This article is republished from The Conversation under its Creative Commons license. On a side note, apparently, The Conversation is now moving into the US after focusing on the UK and Australia in the past -- and that's pretty cool, because it's a great site.

If extreme polarization is now an enduring feature of American politics — not just a bug — how does that change the game for journalists? I have some ideas, but mainly I want to put that question on the table. “Conflict makes news,” it is often said. But when gridlock becomes the norm the conflicts are endless, infinite, predictable and just plain dull: in a way, the opposite of news. This dynamic has already ruined the Sunday talk shows. Who can stand that spectacle anymore?

A recent task force of American Political Science Association put it this way:

The United States used to be viewed as a land of broad consensus and pragmatic politics in which sharp ideological differences were largely absent; yet, today, politics is dominated by intense party polarization and limited agreement among representatives on policy problems and solutions.

In a fascinating paper on “philanthropy in a time of polarization,” three authors — Steven Teles, Heather Hurlburt and Mark Schmitt — take up the question. They point out that leaders in these grantmaking foundations operate from assumptions that extreme polarization can be overpowered by “strong ideas and persuasive research…[that] will motivate elected officials” to act. They believe in the message of bipartisanship and urge foundations to “stay above the political fray.”

The way Obama’s health care reform became law shredded that script. Elites in Washington believed that a compromise would emerge by “combining a broad goal favored by liberals with ideas traditionally supported by conservatives.” Nothing like that went down. One side passed the bill. The other demonized it and continues the fight to this day. Teles, Hurlburt and Schmitt write:

Foundations have traditionally seen themselves as part of civil society – as mediating institutions that form a bridge between dispassionate knowledge and political advocacy. Their resources, many in the sector have hoped, could fund objective, nonpartisan research that would take the edge off partisan conflicts and pave the way for broadly accepted social progress.

That view of American politics no longer makes sense. Nothing has taken the edge off partisan warfare, least of all “objective, nonpartisan research."

Is ‘objectivity’ in journalism dead ?

It’s tricky to compare foundation officers and journalists because officially the mainstream press has no theory of change, no policy agenda – indeed, no politics at all. Officially, journalists are merely out to get the story, tell the truth, inform us about what’s going on, and in special circumstances share their opinion.

But anyone who observes its work cannot help but notice that the Washington press corps shares a certain world view, analogous in many ways to the typical foundation officer’s. (Steve Coll moved easily from the Washington Post to the New America Foundation and on to the deanship of Columbia Journalism School. Walter Isaacson, editor of Time magazine, CEO of CNN, is now president of the Aspen Institute.)

Here are some of the components of this shared world view. Recognize them?

• “Successful candidates move to the middle…”
• Politicians who know how to get things done cut deals among insiders on both sides of the aisle. (Ronald Reagan working with Tip O’Neill is the usual reference point.)
• To “cede the ideological center” is the political mistake par excellence.

And as Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein wrote in the Washington Post:

‘Both sides do it’ or ‘There is plenty of blame to go around’ are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias.

What if the ideological center is effectively gone? What if striking deals with insiders from both parties no longer describes the way the world works? For as authors Teles, Hurlburt and Schmitt put it: “Pundits who say that ‘nothing can get done without bipartisan support’ no longer have the evidence on their side.”

What are the options?

Under these conditions, political journalists have a choice. They can try to muddle through with the framework they had before extreme polarization became too obvious to ignore. If they take this route, they will write well-informed articles about the trend. They will report the data about polarization without drawing any conclusions about their own practices. Or, they can recognize that they too have a world view, and that its assumptions have gone bust.

If they choose the latter, what then?

Instead of trying to stay in the middle between polarized extremes and avoid criticism, political journalists and their bosses could recognize that there is no escape from charges of bias because these charges are just a further aspect of polarization. If you’re going to be attacked anyway, might as well let it rip.

That’s what the Washington Post did when earlier this month it hired Chris Mooney to cover the environment in blog form. Mooney is the author of two books — The Republican War on Science and The Republican Brain (subtitle: The Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality) — that leave no doubt about where he stands. In announcing his appointment, the Post described Mooney as a writer with a distinctive voice and a consistent argument: “that people’s preconceptions – political, religious, cultural – color the way they view science.”

Being transparent about point of view is the honest approach for reporters

Newsrooms are better off with reporters who know their beats, nail their arguments, make clear where they’re coming from and meet high standards of verification, always. Intellectual honesty is a more reliable basis for trust than a ritualized objectivity. A clear voice is more valuable than a nonpartisan veneer.

Calling out falsehoods that have gotten traction is another thing journalists can do once they realize that extreme polarization is a feature, not a bug. Ever since the fact-checking site, Politifact, won the Pulitzer Prize for “separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters,” fact checking has become routine in the coverage of politics. Now the press needs to take the next step: identify the worst offenders, deny them respectability and platform, raise the cost in reputation for relying on falsehoods: in a word, fight. “Detached from the partisan fray” won’t cut it.

The non-profit investigative newsroom, ProPublica.org, calls what it does “accountability journalism.” It is the only kind of journalism ProPublica is interested in doing. Here’s how they describe it:

Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with ‘moral force.’ We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

That is a view of the world as strong as polarization is deep. Political journalists need to adopt a similar view or they will slide into irrelevance. There is one other option: savvy analysts of the game. Winners and losers, who’s up, who’s down, strategy and tactics. That really isn’t journalism, though. It’s scorekeeping.

Jay Rosen is an adviser to The Conversation.

Not so long ago, we wrote about Konami shutting down a fan-remake of the original Metal Gear, the much-beloved initial entry into the vaunted franchise. In that case, Konami did something of a flip-flop, with a company rep telling the development team initially that they had the go-ahead, only for the company's lawyers to pull the rug out from under the remake at the last moment. Well, flip-flopping seems to be becoming a thing when it comes to Metal Gear fan projects, now that the sequel to a previously released Metal Gear Solid fan-film has been nixed by the lawyers.

The original fan-film was called Metal Gear Solid Philanthropy, and Part 1 was released several years ago. It was generally regarded as mega-awesome. The indie team behind the project received no contact from anyone at Konami or from the Metal Gear Solid team until they met creator Hideo Kojima in person, who told the filmmakers how much he appreciated the film. The team began to work on Part 2. Then, apparently because they just couldn't freaking help themselves, the Konami brass shut the project down. You can hear from the director himself, in a "Farewell to Philanthropy" video put out.

It takes a better person than I for him to say these words.

"We knew this might've happened. And we have nothing against the creators of Metal Gear, the saga that we all love and will continue to love."

Good for Giacomo Talamini. He's much stronger with the jedi routine than I am, because I can assure you that if I were in his shoes I would be going full on dark-side. Mind-choking, sand-people killing, the whole bit. It's one thing to have Konami needlessly shut down a fan project instead of simply working out a zero-sum or cheap licensing arrangement, since the production of this film does absolutely nothing to harm the MGS franchise, and may indeed help spur it on further. But for the filmmakers to have received no negative feedback from Konami on their first film, and for the creator of the damned franchise to express his support, only to have the lawyers lose their lunch partway through the filming of the second film would be too much for me to bear.

Hell, it's too much for me to bear as a gamer and a fan.

There are all kinds of ways to improve on everyday items. We've talked about how wallets are a popular type of project on Kickstarter, but there are certainly plenty of other things that could be re-designed and made slightly (or significantly) better. The Ralph Waldo Emerson quote about building a better mousetrap actually didn't mention mousetraps, but we've ended up with a lot of mousetrap inventions, regardless. Here are just a few examples of umbrella inventions that the world might beat a path to.

• A novel umbrella (called the Sa) uses origami techniques to fold up nicely and resist inverting in strong winds. It's a $70 umbrella, though, so it's not quite for everyone. (Plus, it's not made out of a single square sheet of paper.) [url]
• Another Kickstarter umbrella project is selling a battery-powered wand that shoots jets of air to repel raindrops. It doesn't actually exist yet (which might be a violation of Kickstarter's terms), and it looks not unlike a fat plastic toilet plunger. Despite the drawbacks of this design and its $88 price tag, it has exceeded its funding goal by about an order of magnitude. [url]
• A few years ago, another Air Umbrella was designed by Je Sung Park & Woo Jung Kwon, but this concept product didn't solve the engineering challenges of creating a curtain of air that actually repelled raindrops. Perhaps someday there will be a wide selection of nice-looking, quiet, electric umbrellas, but in the meantime, noisy air-blowing umbrellas hopefully won't get too popular. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Sometimes it's difficult to maintain any faith in our legal system, particularly when it comes to intellectual property, and perhaps even more particularly when it comes to publicity rights. Then, some former drug-running dictator comes along to sue a video game and the system actually manages to do right. Yes, the case brought by Manuel Noriega against Activision over the game's depiction of the dictator in the Call of Duty franchise has been tossed out by the judge.

"This was an absurd lawsuit from the very beginning and we're gratified that in the end, a notorious criminal didn't win," said Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, who had defended Activision in the case. "This is not just a win for the makers of Call of Duty, but is a victory for works of art across the entertainment and publishing industries throughout the world."

Nice of the mayor to rub it in, but he ain't wrong. In dismissing the case, the judge explicitly states that the First Amendment rights of Activision outweigh any publicity rights that may or may not be afforded to Noriega. It's an important distinction to make, since the judge likely could have simply dismissed the entire suit based on Noriega being a foreign national and not subject to the publicity rights law of California (under which he filed the claim). Instead, the dismissal brings free speech in to play, with a particular eye towards public persons.

"A brief summary of defendants' uncontroverted evidence conclusively shows that Noriega is a notorious public figure, perhaps one of the more notable historical figures of the 1980's...Noriega's opposing papers do not contest any of this."

The dismissal goes on to note that the depiction of Noriega in the game is clearly transformative, is not the sum total of the game's storyline, and that therefore economic considerations regarding the game being a commercial product don't factor in at all. Finally, it quotes another ruling quite beautifully, "public prominence does not confer a shield to ward off caricature, parody and satire." Bravo.

Aereo's most recent effort to stay alive was to take the Supreme Court's "looks like a duck" test and to say, since the Supreme Court said it looked like cable TV (for the sake of declaring its service a "public performance"), "fine, then let us quack like a duck and pay compulsory licenses under Section 111." Only problem? Other courts have said internet services don't qualify as cable systems for Section 111, leaving them in a Schrodinger's CATV situation. Aereo is a cable TV system as far as the Supreme Court is concerned when it's talking about public performance, but it's not a cable TV system when it wants to go to the FCC and copyright office to pay a compulsory license, which is available to cable and satellite providers.

It appears that FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler may be looking to change that, beginning a process to give internet companies access to those compulsory licenses, letting "over the top" (OTT) video providers get access to network television at compulsory rates:

In 1992 Congress realized that the then-nascent satellite industry would have a hard time competing because much cable programming was owned by cable companies who frequently kept it from competitors. Congress mandated access to cable channels for satellite services, and competition flourished. Today I am proposing to extend the same concept to the providers of linear, Internet-based services; to encourage new video alternatives by opening up access to content previously locked on cable channels. What could these over-the-top video providers (OTTs) supply to consumers? Many different kinds of multichannel video packages designed for different tastes and preferences. A better ability for a consumer to order the channels he or she wants to watch.

Wheeler is clearly thinking of Aereo here, even noting that the company recently came to the FCC to plead for this sort of thing:

In Title VI of the Communications Act, Congress created rules to ensure that cable companies that own video content can’t raise artificial barriers to competition by refusing to let their video competitors have access to the programming they own. That worked for satellite providers, and also helped telephone companies entering the video business. I believe it makes just as much sense – and will have just as positive a consumer benefit – for an OTT.

Such benefits follow from innovation. Taking advantage of this rule, new OTTs may offer smaller or specialized packages of video programming, so consumers will be able to mix-and-match to suit their tastes. Aereo recently visited the Commission to make exactly this point – that updating the definition of an MVPD will provide consumers with new choices. And perhaps consumers will not be forced to pay for channels they never watch.

Of course, this move may be too little, too late for Aereo. The company has been losing in court, and any final FCC rules may take a bit of time. Still, at the very least it can mean that the next Aereo or ivi may actually be able to survive, rather than have to deal with a veto from the TV networks.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about how VPN company Golden Frog had quietly revealed in an FCC filing that an unnamed mobile broadband provider had been (even more) quietly blocking people from sending encrypted emails -- basically blocking users from making use of STARTTLS encryption. The Washington Post has now revealed that the mobile operator in question was Cricket -- a subsidiary of AT&T, and that it stopped blocking such encryption a few days after our post was published.

Cricket did not address repeated questions about the issue and did not alert customers, many of whom rely on Cricket as their sole Internet service, that they would not be able to protect their e-mails from prying eyes. AT&T, which absorbed Cricket when it acquired Leap Wireless last spring, did not respond to a request for comment.

Cricket said in a statement to The Post that it "is continuing to investigate the issue but does not intentionally prevent customers from sending encrypted emails."

The issue appears to be that Cricket started using some Cisco firewall equipment to block sending encrypted emails through Port 25. It's true that many ISPs block Port 25 entirely, as it's often used for spamming. What Cricket did here was to just try to block encrypted emails over Port 25, which in some ways is being more permissive than other providers who block it entirely. Yet, still, the way it did so was somewhat misleading and still concerning. While the intent here may have been reasonable, any time you have an ISP stepping in and quietly making the decision itself to block encrypted traffic while allowing other traffic it should raise questions about the security for end users. Yes, there's a constant battle against spam, but there may be better ways to deal with it than single-handedly blocking email encryption.

So, there's a story in the Washington Post that's getting a bit of attention about how Russian hackers apparently breached a White House computer network (an unclassified network, so not as troubling as it could have been). And that story is kind of interesting, but it seems like the bigger deal is this:

U.S. officials were alerted to the breach by an ally, sources said.

Wait a second. After all we've been told about the brilliant minds at the NSA/US Cyber Command and their "cybersecurity" skills -- it seems immensely troubling that (1) the US didn't catch this themselves and (2) that some other country did catch it. So, uh, just why is some "ally" monitoring the White House's network?

As for the rest of the report, as the Washington Post notes, this isn't even that big of a deal. Foreign state hackers are always going to try to breach US government computers, and sometimes they're going to succeed. That's the nature of the beast. But, it does seem profoundly odd that it was discovered by some other country.

It's not just the City of London Police demanding that websites be taken offline without any due process. It appears that the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is getting in on the game as well. The Wall Street Journal recently published a detailed article about how angry the FDA is with ICANN (there's also a corresponding blog post which may not face the same paywall restrictions) for not simply killing domains that the FDA deems "rogue pharmacies." That's not to say that there aren't reasonable concerns about rogue pharmacies. There are clearly some concerns about those sites, but it seems like there are better ways to deal with those than just barging in and saying that ICANN and registrars need to take down sites based solely on their say so.

In July, the FDA teamed with Interpol and dozens of countries to try to shut down more than 1,300 websites suspected of selling drugs without a prescription. Officials sent a list of all the websites, carrying names such as buyoxycontinonline.com and approvedonlinepharmacy.net, to the Chinese company that registered them. The company replied with a request for a court order and then sent a terse follow-up email: “It is not possible for us to take action.”

In frustration, officials turned to the Internet’s central administrator, an organization called the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann. Its contract with the registrar, BizCN.com, requires the company to investigate reports of illegal behavior.

But here's the thing. Everyone in the articles (including the reporters) seem to take it as perfectly reasonable that ICANN and/or these registrars should have just taken down these sites. No one points out that BizCN seemed to respond properly by asking for a court order. ICANN isn't in the business of censorship. It shouldn't be the one to determine if a site is an illegal pharmacy or not. There's a reason why we have due process and courts to adjudicate decisions like that. Putting the entire burden on registrars and/or ICANN to act as internet cops, ready to take down sites at a notification's notice seems tremendously problematic.

It's a recipe for censorship, stifling free speech and hindering innovation. And yet, that's what the FDA and others want:

Because of its central role, regulators and law-enforcement agencies around the world say Icann could be crucial to their crackdown on illicit Internet operators of all kinds.

Already, just in the online pharmacy space, we've seen how certain pharmaceutical companies like to conflate the small number of truly "rogue" pharmacies that sell either counterfeit drugs or real drugs without proper procedures, with perfectly safe and legal Canadian pharmacies that many Americans rely on for cheaper drugs. The big pharmaceutical companies would like to shut down that competition, even as American politicians have explored expanding the ability of US citizens to get their drugs from such pharmacies. And that's why it's reasonable to ask for an actual court order before taking down sites -- rather than just assuming that some bureaucrat at the FDA can accurately determine which sites are "good" and which are "bad," and then demand that registrars or ICANN automatically take action.

A couple of years ago, we wrote about an effort by the big broadband players to push the FCC away from using M-Lab to measure basic network diagnostics on the internet. M-Lab is a very interesting project, focused on collecting a huge amount of data about internet performance, and making that data widely available. In the past, for example, we've highlighted an M-Lab project showing which ISPs were throttling BitTorrent.

Now, M-Lab has released a new report, along with all of the data and a very nice tool to analyze it all, called the Internet Observatory, that looks at ISP interconnection and, most importantly, its impact on consumer internet performance. The end result? You guessed it. M-Lab found that the various ISPs have plenty of capacity, but it appears that they make the business decision to let your internet get clogged. No wonder the big telcos wanted the FCC to move away from supporting M-Lab!

The idea that broadband players would leverage interconnection bottlenecks for a business advantage (at the expense of subscriber connections) isn't a new idea. But now there's (lots and lots of) data to confirm that.

The report looks at New York City, where M-Lab was able to collect a ton of data from a variety of different vantage points. What it found was that starting in the spring of 2013, customers on Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon basically choked off content coming from Cogent (one of the major transit providers) every day from the early afternoon until late at night. Those big ISPs would like to try to blame the transit providers for the clogging, but M-Lab's data shows that's not the case. That's because a fourth ISP in the area, Cablevision, showed no similar degradation at all -- showing that Cogent appeared to have plenty of bandwidth available. Rather, as we've suggested in the past, the big broadband players were purposely letting the connection between Cogent (and other transit ISPs) wither on the vine, rather than opening up new ports (a trivially simple process).

Similarly, M-Lab's data shows that the problem wasn't a lack of bandwidth on the part of the ISPs (i.e., no actual technical congestion), because those same ISPs had no problem connecting to a different transit provider, Internap. So the only logical culprit was the interconnection points. There was more than enough bandwidth to go around. There's just the single bottleneck of the interconnection border router (which, again, is trivially simple to get rid of by opening up more ports). Here are the charts showing all of this. First up, you can see the rather notable sluggishness found between Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon on downloading content via Cogent: And here's what happens from Cablevision users get content via Cogent over that same period. Notice anything different? Oops. Looks like the problem isn't with Cogent's capacity: And, finally, here's the connection of all four broadband providers to another transit provider, Internap, showing that it's not a problem of capacity with the broadband providers themselves. They all seem fine: From this, it seems pretty darn clear that the location of the problem is the interconnection with Cogent between Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon.

And the impact of this business decision by those ISPs to let the border router get clogged is massive for end users. Basically, everyone's broadband connections slowed down to a level no sane person would describe as broadband.

While daily median download throughput overall hovered around 4 Mbps, performance degradation was much worse during peak use hours. For much of the time between Spring 2013 and March 2014, download speeds during peak use hours remained well below 4 Mbps. By January 2014, the download throughput rate during peak use hours for Comcast and Verizon traffic over Cogent’s network was less than 0.5 Mbps, the minimum rate necessary for web browsing and email according to the FCC (Figure 4). Note that only between 2:00 AM and 1:00 PM were the three affected Access ISPs (Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon) able to attain speeds above 4 Mbps across the Transit ISP Cogent. During peak use, only Cablevision achieved sustained rates above 4 Mbps across Cogent, while all Access ISPs achieved sustained rates above 4 Mbps across Internap throughout the day.

As you can see, after about nine months -- right as Netflix gave in and started paying broadband providers to unclog their Cogent connections, things miraculously picked up.

The M-Lab report shows nearly identical situations with Cogent and broadband access providers in other areas like Dallas, LA and Seattle. While the issue with Cogent is the most obvious (perhaps because Netflix is using it and that was the target of the clogging), the report also found those same broadband providers clogging the other major transit provider, Level 3, though not quite as much as with Cogent. As the report notes, there are indications that the degradation of Level 3 was also for business reasons, not any technical reasons. The degradation with Level 3 happened in a nearly simultaneous manner across many different sites "irrespective of their relative baselines." In other words, even when there was plenty of capacity on all sides, it didn't matter. Verizon decided to start clogging Level 3, and boom. Suddenly performance drops. The report found similar "simultaneous" downgrades in download speeds with another large transit provider, XO as well.

The report's conclusions lay things out pretty clearly:

In conducting this research we find a consistent theme across multiple Access ISPs and Transit ISPs: the interconnection relationships between network operators matter. The quality of service that millions of consumers experience on a daily basis for periods of multiple months can be directly tied to these relationships. Further, these relationships are not simply technical. We see the same patterns of degradation manifest in disparate locations across the US. Locations that it would be hard to imagine share any significant infrastructure (Los Angeles and New York City, for example). We thus conclude that the business relationships between impacted Access ISP/Transit ISP pairs is a factor in the repeated patterns of performance degradation observed throughout this research.

Now let's see the various broadband providers and their friends try to spin this as well. And lets see if the FCC finally realizes that interconnection points absolutely are a major issue for an open internet, and that the big broadband players appear to be purposely letting those connections clog for the sake of business negotiations.

Last week, we learned that the GCHQ certainly isn't engaged in mass surveillance -- provided you redefine the meaning of "mass" and "surveillance" in unconventional ways. Now we discover that maybe it doesn't really need to, since it can just ask the NSA and other secret services for access to their raw data without even needing a warrant, as a group of human rights organizations have discovered:

Details of previously unknown internal policies, which GCHQ was forced to reveal during legal proceedings challenging their surveillance practices in the wake of the Snowden revelations, reveal that intelligence agencies can gain access to bulk data collected from US cables or through US corporate partnerships without having to obtain a warrant from the [UK's] Secretary of State. This position seems to conflict with reassurances by the Intelligence Services Committee in July 2013 that whenever GCHQ seeks information from the US a warrant is in place.

The "arrangements", as they are called by Government, also suggest that intercept material received from foreign intelligence agencies is not subject to the already weak safeguards that are applied to communications that are intercepted by the UK's Tempora programme. On the face of the descriptions provided to the claimants, the British intelligence agencies can trawl through foreign intelligence material without meaningful restrictions and can keep such material, which includes both communications content and metadata, for up to two years.

Once again, we see evidence that intelligence agencies are happy to do the dirty work for each other so that they can all claim to have clean hands -- just as the outgoing head of the GCHQ claimed when he said that people there would "walk out the door" rather than be involved in anything so sordid as mass surveillance. It also shows how even the weak safeguards and ineffectual oversight of spy agencies can be circumvented by this kind of mutual help, something pointed out by the organizations behind the latest information:

The disclosed "arrangements" bring into sharp relief the minimal safeguards and weak restrictions on raw intelligence sharing with foreign governments, including between the UK and the United States. The fact that GCHQ can request and receive large quantities of "unanalysed" raw bulk data from foreign intelligence agencies without a warrant in place, simply because it would "not be technically feasible" to obtain it in the UK, shows the inadequacies in [the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000] to deal with intelligence agency co-operation. Under these "arrangements", there is a clear risk that agencies can sidestep British legal restrictions to obtain access to vast amounts of data.

There is a minor silver lining to these latest revelations that the situation in the UK is even worse than previously believed. It's the fact that a legal action against GCHQ's mass surveillance has, unexpectedly, forced the UK government to admit to even more unsavory practices. Here's how that came about:

Descriptions of the policies were disclosed to the parties after a secret hearing at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which is currently considering a challenge to GCHQ's surveillance practices that has been brought by human rights organisations including Privacy International, Liberty and Amnesty International. A public hearing of the case was held in July, but these “arrangements" were revealed to the Tribunal in a closed hearing that the claimants were barred from attending. Some details about the policies are now disclosed in order for the claimants to provide comment.

That's a useful reminder that no matter how hopeless these actions might seem, they are not only pretty much the only avenue open to human rights organizations who wish to challenge mass surveillance by governments, but they sometimes yield valuable new information that bolsters the case for greater oversight and tighter regulation of spy agencies.

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