ICANN and the European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) encouraging further cooperation between the two organizations on strengthening multistakeholder Internet governance in Europe, ICANN said Wednesday. The MOU, signed by ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé and EuroDIG Managing Director Sandra Hoferichter during ICANN’s meeting in Dublin last week, formalizes ICANN’s involvement in EuroDIG activities. EuroDIG will include ICANN in its outreach to European stakeholders and ICANN will “contribute its expertise in technical and logistical matters such as remote participation and capacity building,” the groups said in the agreement. ICANN will also increase its existing involvement in EuroDIG’s annual conference.

A coalition of privacy and civil liberties groups sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Thursday, asking him to “disclose information on the impact that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] has had inside the U.S.,” a TechFreedom news release said. The letter was signed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Cyber Privacy Project, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, R Street, Restore the Fourth, the Sunlight Foundation and the World Privacy Forum, and several others. In it, the groups ask Clapper to “disclose an estimate of the number of communications involving U.S. residents that are subject to surveillance, the number of times the FBI has used U.S. person identifiers to query Section 702 data, and the policies governing how agencies notify individuals that they intend to use information derived from Section 702 surveillance.” Since the FISA Amendments law is set to expire at the end of 2017, “this information is key to evaluating the decisions Congress will finally have to make about reforming over-broad surveillance,” TechFreedom Policy Counsel Tom Struble said.

The Trustworthy Accountability Group announced an industrywide anti-fraud program, Verified by TAG, to “fight digital ad fraud and bring new transparency across the digital ad ecosystem,” a TAG news release said Thursday. Companies can apply to be verified by TAG as a trusted advertising party, it said. Registered companies will receive a TAG-issued identifier they can share with partners and pass with every ad they buy, process, place or run, it said. TAG is also developing a Payment ID system to create a record of who gets paid for every impression, to prevent criminals from receiving ad spend, it said. “The TAG Registry and upcoming Payment ID system will act like a ‘two-factor authentication’ for the digital ad supply chain,” said TAG CEO Mike Zaneis. “Through the TAG Registry, buyers will be able to ensure that they are working with trusted parties at every step of their campaigns, while the Payment ID system will ensure that payments only go to legitimate players, choking off the cash to criminals.” Registration is open, and "it’s time for every company in digital advertising to get TAG’ed,” Zaneis said. TAG’s registration program has been endorsed by the “big five” ad agency holding companies, plus AOL, Google and other major programmatic ad players, the release said.

International privacy and consumer organizations celebrating the success of Max Schrems' case before the European Court of Justice urged worldwide data protection officials to support a “meaningful legal framework that would protect the fundamental rights of both citizens and consumers in the online era,” in a joint statement issued Wednesday during the International Data Protection and Privacy Conference in Amsterdam. Organizers of the conference focused on the “Bridges report,” which recommends “no substantive changes in law” and does “little to change the business or government behavior that threatens privacy and data protection,” the groups said. Failure to address issues ranging from “Big Data” to drone surveillance at the conference is a “lost opportunity,” they said. Focusing on failed policies like self-regulation makes the work or privacy experts more difficult, they said. The groups, which include Access Now, Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Cyber Privacy Project, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Patient Privacy Rights and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, want “Data Protection Commissioners to refocus their attention on the need to update and enforce privacy law,” saying they share a common goal to strengthen the fundamental rights and the protection of privacy and data protection.

The Rutherford Institute bemoaned a federal court's dismissal of a motion by educational, legal, human rights and media organizations (see 1509040029) that asked the court to reject the U.S. government’s motion to dismiss Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA against the NSA and the Department of Justice over mass surveillance programs of all international text-based communications. The dismissal of the lawsuit that was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Rutherford, Wikipedia and others came "despite extensive evidence that the government is systematically copying and substantially reviewing all international text-based communications," said Rutherford in a Tuesday news release. U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis ruled the groups don’t have standing to bring a First and Fourth Amendment suit. “On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears,” said Rutherford Institute President John Whitehead.

The Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability's (CCWG-Accountability) consensus at ICANN's Dublin meeting last week on several important provisions in its proposed set of changes to ICANN's accountability mechanisms “marked an important step in developing a mechanism that will effectively empower business and other stakeholders to hold ICANN accountable,” said U.S. Council for International Business (USCIB) Vice President-Information and Communications Technology Policy Barbara Wanner in a news release Monday. “We have repeatedly said that accountability mechanisms must be in place before the IANA transition takes place.” CCWG-Accountability agreed in part to proceed with a sole designator model as its mechanism for enforcing proposed new ICANN community powers (see 1510220053). “What I think we can take away from this week is the wonderful and amazing way in which we have brought together in the same room people from different [stakeholder] groups to work in a collaborative manner -- and that makes a difference and brings progress,” said CCWG-Accountability co-Chairman Mathieu Weill in the USCIB news release.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation will urge an appeals court to reject government attempts to block an appeal (see 1508050058) in Jewel v. NSA, “EFF’s long-running lawsuit battling unconstitutional mass surveillance of Internet and phone communications,” a news release said Monday. “Evidence from whistleblowers and the government itself confirms the Internet backbone spying, yet a district court judge ruled earlier this year that there wasn’t enough publicly available information to rule if the program is constitutional.” EFF appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The government argues the appeal is “premature and entwined with other issues that are still being litigated in the lower court,” but EFF Special Counsel Richard Wiebe will argue Wednesday that the “appeals court should reject the government’s delay tactics, and finally address whether backbone spying is legal and constitutional,” it said. The hearing begins at 2 p.m. PDT in Courtroom 1 at the 9th Circuit in Pasadena, California.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other privacy advocates opposed to encryption back doors have three days left to obtain the 100,000 signatures on their WhiteHouse.gov petition (see 1509300059) required to receive a White House response, EFF tweeted Monday. The petition had close to 97,700 by our deadline.

“After a second review of the European Court of Justice's (ECJ) judgment (see 1510060001), it will be very hard to come up with a solution that addresses all problems identified by the Court, given the U.S. position,” said Max Schrems, whose questions about the U.S. government’s access to his Facebook data prompted a review of safe harbor, in a post for the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ Privacy Perspectives blog Thursday. “While all issues brought up by the ECJ could be solved in theory, the U.S. government will very likely not be able or willing to limit surveillance laws to an extent that they comply with all requirements of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR) in respect to the right to privacy,” Schrems said. “The attempt to enact a Judicial Redress Act and the proposed 'Umbrella Agreement' show that the two sides can only reach agreement for very limited safeguards, that are far from what the ECJ now requires.” A new agreement will have to include much stricter restrictions on businesses, Schrems said. U.S. businesses that comply with surveillance by U.S. authorities like the Prism program, which according to documents shared by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden include AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, “may require serious reorganization,” Schrems said.

AOL completed its acquisition of end-to-end mobile platform Millennial Media (see 1509030062), it said in a news release Friday. AOL made a tender offer of $1.75 in cash per share of Millennial Media common stock, which expired at midnight Thursday, it said. At the expiration of the tender offer, nearly 115 million Millennial shares were validly tendered, or about 80.3 percent of its outstanding shares, said AOL, which completed the acquisition of the remaining eligible shares not acquired in the tender offer. Millennial Media is now an AOL subsidiary, AOL said. AOL itself has been bought by Verizon (see 1505120019).