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Threats to the ‘Freedom of the Internet are Real’

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Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Images

An Obama administration plan to give up oversight of certain technical Internet functions could open the door to a takeover by authoritarian regimes, Republican lawmakers claimed Wednesday.

If Russia or China gain new influence over the management of the Internet, they could begin censoring content or blocking websites, the Republicans warned.

“Make no mistake: Threats to the openness and freedom of the Internet are real,” said Republican Rep. Greg Walden, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee, which held a hearing on the issue Wednesday. “Leaders such as Vladimir Putin have explicitly announced their desire to gain control of the Internet.”

Walden and other Republicans are pushing a bill that would block the transfer of authority until the Government Accountability Office can study the issue. Dozens of Senate Republicans, led by John Thune and Marco Rubio, sent a letter to the administration on Wednesday, demanding more answers about the plan.

But Democrats at Wednesday’s hearing insisted that if Republicans were serious about Internet freedom, they would support the U.S. proposal. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Larry Strickling said the U.S. will make sure that no foreign government will be able to seize new powers over the Internet.

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Troubling News for the Surveillance State: Younger Generations Surprisingly Want Privacy

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Photo Credit: AP

The generation that’s grown up posting their lives online wants a little privacy. That’s not what we might expect as we debate just how much access the government should have to our mobile and online lives.

But as it turns out, young people are much more complex than some may think when determining what personal information they want to share.

Sure, they’re as likely as ever to post photos of themselves online, as well as their location and even phone numbers — and assume that at least some of their information is shared among website providers — say those who track their high-tech habits. But as they approach adulthood, they’re also getting more adept at hiding and pruning their online lives.

Despite their propensity for sharing, many young adults also are surprisingly big advocates for privacy — in some cases, more than their elders.

That attitude showed up most recently in a poll done over the weekend for the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and The Washington Post. The poll, tied to the disclosure of broad federal surveillance, found that young adults were much more divided than older generations when asked if the government should tread on their privacy to thwart terrorism.

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Secret House Intelligence Meetings: Internet Freedom Under Attack Again?

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Photo Credit: nist6ss

Members of the media and the public will not be able to watch the House Intelligence Committee’s markup next week of a controversial cybersecurity bill, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

Lawmakers will be allowed to discuss what happened in the meeting afterward, and the committee plans to release information about what amendments were offered and how lawmakers voted. But the public will not be allowed in the room, and the meeting will not be streamed online.

Susan Phalen, a spokeswoman for the committee, explained that the Intelligence Committee often restricts access to hearings and that it is possible that lawmakers will need to discuss classified information.

“Sometimes they’ll need to bounce into classified information and go closed for a period of time to talk,” she said. “In order to keep the flow of the mark-up continuing forward, you can’t stop in the middle of an open hearing, move everyone to another location for a portion of it, and then move back.”

She noted that the committee used the same procedure when it marked up CISPA last year. The committee has yet to formally schedule the markup, but it is expected to happen next Wednesday.

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Tea Party Republicans sketch out Internet policy

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the son of libertarian Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, visited the conservative Heritage Foundation on Thursday to sketch out his agenda for preserving Internet freedom. In Paul’s view, this means opposing warrantless government snooping of private networks—and also opposing regulations intended to protect privacy and network neutrality.

The event follows last month’s announcement of a new “Internet freedom” initiative by the Campaign for Liberty, an activist group founded by the elder Paul. It appears that father and son see eye to eye on Internet issues, and the younger Paul used the Heritage event as an opportunity to explain his views.

Sen. Paul began by referencing Gordon Crovitz’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal, questioning whether the government launched the Internet. We’ve pointed out that Crovitz’s column was factually challenged; Paul offered a more nuanced version of the argument.

“It may not be completely simple but it’s definitely not as simple as that the government invented it,” he said. “When you say stuff like, ‘Oh, the government invented the Internet,’ it sort of demeans the process of the individuals who were involved.”

For example, “There was Vinton Cerf. There was Tim Berners-Lee. There were individuals. But it wasn’t the faceless government that invented the Internet. It was individuals. Even if some of them did work for government, the mind of the individual is what should be extolled, not some faceless bureaucracy.”

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Russia joins international effort to limit Internet freedom; pushing bill with similarities to SOPA, China’s firewall

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Two months after Vladimir Putin once again assumed the post of Russian president, the long-feared crackdown on his critics appears to have begun. The internet bill due to be considered by parliament on Wednesday is, say activists, the latest sign of growing repression of civil freedom in Russia.

The bill calls for the creation of a federal website “nolist”. Internet providers and site owners would be forced to shut down any websites on this list. According to Wikipedia authors on Tuesday, the bill will “lead to the creation of a Russian analogue to China’s great firewall”.

The bill’s backers in Putin’s United Russia party argue that the amendments to the country’s information legislation are aimed at child pornography and sites that promote drug use and teen suicide.

But critics, including the Russian-language Wikipedia, say the legislation could be used to boost government censorship over the internet.

In protest, the Russian-language Wikipedia site shut down for 24 hours on Tuesday. The Wikipedia logo was crossed out with a black rectangle, and the words “imagine a world without free knowledge” appeared underneath.

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Photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Ron Paul’s New Mission: Internet Freedom

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For months we’ve been speculating about how Ron Paul might spend the political capital he’s amassed accumulating all those delegate votes through the primary season. Now it looks like we have our answer.

A new document from Ron Paul and his son Rand called “The Technology Revolution” lays out the Pauls’ roadmap for where they’ll focus their agenda moving forward: Internet freedom.

The document makes a case against the largely GOP-motivated legislation to regulate the internet that’s been proposed over the last year—acts like SOPA, PIPA, etc. It also makes a case against the dominant voices resisting internet regulation—the tech companies and political progressives who protested SOPA and who last week released their own manifesto called the Declaration of Internet Freedom.

The Pauls argue that both approaches from the left and the right seek to impose harmful controls on an internet that should be left totally unregulated. In the Pauls’ view, the left’s anti-trust concerns and advocacy for “Net Neutrality,” which would prevent telecoms from divvying up their bandwidth and charging sites for quick load times, are as misguided and anti-free-market as the right’s push for tighter copyright controls with SOPA. Government regulation in the interest of openness and consumer fairness is neither open nor fair, they say.

Instead, the Pauls want to see the internet totally unregulated, with corporations and individuals behaving in the ecosystem however the market will motivate them to.

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Photo credit:  everett taasevigen