Following spying concerns that emerged after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden “revealed extensive U.S. government surveillance,” the U.S. tech industry as a whole underperformed, resulting in an economic impact far greater than the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation's initial $35 billion estimate, ITIF said in a news release Tuesday. That affected the cloud computing sector and the industry as a whole, ITIF said. In a report released Tuesday, ITIF cataloged a “wide range of specific examples of the economic harm that has been done to U.S. businesses as a result of unreformed government surveillance practices,” and “proposes a series of reforms designed to improve security, protect transparency, and increase cooperation and accountability in the global technology ecosystem,” the release said. “The U.S. government’s failure to meaningfully reform its surveillance practices has taken a serious economic toll on the U.S. tech sector and the total cost continues to grow each day,” said ITIF Vice President Daniel Castro, who co-wrote the report. “Foreign customers are increasingly shunning U.S. companies, and governments around the world are using U.S. surveillance as an excuse to enact a new wave of protectionist policies,” which is bad for U.S. companies, workers and the economy as a whole, Castro said. “Now that Congress has passed the USA Freedom Act, it is imperative that it turn its attention to reforming the digital surveillance activities that continue to impact our nation’s competitiveness,” he said. In its report, ITIF recommended policymakers “level the playing field for the U.S. tech sector” by implementing reforms like transparency about surveillance practices, opposing government efforts to weaken encryption or place backdoors in software, strengthening mutual legal assistance treaties with other nations, and combating anti-competitive practices by other nations, the release said. “Congress must decide how many American jobs it is willing to sacrifice in pursuit of intelligence gathering and find a better balance between economic interests and national security interests,” Castro said.

More than 25 groups, including privacy advocates, wrote to House leadership and Appropriations Committee and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee leaders Wednesday urging them to support an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2016 (HR-2685) offered by Reps. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky. The amendment would “defund warrantless government searches of the database of information collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 using U.S. person identifiers, absent certain circumstances,” the letter said. The amendment would also “prohibit the use of appropriated funds to require or request that United States persons and entities build security vulnerabilities into their products or services in order to facilitate government surveillance, except as provided for by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act,” the groups said. The amendment proposed this year is “identical to the Massie-Lofgren amendment that passed the House of Representatives by an overwhelming 293-vote majority in 2014, although it was not included in the omnibus appropriations bill that ultimately was enacted into law,” the letter said. Groups that signed the letter include the Center for Democracy & Technology, New America’s Open Technology Institute, Restore the Fourth, Sunlight Foundation and TechFreedom.

As of Wednesday, Twitter lets users share block lists with others, allowing a user to block multiple accounts in an easy, fast and community-driven way, User Safety Engineer Xiaoyun Zhang wrote in a blog post Wednesday. The new feature comes as Twitter recognizes some users experience “high volumes of unwanted interactions on Twitter” and require more sophisticated tools than individually muting and blocking other users, Zhang wrote. With the new feature, a user can export and share a block list with those facing similar issues or import another user’s block list to block multiple accounts at once. Twitter hopes these “advanced blocking tools will prove useful to the developer community to further improve users’ experience,” said Zhang. “This feature is yet another step towards making Twitter safer for everyone and will be available to some of our users starting [Wednesday] and all users in the coming weeks.”

Some Marriott hotels around the U.S. began letting guests sign onto their Netflix accounts on Internet-connected hotel room TVs, in a first such deal between the streaming video website and hotels, the lodging chain said in a Wednesday news release. The Netflix offering is available at six Marriott hotels and more than two dozen of its other Marriott International brand properties, and is expected to be in almost all Marriotts by the end of 2016, it said.

The Information Technology Industry Council and Software & Information Industry Association wrote President Barack Obama Monday opposing “any policy actions or measures” by the federal government that would undermine encryption technologies, said an ITI and SIIA news release Tuesday. Citing the role encryption technology plays in protecting consumers’ privacy and data security, ITI and SIIA asked Obama in their letter to work with the tech industry to “find a pathway forward that ‘preserves security, privacy, and innovation,'” the release said. Policies that mandate weakened encryption standards to allow for government access are impractical and “compromise the security” of technology products and services, “rendering them more vulnerable to attacks,” the letter said. Consumer trust would be eroded, it said. “The U.S. policy position on encryption will send a signal to the rest of the world,” the letter said. “Should the U.S. government require companies to weaken encryption technology, such requirements will legitimize similar efforts by foreign governments,” which would “threaten the global marketplace as well as deprive individuals of certain liberties,” the letter said. ITI and SIIA recognize the issue of encryption is “extremely complex” and has implications domestically and internationally, the letter said. The release said they seek an open dialogue with the administration on encryption policies.

The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) Cyber Security Division has made it a top priority to develop tools to prevent criminals from using malicious software and is ready to demonstrate its new malware detection technologies at the Transition to Practice Technology Demonstration Day for Investors, Integrators and IT Companies in Santa Clara, California, Tuesday, an S&T blog post said. One of the technologies S&T developed is the Federated Malware Analysis System (FMAS), which is a CSD-funded technology that counters the strengths of a malware attacker by clustering malware behaviors into “families” so it’s easier to detect, the post said. “Our aim is to work with our private sector partners to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure systems and commercial marketplace,” S&T Cyber Security Division Director Douglas Maughan said. “Showcasing and, most importantly, transitioning these technologies into the commercial market will be impactful to all organizations engaged in securing cyberspace and protecting various organizations such as government, public utilities and healthcare,” Maughan said. “We know these solutions can impact the cyber landscape that the Department is working to protect,” said S&T Cyber Security Division Transition to Practice Program Manager Michael Pozmantier.

Two years ago, on June 5, National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations about the agency's bulk data collection program were reported in The Guardian. In an email sent out on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union Friday, Snowden said there has been much progress on privacy in the past two years, but “the right to privacy remains under attack.” Surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is ending, but many other programs have yet to be revised, Snowden said. “We needed to push back and challenge the lawmakers who defend these programs,” because a “vote in favor of mass surveillance is a vote in favor of illegal and ineffective violations of the right to privacy for all Americans,” he said. “As I said on Reddit last month, arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”

“Bottom line is that the USA Freedom Act protects Americans’ civil liberties and enhances our national security,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., in a column on his website Friday. “In addition to ending the bulk collection of data by the federal government, the USA Freedom Act increases the transparency of the government’s intelligence-gathering programs by making more information available to the American public,” Goodlatte said. “It requires the declassification of all significant court opinions, mandates the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence provide the public with detailed information about how they use national security authorities, and provides technology companies with a range of options for describing how they respond to national security orders,” he said. “While this new law preserves key intelligence-gathering authorities, it replaces the NSA’s current, unlawful program with a new, targeted call detail records program." USA Freedom doesn’t stop the bulk collection of phone or email content authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) or fiber taps authorized by executive order 12333, former NSA intelligence official-turned-whistleblower William Binney told us. There are 80 to 100 taps on fiber cables in the lower 48 states and they're not solely along the coasts, so they can’t be just for foreigners, Binney said. Metadata collected from Section 215 of the Patriot Act was used to fill in the content gaps, he said. Following an article in The New York Times and ProPublica Thursday that said the NSA conducted warrantless surveillance on Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for malicious attacks, the Center for Democracy & Technology in a news release Friday called the NSA’s expanded role in battling cyberattacks troubling. Leaked documents show that the NSA is using Section 702 of FISA “in a far broader manner than previously understood,” CDT said. “By using Section 702 to collect information directly from main Internet cables in the U.S., the NSA is sweeping up communications of Americans, including those who have been victimized by cyber attacks,” it said. “The NSA sees surveillance as the flipside of cybersecurity,” said CDT Freedom, Security and Technology Project Director Greg Nojeim. “Being the victim of a cyber attack should not be a reason for the NSA to collect your communications and mine them for intelligence purposes,” Nojeim said. "The backdoor search loophole in Section 702 of FISA is a far bigger problem than we thought,” he said, especially since “collection under Section 702 gets the actual content of communications.”

Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., wrote a letter to FBI Director James Comey Thursday “demanding explanations to recent [news] reports that the agency used aircraft for secret surveillance missions over several U.S. cities,” including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Seattle and in southern California, a news release said. “Some of these aircraft were reported to be equipped with advanced surveillance devices that can pick up data from thousands of cell phones and capture high-definition images,” the letter said. “The possibility that that these surveillance activities are being approved without clear guidelines or judicial oversight to protect Americans from warrantless intrusions of their privacy is highly concerning,” the letter said. Reps. Ted Deutch, D-Fla.; Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.; David Cicilline, D-R.I.; Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.; John Conyers, D-Mich.; Cedric Richmond, D-La.; Judy Chu, D-Calif.; Scott Peters, D-Calif.; Karen Bass, D-Calif.; Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.; Steve Cohen, D-Tenn.; Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.; Hank Johnson, D-Ga.; John Yarmuth, D-Ky.; and Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, joined DelBene in signing the letter to Comey. The lawmakers asked Comey for a briefing on the program and for answers to questions to be answered before June 26. Questions include: Under what legal theory did Justice Department lawyers approve the creation and use of fake companies to hide the government’s link to these aircrafts? Under what circumstances are warrants sought for these surveillance operations? How many warrants have been sought and how many were obtained in the past year for use of cell-cite stimulators or comparable devices? What is the agency’s privacy policy for surveillance by piloted aircraft equipped with high-tech cameras and cellphone tracking devices? What surveillance technologies or devices are the aircraft equipped with? What safeguards are in place to protect the civil liberties of those who aren't subjects of an investigation? What's done with extraneous data captured by these surveillance activities? And, are there limits on the duration of surveillance activities? A spokesman for the FBI was unable to confirm receipt of the letter, but an FBI news release Thursday addressed the issue, saying the FBI “routinely uses aviation assets in support of predicated investigations targeting specific individuals and, when requested and appropriate, in support of state and local law enforcement.” The release said contrary to media reports, the “FBI’s aviation program is not classified,” and some of the FBI’s aircraft are registered covertly because “overt registration would put our aircraft and operations at risk of compromise.” The Department of Justice oversees covert registration, which is done in full compliance with the Attorney General Guidelines and the FBI’s domestic Investigations and Operations Guide for undercover operations, the release said. “The FAA is fully aware and supportive of this practice,” the release said. The aircraft are not equipped, designed or used for bulk collection activities or mass surveillance, and “are not routinely equipped with cell site simulators,” the release said. Lawfully protected First Amendment activity is not monitored, it said. FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano said the planes are used to follow terrorists, spies and serious criminals. “We have an obligation to follow those people who want to hurt our country and its citizens, and we will continue to do so.”

Sunlight Foundation President Christopher Gates decried Twitter’s decision to cut off Twitter API access for the group’s Politwoops website, saying in a blog post Thursday that the action “is a reminder of how the Internet isn’t truly a public square. Our shared conversations are increasingly taking place in privately owned and managed walled gardens, which means that the politics that occur in such conversations are subject to private rules.” Twitter confirmed Wednesday that it won’t “restore Twitter API access” for the Politwoops website, which tracks Tweets that politicians delete. “We strongly support Sunlight’s mission of increasing transparency in politics and using civic tech and open data to hold government accountable to constituents, but preserving deleted Tweets violates our developer agreement,” Twitter said in a statement. “Honoring the expectation of user privacy for all accounts is a priority for us, whether the user is anonymous or a member of Congress.” Sunlight created the Politweeps website “because public communications from public officials should be available to anyone who wants to see them,” Gates said. “The site isn't just about blunders, but rather revealing a more intimate perspective on our politicians and how they communicate with their constituents.” Twitter allowed Politweeps to have Twitter API access in 2012 after Sunlight pledged to “create a human curation workflow to ensure that the site screened out corrected low-value tweets like typos, links and Twitter handles,” Gates said. “We are truly mystified as to what prompted the change of heart, and it's deeply disappointing to see Twitter kill a project they had supported since 2012. … Clearly, something changed -- and we’re not likely to ever know what it was.”