News & Commentary

An effort is underway to significantly set back even the limited amount of government privacy oversight that currently takes place over commercial privacy in the United States. Tuesday the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade held a hearing titled Federal Trade Commission Review and Outlook. At the hearing, FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen argued for the repeal of the communications common carrier exemption which would transfer regulatory power of telecommunications networks from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to the FTC. While this might sound innocuous enough, the rework could have serious implications for consumer privacy protections.

Millions of Americans are still suffering the effects of the subprime mortgage meltdown. More than four million homeowners have been foreclosed upon already, and nearly 11 million are "underwater," that is, they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. But it's not just these 15 million who are suffering, that number is much larger if you count the children who live in those homes.

This might come as a shock to you, but the privacy of many of your electronic communications has a six-month expiration date.

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The Thanksgiving holiday is over, so it's time for Congress to get back to business and tie up some loose ends--like a new budget deal, a farm bill, and a defense spending bill for next year--before the first session of the 113th Congress comes to a close, right?

Amazon attracted a lot of attention this weekend when, on “60 Minutes,” CEO Jeff Bezos announced a futuristic vision for the company: using drones to make deliveries within 30 minutes to homes in metropolitan areas.

When you show up at a hospital, in need of medical aid, you expect that you're going to get the care that you need—that the doctors and nurses will figure out what's wrong, explain to you the options for treating it, and give you the best medical care possible.

In the five months since the world first learned of Edward Snowden, story after story based on documents disclosed by the young whistleblower have filled out a picture of the National Security Agency (NSA) as an organization with a limitless — and almost indiscriminate — hunger for information. Today, Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher, and Ryan Grim add a startling new dimension to that portrait by revealing that the agency has contemplated ways to use its troves of data to discredit and undermine individuals who the agency believes are "radicalizing others through incendiary speeches" but who lack any ties to actual criminality. The government is apparently seeking out "personal vulnerabilities" of these individuals, including their online sexual activity, hoping to expose them as hypocrites to their followers. While all of the targets are outside the United States, at least one of them is a U.S. person — meaning, either a citizen or a permanent resident.