• And here’s Google with a timely reminder of the kind of problems they’re causing. When Google was breached in 2010 by Chinese hackers, it appears they may have been able to access a database of information on targets of U.S. surveillance.

• See also: Anonymous, who have pledged to “disrupt activities” at Guantanamo Bay, prompting the military to shut off Wi-Fi access entirely.

• Apple’s CEO testified in front of a Senate committee on Tuesday about its tax practices—put simply, the utilization of loopholes that saved them billions in taxes. (The New York Times’ liveblog of the hearing is here) Cook was apparently effective at easing tensions, and pushed hard for corporate tax reform, a set of laws that’s become so riddled with loopholes that numerous tech companies are able to avoid huge tax burdens without technically breaking any laws. Central to this strategy is Ireland, through which many companies route a lot of money to take advantage of a favorable tax rate, resulting in ire all over the world.

• While Apple’s Tim Cook was testifying in the Senate, Microsoft was revealing its new Xbox. Wired’s Peter Rubin has an excellent run-down on what you need to know.

• Is 3-D printed food the answer to world hunger? NASA thinks so: they just awarded a $125,000 grant to build a prototype of a “universal food synthesizer.”

• Remember Watson, IBM’s robot Jeopardy winner? It’s already being utilised in the medical industry, and now IBM hopes it can help with customer support too.

Apple faces a Senate hearing over the $100 billion cash it has overseas—an arrangement that helped it avoid around $9 billion in taxes—this week. Ahead of the hearing, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook gave a rare interview with Politico in which he talks about the impending hearing and his plans for it. Lots of interesting details, including Apple’s plans to go “very deep” on US manufacturing. Google and Amazon have also faced fresh attention over their tax practices.

Tom Wheeler’s Conflicts of Interest

Tom Wheeler, who will probably replace Julian Genachowski as head of the FCC soon (Nicholas Thompson at The New Yorker did a great exit interview with him), has about a million dollars in holdings in AT&T, Verizon, and various other companies that represent conflicts of interest in his new position. Wheeler is still waiting for sign-off from the Senate, but said he will divest all of his conflicting positions, which currently contribute to a salary of at least $1,105,189.

The FBI Knows Who You DDoS’d Last Summer

Did you know there are websites that let you buy your own personal DDoS attack using Paypal? One of those is ragebooter.net, which Brian Krebs recently profiled and found a Memphis, Tennessee resident who claims his site is not illegal and operates with the FBI’s blessing, and a backdoor letting them monitor who uses it.

Now You Can Print Your Solar Cells

Researchers in Australia have developed a printer that can print 30 feet of flexible solar cells per minute, a major breakthrough in solar technology. And in a month, Harvard will also release a list of compounds that can be used for printing solar cells. The technology is still relatively inefficient and expensive (one of those printers will set you back about $200,000), but the findings and impending database are expected to have useful effects on the cost and efficiency of printing solar cells.

Google Glass Still New

There are few useful or interesting things I could tell you about Google Glass at this point that you haven’t already heard, and the tech is so expensive that it barely matters to most people. But these things are ostensibly the future, and so far the future has pretty crappy apps. But at least people that wear prescription glasses will be able to take advantage of them.

• Key senators are divided on the immigration bill, preventing it from gaining the critical mass of support it needs to pass the Senate. The AFL-CIO is arguing to protect provisions in the bill requiring Americans to be recruited for openings before immigrants, which the tech industry calls “unworkable.”

• A new report released today says the internet wiretap technology proposed by the FBI poses “serious security risks.” By creating backdoors for the FBI to use it opens the same holes to malicious intruders.

• Kayla, Topiary, tflow, and Viral—more commonly known as Lulzsec—were sentenced to jail today, with sentences ranging between 20 and 32 months, for their 50 day hacking spree in 2011.

• Google teamed up with NASA to study artificial intelligence using a quantum computer.

• The Center for Copyright Information—the group behind the “six strikes” program—has had its company status revoked, meaning it can no longer do business in the United States. France, meanwhile, is dropping its equivalent three strikes program, following a recommendation for automated fines of 60 euro for infringement instead. Lawmakers there are going to review the recommendations and revisit it during Summer.

• Here’s a good summary of the Marketplace Fairness Act, the so-called online sales tax bill, that does a good job of explaining some of the finer points of the act, and explaining why retail companies are divided.

• The Verge has a cheatsheet and lots of details on what Google announced at its I/O conference keynote on Wednesday. Unified messaging, subscription music, a new phone, and much more.

• Hollywood claims its bottom line is suffering from piracy, but it has some of the highest paid execs.

• Those meters that grade the strength of your password have overrun sign-up forms on the web, but do they work? Sometimes.

The hits keep coming for FWD.us, with even Silicon Valley best friend Techcrunch describing the group as “reviled” this week. The latest is that Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, among other things, has pulled his support, along with David Sacks, chief executive of Yammer. Neither FWD.us or the departed has elaborated on their reasoning yet (or how much money they’re taking with them), but it’s not too hard to make an educated guess.

More “Cyberattacks” for U.S. Corporations

The New York Times is reporting that a “new wave of cyberattacks” is under way, targeting mostly energy companies. Where intrusions in the past have seemed to focus on cyberespionage, anonymous officials said this time they’re looking for ways to get control of their processing systems. As of Sunday, the unnamed officials either don’t know or won’t say the source of the attacks, confirming only that they’re coming from the Middle East. (Complete speculation, but Iran is likely the primary focus, having successfully deployed malware that wiped a bunch of computers and making an appearance in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate as a country with “nothing but upside” if they decided to target American infrastructure.)

Leftovers

• Thousands of Social Security numbers have escaped again, this time from the Washington state Administrative Office of the Courts, in a data breach that happened months ago and was only just discovered. The information “just happened to be on a server in an area that was accessed,” said the director of the courts’ information services division, very helpfully.

• Julian Sanchez for Wired on the FBI’s wiretap proposal: “criminals, rival nation states, and rogue hackers routinely seek out and exploit vulnerabilities in our computers and networks … much faster than we can fix them. We don’t need to add wiretapping interfaces as new and “particularly juicy” targets to this cybersecurity landscape.”

The Senate’s immigration reform plan has language buried inside its 800 pages that mandates the creation of a “photo tool,” described as a federal database controlled by Homeland Security that contains names, ages, social security numbers, and photographs of anyone with state ID. The legislation only allows it to be used for employment purposes, but it could set a precedent that could later be loosened, warns Chris Calabrese with the ACLU.

Fwd.Us Still Getting Criticism

Mark Zuckerberg’s Fwd.Us advocacy group hasn’t had a very warm reception, and it’s only getting worse. Now, the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, and MoveOn.org have pulled their advertising on Facebook. The protest will have minimal economic impact on Facebook, but they hope to send a strong message:

“When the ads came out they were politics as usual and divisive and pitting one issue against another,” Ms. Duvall said. “We were really surprised that Silicon Valley would be moving into the political space by doing the worst of business-as-usual politics.”

The New York Times mentioned the move in a report on Thursday that quoted Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist and Fwd.Us contributor, saying the reaction was expected and that he was proud to support it. Other backers may be less proud of Facebook’s tactics, like John Doerr, an investor in clean tech companies, or Bill Gates, but none of them returned The Times’ calls.

The Business of Zero Days

The Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence agencies are some of the biggest buyers of software exploits, according to an extensive Reuters report. The exploits are used to infiltrate computer systems, and the U.S. spends so much on them that it’s changing the market:

Defense contractors and agencies spend at least tens of millions of dollars a year just on exploits, which are the one essential ingredient in a broader cyber-weapons industry generating hundreds of millions annually, industry executives said privately.

Much of the U.S.’s online efforts utilize these exploits, and Reuters quotes a number of critics who warn of unintended consequences stemming from the government waging war with software exploits that aren’t disclosed to the software creators, like the possibility of other actors having the same exploit. (Perhaps they should talk to the FBI.)

DMCA Reform is Here

Representative Zoe Lofgren, with Reps Thomas Massie, Anna Eshoo, and Jared Polis, has introduced the Unlocking Technology Act of 2013:

In addition to explicitly legalizing cell phone unlocking, the Unlocking Technology Act of 2013 also modifies the DMCA to make clear that unlocking copy-protected content is only illegal if it’s done in order to “facilitate the infringement of a copyright.” If a circumvention technology is “primarily designed or produced for the purpose of facilitating noninfringing uses,” that would not be a violation of copyright.

Previous bills designed to address the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have been unpopular, and haven’t addressed the real issues but Lofgren’s bill is said to be “exactly what the digital community was asking for.”

Leftovers

• PayPal’s chief information security officer has pledged to “obliterate user IDs and passwords and PINs from the face of the planet” with an open standard called Fast Identity Online, or FIDO.

• An executive order from President Barack Obama requires all government IT systems to produce “open and machine-readable” data formats

• The White House is taking 3D printing seriously: it’s announced a $200 million initiative that will open manufacturing centers to put 3D printing to military use.

Syria went offline yesterday when the entire country’s internet access was disabled. Syria has had a number of internet outages in recent years, most recently in November, when a “well-rehearsed and deliberate act” took the internet offline for two days. Early speculation suggested the outage was likely to be deliberate this time, too—CloudFlare’s CEO compared it to removing all the street signs into Syria—but a state-run news agency later called it a “malfunction,” and the Syrian government said it was working to repair it (indeed, Syria is now back online). Nevertheless, activists are taking it as an ominous sign .

Senate Passes The Marketplace Fairness Act

No surprise: The Marketplace Fairness Act, which would give states the ability to require online retailers to collect sales tax, passed the Senate on Monday in a 69-27 vote. Now it will go to the House of Representatives, where it has good Republican support and “overwhelming” Democratic support, but it would probably need at least half of the House Republicans to support it to get to a floor vote.

Leftovers

• The Obama administration might back the FBI’s plan for making it easier to wiretap internet communications, according to the New York Times. The proposal, if passed into law, would levy fines on companies that refuse to comply with court orders asking for information on users, which many do, and probably send the internet into a death spiral of outrage over personal privacy.

• The U.S. has directly accused China of military attacks on American computer systems, the first time they’ve done so, in a “thoroughly coordinated” Pentagon report that describes China’s motives as theft of industrial technology.

• The FTC has been looking into data brokers—the companies that collect and sell personal data for marketing—for a while and today escalated a broader investigation to issuing formal letters to ten companies warning them that they might be violating federal regulations. Actions like this are usually a precursor to more formal action, so this might be about to get interesting.

Senator Chuck Schumer announced a bill to combat patent trolls last week, the second bill this year with such a goal. Where the SHIELD Act seeks to make frivolous lawsuits more expensive for the litigator, Senator Schumer’s bill would expand the America Invents Act to allow tech patents to be challenged within 18 months of issuance, in combination with lowering the cost of patent litigation. Not much else is known about the bill yet, but Reuters says it will be formally introduced today.

FCC To Consider In-Flight Internet Plan

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will discuss a plan this week to provide broadband to airplanes. The plan comes from Qualcomm, who have proposed making themselves the exclusive provider of bandwidth to airlines and ISPs (like Gogo), using a system that transmits bandwidth through the 14.0-14.5GHz radio band. Even if the plan goes ahead it has a long road to fruition, but first it needs to allay the satellite industry’s concerns about interference — its proposed solution to which has received mixed reception — and everyone else’s fears about monopolies.

Surveillance States Behaving Badly

We know the Department of Justice is giving telecommunications companies a break if they help intercept communications, but America isn’t alone in overreaching with their surveillance. In New Zealand, the Prime Minister wants to legalize domestic spying by their intelligence agency, a reaction to being caught illegally wiretapping King Dotcom. Meanwhile in the Netherlands, the government just presented a bill that would give law enforcement the power to hack into computer systems both domestic and foreign without breaking the law, among other things. Cool!

Immigration, Again

I got some reader feedback that my coverage of the Senate’s immigration bill seemed biased. Since then, I’ve been looking out for more positive takes on the bill and Zuckerberg’s advocacy group. Haven’t found any yet, but this, by Lydia Depillis is pretty generous, ascribing FWD.us’s “deep-pocketed cynicism” to simply playing the politics game. A necessary evil, for now at least. Anil Dash also had a more even-handed take that’s well worth a read. On a more substantial note, the New York Times published some details this weekend on the tech sector’s involvement in shaping the bill, with some interesting nuggets like this: “Those deals were worked out through what Senate negotiators acknowledged was extraordinary access by American technology companies to staff members who drafted the bill.” (And a quick sidenote: I am an immigrant and absolutely not anti-immigration. Only anti-tech company profiteering.)

Leftovers

• Aereo’s legal battles continue; this time it’s Aereo making the moves, asking the same judge that ruled in their favor last time to preemptively rule against CBS in all of the cities it plans to expand to.
• “Ever wondered what happens to all these old phones?” asks The Times. Answer: It’s complicated, and not pretty.

President Barack Obama has named Tom Wheeler, a venture capitalist and former lobbyist for the wireless industry, the new head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). On his way out, Julius Genachowski, the former FCC head, said AT&T and Verizon’s dominance of the wireless industry is a “very bad thing for our innovation economy,” so public interest groups are understandably wary of Wheeler, whose stance on many of these issues is unknown. But it’s probably not good news that AT&T’s chairman called Wheeler an “inspired pick.”

Leftovers

• The EFF has released its annual report on the policies of major Internet companies regarding their handling of government requests for user data. Twitter is a clear winner, and many internet companies seem to have pretty good policies in place, but things remain pretty murky for wireless carriers and bigger tech companies.

• I’ve talked about Do Not Track and its utter failure before, but here’s some more good news: even the ad-tracking companies don’t know who’s tracking you.

In the United Kingdom last week, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill received Royal Assent. (For those in countries without a royal family, that means the act was passed into law.) What the act was written to do is, in the British Journal of Photography’s words, “eradicate unnecessary bureacracy.” The catch: the act also features a number of provisions snuck in by the Intellectual Property Office that, if approved by the government (quite likely, historically speaking), will allow the government to introduce regulations governing copyrighted works with little oversight. In short, the provisions enable commercial use of “orphan works” — per Wikipedia, “copyrighted work for which the copyright owner cannot be contacted.” The ramifications are potentially huge, particularly for photographers, who voiced mass opposition to such provisions earlier this year.

Here’s a fun thing to chase this news with: on the Embedded Metadata website there is a survey of social sites that strip EXIF data from photographs. All of the services that do this — which include Twitter, Facebook, and even Flickr — are potentially creating orphan works on a massive scale.

The FBI Wants to Wiretap Facebook

The FBI has a problem: with the internet-assisted splintering of common communication methods, it can no longer easily wiretap communications, and companies like Twitter have a habit of ignoring their court orders. This has been a “problem” for a while, and the FBI is back with another idea to fix it, which is more or less the same as their previous ideas: to try to pass a law that would require companies to make some kind of backdoor that they can use for spying available, and fine the ones that won’t. (Can’t think of any clear-as-day problems with this approach!) This time around, Facebook and Google are receiving some directed pressure to provide a way to intercept communications “as they occur,” unnamed officials told the Washington Post. It goes without saying that there will be predictable resistance to the bill, and probably a lot of lobbying, but the FBI’s general counsel said it’s the bureau’s top legislative priority this year, as I’m sure it is every year.

The Tech Sector’s Self-Serving Immigration Bill

There’s not much more to say about the Senate’s overhaul of immigration law yet, at least as it pertains to the tech world, but smarter people than I are writing about it, and the problems with the tech sector’s labor shortage narrative. For The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann explains a new study that debunks many of the myths driving the H-1B provisions in the bill:

So it turns out the United States is not, in fact, the educational wasteland tech industry lobbyists would have you think.

The study is new, but its findings are not: in short, most of the claims put forth by Silicon Valley’s lobbyists are demonstrably false. It’s quite important to understand why they’re false, so do take a look at the full report.

Covering the Zuckerberg side of things this week is Tony Romm for Politico and Adrian Chen for Gawker. Chen does a great job of explaining why Zuckerberg’s involvement through FWD.us, the political advocacy group he launched earlier this month, is shamelessly self-interested, even pandering to both sides of the political aisle when it helps the cause. To explain how that works, we turn to Politico, where Romm explains the “secret money” driving FWD.us’s “advocacy.” In short, it’s set up as a 501(c)(4), which has the handy advantage of meaning none of the causes its members donate to have to be disclosed. Yes, this is the same Zuckerberg that said privacy was dead two years ago.

For observers of the tech industry, and those affected by it (which is almost anybody that owns a computer or cellphone), understanding how these groups work is increasingly important. It’s fast becoming the Valley’s default mode of advocacy, and more groups like FWD.us will pop up in the future, spending billions of dollars in Washington to influence, as secretly as possible, the laws and regulations that govern the tech world. It’s not particularly hyperbolic to say the tech industry is trying to write the laws that govern them.

Progress on E-mail Privacy

The New York Times had a small update on Senator Leahy’s Electronic Communications Privacy Act last week. The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously passed a measure that would require the government to get a search warrant to access personal e-mails held by a third party. The current law only requires a warrant for e-mail less than six months old. The bill still has some work ahead of it to get full Senate approval, but Senate agreement on this basic provision is encouraging.

In October, the Federal Reserve will begin circulating redesigned $100 bills. At a glance, there doesn’t seem to be much of a tech angle here, but on closer inspection, the new bills feature a number of technological innovations aimed at preventing counterfeiting. Interestingly, the new bills were actually introduced in 2010, but came off the presses with defects. One of the bill’s new features is a blue ribbon that creates the effect of 3D bells moving up and down it, but it put an unexpected strain on the printing presses:

When paper normally runs through the presses, it’s hit with more than 100 tons of pressure. Because of that force, the back edge spreads ever so slightly; to the naked eye a dollar is rectangular, but to a currency geek it’s trapezoidal. Somehow, the more rigid thread hosting the motion feature prevented smooth spreading of the usually flexible paper, resulting in the crease.

David Wolman wrote up the full, fascinating story for Wired.

In the Wired World, Feeds Drive Trading

When the AP’s Twitter account was hacked this week, and posted a fake tweet about an explosion in the White House, the Dow Jones fell 145 points in a matter of seconds. The cause: high frequency traders; automated computer programs that make trading decisions based on news alerts. The Wall Street Journal published a piece on Thursday that explained what happened, going into some detail on how these programs work:

Some of the new programs are rather simple, looking for key words in verified accounts of major news sources. Others use complex algorithms to detect patterns. Dataminr’s program works by processing hundreds of millions of daily tweets instantly to find credible and actionable information that they can share with clients.

The Dow rebounded to its former levels within moments, when Dataminr generated an alert saying the news may be a hoax — even before the AP confirmed it.

A History of Like

The decision by social media companies to infest the we with “like” buttons seems fairly arbitrary, but there’s quite a bit more to it than that. Robert W. Gehl explains in The New Inquiry:

The marketing subfield of Liking Studies, which began before Internet use became mainstream, is key to understanding how this somewhat bland, reductive signal of affect became central to the larger consumer economy we live in. It also explains why Facebook will never install a Dislike button.

Good news! The Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act is as good as dead. Despite strong House support, Senator Jay Rockefeller signaled insufficient privacy protections and the expansiveness of CISPA as the reason for the Senate breaking it up into smaller chunks to pass as separate bills. The Senate’s approach to cybersecurity has historically been much more concerned with privacy than the House, but it’s going to be a little while before they get to it with immigration, online sales tax, and the Boston bombing to contend with. But we’re one step closer as of today, now that rich people can fly again.

The Justice Department Secretly Immunized Telcos From the Wiretap Act

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has obtained documents that show the Justice Department secretly granted AT&T and other ISPs and telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution under the Wiretap Act if they help them intercept communications.

The letters were sent as part of a cybersecurity pilot program designed to help the military monitor the activity of defense contractors, but effective June 12th that program will be expanded to all “critical infrastructure sectors” (eg, finance, healthcare, energy). According to CNET, who were provided with the documents EPIC obtained and have an extensive reporting of the details, the Department of Justice and some of the companies contacted had reservations—presumably being aware that it was almost definitely illegal—but at the urging of the NSA and Defense Department, eventually signed off anyway.

And an interesting wrinkle: Although the legality of this kind of behavior is highly questionable, it would be much more clean-cut under CISPA, because it overrides all federal and state privacy laws. CISPA may be dead, and the Senate will instead draft its own version, but it’s probably safe to assume an exemption of this nature will still make it into their drafts.

T-Mobile Has A Bad Day

In what seems like a kind of weird decision, Washington state’s Attorney General has ordered T-Mobile to correct “deceptive advertising” relating to its new un-carrier initiative.

Under T-Mobile’s un-carrier program, customers are able to sign up under a month-to-month contract, instead paying a monthly fee on the cost of the unsubsidized handset without having to commit to a two-year contract. The Attorney General apparently felt it wasn’t clear enough that customers would still be required to make a 24-month commitment—to payments on the cost of the phone—and face a large charge for canceling early. It’s an odd distinction because the fee is simply paying the remaining cost of the phone, and not the extortionate early termination fee most carriers would ask for. It’s notable, too, that the Attorney General has actually received no complaints about the program and is instead claiming “proactive” action.

T-Mobile didn’t admit to any violation of the law, but was happy to cooperate, agreeing to modify its marketing to make the charges clearer and paying $26,000 to cover the Attorney General’s legal fees.

Leftovers

• House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte signaled an interest in a “sweeping review” of copyright law this week. Congress has been making noise about copyright reform for a little while now, but Goodlatte’s interest isn’t necessarily good news, considering his history with Hollywood

• Google’s latest transparency report is out. Good news!: “government censorship requests jumped 20% in last six months”

• In a rare win for privacy, a judge denied the FBI’s request to spy on a suspected hacker through his webcam this week

The Right to Know Act of 2013, which seeks to give consumers more access to what kind of data companies are collecting, hit a roadblock last week: Silicon Valley lobbyists. If made law, the bill would give Californians (and if history is any guide, much of the country eventually) an “unprecedented” level of access to the personal data companies collect on them and introduces the threat of civil suits for noncompliance. It’s not particularly surprising, then, that Silicon Valley is not a fan.

Silicon Valley’s Mercury News calls Silicon Valley’s attempts to kill the bill a “quiet but forceful campaign.” So far, that campaign has taken the form of pressure on local representatives and a letter signed by 15 tech companies and trade groups—including TechAmerica, who represent Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and numerous other major tech companies—demanding that the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, drop it entirely. Lowenthal seems determined to fight, and told Mercury News she has no intention of dropping the bill.

But the lobbyists did manage a minor victory this week, getting a hearing on the bill, initially scheduled for last week, pushed back to May. Bob Wieckowski, the Assembly Judiciary Committee chairman, said he pushed the bill back because of “concerns that the current version may be too broad and not clear enough to properly guide businesses on what they can and cannot do.” Which is a polite, PR-friendly way of saying tech companies want no fucking part of this and will fight tooth and nail to stop it.

The Marketplace Fairness Act Moves Forward

The Senate made its decision on the Marketplace Fairness Act—a bill that would empower states to collect online sales tax—on Monday, voting 74-20 to pick the legislation up for debate and amendment. A final vote is expected by the end of the week, per the New York Times, and then it’s off to the House, where the bill’s prospects are more uncertain. Some Republican opposition has been vocal in labelling the bill a tax hike and predicting a “bookkeeping nightmare,” while eBay is trying to get its 40 million users to tell their representatives to vote against the bill, on top of the usual lobbying efforts from either side that have now shifted their focus to limiting the bill through amendments. Pushing the momentum in the opposite direction is the official backing of President Obama and wide support from Democrats.

Silicon Valley’s Mercury News calls Silicon Valley’s attempts to kill the bill a “quiet but forceful campaign.” So far, that campaign has taken the form of pressure on local representatives and a letter signed by 15 tech companies and trade groups—including TechAmerica, who represent Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and numerous other major tech companies—demanding that the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, drop it entirely. Lowenthal seems determined to fight, and told Mercury News she has no intention of dropping the bill.

But the lobbyists did manage a minor victory this week, getting a hearing on the bill, initially scheduled for last week, pushed back to May. Bob Wieckowski, the Assembly Judiciary Committee chairman, said he pushed the bill back because of “concerns that the current version may be too broad and not clear enough to properly guide businesses on what they can and cannot do.” Which is a polite, PR-friendly way of saying tech companies want no fucking part of this and will fight tooth and nail to stop it.

Reached for comment by Mercury News, Robert Callahan, the director of California government affairs for TechAmerica, said “our companies are active proponents of ensuring that consumers’ privacy is safeguarded. It is a fundamental part of their business model.” The second part is certainly true. The issue for Silicon Valley is that the bill would place highly undesirable requirements on them to be open and clear about their privacy practices. Collecting data on their users, for marketing purposes or to sell to someone else, is extremely lucrative for companies like Facebook and Google, and there’s absolutely no doubt that some highly questionable practices are occurring out of the public eye. If they can’t do that in private, they’re looking at some really tough conversations, potential user mutiny like what Instagram faced last year, and even more restrictive regulation. Tech companies are in the business of making new things, changing the world, and trying to make money without asking for money from their users. None of this is possible without doing things that our current laws never even considered, and thus don’t protect against. In a sense, it’s innovation by legal loophole, and the closing of those loopholes is death for much of Silicon Valley.

This has never been more evident than it is right now, with tech companies spending millions on lobbying, mostly against rather than for new laws. Already, considerable influence has been exerted by tech industry lobbyists on Europe’s data protection reforms and various American legislative efforts. In almost all cases, Silicon Valley is trying its hardest to avoid any kind of increased scrutiny, a pattern that should be extremely worrying.

The campaign against SOPA was one of the earliest signs that Silicon Valley was taking an interest in the law. In that case, the attention was warranted, and it worked. But tech companies go straight to the source—politicians—now. Look at CISPA, which has received almost no attention from Silicon Valley, despite being highly problematic from a privacy perspective, but which has been a considerable windfall in campaign donations for Mike Rogers, the bill’s author. Tech companies don’t want to help anymore, they want to protect themselves.

If recent history is any indication, Silicon Valley will go all out trying to kill the Right to Know Act of 2013, and they’ll probably be quite successful.

The Senate’s immigration bill arrived on Tuesday last week. The tech sector has lobbied heavily for more flexible rules for highly skilled worker visas (H-1B), claiming there aren’t enough of them in America. The cap on the number that can be granted per year has been almost doubled to a maximum of 180,000, 25,000 of which are set aside for STEM graduates. Some green card and permanent residency provisions have been loosened too. Some of the H-1B provisions are a “disaster,” according to Stuart Anderson, executive director the National Foundation for American Policy, referring to the supposed imposition of expanded Department of Labor authority to investigate companies that hire highly skilled workers from overseas, and the requirement to pay higher fees and wages. Overall, the tech sector’s lobbying has been very effective, but they are likely to want even more.

Online Sales Tax Goes to a Vote Today

A key vote on the Marketplace Fairness Act in the Senate is scheduled for this evening. Under current law, states can only collect sales tax from retailers with a physical presence in-state. The bill, expected to sail through the vote, empowers states to collect sales tax from online purchases for retailers with no presence inside their borders. The bill is widely supported, and backed by “intense” lobbying from groups representing major retailers.

One notable voice of dissent comes from eBay, whose CEO John Donahoe is asking 40 million users to email Congress demanding changes to the bill. As it currently stands, the Marketplace Fairness Act provides an exemption for small retailers that earn less than $1 million annually. Donahoe wants that raised to $10 million. The bill will also face resistance in the House, where GOP Chairman Bob Goodlatte says it has a “long way to go.”

The House Comes Together in “Rare Consensus” Over Internet Freedom

The House Energy and Commerce Committee backed a bill last week that has little to do with domestic policy and everything to do with affirming the importance of an internet “free from censorship and government control.” The main purpose of the bill is to prevent foreign governments taking control of the internet, but as internet freedom becomes an area of what Gautham Nagesh calls “rare consensus,” it represents a partisan commitment to the existing multi-stakeholder model.

It wouldn’t be politics without politics, and the phrase “free from government control” had to be removed from the bill at the last minute to quiet Democrats, who argued that the phrase could undermine the government’s ability to enforce existing or future laws.

FTC to Crack Down on Unauthorized Text Message Charges

The Federal Trade Commission is beginning a crackdown on “bill cramming” — premium text message services that run up your bill with unauthorized flirting tips and horoscopes. The FTC announced its first case on Wednesday, a civil complaint against Atlanta-based Wise Media, purveyors of expensive Horoscopes. They’re trying to freeze Wise Media’s assets and make them refund all unauthorized payments, with the FTC places in the “millions of dollars.”

Japanese Police Move to Punish Tor Users

The Japanese National Police Agency (NPA) keeps getting embarrassed by online crime investigations, so they’re asking ISPs to block customers found to have “abused” Tor, a service for anonymising your internet activity. Tor is used all over the world by activists and repressive regimes, but the NPA is more interested in the financial fraud, “predatory behavior,” and confidential leaks it claims Tor facilitates. The NPA is also encouraging officers to start “joining hacker communities” for information-gathering purposes. Hopefully it will go better than Boston PD’s attempts at covert infiltration of online communities.

What if speeding tickets were issued automatically, by a computer? Seems like it should be fairly simple: either you’re speeding or you’re not, and we know computers can accurately determine a moving vehicle’s speed. Not so, says Woodrow Hartzog, co-author of a paper that investigated the feasability of writing a computer program that issued tickets. “It is significantly more complicated than one thought,” he told Ars Technica.

On a related note, Will Knight cautioned this week to “proceed with caution toward the self-driving car.” Full autonomy is still sometime away, and Knight thinks much smarter artificial intelligence than what’s in Google’s cars will be needed before self-driving cars can be trusted on the road. “We will need automotive technologies to strike a tricky balance: they will have to extend our abilities without doing too much for the driver.”

Hacking The Law

San Francisco Weekly had a great essay this week by Rachel Swan about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and how it’s become an invaluable tool for Silicon Valley companies. Tech companies have unheard of lobbying power in Washington, with Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and many other spending billions on patent reform, the recent immigration bill, a massive public campaign against SOPA, and numerous other issues close to their industry. But it’s a different story on CFAA. “The irony is that Silicon Valley was built by people who broke rules, tore down digital walls, and embraced “disruption” — all the outlaw values that big companies are now trying to expel.”

Pregnancy Tests and Misinformation

Alexis Madrigal wrote a pair of fantastic essays in The Atlantic this week. (Which should came as no surprise to regular readers.) First: “The surprising story of how our data got us made as parents, before we’d actually told anyone we were going to be parents.” Alexis Madrigal and his wife are about to become parents, but before they’d told a single person they started getting baby catalogs in the mail. Right away, Madrigal recalled Charles Duhigg’s blockbuster on Target (another highly recommended read), in which he went in-depth on how Target aggressively datamines for prospective parents. Madrigal conducted his own investigation and found Marketing Genetics, a company that gathers data on buying habits so customers can be targeted with relevant catalogs. “If you’re used to looking at online visitor data, where we know so little about visitors to our site, the amount of customer data they have is stunning.”

The next day (Madrigal is an amazingly productive writer, a source of great jealousy), an essay on Sunil Tripathi, the missing Brown student that, for a blessedly short timeframe, was misidentified as a suspect in the Boston bombing this week. Madrigal took a look at the evidence and tried to figure out how it happened. The piece serves as a fascinating cautionary tale about social media and crowdsourcing, at a time when this kind of thing is becoming the norm. As usual, it took traditional media to set the record straight.

The Reality of Being 100% Reader-Supported

One last quick read that may be of interest to The Brief members. I wrote a short post on my personal blog this week on how The Brief is working out financially. To my delight, The Brief has quite a few paying members. But not enough to make it a viable full-time endeavor, or even enough to sustain daily publishing (you may have noticed I scaled back to only publishing three times a week recently; I hope to reverse that decision ASAP). This isn’t exactly unexpected, especially after only 6 months, but the conversion rates aren’t very encouraging. In a perfect world, I would be able to commit to The Brief full-time, and will continue to dedicate as much time as I can afford to making that a reality. As always, I welcome your feedback on what I could be doing differently and what makes The Brief worth paying for.

After two days of deliberation, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) today in a 288-127 vote.

Deliberations began on Tuesday with a series of proposed amendments geared towards improving the privacy protections in the bill, something the ACLU, EFF, the President, and a large segment of the general public, have advocated strongly for. The Obama administration even went as far as threatening to veto the bill (again) if it didn’t improve privacy protections. So it was surprising, then, when the House Rules Committee rejected almost every amendment directed at privacy. That is, it wouldn’t even let them go to a floor vote. Techdirt has a good rundown on what happened there.

In the end, 196 Republicans and 92 Democrats voted in favor of the bill, with only 29 Republicans voting against it, with 98 Democrats. It’s not yet certain how serious the administration’s veto threat is, but the House vote comes close to the necessary 2/3 majority to override a veto. Whatever the case, the Senate is next for CISPA, and there’s no reason to think the outcome will be much different from last year’s, which is to say there is not much chance it will pass. But the rhetoric is much higher this year (beware of “digital bombs”), and legislative and public interest drastically increased. If you’re not a fan of CISPA, and you really shouldn’t be in its current state, it’s time to turn your attention to the Senate.

IRS Promises It Always Gets A Warrant

Last week ended with some confusion over the IRS’s playbook on accessing the emails and text messages of taxpayers it’s investigating when a Freedom of Information Request by the ACLU was answered with 247 pages of documents that did very little to clear anything up. Steven Miller, the IRS’ acting commissioner, went some way to clearing that up on Tuesday, when he told a Senate committee the IRS has never obtained emails without a warrant. As far as he knows. The ACLU isn’t satisfied yet, though. Miller didn’t specify whether that policy also applies to other forms of communication, like text messages and instant messages, nor did he make explicit when the IRS started following Warshak, a reference to United States v. Warshak, in which it was ruled that the government must obtain a probable cause warrant to access emails.

Your Move, Aereo

Two weeks. That’s how long it took a group of broadcasters to make their next move following the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision that Aereo isn’t violating broadcasters’ rights. Rather than try to go after Aereo directly again, Fox, PBS, and some others are asking the court to reconsider an earlier case involving a similar Cablevision service, a ruling that provided Aereo with a legal loophole and that the broadcasters say “requires reconsideration.” In a nutshell, they want a full court review (known as en banc, and almost never granted), where the judges admit to being wrong the first time, which will likely take years to fully litigate. Good luck with that.

The biggest problem with the troll issue is the lack of information

— David Balto, former FTC policy director

One thing that’s been missing from a much of the conversation concerning patent trolls is hard data; the companies that conduct this kind of business typically keep as much as possible about their business secret, and have little incentive to do otherwise, particularly considering the consequences. As such, the practical effects of patent trolling — for consumers, for developers, and for the patent system in general — is a pretty bug unknown for the most part. A 6(b) investigation would let the FTC use subpoenas to compel companies to release this information — as they did late last year, when they opened an investigation into data brokers. This kind of data is sorely needed if we hope for meaningful patent reform. And as Ars notes, two directors publicly supporting such an investigation is a good indicator of wider FTC support. Unfortunately, the FTC’s full findings would likely not be made public, but the resulting report with aggregated data would be quite useful in improving potential legislation.

Another barrier, as I noted in February, is getting the government interested. Proposed patent troll legislation died on its feet in 2011, partly through lack of congressional interest. We did get the America Invents Act, which went into effect in March this year, but it’s widely agreed that it falls way short. This year, we have the president on board, and although interest is higher in the SHIELD Act of 2013, which proposes shifting the cost of lawsuits on to the patent owners, it’s a problematic bill that could be helped immensely by having more reliable data available.

This is one of those problems largely caused by the advance of technology (and the relentlass advance of assholes looking to make a quick buck), that the law hasn’t caught up with. It will get there, eventually, and in the meantime the patent protection racket is more profitable than ever, Lodsys just sued a bunch of app developers (again), claiming it has a patent on in-app purchases, and Rackspace is taking matters into its own hands and countersuing its patent troll, something many smaller businesses would love the opportunity to do.

The Australian Law Reform Commission announced its plan to reform copyright in Australia last year, releasing a set of considerations, but according to some information released (perhaps mistakenly) that suggested a surprisingly forward-thinking approach. At the time, the idea of fair use—a broad set of exceptions in U.S. copyright law that give content creators some license to use copyrighted works without permission that is nonexistent in Australian copyright law—was only given brief consideration, but it appears the ALRC is looking quite closely at instituting fair use in its copyright reform. A tweet sent by the Australian Law Library Association, who were present at a meeting where the ALRC revelaed some of its proposals, said “ALRC announced they will be recommending ‘fair use’ provision be implemented.” Good news for Australians.

China Agrees to Work With U.S. on Cybersecurity

After months of bickering and repeated denials, China has agreed to setup a “working group” on cybersecurity, in conjunction with the United States, said John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State, last Friday. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Kerry “Cyberspace should be an area where the two countries can increase mutual trust and cooperation.” It’s not yet known what the working group will do, but it’s being taken as an encouraging sign that China is cooperating.

On its blog, the ACLU writes that it sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the IRS last year, seeking information on whether the IRS Criminal Division gets a warrant before accessing people’s email and text messages. They finally received a response, in th form of 247 pages of documents, and—surprise!—the IRS is being less than forthright about it. According to the documentation they sent, the IRS’s position has long been that they don’t need warrants—the same approach most law enforcement takes, under the outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act—and that even the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches don’t apply. But in 2010, in United States v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit of Appeals ruled that the government must obtain a probable cause warrant to access emails. While the IRS’s position pre-Warshak is clear, their position since is not. Here’s the ACLU’s conclusion:

The IRS had an opportunity to officially reconsider its position when it issued edits to the Internal Revenue Manual in March 2011. But its policy stayed the same: the Manual explained that under ECPA, “Investigators can obtain everything in an account except for unopened e-mail or voice mail stored with a provider for 180 days or less using a [relevant-and-material-standard] court order” instead of a warrant. Again, no suggestion that the Fourth Amendment might require more.

Great! The final word from the ACLU: “The IRS should tell the public whether it always gets a warrant to access email and other private communications in the course of criminal investigations. And if the agency does not get a warrant, it should change its policy to always require one.”