Reports of the FBI and NSA using foreign surveillance programs to watch Muslim-Americans are “sadly reminiscent of government surveillance of civil rights activists and anti-war protesters in the 1960s and 70s,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Staff Attorney Mark Rumold in a Wednesday blog post (http://bit.ly/1neAUtC). The Intercept reported Tuesday that documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed the U.S. government was using its surveillance programs intended to target foreigners to covertly monitor the emails of prominent Muslim-Americans, including attorneys, professors, a civil rights advocate and a former government official (http://bit.ly/1k43Vn7). The government has previously acknowledged its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702-authorized surveillance programs incidentally sweep in information about American residents, and a recent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) said the government’s minimization procedures were mostly sufficient to protect the constitutional rights of Americans (CD July 3 p5). The new revelations show this isn’t the case, EFF’s Rumold said. “The government’s surveillance of prominent Muslim activists based on constitutionally protected activity fails the test of a democratic society that values freedom of expression, religious freedom, and adherence to the rule of law.” EFF represents the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the founder of which, Nihad Awad, was one of those the government is reportedly monitoring. This type of surveillance is a “stain on our nation,” said Rumold, saying the revelations emphasize the need for legislation to alter the government’s surveillance programs. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Justice said jointly Wednesday that it’s “entirely false that U.S. intelligence agencies conduct electronic surveillance of political, religious or activist figures solely because they disagree with public policies or criticize the government, or for exercising constitutional rights.” Without addressing any of the individuals mentioned in the report, the agencies said that “with limited exceptions (for example, in an emergency), our intelligence agencies must have a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to target any U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident for electronic surveillance.” If the court finds an individual “is an agent of a foreign power under this rigorous standard,” that person “is not exempted just because of his or her occupation,” the agencies said.

The Open Interconnect Consortium formed to promote interoperability among the billions of connected devices expected to come online by 2020, the consortium said Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1mFaGBz). Founding members include Atmel, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, Samsung and Wind River. The consortium will target interoperability in PCs, smartphones, tablets, home appliances and “new wearable form factors” by establishing a specification, an open source implementation and a certification program for wirelessly connecting devices, it said. “The first open source code will target the specific requirements for smart home and office solutions, with more use case scenarios to follow.” Such open choice specs “could make it simple to remotely control and receive notifications from smart home appliances or enterprise devices using securely provisioned smartphones, tablets or PCs,” it said. Consortium members want to “provide secure and reliable device discovery and connectivity” across multiple operating systems and platforms, including iOS, Android, Linux, Tizen and “other real time operating systems,” it said. There are “multiple proposals and forums driving different approaches” to interoperability, “but no single solution addresses the majority of key requirements,” it said. “We need industry consolidation around a common, interoperable approach,” and a broad industry consensus “to create a scalable solution,” it said. More companies are expected to join the consortium in the coming months, it said. Though the six companies listed are founding members, the consortium’s “organizational structure is not yet formalized,” it said. It said it soon will announce more details, including “membership levels and bylaws.”

Revelations over the weekend about the NSA’s foreign Internet surveillance program’s collection of non-targeted American citizens’ electronic communications could have ramifications on the Hill, Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) President Ed Black told us Monday. The Washington Post reported Sunday that nine of 10 account holders whose information was collected by the NSA’s surveillance program authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) were not the intended surveillance target (http://wapo.st/1xyyGZF). And nearly half of the surveillance files contained personal information of U.S. citizens or residents, The Post said. Although the NSA “masked” the information of 65,000 of the personal details about Americans, the Post uncovered 900 email addresses that could be “strongly linked” to U.S. citizens or residents. “We target only valid foreign intelligence targets under that authority, and the most that you could conclude from these news reports is that each valid foreign intelligence target talks to an average of nine people,” said Office of the Director of National Intelligence Robert Litt in a statement. Black said Litt was downplaying the report’s importance. “It’s noteworthy that it shows such a broad impact on what are clearly just average American citizens,” Black told us. Government surveillance can be esoteric and confusing, Black said, and these revelations make the issue “clearer” and lets “the broad public get a feel of the breadth of impact of innocent civilians.” This may lead to more pressure on lawmakers to enact strict surveillance legislation, he said. Privacy and industry representatives were critical of the House-passed surveillance reform bill, the USA Freedom Act (HR-3361) (CD May 23 p9), saying it was too watered down to meaningfully change government surveillance programs. CCIA -- whose members include Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other tech companies -- withdrew its support of the bill after its passage in the House. “Legislators will be reminded by [these revelations] that we need to be very careful when enacting legislation to minimize the existence of language which could be seen as loopholes,” said Black. The House later passed an amendment to its appropriations bill prohibiting the NSA from using funds to do warrantless searches of information collected under Section 702 searches (CD June 23 p14). The Senate is considering its own version of the USA Freedom Act (S-1599). “As we have always said, we also incidentally intercept the communications of persons in contact with valid foreign intelligence targets,” said an NSA spokeswoman. “That’s why Congress required that there be rules minimizing the collection, retention, and dissemination of information about U.S. persons.” The NSA pointed to a recent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report, which said the 702 report was legal, and had robust protection of Americans’ civil liberties (CD July 3 p5). CCIA’s Black countered: “The extent to which some people are covered is something the NSA, the intelligence community, has not been anxious to highlight."

The European Commission is attempting to coordinate IP protections “by focusing on non-legislative strategies” in a 10-point plan (http://bit.ly/1rIjoRr), said Jeremy Malcolm, Electronic Frontier Foundation senior global policy analyst, in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1mYX56Y) Thursday. Malcolm focused on a provision within the plan that could forbid advertisers or intermediaries from accepting payment from or posting advertisements on infringing websites. Based on other commission documents, the “'follow the money'” strategy “extends to anyone accused of infringing copyright on a ‘commercial scale,'” which “potentially includes an incredibly broad swathe of non-commercial activity,” he said. “Deprived of the ability to receive money from donations or advertisements to cover hosting expenses, popular sites that host user-generated content may have no choice but to close,” he said. “Our press release [http://bit.ly/1pTlCtb] which accompanied the action plan makes clear that we are not trying to follow a punitive approach as suggested in the article here but a more balanced approach,” said a commission spokeswoman.

Microsoft joined the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), a telecom and tech company group working to develop global Internet of Things standards, the company said in a Wednesday blog post (http://bit.ly/1mlSsF4). AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel founded IIC in March (CD March 31 p14). “The IIC’s goal is to reduce customers’ required time and complexity for building intelligent systems through open interoperability standards and common architectures to connect smart devices, machines, people, processes and data,” said Microsoft. The company also said it joined the AllSeen Alliance, a larger consortium of tech companies like Cisco, Panasonic and Sharp working to make connected devices of all brands work together.

About half of multichannel video programming distributor subscribers say they're aware of TV Everywhere services, a study by the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing found. It said 44 percent of MVPD customers “have verified at least once to view TV content in the past six months,” in a news release. The study also identified correlations between TV Everywhere and increased positive perceptions of MVPDs and content providers. Fifty-five percent of respondents said the service “makes the MVPD subscription a better value for the money,” it said. About half of respondents said TV Everywhere makes them feel more positive about their service providers, it said. Hub Entertainment conducted the survey of 608 TV consumers ages 16-74 in April.

Cybersecurity needs a “holistic approach,” White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel said in a blog post Wednesday. “In an overall strategic context, I think that we need to continue to work on how we can flip the economics of cyberspace; specifically, how we can change our overall approach to cybersecurity to more directly address economic and human behavioral factors,” Daniel said (http://1.usa.gov/1o96mr4). “For example, we need to figure out how to use economic incentives to create a market for systems that are secure by default and that increase [the] cost of conducting malicious activities in cyberspace.” The non-technical aspects of cybersecurity are the hard parts, Daniel said.

IP and mobile technology company Vringo received a notice from the Patent and Trademark Office confirming the “validity” of company patent No. 6,314,420, said a company news release (http://bit.ly/1vxzFpT) Wednesday. Google challenged Vringo’s patent claim in 2012, but was rejected, it said. The USPTO began reexamining the claim in 2013, only to uphold its previous decision, it said.

Seven Internet service and communications providers filed a legal complaint Wednesday against the U.K.’s NSA equivalent for “attacking” network infrastructure, said a Wednesday Privacy International news release (http://bit.ly/1sXgee5). The complaint, filed at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (http://bit.ly/TPu6as), said the British government’s attempts to access networks to gather individual’s communications “undermine the trust we all place on the internet and greatly endangers the world’s most powerful tool for democracy and free expression,” said Privacy International Deputy Director Eric King in a statement. “It completely cripples our confidence in the internet economy and threatens the rights of all those who use it.” King said NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters run the activities jointly. Reports of such surveillance activities surfaced partly from documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, said Privacy International.

"To gain access to documents showing how intelligence agencies choose whether to disclose software security flaws known as ‘zero days,'” the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (http://bit.ly/1xd6US0) seeking injunctive relief against the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), said an EFF blog post (http://bit.ly/1qkG4p8) Tuesday. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, “seeks transparency on one of the least understood elements of the U.S. intelligence community’s toolset: security vulnerabilities,” said Andrew Crocker, EFF legal fellow, in the post. “A thriving market has emerged for these zero days; in some cases governments -- including the United States -- will purchase these vulnerabilities, which they can use to gain access to targets’ computers,” said the blog post. EFF filed a related FOIA request May 6, but hadn’t received any documents, “despite ODNI agreeing to expedite the request,” it said.