Cross Border Data Flows: Could Foreign Protectionism Hurt U.S. Jobs?: Hearing Before the Subcomm. On Commerce, Mfg. & Trade of the H. Comm. on Energy & Commerce, 113th Cong., Sept. 17, 2014 (Statement of Laura K. Donohue)

Documents released over the past year detailing the National Security Agency’s telephony metadata collection program and interception of international content under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) directly implicated U.S. high technology companies in government surveillance. The result was an immediate, and detrimental, impact on U.S. firms, the economy, and U.S. national security. The first Snowden documents, printed June 5, 2013, revealed that the U.S. government had served orders on Verizon, directing the company to turn over telephony metadata under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. The following day, The Guardian published classified slides detailing how the NSA had intercepted international content under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The type of information obtained ranged from E-mail, video and voice chat, videos, photos, and stored data, to Voice over Internet Protocol, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications of target activity, and online social networking details. The companies involved read like a who’s who of U.S. Internet giants: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. More articles highlighting the extent to which the NSA had become embedded in the U.S. high tech industry followed. In September 2013 ProPublica and the New York Times revealed that the NSA had enjoyed considerable success in cracking commonly-used cryptography. The following month the Washington Post reported that the NSA, without the consent of the companies involved, had obtained millions of customers’ address book data: in one day alone, some 444,743 email addresses from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail, and 22,881 from other providers. The extent of upstream collection stunned the public – as did slides demonstrating how the NSA had bypassed the companies’ encryption, intercepting data as it transferred between the public Internet and the Google cloud. Further documents suggested that the NSA had helped to promote encryption standards for which it already held the key or whose vulnerabilities the NSA understood but not taken steps to address. Beyond this, press reports indicated that the NSA had at times posed as U.S. companies—without their knowledge—in order to gain access to foreign targets. In November 2013 Der Spiegel reported that the NSA and the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had created bogus versions of Slashdot and LinkedIn, so that when employees from the telecommunications firm Belgacom tried to access the sites from corporate computers, their requests were diverted to the replica sites that then injected malware into their machines. As a result of growing public awareness of these programs, U.S. companies have lost revenues, even as non-U.S. firms have benefited. In addition, numerous countries, concerned about consumer privacy as well as the penetration of U.S. surveillance efforts in the political sphere, have accelerated localization initiatives, begun restricting U.S. companies’ access to local markets, and introduced new privacy protections—with implications for the future of Internet governance and U.S. economic growth. These effects raise attendant concerns about U.S. national security. Congress has an opportunity to redress the current situation in at least three ways. First, and most importantly, reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would provide for greater restrictions on NSA surveillance. Second, new domestic legislation could extend better protections to consumer privacy. These shifts would allow U.S. industry legitimately to claim a change in circumstance, which would help them to gain competitive ground. Third, the integration of economic concerns at a programmatic level within the national security infrastructure would help to ensure that economic matters remain central to national security determinations in the future

The Korean consumer electronics industry : reaction to antidumping actions

Antidumping actions by importing countries do not protect their consumers. What protects domestic consumers is competition. It is Korean consumers who are paying for the development of the Korean electronics industry, not consumers in the countries that import Korean goods. A key element of Korea's industrial development strategy has been to maintain stringent import restrictions while promoting the development of a few large domestic firms. The author strongly stresses the need to implement progressive import liberalization policies that will allow foreign competition in the Korean market. Import policy regimes in exporting countries have played a critical role in creating an environment that makes it possible for profit-maximizing firms to follow a price-discriminating marketing strategy. Progressive liberalization will eliminate the incentive for following such a marketing strategy as monopoly profits are slowly eroded.Environmental Economics&Policies,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets

Setting Standards for Fair Information Practice in the U.S. Private Sector

The confluence of plans for an Information Superhighway, actual industry self-regulatory practices, and international pressure dictate renewed consideration of standard setting for fair information practices in the U.S. private sector. The legal rules, industry norms, and business practices that regulate the treatment of personal information in the United States are organized in a wide and dispersed manner. This Article analyzes how these standards are established in the U.S. private sector. Part I argues that the U.S. standards derive from the influence of American political philosophy on legal rule making and a preference for dispersed sources of information standards. Part II examines the aggregation of legal rules, industry norms, and business practice from these various decentralized sources. Part III ties the deficiencies back to the underlying U.S. philosophy and argues that the adherence to targeted standards has frustrated the very purposes of the narrow, ad hoc regulatory approach to setting private sector standards. Part IV addresses the irony that European pressure should force the United States to revisit the setting of standards for the private sector

The Political Potency of Tibetan Identity in Pop Music and Dunglen

Since their beginnings in the 1980s, Tibetan pop music and dunglen (lute songs of northeastern Tibet) have shown strong expressions of Tibetan identity. They also represent a flourishing area of Tibetan language cultural production. This is significant after the repetitive propaganda songs of the Cultural Revolution and given the pressures and restrictions in Tibet on language and religion in particular. However, in this article, I critique straightforward interpretations of the Tibetanness of Tibetan popular music as representing a zone of assertion or resistance, arguing instead that the political potency of Tibetan pop music and dunglen is far more double-edged, coopted and complex. Drawing on ethnography, I describe how state institutions and largely Tibetan cultural workers have in fact played the leading role in its genesis and production and are still a powerful force in its production and dissemination. Moreover, while it is often said that the state is against Tibetan identity and culture, in fact, the attitude is far more ambivalent and contradictory, with China a unitary multi-ethnic state where 55 minority nationalities with distinct culture and identity are recognized, including Tibetans. I argue through the analysis of song lyrics that expressions of Tibetan identity per se are not censored; rather, it is when these expressions are linked to particular political demands. As I explore, a number of reasons can be identified as to why the state does not censor Tibetan pop music and dunglen more harshly, and furthermore, there are reasons why Tibetan language assertion has had so much more success in the realm of pop music than it has had in schools

European Reference Network for Critical Infrastructure Protection: ERNCIP Handbook 2017 edition Version 1.0

The ERNCIP network has been established to improve the protection of critical infrastructures in the EU. The European Reference Network for Critical Infrastructure Protection (ERNCIP) therefore works in close cooperation with all types of CIP stakeholders, focusing particularly on the technical protective security solutions. This handbook aims to assist the dissemination of the activities and results of ERNCIP. It is intended that the document will be updated and issued by the ERNCIP Office in spring each year. The information provided will be up to date as of the end of the previous calendar year, i.e. in this case as at 31 December 2016. The report summarises the achievements of all the ERNCIP Thematic Groups, providing a convenient way to access information on any specific theme of interest covered by ERNCIP. The report also describes current thematic group activities, to allow subject-matter experts and critical infrastructure operators to identify ongoing areas of research they might be interested in assisting. This report is publicly available via the ERNCIP web site, and is distributed to all ERNCIP Group of EU CIP Experts for onward dissemination within their Member State.JRC.E.2-Technology Innovation in Securit