Edward Snowden criticizes Russia’s mass surveillance law, and a Russian official retaliates by outing him ‒ as a Russian intelligence source. Silent Circle, the phone company that built its marketing on fear and loathing of the NSA, is nearing bankruptcy. Members of the dominant European Parliament faction are asking the Commission, “Hey! How come you keep demanding more data export and privacy concessions from the US without asking for bupkis from China?” And the FBI now has three politically viable paths to win back authority to obtain electronic communications transaction records with a National Security Letter.
Truly, episode 123 feels like a reward for living through 2013.
In other news, Alan Cohn and Katie Cassel report on the Bank for International Settlements’ surprisingly sophisticated cybersecurity standards. I whinge about Bob Litt’s 18 pages of binding commitments to Europe on how the US will conduct intelligence from now on. Alan and I compliment CBP on its technical savvy in easing border clearance ‒ and ponder the role of stools in protecting the homeland.
I report that Belgian courts have reversed a verdict by the local DPA against Facebook, and Maury Shenk comments on broader implications for EU data protection. Katie notes that FTC commissioner Maureen Olhausen continues to tout the advantages of her agency’s “flexible” privacy and security standard and to diss the FCC’s more explicit approach. I mock the ACLU for demanding the right to violate criminal law to get information from private companies and ask if I can do the same to get the ACLU to answer my Twitter questions about whether it provides real security for its clients. And Maury reports that China is still rolling out new internet regulations, from online search standards to where to store Chinese citizens’ personal data (China, natch).
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