OMINOUS TIDINGS
- MICAH L. SIFRY
- December 7, 2015
- 6:00 am
Politicians want Silicon Valley to “disrupt” terrorism; Donald Trump’s words; and more.
- Crypto wars: Speaking to the nation from the Oval Office Sunday night, President Obama suggested that among the new steps his administration will take in response to the emergence of home-grown terrorist attacks against Americans is to “urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice.”
- Speaking at the Brookings Institution, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said she wants Silicon Valley to do more to “disrupt” or take down Islamic State websites, videos and encrypted communications, David Sanger reports for the New York Times. (Note to TechCrunch Disrupt: don’t think she means you.)
- Deepa Seetharaman, Alistair Barr, and Yoree Koh report for the Wall Street Journal on how Facebook, YouTube and Twitter already monitor and block some objectionable content but worry about censoring legitimate news.
- Leaked documents obtained by Le Monde suggest that France’s government is seeking to ban free and/or shared Wi-Fi during a state of emergency and to forbid the use of the Tor anonymous browser, Sebastian Anthony of Ars Technica reports. (h/t Tim Karr)
- “To this day, there’s hardly any publicly available evidence that the Paris attackers used encrypted communications to plan their attack,” Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation writes in the Columbia Journalism Review. That fact hasn’t stopped journalists, who actually need strong encryption to do their jobs, from parroting government officials claiming that it was time to “ban encryption.”
- Related: Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project, which has specialized in developing secure communications tools for human rights activists for more than a decade, describes “6 ways law enforcement can track terrorists in an encrypted world,” for Technology Review.
- Trump watch: The New York Times’ Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman took a close look at the 95,000 words that tripped from Donald Trump’s tongue over the last week, and found “many of them ominous.”
- Remember net neutrality? Susan Crawford explains how Comcast’s sly promotion of “usage-based billing allows a cascade of practices that will make a mockery of net neutrality.”
- Related: The FCC defended its new neutrality regulations in court Friday, and while the case will undoubtedly get pushed up to the Supreme Court, observers felt the legal ground to maintain its reclassification of internet service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act was solid, Dante D’Orazio reports for The Verge.
- Natasha Singer reports for the New York Times on how consumer technology is designed to addict you to constant distractions, and why some in the industry like Tristan Harris of Google (and friend of PDM) are fighting back.
- This is civic tech: New York City’s Big Apps competition, which just announced its latest round of winners, has come “a long way from the Washington, D.C., local government’s ‘Apps for Democracy’ contest in 2008, which hinted at the promise of opening up data for public benefit, but failed to deliver meaningful long-term social change or services,” Alex Howard of the Huffington Post writes.
