President Barack Obama

Executive action by President Barack Obama is giving more relief to immigrants living illegally in the United States, including stopping deportations that take undocumented parents away from their American-born kids. But the downside to the plan is that families with parents back home or older children living in their home countries can't be reunited except for "brief emergency trips," The Washington Post's Pamela Constable reports: "Now, hundreds of thousands of undocumented families who left children or parents behind are in a special bind. They may still be tempted to arrange illegal cross-border visits, but they have more to lose now if they get caught, because it would jeopardize their new legal status and their ability to support the children they have here."

Undocumented immigrants can only leave the country if they apply for an emergency travel document called "advanced parole," but the applications often are denied at the full discretion of immigration officials, Constable further reports. The definition for "humanitarian" travel includes family funerals, but not family reunions.

The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin and Jerry Markon report that the reason parents of "dreamer" children, who had been brought into the country illegally and had been granted temporary relief under the president’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, weren't included in President Obama's executive action protecting many immigrants from deportation is because " lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the White House examined the legal arguments and decided against it." The reasons the governmental lawyers gave for not including parents of "dreamers" were: "First, even though DACA recipients are not being deported at the moment, 'they unquestionably lack lawful status in the United States.' Second, doing so 'would represent a significant departure from deferred action programs that Congress has implicitly approved in the past.'"

Major telecom companies were "stunned" by President Obama's proposal to regulate the Internet like it's a utility, The Guardian's Dominic Rushe reports. Regulating the Internet as a utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act has been favored by net neutrality advocates when the Federal Communications Commission's prior strategy to ensure Internet service providers don't play favorites was struck down in court. National Cable and Telecommunications Association Michael Powell said, “'We are stunned the president would abandon the longstanding, bipartisan policy of lightly regulating the internet and [call] for extreme Title II regulation,'” The Guardian further reports.

The FCC is considering a hybrid Title II regime in which ISPs would be regulated as utilities but they could charge more money to some for fast-lane access, Electronista reports.

The Washington Post's Craig Whitlock reports the White House is preparing a policy to require federal agencies to publicly disclose where they fly drones domestically and what they do with the "torrents of data collected from aerial surveillance": "The presidential executive order would force the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to reveal more details about the size and surveillance capabilities of their growing drone fleets — information that until now has been largely kept under wraps." Whitlock notes that little is known about the scope of domestic drone use by the federal government.

The federal government will pay the Navajo Nation $554 million to settle claims that it mismanaged funds and natural resources on the Navajo reservation, according to the Wall Street Journal's Dan Frosch. It's highest-ever such settlement in a case about land the federal government held in trust for an American Indian tribe, according to the WSJ. The Obama administration has paid out more than $1 billion "during the past several years to settle lawsuits filed by dozens of tribes who have made similar claims regarding the chronic mismanagement of trust land and resources by the federal government," the WSJ further reports.

President Obama finally weighed in on where the line should be drawn between surveillance and privacy in a speech today. The New York Times reports: the president "will require intelligence agencies to obtain permission from a secret court before tapping into a vast storehouse of telephone data, and will ultimately move that data out of the hands of the government."

The president also said surveillance of foreign leaders will be curtailed.

The president also suggested the creation of a "panel of advocates on privacy and technology issues who would appear before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court." The Times reports that the advocates would only appear in novel cases, but it's unclear who would decide which cases are novel.

President Barack Obama promises that "I'll be proposing some self-restraint on the NSA" in an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, according to Politico. However, the president provided few details on what form that would take.

The president also said the NSA is reasonable in the amount of domestic surveillance it conducts in terms of "not reading people's emails, not listening to the contents of their phone calls" but that the NSA's foreign surveillance needs to be curbed more.

Last week, ProPublica founder and executive chairman Paul Steiger received the Burton Benjamin Memorial award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. In his remarks, Steiger said that President Barack Obama's administration has been the most dangerous president for the First Amendment since President Richard Nixon: "For the starkest comparison, I urge any of you who haven’t already done so to read last month’s report, commissioned by CPJ and written by Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post. It lays out in chilling detail how an administration that took office promising to be the most transparent in history instead has carried out the most intrusive surveillance of reporters ever attempted. It also has made the most concerted effort at least since the plumbers and the enemies lists of the Nixon Administration to intimidate officials in Washington from ever talking to a reporter."

most concerted effort at least since the plumbers and the enemies lists of the Nixon Administration to intimidate officials in Washington from ever talking to a reporter.

With the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, one UN event looked at the role the United Nations could have, if any, regarding ensuring privacy on the Internet from governmental spying.

A blogger for Ars Technica who was on the panel and who wrote about the event "pointed out that while anti-democratic countries may want legitimacy, their policies are already well in place. Surveillance capabilities are already being used, with or without the UN’s approval or disapproval, by democratic and anti-democratic governments."

Another interesting point from the panel was a Brazilian representative who "referred to the fact that President Barack Obama had recently defended the global American spying effort: 'I think it's important to recognize you can't have 100 percent security, and also 100 percent privacy, and also zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society.'" 

The Brazilian official said in light of the revelations of American spying on the Brazilian president and a major Brazilian energy company '“Brazil has 100 percent inconvenience, 0 percent security, and 0 percent privacy.”'