NSA Appears To Be Seducing Sen. John Cornyn With Personal Tours And One-On-One Meetings
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One of the surveillance state's biggest cheerleaders is seeing his years of support pay off.Two congressional sources confirmed a May meeting, where Sen. John Cornyn, (R-Tex.), a vocal supporter of the intelligence community, got a private audience with the NSA Director Adm. Michael Rogers.Cornyn also got a private tour of the signals intelligence facility at Fort Meade, Maryland at the same time as the May meeting. Officials "familiar with the situation" (possibly read "jealous as hell") expressed concern about Cornyn's personal NSA tour. And for good reason. If Rogers and other NSA officials were feeding Cornyn information the rest of the NSA's Congressional oversight isn't privy to, that's a problem. It's more of a problem as the date for Section 702's reauthorization approaches. And it seems even more problematic that Cornyn was given a personal walk-and-talk while oversight members were failing to get substantive answers from the DNI during a Senate hearing.There's a long history of the IC playing favorites with oversight members (and vice versa) and a long history of those favorites withholding information from other members of Congress. This visit/personal chat may have been innocuous but given its context -- the Section 702 renewal -- it looks shady as hell.The additional context is the DNI's office believes all is forgiven -- or at least, no longer relevant. Reversing Clapper's promise to hand in something on incidentally-collected US persons' communications, the new Director is saying that's just not going to happen.The Foreign Policy article notes that it's common for incoming reps and senators to be given a tour and that oversight members routinely visit the NSA as part of their oversight duties, but this Cornyn-only event definitely appears to be the agency making a play for unbridled support from a powerful Senator.
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posted at: 12:00am on 29-Jun-2017
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Thankfully, Marketing Industry Plan For 'Ringless Voicemail' Dies a Quiet Death...For Now
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So we've been talking the past month about a push by the marketing industry (a company by the name of "All About The Message," specifically) to exempt "ringless voicemail" from existing robocalling and privacy rules. Ringless voicemail lets a company leave a marketing or political message in your inbox without your phone ringing. But such technology is currently prohibited by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) , which prohibits such marketing efforts without the "prior express consent of the called party."In its petition to the FCC (pdf), All About the Message tried to claim that the existing consumer protections on this front were "archaic," ringless voicemails shouldn't be included because they're not technically "calls," and that exempting ringless voicemail from these rules provided an "important public purpose:""A direct to voicemail service platform is not covered by the TCPA, and the use of direct to voicemail insertion technology does not make a call to a wireless phone number as contemplated by Section 227, of Title 47 of the U.S. Code. What is more, consumers are not charged for delivery of the voicemail communications. Further, from a broader policy perspective, the use of direct to voicemail technology serves an important public purpose. The act of depositing a voicemail on a voicemail service without dialing a consumers' cellular telephone line does not result in the kind of disruptions to a consumer's lifedead air calls, calls interrupting consumers at inconvenient times, or delivery charges to consumers -- which the TCPA was designed to prevent. The effort quickly then received the full-throated support of the US Chamber of Commerce, American Financial Services Association and the Republican National Committee, which in a supporting filing of its own (pdf) tried to claim that blocking this annoying effort would violate the First Amendment:"Telephone outreach campaigns are a core part of political activism. Political organizations like the RNC use all manner of communications to discuss political and governmental issues and to solicit donations - including direct-to-voicemail messages. The Commission should tread carefully so as not to burden constitutionally protected political speech without a compelling interest. The problem: at no point did any of these companies or organizations spend much time thinking about what consumers actually wanted, and they sure as hell didn't want their voicemail inboxes being filled up with spam. As a result, when the news wires began to issue reports on the ringless voicemail plan, consumers were quick to complain to the FCC and political leaders about the effort. All About the Message has since submitted a very short letter to the FCC stating they were pulling their petition from consideration, putting this latest attempt to annoy the hell out of you and your family to bed... for now.
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posted at: 12:00am on 29-Jun-2017
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