There is currently no way to wiretap some of these communications methods easily, and companies effectively have been able to avoid complying with court orders. While the companies argue that they have no means to facilitate the wiretap, the government, in turn, has no desire to enter into what could be a drawn-out contempt proceeding.

Under the draft proposal, a court could levy a series of escalating fines, starting at tens of thousands of dollars, on firms that fail to comply with wiretap orders, according to persons who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. A company that does not comply with an order within a certain period would face an automatic judicial inquiry, which could lead to fines. After 90 days, fines that remain unpaid would double daily.

... The proposal, however, is likely to encounter resistance, said industry officials and privacy advocates.

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As CNET reported Wednesday, "Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on portions of networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws." The Justice Department has been granting immunity to service providers through special "2511" letters that absolve carriers in the event that the surveillance is found to run afoul of federal law. As such, the DoJ is secretly enabling AT&T and others to evade wiretapping laws so that the government can conduct surveillance on parts of their networks.

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As noted here Tuesday, a huge amount of special interest funding ($84 million, to be precise) may have helped more than double the number of Democrat representatives willing to vote for CISPA from 42 to 92. However, the bill -- which would allow the private sector to acquire and search sensitive data relating to U.S. citizens -- is going nowhere particularly fast in the Senate. As the AP reported:

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CISPA is designed to create a structure in which private companies can seamlessly share information about their users with the government in cases involving threats to "cybersecurity." The House of Representatives passed the bill on Thursday, but the Obama administration has threatened to veto it in its current form.

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"The best thing would have been a dog," explains Joseph King, professor of terrorism and organized crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former chief of counterterrorism for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. "They don't need to be at a choke point; they can move through the crowd."

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CISPA is designed to make it easier for private companies to share information about "cybersecurity" issues -- hacker attacks, Chinese sabotage, etc. --  with government agencies. Under CISPA companies such as Facebook or Microsoft could freely hand over personal information -- emails, texts, news feed postings -- without having to worry about potential negative consequences, including litigation from outraged users. Naturally, CISPA enjoys wide support from by the tech lobby; IBM sent more than 200 executives to Washington this week to push for its passage. The bill also enjoys bipartisan backing. The House of Representatives is set to vote on the bill either Wednesday or Thursday.

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"We will go to ends of the earth to find those responsible for this despicable crime,'' said FBI special agent Richard Deslauriers at a press conference in Boston on Tuesday morning. But what he really meant was we will leave no digital stone unturned. Every one and zero will be interrogated.

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My guess is that even the original Big Brother, "1984's" all-seeing dictator of Oceania, justified his surveillance as in service of the greater good. So it's not all that reassuring to hear that CourseSmart's product is made to be used with the best of intentions, even if it's entirely understandable that professors might be eager for better data measuring how students are "engaging" with their textbooks. In the context of our current digital lives, in which everything we do is measured and recorded and sliced and diced, CourseSmart seems like just one more brick in the panopticonic wall. One also has to wonder, how do such strategies fit into the larger trends remaking education?

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The regulators announced plans to take legal action Tuesday. But the threat of fines will mean little to the Internet giant. As the Guardian noted, two threatened sets of fines (one up to $500,000, one up to $300,000) amount to the money generated by Google in sales every 10 minutes. Via the Guardian:

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The decision upheld a 2011 ruling by the Florida Supreme Court suppressing evidence uncovered at Joelis Jardines' home with the help of Franky, a chocolate Labrador retriever with a strong record of sniffing out drug stashes. The Economist explained the justices' reasoning, the decision and its relevance to privacy laws more broadly:

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A budding commercial drone industry is poised to put mostly small, unmanned aircraft to countless uses, from monitoring crops to acting as lookouts for police SWAT teams, but federal and state privacy laws have been outpaced by advances in drone technology, experts said at a Senate hearing.

Current privacy protections from aerial surveillance are based on court decisions from the 1980s, the Judiciary Committee was told, before the widespread drone use was anticipated. In general, manned helicopters and planes already have the potential to do the same kinds of surveillance and intrusive information gathering as drones, but drones can be flown more cheaply, for longer periods of time and at less risk to human life. That makes it likely that surveillance and information-gathering will become much more widespread, legal experts said.

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While the White House has urged Congress to pass a cybersecurity bill, CISPA would give businesses and the federal government legal protection to share data on cyberthreats with each other and has garnered criticism for being overly broad and failing to protect user privacy. HuffPo's Gerry Smith reported on the online actions taken up by thousands of sites this week to fight the bill:

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It's a lesson in state-of-the-art online flimflam, the generation of billions of advertising impressions and clicks through bot-generated traffic.

Increasingly, digital agencies and buy-side technology firms are seeing massive traffic and audience spikes from groups of Web publishers few people have ever heard of. These sites -- billed as legitimate media properties -- are built to look authentic on the surface, with generic, nonalarm-sounding content. But after digging deeper, it becomes evident that very little of these sites' audiences are real people. Yet big name advertisers are spending millions trying to reach engaged users on these properties.

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The law has long been criticized by privacy advocates as a loophole when it comes to protecting Americans from government snooping.

"There is no principled basis to treat email less than 180 days old differently than email more than 180 days old," Elana Tyrangiel, acting assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy, told a House judiciary subcommittee. She also said emails deserve the same legal protections whether they have been opened or not.

Tyrangiel's testimony gives Congress a starting point as it begins to review a complicated 1986 law known as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Written at a time before the internet was popularized and before many Americans used Yahoo or Google servers to store their emails indefinitely, the law allows federal authorities to obtain a subpoena approved by a federal prosecutor – not a judge – to access electronic messages older than 180 days.

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ECPA was originally enacted into law in 1986, when Mark Zuckerberg was 1 year old. Just about everybody agrees -- law enforcement, Congress, the White House, civil libertarians, tech companies -- that the law needs to catch up with contemporary practice. But the exact details of said updating? That's where it gets tricky.

In prepared testimony Assistant Attorney General Elana Tyrangiel acknowledged that there were cases in which the government should be required to get a warrant before accessing the content of, for example, stored emails. But at the same time she pushed for wide exceptions to that rule for civil litigators, opening up the possibility that if the law were updated per the DoJ's wishes, regulatory authorities and civil litigators would be able to gain more access than ever to your emails, Twitter direct messages, and Facebook communications without ever having to go before a judge. (Zach Whittaker has a nice rundown of the DoJ's overreaching in ZDNET.)

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Last year the FBI sent out more than 16,000 of the letters relating to the private data – mainly financial, internet or phone records – of more than 7,000 Americans. The agency began issuing NSLs in 2001, when Congress passed the Patriot Act. However, critics have long argued that the use of NSLs has extended beyond its intended counter-terror purpose. The judge noted in her decision that "too large a danger that speech is being unnecessarily restricted" with the letters and their non-disclosure clause.

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The New York Times quoted Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen lauding the "new Google":

"This is the industry giant," he said. "It is committing to change its corporate culture to encourage sensitivity to issues of personal data privacy."

But less than 24 hours later, Google kicked Adblock Plus, a popular app that blocks ads and prevents third-party tracking, right out of its Google Play app store. There are obviously some clear limits to Google's privacy sensitivity, particularly when it comes to protecting advertising revenue on mobile devices.

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The proposal to extend access to FinCen was detailed on a March 4. Treasury document obtained by Reuters. It constitutes a furthering of efforts to centralize the broad monitoring of U.S. citizens on the grounds of counterterror and anti-crime efforts. Reuters noted that privacy advocates have reacted with concern to the proposal, which remains in its early stages:

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The U.K.-based Gamma Group markets and sells the software to law enforcement ostensibly with the sole purpose of lawfully monitoring the computers of criminals -- including pedophile rings, human traffickers and organized crime syndicates. The tool has, as Citizen Lab found, been put to broader and more nefarious uses by governments in countries including Bahrain, Ethiopia and Vietnam with "strong indications of politically-motivated targeting."

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