Obama calls for more regulation of Internet providers, industry fires back

President Obama threw down the gauntlet Monday with cable companies and Internet providers by declaring they shouldn’t be allowed to cut deals with online services like YouTube to move their content faster.

It was his most definitive statement to date on so-called “net neutrality,” and escalates a battle that has been simmering for years between industry groups and Internet activists who warn against the creation of Internet “fast lanes.” The president’s statement swiftly drew an aggressive response from trade groups, which are fighting against additional regulation.

"We are stunned the president would abandon the longstanding, bipartisan policy of lightly regulating the Internet and calling for extreme" regulation, said Michael Powell, president and CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the primary lobbying arm of the cable industry.

Obama, in his statement, called for an “explicit ban” on “paid prioritization,” or better, faster service for companies that pay extra. The president said federal regulators should reclassify the Internet as a public utility under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.

"For almost a century, our law has recognized that companies who connect you to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access in and out of your home or business," Obama said in his statement. "That is why a phone call from a customer of one phone company can reliably reach a customer of a different one, and why you will not be penalized solely for calling someone who is using another provider. It is common sense that the same philosophy should guide any service that is based on the transmission of information -- whether a phone call, or a packet of data."

Obama's statement puts him in the middle of a debate between industry groups and the Federal Communications Commission, which is under public pressure – now from Obama as well -- to prevent broadband providers from creating the “fast lanes.”

The FCC is nearing a decision on how far to go to protect Internet consumers from deals between broadband providers like Verizon and AT&T and content companies like Netflix or YouTube.

But industry groups pushed back, with Powell arguing that such regulation would slow Internet growth.

This "tectonic shift in national policy, should it be adopted, would create devastating results," Powell said, claiming only Congress should make a policy change of this magnitude.”

Likewise, CTIA-The Wireless Association called Obama's proposal a "gross overreaction" that would ignore other viewpoints.

Last January, a federal court overturned key portions of an open Internet regulation put in place by the FCC in 2010. The court said the FCC had "failed to cite any statutory authority" to keep broadband providers from blocking or discriminating against content.

That ruling sent the FCC back to the drawing board. Until the FCC can agree on new regulations that satisfy the court's requirements, Internet service providers could block or discriminate against content moving across their networks with impunity.

Internet activists say the FCC should reclassify the Internet as a public utility under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act to ensure it has enough power to regulate the Internet effectively. That's exactly what industry doesn't want to happen. Industry officials say they are committed to an open Internet in general but want flexibility to think up new ways to package and sell Internet services.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has said he is open to using a "hybrid" approach that would draw from both Title II and the 1996 Telecommunications Act. But Wheeler said Monday that so far, those options have presented "substantive legal questions."

"We found we would need more time to examine these to ensure that whatever approach is taken, it can withstand any legal challenges it may face," he said.

South Korean troops fire warning shots after Northern soldiers approach border

SEOUL, South Korea –  South Korean troops fired warning shots Monday after North Korean soldiers approached too close to the border separating the rival countries, Seoul defense officials said.
About 10 North Korean soldiers retreated without returning fire after South Korean troops fired 20 rounds of warning shots, the officials said on condition of anonymity, in line with office policy. There were no reports of casualties.
The incident happened near the military demarcation line inside the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone that was created when the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice.
Tensions between the Koreas remain high following two incidents last month involving exchanges of gunfire, though no casualties were reported in either one.
In the first incident, troops from the two countries traded gunfire over propaganda leaflets South Korean activists floated across the border. In the second, North Korean soldiers were seen too close to the border, triggering a gunfire exchange. The North said its soldiers were engaging in routine patrol missions.
At the center of their recent animosities is North Korea's demand that South Korea ban activists from launching the anti-Pyongyang leaflets. South Korea has said it cannot do so, citing freedom of speech.
The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war because the Korean War armistice has not been converted to a peace treaty.

Obama: 'I’m going to do what I need to do' on immigration

President Obama repeated Sunday that he intends to change U.S. immigration law through executive action, over Republican leaders’ repeated requests to wait and dire warnings about the consequences of sidestepping Congress.
“I’m going to do what I need to do,” Obama told CBS’ “Face the Nation,” in an interview taped on Friday.
As he has said before, the president said he would prefer that reform legislation come through Congress, but that he has waited for more than a year for House Speaker John Boehner to pass a bill like the Democrat-controlled Senate has done.
“If a bill gets passed, nobody would be happier than me,” Obama said.
His remarks followed similar ones made Wednesday, which brought dire warnings from Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that were followed by more on Sunday.
“I believe [executive action] will hurt cooperation on every issue,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told “Fox News Sunday.” “I think it would be like the president pulling the pin out of a hand grenade and throwing it in as we are trying to actually work together. I am hoping that cooler heads at the White House can prevail."
The comments by Barrasso, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, followed Boehner warning Obama that using executive action would “poison the well” and McConnell, who will likely be the Senate majority leader next year, comparing it to waving a flag in front of a bull.
“Their time hasn’t run out,” Obama told CBS, arguing that legislation passed by Congress would supersede his executive action.
To be sure, the president is under pressure to use executive action on immigration reform, after promising Americans that he would by the end of summer, then delaying any action until after the midterms, which upset Democrats’ strong Hispanic base.
Obama also said Sunday that inaction is a “mis-allocation of resources” and that the country cannot continue to deport people who should be allowed to stay and keep those who should leave.

Federal firewall reportedly struggles against increasing number of cyberattacks

Federal employees and contractors are unwittingly undermining a $10 billion-per-year effort to protect sensitive government data from cyberattacks, according to a published report. 
The Associated Press says that workers in more than a dozen agencies, from the Defense and Education departments to the National Weather Service, are responsible for at least half of the federal cyberincidents reported each year since 2010, according to an analysis of records.
They have clicked links in bogus phishing emails, opened malware-laden websites and been tricked by scammers into sharing information. One was redirected to a hostile site after connecting to a video of tennis star Serena Williams. A few act intentionally, most famously former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who downloaded and leaked documents revealing the government's collection of phone and email records.
Then there was the federal contractor who lost equipment containing the confidential information of millions of Americans, including Robert Curtis of Monument, Colorado.
Curtis, according to court records, was besieged by identity thieves after someone stole data tapes that the contractor left in a car, exposing the health records of about 5 million current and former Pentagon employees and their families.
"I was angry, because we as citizens trust the government to act on our behalf," Curtis told the AP. 
At a time when intelligence officials say cybersecurity now trumps terrorism as the No. 1 threat to the U.S. -- and when breaches at businesses such as Home Depot and Target focus attention on data security -- the federal government isn't required to publicize its own brushes with data loss.
Last month, a breach of unclassified White House computers by hackers thought to be working for Russia was reported not by officials but The Washington Post. Congressional Republicans complained even they weren't alerted to the hack.
"It would be unwise, I think for rather obvious reasons, for me to discuss from here what we have learned so far," White House press secretary Josh Earnest later said about the report.
To determine the extent of federal cyberincidents, which include probing into network weak spots, stealing data and defacing websites, the AP filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, interviewed hackers, cybersecurity experts and government officials, and obtained documents describing digital cracks in the system.
That review shows that 40 years and more than $100 billion after the first federal data protection law was enacted, the government is struggling to close holes without the knowledge, staff or systems to outwit an ever-evolving foe.
"It's a much bigger challenge than anyone could have imagined 20 years ago," said Phyllis Schneck, deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, which runs a 24/7 incident-response center responding to threats.
Fears about breaches have been around since the late 1960s, when the federal government began shifting its operations onto computers. Officials responded with software designed to sniff out malicious programs and raise alarms about intruders.
And yet, attackers have always found a way in. Since 2006, there have been more than 87 million sensitive or private records exposed by breaches of federal networks, according to the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, which tracks cyberincidents at all levels of government through news, private sector and government reports.
By comparison, retail businesses lost 255 million records during that time, financial and insurance services lost 212 million and educational institutions lost 13 million. The federal records breached included employee usernames and passwords, veterans' medical records and a database detailing structural weaknesses in the nation's dams.
From 2009 to 2013, the number of reported breaches just on federal computer networks -- the .gov and .mils -- rose from 26,942 to 46,605, according to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. Last year, US-CERT responded to a total of 228,700 cyberincidents involving federal agencies, companies that run critical infrastructure and contract partners. That's more than double the incidents in 2009.
And employees are to blame for at least half of the problems.
Last year, for example, about 21 percent of all federal breaches were traced to government workers who violated policies; 16 percent who lost devices or had them stolen; 12 percent who improperly handled sensitive information printed from computers; at least 8 percent who ran or installed malicious software; and 6 percent who were enticed to share private information, according to an annual White House review.
Documents released to the AP show how workers were lured in.
In one incident around Christmas 2011, Education Department employees received an email purportedly from Amazon.com that asked them to click on a link. Officials quickly warned staff that it could be malicious. The department did not release information to the AP about any resulting damage.
Reports from the Defense Department's Defense Security Service, tasked with protecting classified information and technologies in the hands of federal contractors, show how easy it is for hackers to get into DOD networks. One military user received messages that his computer was infected when he visited a website about schools. Officials tracked the attacker to what appeared to be a Germany-based server.
"We'll always be vulnerable to ... human-factor attacks unless we educate the overall workforce," said Assistant Secretary of Defense and cybersecurity adviser Eric Rosenbach.
Although the government is projected to spend $65 billion on cybersecurity contracts between 2015 and 2020, many experts believe the effort is not enough to counter a growing pool of hackers whose motives vary. Russia, Iran and China have been named as suspects in some attacks, while thieves seek out other valuable data. Only a small fraction of attackers are caught.
For every thief or hostile state, there are tens of thousands of victims like Robert Curtis.
He declined to talk about specifics of his case. According to court records, a thief in September 2011 broke into a car in a San Antonio garage and stole unencrypted computer tapes containing the Pentagon workers' information. The car belonged to an employee of a federal contractor tasked with securing those records.
Criminals have tried to get cash, loans, credit -- even establish businesses -- in Curtis' name, according to court records. He and his wife have frozen bank and credit accounts. A lawsuit brought by victims was dismissed.
"It is very ironic," said Curtis, himself a cybersecurity expert who worked to provide secure networks at the Pentagon. "I was the person who had paper shredders in my house. I was a consummate data protection guy."

European think tank says Russian brinksmanship at Cold War levels

A report from a European think tank has identified more than 40 dangerous incidents involving forces from Russia and those of NATO member states over the past eight months. 
The report, released Monday by the London-based European Leadership Network (ELN), specified three incidents in the past year that could have sparked open conflict between Russia and the West. 
"We believe [the incidents] are a very serious development, not necessarily because they indicate a desire on the part of Russia to start a war but because they show a dangerous game of brinkmanship is being played, with the potential for unintended escalation in what is now the most serious security crisis in Europe since the cold war," the report's authors wrote. 
The report was released following this weekend's celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, during which ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev warned that Russia and the West were in danger of entering a "new Cold War."
The 83-year-old accused the West, particularly the United States, of giving in to "triumphalism" after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the communist bloc. The result, he said, could partly be seen in the inability of global powers to prevent or resolve conflicts in Yugoslavia, the Middle East and most recently Ukraine.
The first incident noted by the ELN, in March of this year, involved a near-collision between a civilian airliner and a Russian spy plane that had turned off its transponders, making it nearly impossible to be tracked by civilian air traffic controllers. The aircraft, which was traveling from Copenhagen to Rome at the time of the near-miss, was carrying 132 people on board. The report said that the civilian aircraft's pilots were only just able to avert a tragedy when they spotted the Russian plane through their window. 
The second major incident was the September abduction of Eston Kohver, an Estonian secret service operative who was taken from a border post on Estonian territory. Kohver was later brought to Moscow and accused of espionage. The third incident was last month's hunt by Sweden's armed forces for the source of what Stockholm termed "foreign underwater activity." Rumors that the military was searching for a Russian submarine were never confirmed by officials.
The report maps most of the encounters as having taken place around the Baltic Sea, but incidents have also occurred over the Black Sea and along the U.S. and Canadian borders. 
In September, military officials said that two F-22 fighter jets intercepted six Russian military airplanes that were flying about 55 nautical miles from the coast of Alaska. The Russian planes were identified as two IL-78 refueling tankers, two Mig-31 fighter jets and two Bear long-range bombers. They looped south and returned to their base in Russia after the U.S. jets were scrambled.
Hours after that encounter, two Canadian CF-18 fighter jets intercepted two of the long-range Russian Bear bombers about 40 nautical miles off the Canadian coastline in the Beaufort Sea.
In both cases, the Russian planes entered the Air Defense Identification Zone, which extends about 200 miles from the coastline. They did not enter sovereign airspace of the United States or Canada.
The report recommends that Moscow "urgently re-evaluate" its posture, adopted in the midst of ongoing fighting in Ukraine; that both Russia and NATO improve communications, including the development of a joint crisis management arrangement in the event of a deadly incident; and that both sides exercise "military and political restraint."