that the government’s position is challenged by an adversary."
   
3. "We can and must be transparent. I have directed the intelligence community to make public as much information about these program as is possible…. At my direction the Department for Justice will make public the legal rationale for the government’s collection activities under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The NSA is taking steps to put in place a full time civil liberties and privacy officer, and release information that details its mission, authority and oversight."
   
4. "We’re forming a high-level group of outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies. We need new thinking for a new era … I am tasking this independent group to step back and review our capabilities particularly our surveillance technologies."

Is TMZ the Future of Local News?

On Tuesday, I took part in an on-air discussion at NJ News Commons about the future of local news in New Jersey and beyond.

Exhibit A was Fox Broadcasting Company’s decision to replace WWOR’s evening newscast with Chasing New Jersey, a TV newsmagazine modeled after the celebrity gossip show TMZ.

Chasing New Jersey is Fox’s attempt to reinvent local news. Its format — young reporters “chasing” events around the state and reporting them back in conversations with colleagues — is a departure from the standard news fare featuring co-anchors seated before a teleprompter.

The switch is Fox’s attempt to appeal to a younger demographic, especially those 18-to-34-year-olds that advertisers pay top dollar to reach.

Speech Notes from Today's Restore the Fourth Rally

Photograph by Peter Micek

Follows are my speech notes from today's "Restore the Fourth" protest in Manhattan.

As we didn't have a PA system these were delivered using the call and response of the "mic check," popularized  by the Occupy Wall Street movement, where the speaker speaks briefly and the crowd repeats his or her words en masse.

We had a good turnout today with 1,000 people braving heat and holiday crowds to march from Union Square to Federal Hall where we read the Fourth Amendment in the shade of the statue of George Washington:

Obama. Like Nixon, but Worse

Is Barack Obama like Richard Nixon?

Until recently that pairing seemed odd. Obama and Nixon are leaders from different generations, leading different parties with distinctly different styles.

Yet both used excessive force to crack down on whistleblowers and journalists. And while their tactics have differed, the goal was the same: to silence and criminalize those who expose government wrongdoing.

Obama, however, may have learned from his predecessor's mistakes. While Nixon broke the law to attack dissenting voices, Obama has distorted it to the same effect.

Jimmy Carter vs. 'Jimmy Carter'

Carter Christening 'Carter' in 2004

Late last week. Former President Jimmy Carter chimed in on the NSA surveillance scandal and the plight of whistle blower Edward Snowden.

"I think the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far," President Carter told CNN's Suzanne Malveaux. "And I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive... Bringing it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial." (Video at 2:15)

Last year, Carter railed against the U.S. government for losing moral ground on a series of human rights issues. "Recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications," he wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed.

Meanwhile, the latest NSA disclosure revealed just how deep the U.S. government's was willing to go to listen in on communications both at home and abroad -- eavesdropping that involves Carter more in name than in spirit.