Conservative privacy advocates urged Congress not to automatically reauthorize the controversial USA Patriot Act Section 215, telling congressional aides during an R Street Institute event Wednesday to urge their bosses to conduct a thorough debate on the provision that authorized controversial NSA bulk collection of phone metadata. The phone metadata collection program was one of the major NSA surveillance initiatives disclosed through former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's leaks to the media beginning in June 2013. Without reauthorization, Section 215 and other key provisions of the Patriot Act are to sunset June 1, with May 21 widely seen as the last working day Congress can act on reauthorization, given the Memorial Day recess. The debate over Section 215 reauthorization is set to reignite when Congress returns from recess next week, while other legislators are pushing for more wholesale NSA surveillance reforms.
Antitrust laws need clarification and U.S. patent laws need to be reformed, especially because there's more economic evidence available worldwide, economists and antitrust lawyers said at a George Mason Law Review antitrust event Thursday. Some also sought more transparency and privacy protections, and a boost in the number of people working on antitrust cases. Panelists touted the superiority of U.S. antitrust laws.
Former NSA analyst-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden said it's the bosses at his former employer and not rank-and-file employees who abused the public trust with widescale government surveillance. His remarks came via teleconference during a privacy symposium at Harvard University Friday. The Internet was designed to promote surveillance, said security specialist Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, sparking a conversation on whether it was possible to have an Internet and maintain privacy at all. Schneier said the public should not have been surprised they were being watched. John DeLong, director of commercial solutions at the NSA, who was director of compliance while Snowden worked there, made a rare public appearance for an employee of that agency. He said the NSA was authorized to collect the information that it had gathered from the American public. “Protecting privacy today is more an art than a science,” DeLong said. “The science and engineering of privacy [is] the key challenge of our time.” Snowden, who spoke via a live video feed from Moscow, said the "NSA is virtually unregulated." He said NSA employees are "not bad people" but "a culture for impunity develops.”
House members and Commerce Department officials criticized alleged abuse by some employees within the Patent and Trademark Office’s telework program and its hiring practices (see 1411100040), in a joint House Judiciary and Oversight committees hearing Tuesday. The PTO employees who allegedly abused the telework program already should’ve been fired, said House Appropriations Committee member Frank Wolf, R-Va., in prepared testimony. Wolf said he’s a “huge advocate” of telework programs, but that the PTO needs stronger enforcement policies for those programs. Commerce’s 2014 investigation uncovered that a PTO “senior official intervened in the hiring process to ensure that a nonselected candidate, who was the fiancé of a close relative of the official, was ultimately selected for a position as a trademark examiner,” said Todd Zinser, Commerce inspector general, in prepared remarks. Ninety-five percent of PTO paralegals who participated in the Patent Hoteling Program had “insufficient work assigned to them over a four-year period despite a significant and growing backlog of appeals,” he said. The PTO received four “whistleblower” complaints in 2012 alleging abuse of the telework program, said Margaret Focarino, PTO commissioner for patents, in prepared testimony. “The USPTO investigated the claims, immediately took action to address issues raised during the investigation, and subsequently submitted a report to the Department of Commerce Office of the Inspector General." That report posited eight recommendations to improve the telework program, said Focarino. “We began implementing these recommendations and taking other actions even before submitting the report.”
The FCC “overstepped its authority” and “implemented a rule inconsistent with existing law” when it doubled the record-retention requirement in a July E-rate order (CD July 14 p1), USTelecom said in a petition for reconsideration filed Thursday and made available to us. The rule will “adversely” affect the program, the filing said. The agency had no comment. Despite an agency assertion otherwise, the rule is not necessary to comply with the False Claims Act, USTelecom said. That law “is designed to ferret out fraudulent claims by government contractors, not to increase the recordkeeping expense of government contractors,” said USTelecom. The act has a 10-year statute of limitations, the association said, but “a statute of limitations period by which a claim must be brought and a recordkeeping period during which records must be maintained serve fundamentally different purposes -- purposes that the Order conflates.” The 10-year requirement exceeds the requirement in other federal programs, many of which require record retention of five years or less, USTelecom said. The costs of maintaining and storing records for 10 years “is significant and would “greatly outweigh any purported benefit from having available records during the entire time that a person could theoretically assert a False Claims Act claim,” said the association.
A petition asking the Obama administration to protect journalists' “right to report” in the digital era was launched by the Committee to Protect Journalists Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1rMWbig). The petition seeks three commitments from the administration: a presidential directive banning the “hacking and surveillance” of journalists and media organizations; putting limits on “aggressive prosecutions” of journalists and whistleblowers; and preventing the “harassment” of journalists at all U.S. borders, it said. The petition was signed by individual reporters, news organizations and free speech groups, including The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it said.
Samsung Electronics America will pay $2.3 million to settle with the Justice Department over allegations of providing inaccurate country of origin claims to resellers, said a DOJ news release (http://1.usa.gov/1thUGXL). The company was accused of causing “the submission of false claims for products sold on General Service Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) contracts in violation of the Trade Agreements Act” (TAA), said the department Tuesday. “Samsung caused resellers of its products to sell items on their GSA MAS contracts in violation of the TAA by knowingly providing inaccurate information to the resellers regarding the country of origin of the goods.” The government said that “Samsung represented to the resellers, who in turn represented to federal agencies, that the specified products were made in TAA designated countries, generally Korea or Mexico, when the specified products were in fact manufactured in China, which is not a TAA designated country.” The allegations began with Robert Simmons, a former Samsung employee who made the claims under whistleblower provisions, which let the whistleblower share in any recovered money. Simmons’ share has not yet been determined, said the DOJ. The case was filed in U.S. District Court for Maryland. DOJ and Samsung noted there’s been no finding of liability related to the case. “Samsung Electronics fully cooperated with the DOJ’s investigation, and the claims resolved by the settlement are allegations only,” emailed a Samsung spokeswoman. “There has been no determination of wrongdoing by the company. We are committed to working with the government, and abiding by its regulations."
A New York appellate court denied Sprint’s request to throw out state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s $400 million lawsuit against the company for allegedly undercollecting and underpaying state and local sales taxes. Brought under the New York False Claims Act, Schneiderman’s suit would require Sprint to pay three times its approximately $130 million underpayment, said the AG’s office in a news release Thursday (http://bit.ly/1hCjeF2). Sprint had sought a dismissal of the suit, saying the AG hadn’t adequately shown that the carrier knowingly violated the tax law and that the company could not be held liable for conduct before the 2010 passage of the False Claims Act. Thursday’s decision by a five-judge panel in a New York appellate court upheld state Supreme Court Justice Peter Sherwood’s July decision to deny Sprint’s petition.
European Parliament recommendations for dealing with U.S. mass surveillance can’t be allowed to simply “evaporate” when a new legislature is elected in May, member (MEP) Claude Moraes, of the Socialists and Democrats and the U.K., said Thursday. He presented the final version of his resolution (bit.ly/1e58zU1) on spying to general preliminary approval by the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE). The document recognized the magnitude of the revelations and their ongoing nature, and pushed for “forward planning” to ensure there are specific proposals on the table for follow-up in the next session. It called for a “European digital habeas corpus” to protect privacy based on seven actions: (1) Adopt the data protection revamp package this year. (2) Finalize the EU-U.S. umbrella agreement on data protection with provisions allowing redress for Europeans whose data has been transferred to the U.S. for law enforcement purposes. (3) Suspend the safe harbor agreement allowing data transfers to the U.S. pending a full review. (4) Suspend the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program until the umbrella agreement has been concluded and all problems raised by the parliamentary enquiry have been addressed. (5) Protect the rule of law and Europeans’ rights with a focus on threats to press freedom and better whistleblower safeguards. (6) Develop a European strategy for information technology independence. (7) Develop the EU as a reference player for democratic, neutral Internet governance. The report sets a proposed timetable for monitoring implementation to try to keep the findings high on the EU political agenda. “We want to look to the future,” Moraes said. The report is an “excellent, very comprehensive package” whose recommendations should be adopted as this Parliament’s legacy to the next, said MEP Sophie in ’t Veld, of the Alliance for Liberals and Democrats in Europe and the Netherlands. However, she said, the issue of enforcement is also important. Europe has good data protection rules in place which national authorities and the European Commission should be much stricter in enforcing, she said. The next parliament should be given the authority to conduct full enquiries, including subpoena power, she said. Moraes’ report is “one of the most important” in this legislative session, said MEP Cornelia Ernst, Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left and Germany. The question now is what parliament’s priorities will be, she said. Legislators must ask whether they have gotten to the heart of the matter and what happens next with the report, she said. Parliament needs stronger powers to be able to make a difference, she said. Proposed amendments from LIBE members are due Jan. 22.
The Center for Constitutional Rights petitioned the Supreme Court last week to reverse or change its ruling in Clapper v. Amnesty International, the rationale from which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had used to reject the center’s concerns about government surveillance in a separate case, Center for Constitutional Rights v. Obama (http://bit.ly/1a6JsMW). “We have always been confident that our communications -- including privileged attorney-client phone calls -- were being unlawfully monitored by the NSA, but Edward Snowden’s revelations of a massive, indiscriminate NSA spying program changes the picture,” Senior Attorney Shayana Kadidal said in a news release Thursday (http://bit.ly/1lFpJ8Q). “Federal courts have dismissed surveillance cases, including ours, based on criteria established before Snowden’s documents proved that such concerns are obviously well-founded.” The center considers U.S. surveillance practices unconstitutional, it said. “Eight years after the initial disclosures that spawned this litigation, the seeming futility of attempts to debate the legality of broad surveillance in the courts has led to that debate being removed to the only remaining open forum available -- the press -- through the intervention of whistleblowers,” the attorneys said in the 108-page filing for a writ of certiorari. “The current vitality of that debate demonstrates the exceptional importance of the questions before this Court.”