White House to share secret documents on the warrantless domestic surveillance program

The White House Thursday agreed to let US Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy and Republican Sen. Arlen Specter see classified documents pertaining to President George W. Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance program, in hopes that it would speed up the approval of proposed legislation to grant telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution for assisting in government eavesdropping between 2001 and 2007. The committee’s endorsement of the immunity plan is needed for the rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to move forward. President Bush has threatened to veto the legislation unless it includes the telecommunications liability protection.Exactly what electronic surveillance the Bush administration has conducted inside the U.S. is classified.

Under current rules, the government can monitor Americans’ phone and computer lines outside the country if the Attorney General certifies that the American is believed to be an agent of a foreign power. The new bill would require the government to get a court order to eavesdrop on Americans wherever they are in the world.

NPR has an excellent primer on the current state of FISA and legislation.

Comcast Interfering with Online File Sharing

The Associated Press is reporting that Comcast is interfering with high speed Internet users’ attempts to share files on-line.  The Associated Press confirmed this interference with a series of nationwide tests.  As the No. 2 Internet provider in the U.S., Comcasts data discrimination program may influence other ISP’s to adopt similar technological measures. 

EFF is also reporting the results of  similar testing to confirm the AP’s results.  EFF explains that Comcast is forging TCP RST packets which cause connections to drop, a technique also used by Internet censorship systems in China.  Apparently, these packets cause software at both ends to believe, mistakenly, that the software on the other side does not want to continue communicating.  See EFF’s post for more.
 

Google Announces New Copyright Monitoring Tool for YouTube

On Oct. 15th, Google Inc. announced the launch of “Youtube Video Identification.”  This tool allows copyright owners an effective means to easily identify their content and manage how it is made available on YouTube.According to a statement on the Official Google Blog, Youtube Video Identification “goes above and beyond” the company’s legal responsibilities. See the info on Youtube Video Identification here.

Some critics of the move, including Public Knowledge, a D.C.-based digital rights advocacy group, feel that this step was unnecessary, and that Google may have caved to the entertainment industry, in the face of the upcoming $1B Viacom lawsuit.  Read Public Knowledge’s excellent summary of the new Google system here.