from the NSAnniversary dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2018 began with a much-anticipated day: the official end of net neutrality rules. We took a long look at Ajit Pai’s latest comments about the change, while the FCC was busy fending off questions about the DDoS attack it made up (and also, randomly, about Pai’s big coffee mug), though Senators certainly had questions (about the attack, not the mug). Meanwhile, we looked at the huge dangers of the EU Copyright Directive and hoped European citizens would step up to oppose it the way they did with ACTA, while the UN’s free speech expert called it an attack on free speech that would violate human rights. And in the US, lawmakers were reintroducing pro-encryption bills after the FBI destroyed its own “going dark” narrative.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2013, America was reeling from the revelations (late the previous week) of the NSA’s PRISM program and general domestic surveillance. Many were anticipating a manhunt for the whistleblower, but one wasn’t necessary, because this was also the week we learned the name Edward Snowden when he revealed himself as the man behind the leaks. Meanwhile, the fallout was widespread: the author of the Patriot Act himself said the surveillance is abusive and must end, James Clapper was trying to explain why he had recently denied there was any data collection while Ron Wyden was calling for hearings over intelligence officials lying to Congress, Rand Paul called for a class action lawsuit, a group of 86 companies and civil liberties groups called on Congress to end the spying (which a bipartisan group of Senators quickly moved to do), while previous NSA whistleblowers were defending Snowden and adding context to the revelations.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2008, the MPAA was asking the FCC for the power to block DVR recording of certain movies, XM settled its lawsuit with EMI over the ability to record streams, and the Associated Press was going after bloggers for posting headlines and article snippets. Metallica was going back to its anti-internet roots and forcing early reviews of its latest album offline (and the backlash led the band to apologize and insist its management company was the one to blame). A court ruled, thankfully, that record labels cannot stop the sale of promo CDs just by printing “not for resale” on them, and we looked at a great article about how copyright has stretched so far it has broken. Meanwhile, Canada introduced its own version of the DMCA and tried to pretend US lobbyists had nothing to do with it.
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