Berkman Buzz: July 19, 2013

Following the leaks about NSA surveillance, people demanded information about the scope and scale of the US government's data collection. In response, the administration offered internet companies a deal: they could publish the number of secret national security requests, but only if it was aggregated with data about non-secret, criminal requests.

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo! immediately accepted and published aggregate data. But Google rejected the offer, stating that "lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users".

One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government's spying on American citizens is that it's only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there's a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of "terrorism" and "weapon of mass destruction" are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism.

The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping – http://bit.ly/12TfRiE (via @TheAtlantic)
—Internet Monitor (@thenetmonitor)

Like many other civil liberties advocates, I’ve been annoyed by how the media has spilled more ink talking about Edward Snowden than the issues that he’s trying to raise. I’ve grumbled at the “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” reality show and the way in which TV news glosses over the complexities that investigative journalists have tried to publish as the story unfolded. But then a friend of mine – computer scientist Nadia Heninger – flipped my thinking upside down with a simple argument: Snowden is offering the public a template for how to whistleblow; leaking information is going to be the civil disobedience of our age.

Zeega Offers a New Way to Tell Stories With Interactive Media http://on.mash.to/151PryB via @mashable
—Kara Oehler (@karaoehler)

With the results of students’ final exams now recorded, CopyrightX—Harvard Law School’s first course offering under the auspices of HarvardX, and HarvardX’s first limited-enrollment course—has come to a close. The 12 weeks of the course generated a wealth of experiences and data that will inform analysis of the course’s design and operational features, as well as the next iteration of the course in Spring 2014.

Renowned Chinese anti-corruption sleuth Zhu Ruifeng has withdrawn from the online world and his website and four personal microblogs blocked in mainland China on the heels of his exposing the alleged corrupt dealings of Chinese Communist Party (CPC) chief secretary in southeastern Fujian province.