Google Data

Posted by Susan Molinari, Vice President, Americas Public Policy and Government Relations

In passing the USA Freedom Act, Congress has made a significant down payment on broader surveillance reform. Today marks the first time since its enactment in 1978 that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has been amended in a way that reflects privacy rights enshrined in our history, tradition, and Constitution.

While most of the focus has been on ending the bulk telephony metadata program under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, there are other meaningful reforms in the bill for Internet users. The USA Freedom Act shuts the door to the bulk collection of Internet metadata under a separate legal authority that the government relied upon in the past to collect Internet metadata in bulk. The USA Freedom Act additionally prevents bulk collection of Internet metadata through the issuance of National Security Letters.

Not all of these legal authorities expired on June 1, and we are pleased that Congress took the initiative to prevent the bulk collection of Internet metadata under these legal authorities.

Today’s vote represents a critical first step toward restoring trust in the Internet, but it is only a first step. We look forward to working with Congress on further reforms in the near future.

Posted by Susan Molinari, VP of Americas Public Policy and Government Affairs

Today, there are more artists, publishers, and authors creating more works for global audiences, on a growing number of platforms — on YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Twitter, Dailymotion, Tumblr, Medium, SoundCloud, Etsy, Vine, Pinterest and more.

These digital exchanges have become an increasingly important driver of the global economy. As a result, more open trade has the potential to give creators, online platforms and other businesses access to more consumers around the world. And Trade Promotion Authority — which empowers U.S. officials to negotiate trade agreements subject to up or down votes in Congress — presents an opportunity to modernize our trade strategy for the Internet era.

While U.S. trade agreements have historically included copyright provisions to protect right holders, the Internet’s success depends on both copyright protection and pro-innovation limitations and exceptions, such as fair use and safe harbors for online platforms. Without both, Internet platforms — and the explosion of creativity and new distribution channels they have enabled — would not be possible.

We tend to take this balanced approach for granted in the U.S. But without trade agreements reflecting that balance, there is a very real risk that the Internet’s most popular platforms — like search engines, video sharing sites, and social networks — could be hindered or even blocked in foreign markets on the basis of one-sided copyright principles. And that could hurt the overall U.S. economy; one study found that 1 in 8 U.S. jobs are tied to industries that rely on copyright limitations and exceptions.

We were glad that U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman last year committed to “asking our trading partners to secure robust balance in their copyright systems — an unprecedented move that draws directly on U.S. copyright exceptions and limitations, including fair use.” That was a big step. 

And while it’s unfortunate that the Trade Promotion Authority legislation now being debated by Congress does not on its face fully reflect Ambassador Froman’s commitment, we’re happy that the bill’s authors made clear for the first time ever (in their accompanying report on the bill) that trade agreements should foster an appropriate balance, including copyright limitations and exceptions. It’s progress. We’re also glad to see other provisions to promote pro-innovation policies globally.

We hope Congress will approve Trade Promotion Authority, and urge trade officials to increasingly promote the balanced copyright policies abroad that have enabled great content and Internet platforms to thrive.

Posted by Susan Molinari, VP, Public Policy and Government Affairs, Americas 

We’re grateful that the U.S. House of Representatives just approved the USA Freedom Act, which — as I blogged last week — takes a big step toward reforming our surveillance laws while preserving important national security authorities. It ends bulk collection of communications metadata under various legal authorities, allows companies like Google to disclose national security demands with greater granularity, and creates new accountability and oversight mechanisms.

The bill’s authors have worked hard to forge a bipartisan consensus, and the bill approved today is supported by the Obama Administration, including the intelligence community. The bill now moves to the other side of the Capitol, and we hope that the Senate will use the June 1 expiration of Section 215 and other legal authorities to modernize and reform our surveillance programs, while recognizing the importance of protecting Americans from harm. We believe the bill approved today achieves that goal.

Posted by Kate Sheerin, Public Policy and Government Affairs Analyst 

For students today, coding is becoming an essential skill just like reading, writing and math. And the need for coders is only going to increase over the next few years. But today, fewer than one percent of high school girls express interest in majoring in computer science.

Research tells us that perceptions of CS and computer scientists are primary drivers that motivate girls to pursue CS. Disney Junior and Google recently teamed up on their series “Miles from Tomorrowland” to take on this challenge in a new way.

This Monday, May 18, we invite you to join us at our DC office to hear more about this exciting project.

The event will feature a panel discussion with Dr. Yvonne Cagle, NASA’s Johnson Space Center Space and Life Sciences Directorate and Series Consultant, “Miles from Tomorrowland”, Julie Ann Crommett, CS Education in Media Program Manager at Google, Nancy Kanter, Executive Vice President, Original Programming and General Manager at Disney Junior, Angela Navarro, Google Software Engineer, and Sascha Paladino, Creator and Executive Producer of “Miles From Tomorrowland” and remarks by Congresswoman Susan Brooks and Congresswoman Suzan DelBene.

Hope to see you there.

by Susan Molinari, Vice President, Americas Public Policy and Government Relations

Nearly two years have passed since the initial Snowden revelations. In about a month, Section 215 of the Patriot Act — one of the key authorities relied upon by the government to undertake bulk collection — is set to expire. As we and others noted last month, Section 215 should not be reauthorized without significant changes.

Yesterday, a bipartisan group of legislators in the House and Senate introduced legislation that represents a step toward broader surveillance reform while preserving important national security authorities. Google supports this measure as introduced, the USA Freedom Act of 2015, and we urge Congress to move expeditiously to enact it into law.

The bill would advance several important goals that Google and other members of the Reform Government Surveillance coalition (RGS) underscored in principles unveiled in 2013:

• First, the bill would end the bulk collection of communications metadata under various legal authorities. This not only includes telephony metadata collected under Section 215, but also Internet metadata that has been or could be collected under other legal authorities. 

•  Second, the bill would enable companies like Google to disclose the volume and scope of national security demands in smaller ranges (bands of 500) than we are currently permitted to report national security demands (bands of 1,000). 

•  Finally, the bill would create new oversight and accountability mechanisms that will shed greater light on the decisions reached by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and enable participation by outside attorneys in cases involving significant interpretations of the law. 

While the USA Freedom Act of 2015 does not address the full panoply of reforms that Congress ought to undertake, it represents a significant down payment on broader government surveillance reform. It is critical that Congress now act to begin to restore consumers’ trust in the Internet. 

Posted by Allen Lo, Deputy General Counsel for Patents

Last year Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp, accused Google of creating a “less informed, more vexatious level of dialogue in our society.” Given the tone of some of your publications, that made quite a few people chuckle.

This week you were at it again.  One of your newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, accused Google of wielding undue political influence.  Blimey!

More seriously, given the inaccuracies that have been published, we wanted to give our side of the story. Here goes.

Wall Street Journal:

• Several visits were advertising industry meetings attended by Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and others.  Yes, Microsoft, the main complainant in the FTC’s antitrust investigation;
• Over a dozen visits were for production crews covering the YouTube interviews with the President following the State of the Union and photographing the White House art collection for Google’s Art Project;
• One of the meetings specifically called out by the Journal was actually a meeting with our Chairman, Eric Schmidt, and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, with several other technology companies to discuss copyright legislation (the draft SOPA/PIPA laws that were ultimately dropped by Congress).

As the FTC has said, the Journal “makes a number of misleading inferences and suggestions about the integrity of the FTC’s investigation. The article suggests that a series of disparate and unrelated meetings involving FTC officials and executive branch officials or Google representatives somehow affected the Commission’s decision to close the search investigation in early 2013. Not a single fact is offered to substantiate this misleading narrative”. 

We understand you have a new found love of the regulatory process, especially in Europe, but as the FTC’s Bureau of Competition staff concluded, Google has strong pro-competitive arguments on our side.  To quote from their report “… the record will permit Google to show substantial innovation, intense competition from Microsoft and others, and speculative long-run harm”.  

And the FTC was not alone when it comes to search ranking and display.  The Texas and Ohio Attorneys General closed their comprehensive competition investigations into Google in 2014. And courts in Germany and Brazil found that there is no basis in the law for Google competitors to dictate Google’s search results.

At the end of May, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act is set to expire. Section 215 is one of the legal authorities relied upon by the U.S. government to conduct surveillance through the bulk collection of communications metadata.

• Cloud services provide much better resiliency and redundancy than local services in the face of disasters of all sizes, from small transformer explosions that affect 30,000 users up to superstorms the size of Thaiphoon Haiyan that can interrupt entire countries. If data has to stay in one place by law, that redundancy is lost.
  
• Security expertise is in short supply and tends to congregate in large organizations and sharing what expertise there is is better for everyone as a whole. E.g. – There are currently over a million unfilled security positions open worldwide and all of the GCHQ-led cybersecurity programs together will graduate just 66 PhD’s per year starting in 2017. Small companies that are forced to host their own data will find it hard to compete to hire qualified security engineers.

Last summer, students from all over the US and Canada gathered to explore pressing questions at the intersection of technology and policy. Whether working on data security standards at the National Consumers League or innovation economy issues at the R Street Institute, students gained hands-on experience tackling critical technology policy questions.