Inside The FCC’s 1.1 #Million Net #Neutrality #Comments

#GNN - If you ever #wanted to make your #Chrome #browser #freeze 10 times in one afternoon, you could take a look at the 1.4 GB of XML files of net neutrality comments that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) posted on Tuesday.

More than 1.1 million comments regarding net neutrality have been submitted to the FCC, and we expect that number to surge as the second comment period comes to a close on September 10. The only time the commission has seen more data was in response to Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction in the 2004 Super Bowl.

The FCC released five massive XML files that contained the comments. TechCrunch went through two — batches one and four — to sort the content of the missives by keyword to see if anything interesting cropped up. Our sample size — thousands and thousands and thousands of comments — shed light on the general bent of commenters’ main topics of interest: free speech, ISPs and anger.

After summing our search results from the two files, the term ‘free speech’ racked up 2,322 mentions, beating out Netflix, which picked up 1,903. Comcast beat both with 4,613. Notes containing New York, Chicago, and San Francisco — each mostly sourced from the location of the comment submitter — came in at 1,447, 1,109, and 979 apiece.

TechCrunch itself picked up 22 mentions, all from the first file. We beat out ‘Greenwald’ who picked up a slimmer nine mentions. Drunk, with five mentions, beat both Kanye and Oprah, who got a mere two apiece. Metallica was not mentioned, nor was Katy Perry.

Here’s a chart of some of our favorite entries:

IMAGE BY FLICKR USER SARAH JOY UNDER CC BY-SA 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Don’t Compare The Brazilian Spying Case To The NSA’s Mass Surveillance Efforts

Earlier today a Brazilian newspaper broke the story that ABIN, the top intelligence agency in that country, has employed low-tech spying techniques on foreign diplomats.

This is sticky for the country as it has been intensely critical of the NSA and its practices of mass surveillance the world around. If the NSA is spying, and ABIN is spying, do we come to a wash, all walking away simply saying that everyone spies, so calm down?

Not in the least.

Let’s review a few facts. Governments spy. They even joke about how they all do it. This is the normal state of affairs, as it has always been the state of affairs.

Here’s the New York Times discussing Brazil’s efforts to spy on people, as originally reported by Folha de São Paulo:

The statement followed a report in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo describing how the Brazilian Intelligence Agency, commonly known as Abin, had followed some diplomats from Russia and Iran on foot and by car, photographing their movements, while also monitoring a commercial property leased by the United States Embassy in Brasília, the capital.

So, we’re talking about activities so basic that they aren’t uncommon among ex-partners who are a bit hung up on the end of a relationship. And if the United States didn’t expect that its embassies on foreign soil might be target for local surveillance, I’ll shave my head.

Now for context, here’s a partial roll of the NSA’s activities that have been recently revealed:

1. Tapping the core fiber cables of the Internet.
2. Tapping the data lines between the datacenters of American companies overseas for increased access.
3. Working to end the effectiveness of encryption, so nothing is off-limits for its view, if it wants access.
4. Tapped the communications of the president of Brazil and her associates, the email address of then-Mexican President Felipe Calderon. And his successor. And the phone of the German Chancellor Merkel.
5. Intercepted a stunning 70 million phone calls in France in a single month.

That’s just a taste and doesn’t include the domestic efforts of the agency and even most of its foreign work.

If governments are going to spy, why am I unhappy with the NSA and its efforts? Because there is a difference between walking behind a visiting diplomat to see where she goes than ending digital privacy for all global citizens. If you can’t feel the difference between the two, I doubt that we are going to be able to come to comity on this issue.

I find it frustrating that people are comparing two things of utter disparate scale as if they are commensurate. They are not.

And no, I would not be either offended or surprised if the United States government dispatches gumshoe hacks to walk 15 feet behind certain diplomats. Sure. Go for it. But the fact that governments do that has nothing to do with the NSA’s offenses to privacy, and therefore democracy. Don’t trivialize the destruction of the fundamental core tenet of democracy. (Yoogle) (TechCrunch) (GNN)

Apple’s Tim Cook Is Right, Anti-Gay Policies Hurt The Economy

The elusive CEO of the richest company in the world, Apple’s Tim Cook, has taken a rare step into the spotlight to urge Congress to ban sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace.

In a Wall Street Journal OpEd, Cook argues that passing the Employment Nondiscrimination Act is not only a moral imperative, but sound economic policy:

“Those who have suffered discrimination have paid the greatest price for this lack of legal protection. But ultimately we all pay a price. If our coworkers cannot be themselves in the workplace, they certainly cannot be their best selves.

When that happens, we undermine people’s potential and deny ourselves and our society the full benefits of those individuals’ talents.”

I’m no fan of bigotry, but is Cook, who is widely thought to be gay himself, right that discrimination hurts the economy? In short, yes, but it’s hard to determine the impact.

A UCLA Law review of research finds that anti-discrimination policies make for healthier, more cooperative, and committed workers [PDF]. IBM-sponsored ethnographic research finds that gay workers who feel accepted in the workplace are also more willing to share creative ideas [PDF]. “If I’m not out at work, I spend more time trying to conceal my home life and therefore not concentrating on my job.” explained one respondent.

To some extent, we’re lucky to live in a country where our economy isn’t held hostage to Congress’s inability to promote equality.

Nearly every major company in America supports gay workers and knows they’d face crippling public backlash on top of missing out on top-notch talent by discriminating. The companies most in charge of innovation won’t be impacted by legislation.

Still, every sick, disparaged, and fearful worker hurts the economy. Innovation comes from unexpected places: every fired teacher and bullied teenager makes it that much less likely innovative Americans will ever reach their potential.

One of the godfathers of modern computing, Alan Turing, died shortly after the British government forced him into chemical castration for being gay.

Turing’s revolutionary mathematical theorems proved how computers could be more than simple calculators. He died at the young age of 41 directly from discriminatory legislation.

Who knows what he could have contributed to computing in the later years of his life?

Watch Google’s Eric Schmidt Call NSA Spying “Outrageous” and Perhaps Illegal

Google’s Eric Schmidt didn’t pull any punches in a new interview about the National Security Agency, which supposedly tapped the company’s data centers.

“It’s really outrageous that the National Security Agency was looking between the Google data centers, if that’s true.

The steps that the organization was willing to do without good judgment to pursue its mission and potentially violate people’s privacy, it’s not okay.”

He also didn’t see the logic in spying on all Americans to get scoops on just 300 potential threats.

“The NSA allegedly collected the phone records of 320 million people in order to identify roughly 300 people who might be a risk. It’s just bad public policy and perhaps illegal.”

See the full interview with the Wall Street Journal‘s Deborah Kan above.

NSA Infiltrates Google And Yahoo Networks, Report Says

The National Security Agency has secretly taped the networks of Google and Yahoo to monitor real-time communication, according to newly revealed documents from whistleblower, Edward Snowden.

“The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials,” according to The Washington Post, which obtained the hand-scribbled documents.

Both Google and Yahoo maintain expensive fiber-optic data linkages in strategic data centers around the world to optimize the flow of information. This infiltration would allow the NSA to know “who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.”

Upon learning about the NSA tapping into their networks, Google released a statement, saying the company is “troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity.”

Codenamed, MUSCULAR, the surveillance project is operated jointly with British Intelligence agency, GCHQ.

While the NSA already had access to communication through court-sanctioned collection program PRISM, the agency may prefer international territory because it permits them to subvert American privacy law. The NSA is forbidden from spying on Americans without stringent court oversight; international law may be less restrictive.

The Post reports that upon showing this information to two engineers familiar with Google’s system, they “exploded in profanity” and said “I hope you publish this.”

Another Member Of Congress Calls Congressional Oversight Of The NSA An Utter Farce

Members of Congress calling Congressional oversight of the United States intelligence empire flaccid at best, and utterly incompetent at worst, is becoming a trend. Recently in The Guardian, Rep. Alan Grayson called Congressional oversight of the National Security Agency a “joke.”

Calling oversight in Congress nothing more than “overlook,” Rep. Grayson also stated that he has “learned far more about government spying on citizens from the media than [from] official intelligence briefings.” Us too, Congressman.

The comments of a lone, controversial representative in the House isn’t usually news, but Rep. Grayson’s comments come as a member of a larger grouping that is worth highlighting.

Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee sent the president a letter, complaining that briefings provided to Congress were “limited” and did not provide “a fulsome accounting of the totality of surveillance activities conducted by the federal government, and in particular, by the NSA.”

He went on to repeat a refrain that by now is quite familiar:

As a result [of lukewarm briefings], members of Congress regularly read new revelations on the front pages of various newspapers.  Even more troubling, members of Congress are left to wonder why the prior briefings provided by the Executive Branch did not cover the material contained in these articles.

Senator Patrick Leahy agrees:

We sometimes find we get far more in the newspapers we get crossword puzzles as well we get more in the newspapers than in classified briefings.

Now, you might say, it can’t be as bad as all that, can it? Well, it’s actually worse. Even when you manage, as a member of Congress, to get the intelligence apparatus into the same room as yourself, you have to essentially beg them for answers.

Here’s Rep. Justin Amash on the game he is forced to play with the NSA:

So you don’t know what questions to ask because you don’t know what the baseline is. You don’t have any idea what kind of things are going on.

So you have to start just spitting off random questions: Does the government have a moon base? Does the government have a talking bear? Does the government have a cyborg army? If you don’t know what kind of things the government might have, you just have to guess and it becomes a totally ridiculous game of 20 questions.

With members of both political parties in both chambers of Congress shouting that their own oversight is a farce, we can safely agree with them. That fact undercuts the NSA’s horse-beaten-dead line that it has more oversight than darn near anyone else. No. Oversight on paper is just that.

As such, the NSA’s spying activities are essentially unilateral authority provided to the Executive Branch of the United States government to decide whether I get privacy. That won’t do.  (TechCrunch) (Yoogle) (GNN)