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.

Glenn Greenwald: Exposing the Rot

The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald just offered an inside account of his relationship with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. During a speech at the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago, Greenwald praised Snowden and those like him who shed light on abuse by the powerful.

Greenwald said that Snowden's sacrifice inspired him to continue to reveal the full extent of U.S. government surveillance efforts. To that end, Greenwald gave the audience a preview of his next Snowden exposé:

"There's another document that I probably shouldn't [share with you] because it’s not published," Greenwald said. "You’re getting a little preview."  It's a report on "a brand new technology [that] enables the National Security Agency to redirect into its own repositories one billion cell phones calls every single day." (video at 40:00).

For now we'll have to wait on Greenwald to divulge more.

Five Questions for the Next FCC Chief

Tom Wheeler, the White House's pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, was for years a well-heeled lobbyist for cable and wireless companies.

He also served the president's 2008 and 2012 election campaigns as a top "bundler," raising more than $700,000 from undisclosed donors in support of Obama.

Many in the public interest community see Wheeler's insider status as more of a minus than a plus. Wheeler's confirmation hearing in the Senate today is the nominee's best chance to prove these skeptics wrong.

Why William Eggleston is the Greatest Living Photographer, and Why He'll Never Admit to it

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1973

A show of William Eggleston’s early work hangs for another six weeks at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It’s been a good year for the photographer, if you count exhibits at major international venues as “good.”

What D.C. Doesn't Get About NSA Surveillance

Watching conventional wisdom form in Washington can be appalling. The emerging consensus on surveillance this past week has D.C.'s pundit class saying that privacy violations are a small price to pay for keeping Americans safe.

But conventional wisdom is wrong. Trampling over our most essential rights is never OK. All of us should be free to connect and communicate without fear of government intimidation.

Too many of Washington's talking heads and politicos don't seem to get this. Their profound misreading of the Constitution has put our democracy on a perilous path toward a surveillance state.

Dancing Around the First and Fourth Amendments

Originally published by Other Words

Whether you think spying is OK or not often depends on your relationship to the information being collected.

If you’re on the gathering end, the invasion of someone else’s privacy doesn’t seem like a big deal. But if you’re the one whose private life is being pried into, this kind of surveillance seems like a very big deal indeed.

This dynamic is at work with the unfolding story about National Security Agency programs that vacuum up the telephone and Internet data of millions of people.

On Gregory Halpern and the Documentary Dogma

Photographer Gregory Halpern talks about his approach to taking pictures with Cameron Van Loos at ASX:

“To ask what one’s ethics are when making photographs of other people is as complicated as asking what one’s ethics are in general. 

“I should start by explaining why I don’t call my work documentary. To begin with, the way the word “documentary” is understood by still photographers, particularly in the US, is extremely limited and strict. The second is that I am not primarily motivated by the desire to document things. I am motivated more by the desire to create things, to make photographs that rely on things/facts found ‘in the world’ but that are then shaped and altered according to my vision of them.”

Newspaper Readers Speak Out Against the Kochs

Opposition to the Koch Brothers' reported plan to take over eight Tribune Company newspapers has spread from activist groups, unions, lawmakers and journalism advocates to the readers of these papers.

Thousands in Los Angeles have pledged to unsubscribe from the Los Angeles Times should the deal move forward.

And the New York Times reported that news of the potential sale "is setting off a firestorm of opposition" in California. Ten public employee unions joined with state legislative leaders to oppose the sale of the Los Angeles Times to the wealthy industrialists.

Internet Uncertainty

Our Internet freedoms are what we make of them.

When asked whether the Internet has been a force for good or evil, Zeynep Tufekci likes to answer "Yes."

In other words, it is both the best of times and the worst of times for the Internet. It's also the best and worst of times for the freedoms the Internet is supposed to nurture.

Tufecki should know. As a fellow at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, she focuses on the politics of free speech in social media. Over the years she's traced this push and pull with particular attention to the Middle East and North Africa (Tufecki is a native of Turkey).

Putting up a Fight with the Internet Racket

Is your internet bill too high? You can thank the phone and cable companies for that.

Today, high-speed broadband services offered by these national carriers cost more than $500 a year and even more when customers are forced to bundle internet access with cable or phone packages. These rates put access out of reach for millions.

And the Americans who can afford this essential service can choose from only one or two kinds of providers: either a big phone or cable company.

Market dominance suits the phone and cable giants. As the real cost of hooking up your home declines, they keep hiking their rates... (Read the full op-ed in the New Jersey Star-Ledger)

The Filthy Fourteen

The following 14 Senators are hoping to get re-elected to Congress in 2014. One problem. They just voted against the desires of a vast majority of Americans and rejected efforts to expand background checks for would-be gun purchasers.

The move would have closed a so called "gun-show loophole" that has put guns in the hands of countless murderers without vetting. These members of Congress were among the 46 in Senate whose votes failed to give the gun control measures the 60 votes needed to move forward.

Fast News and Inuendo at the New York Post

Screen captured. The original link here.

It's hard to see how the New York Post got this tragic detail right while all the other news organizations covering the blasts in Boston didn't. (Most early reports put the toll at two or three dead, citing sources at the Boston Police Department).

The Post is also reporting that Boston Police have a suspect in custody -- a 20-year-old Saudi Arabian. Time will tell if either of these claims are true. If not, how long will it take the Post to correct its version of events?