House Extends Surveillance Law, Rejecting New Privacy Safeguards
January 12, 2018 by admin
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Effectively, the vote was almost certainly the end of a debate over 21st-century surveillance and privacy rights that broke out in 2013 after the leaks by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden.
The Senate began considering the newly approved House bill on Thursday afternoon; Senators Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, are expected to oppose the measure in the coming days. But Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, moved to essentially ensure that no amendments to the House legislation would be considered, and it appeared to be on a path to final approval when senators return to Washington next week.
Mr. Snowden’s disclosures in 2013 ushered in a period of intense interest in surveillance. Civil libertarians and conservative skeptics of government power worked together to push for new limits, while intelligence and law enforcement agencies and their backers in Congress from across party lines — and in both the Obama and Trump administrations — tried to hold the line.
The post-Snowden privacy movement secured its largest victory in 2015 when Congress voted to end and replace one of the programs that Mr. Snowden exposed, under which the N.S.A. had been secretly collecting logs of Americans’ domestic phone calls in bulk. But lawmakers who hoped to add significant privacy constraints to the warrantless surveillance program, too, fell short on Thursday.
Before voting to extend the law, known as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, the House rejected an amendment that would have imposed a series of new safeguards. That proposal included a requirement that officials obtain warrants in most cases before hunting for, and reading, emails and other messages of Americans that were swept up under the surveillance.
Supporters of those changes contended that the overhaul was needed to preserve Fourth Amendment privacy rights in the internet era. But intelligence and law enforcement officials argued that it was unnecessary, and dangerous, to limit security officials from being able to freely gain access to information the government already possessed.
Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican of California who leads the House Intelligence Committee, celebrated the outcome. “The House of Representatives has taken a big step to ensure the continuation of one of the intelligence community’s most vital tools for tracking foreign terrorists,” he said.
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The program’s surveillance can be used for all foreign intelligence purposes. The sharpest points of the debate centered on when information about Americans that is gathered by the program can be used for criminal investigations unrelated to terrorism.
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Tom Brenner/The New York Times
Representative Justin Amash, the Republican of Michigan who sponsored the privacy measures, expressed disappointment but vowed to keep fighting.
“We had a bipartisan coalition who worked very hard to protect people’s rights, and we will continue to fight and continue to educate our colleagues about it,” Mr. Amash said.
The House bill that was approved on Thursday does contain a gesture toward requiring officials to obtain a warrant to read Americans’ emails that are collected under the program. But it is written so narrowly that it will not protect the overwhelming majority of citizens’ information that is queried in the warrantless surveillance repository.
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Specifically, a warrant would be required only if an F.B.I. agent wants to look at emails about a subject of an open criminal investigation for which there is no national security angle. It would not apply to security-related queries by any intelligence or law-enforcement agency, nor to requests from F.B.I. agents who are following up on criminal tips but have not yet opened formal investigations.
Matthew Olsen, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency and the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said that while he had concerns about how the F.B.I. would distinguish between criminal and national security cases, the overall thrust of the bill was a positive step.
“Congress has made clear that it is lawful to search using U.S. person identifiers for information that could help stop terror attacks and catch spies without a warrant,” he said. “That is the way the intelligence community has been operating under 702, and that is the way it will continue to operate if this bill becomes law.”
But Mr. Amash expressed hope that Mr. Trump might yet intervene to push for more changes to the legislation in the Senate.
Just before debate began on Thursday, the president posted a statement on Twitter that suggested skepticism about the surveillance bill.
“House votes on controversial FISA ACT today.” This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?
—
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Jan. 11, 2018
Mr. Trump wrote the message shortly after a libertarian legal analyst on “Fox Friends,” Andrew Napolitano, appealed directly to him to go another route. Mr. Napolitano added that Mr. Trump’s “woes” began with surveillance.
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The president’s tweet enraged Republican leaders who have been trying to renew the 702 law more or less intact. Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Mr. Trump spoke by phone until he posted his next message, a senior Republican congressional aide said.
Fewer than two hours later, the president appeared to reverse himself on the issue in another statement on Twitter.
With that being said, I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!
—
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Jan. 11, 2018
Despite the confusion, Republican leaders pushed forward, counting on moderate Democrats and Republicans to reject the proposed overhaul and pass the extension bill. John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, lobbied members in a House cloakroom before the vote.
Some of the most conservative Republicans in the House joined with some of the most liberal Democrats in the failed bid for more privacy protections. Ultimately, 58 Republicans joined 125 Democrats in voting for the overhaul amendment, while 55 Democrats joined 178 Republicans in rejecting it. On Twitter, Mr. Snowden observed that it would have passed had fewer Democrats broken ranks.
House votes 256-164 to expand Trump’s warrantless surveillance powers for the next six years. The vote to reform warrantless searches of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails failed, needing the support of 26 more. Dems could have swung it, but 55 of them voted with the Trump camp.
—
Edward Snowden (@Snowden)
Jan. 11, 2018
But Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said afterward that by rejecting the overhaul amendment, the House had avoided imposing “a crippling requirement in national security and terrorism cases.”
“We were certainly thrown into plenty of turmoil with the president’s tweets this morning and that made everything look quite speculative,” Mr. Schiff said. “I do think the underlying bill makes a sensible compromise.”
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Media Organizations Grapple With the New Facebook
January 12, 2018 by admin
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As part of the shift, Facebook pages run by publishers and businesses may see a reduction in the number of people they reach and site visits, he wrote. The numbers will vary based on factors including “the type of content they produce and how people interact with it,” Mr. Mosseri added.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in an interview with The Times on Thursday that he wanted the company to focus on “meaningful interaction.” With the changes, the company will prioritize posts that it believes are likely to spur discussion among people who know one another and reduce the kind of content that people simply scroll past or watch.
Raju Narisetti, the chief executive of the Gizmodo Media Group, the unit of Univision that operates Jezebel and other sites, said he was expecting the changes any day, but that he had not heard from Facebook about what it could mean for publishers.
“If Facebook downplays ‘low quality’ publishers, as is widely rumored, it could be a net positive for Gizmodo, Jezebel, TheRoot and our other brands,” Mr. Narisetti said in an email. “As always, it would be good to see transparency from any platform, particularly Facebook, as to how they are going about deciding what constitutes quality.”
Jason Kint, the chief executive of Digital Content Next, a trade group that represents entertainment and news organizations, including The Times, was skeptical of the change in strategy.
“If this change is as significant as they describe it, news organizations will go out of business or succeed based on a change that they didn’t necessarily have input on,” Mr. Kint said. “It reads as something that will drive up engagement and probably push away policy risk, because they’re not allowing news properties to have the same sort of presence in their feeds.”
Facebook’s new direction comes at a time when political discourse is often heated in the United States, and nationalist groups are on the rise in other parts of the world. In this charged political atmosphere, agents working for a Kremlin-linked company, the Internet Research Agency, disseminated content that reached an estimated 126 million users in the United States in 2016, Facebook revealed to Congress during hearings on the matter last year.
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The move away from news-related content may be a way for Facebook to step back from the political debate, which brings up issues known to ruin family get-togethers. But Mr. Kint said he had hoped that the social media giant would have found another way to weed out hoaxes and made-up news stories without penalizing all publishers. Facebook accounts for about 17 percent of visits, on average, to the digital companies he advises, he said.
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For media companies, a reliance on the company as a driver of traffic has proved an unreliable business model, given that it can change what it prioritizes in its News Feed at any time. Facebook’s battle against clickbait, for instance, sent click-dependent publishers like Upworthy into a tailspin several years ago.
Facebook recently paid millions to publishers, including The Times, to invest in making live videos for the platform, but it is unclear how successful the effort was for both Facebook and the news organizations who signed on.
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Many publishers have already recognized that they must spread their content beyond Facebook. Referral traffic to publishers from the site dropped 25 percent from February 2017 to October 2017, according to data from Parse.ly, a digital publishing analytics company. But forced to confront declines in digital advertising and online readership, many publishers have also staked at least some of their future on Facebook’s ability to augment their audience.
The algorithm changes will almost certainly affect ad-supported media companies like BuzzFeed and Bustle, which depend in part on Facebook to bring in an audience. But publishers that have lately shifted to subscription-based business models, including The Washington Post and The Times, will also have to confront the likely declines in referral traffic that the changes will bring.
Almost half of American adults get at least some of their news from Facebook, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center.
The changes matter more for media companies, which can garner more exposure in people’s feeds based on how often their content is being shared or viewed, than for brands, which typically pay for their posts to appear there. Facebook’s annual revenue, nearly all of which comes from online advertisements, has more than tripled in the last four years, reaching $27.6 billion in 2016, when it posted a net profit of $10.2 billion. The company will report its 2017 results later this month.
Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, recently compared the relationship between the publisher and Google and Facebook to an “airport and airline.”
“You’ve got an infrastructure owner on which you depend for your business,” he said at a conference last month. “Both parties gain from a smooth operation. But the economic division of value is sometimes difficult and the operation is sometimes difficult.”
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Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corporation, which owns The Wall Street Journal, said that he had “algorithm angst” at a conference last summer. He complained that although algorithms are viewed as objective and scientific, they are in fact “throwing up content from parameters that you’ve set.”
He added, “The news skew in algorithms is immense and the potential censorship in algorithms is immense.”
Mr. Zuckerberg signaled the change in a Facebook post last week. As he does at the start of every year, he let his audience in on the challenges he hoped to conquer in the coming year, and the chief one for 2018 was making Facebook a force for moral good. His company’s return to its scrapbook roots seems to be a part of making good on that aim.
“The world feels anxious and divided,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote, “and Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”
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