Europe, Shaken by Paris Attacks, Weighs

Security With Privacy Rights

November 18, 2015 2:16 pm November 18, 2015 2:16 pm
Photo

Flowers left outside the Carillon restaurant in Paris to honor victims of last week’s terrorist
attacks.Credit Daniel Ochoa De Olza/Associated Press

As France comes to terms with its deadliest domestic attack since World War II, attention
has quickly turned attention to whether European governments need to reassess how they
collect, manage and use people’s digital footprint.

Already, European politicians are mulling new rules that would allow them to share airline
passenger data across the 28-member bloc to identity potential terrorists. And new
legislation in France and Britain is expected to give intelligence agencies further access to
people’s digital lives. That includes allowing French officials to tap phones and access
emails without judicial review and forcing Internet providers in Britain to potentially hold
individuals’ communication data for a year so that agencies can review the records when
necessary.

Yet European data protection advocates and lawmakers say the strong rules that limit how
companies can handle information will likely remain in place, highlighting how Europe has
separated how companies handle people’s data from the needs of governments to protect
national security. The region’s tough privacy rules are enshrined as a fundamental right on
par with freedom of expression.
“Fundamental rights are just that, fundamental,” said Nico van Eijk, a data protection
expert at the University of Amsterdam. “Of course, there are exceptions for national
security reasons. But governments have to be pragmatic.”

In recent months, Europe’s tough stance towards privacy has taken on greater importance
for companies, particularly American tech giants. That includes attempts by some of
Europe’s data protection authorities to force search engines like Google to allow people
anywhere in the world to ask for the removal of links about themselves from online queries
when the information is deemed out of date or irrelevant. If granted, such requests would
give Europe’s privacy watchdogs greater say over how the Internet is policed anywhere in
the world.

And in a landmark decision, the European Court of Justice, the region’s highest court, ruled
last month that a 15-year-old data-sharing agreement between Europe and the Unites States
was invalid. The decision, in part, was based on the judges’ view that Europeans did not
have sufficient legal protection if their data was accessed unlawfully by American
intelligence agencies when it was transferred outside of Europe.

Such challenges, says Mr. van Eijk, will only increase if European governments — and
overseas partners like the United States — fail to balance the national security needs of
accessing digital information with the region’s civil liberties. After the Sept. 11 attacks, as
well as attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, local authorities passed sweeping
reforms to give national agencies greater powers to find, track and stop those who were
planning future atrocities.

The region’s mood about surveillance changed, though, after the revelations of Edward J.
Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, who outlined in 2013 how
United States and British intelligence agencies had gained widespread access to people’s
digital lives.

These disclosures have led to a series of legal challenges aimed at curbing the powers of
American and European intelligence agencies. Advocates also have taken aim at
companies, including several American tech giants like Facebook and Google, which have
been accused of allowing access to their networks as part of the surveillance programs. The
companies deny that they cooperated with these activities.

That push has led to stronger individual privacy protections demanded from companies,
even though experts say Europe’s national intelligence agencies continue conducting their
own surveillance activities on their citizens and those outside their national borders. Last
week, for instance, a Brussels-based court ruled that Facebook could not collect online data
on people who did not use the social network in Belgium, though the company said it
would appeal the ruling.

Many countries’ intelligence services, privacy groups say, already have access to much of
the Internet traffic in Europe and father afield, as long as there’s sufficient oversight to
these surveillance efforts. Others say it remains unclear whether increased powers,
particularly access to encrypted online messaging services, would have thwarted the most
recent attacks in Paris.

Yet in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, some say they believe the scales may tilt back
toward national security, as evidenced by the recent push for expanded surveillance powers
in Britain and France.

“The French and British laws are now seen as the new status quo,” said Claude Moraes, a
British politician who is chairman of the civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee
in the European Parliament. “The political climate in Europe is changing.”

But some European lawmakers are already warning that expanded surveillance should not
go too far. While governments have a duty to keep their citizens safe, these politicians say,
allowing national intelligence agencies almost unfettered access to people’s digital lives —
from their phone calls and texts to online search histories and social media posts — could
jeopardize Europe’s hard-won civil liberties that may prove difficult to unwind.

“If we go down this path, we would be falling into the trap of these terrorists who want to
limit our freedoms,” said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German politician who had campaigned
for greater limits on intelligence agencies’ surveillance activities.

“I’m afraid that governments want more and more powers when it’s not proven that they
would be effective in preventing future terrorism cases,” he added.

If Your Wi-Fi Is Terrible, Check Your

Router
Tech Fix

By BRIAN X. CHEN OCT. 7, 2015

Photo
Bob McConnell, a retired engineer, set up a new wireless router in his home this year to get
faster Internet speeds. Instead, he got the opposite, with his iPad often getting no wireless
connection in his bedroom.

For days, he tinkered with the router’s settings, but couldn’t figure out a fix. “It was totally
ruining my life,” said Mr. McConnell, who lives in a condominium building in Kirkland,
Wash. “Things would work, and then the next morning they wouldn’t work again.”

What Mr. McConnell experienced is a situation we call “Wi-Fi headache,” and it’s an
ailment that many can relate to. The condition is rooted in the networking devices called
routers that people install in their homes for Wi-Fi connectivity. Most routers are difficult
to configure for anyone who doesn’t work in an information technology department.
Jargony tech terms like 802.11 or dual-band add to the confusion when people upgrade a
router or try to decide which one to pick.

So to diagnose and cure Wi-Fi headaches, we teamed up with The Wirecutter, the product
recommendations website. The Wirecutter put dozens of top-rated routers and devices
through hundreds of hours of testing to pick out the best router for most people and come
up with other recommendations tailored to different living situations and budgets. It also
ran new tests for The New York Times to come up with best practices for getting a
stronger, faster Wi-Fi signal.
The bottom line: People with devices both new and old will see an improvement by
upgrading to a recent router that supports the latest Wi-Fi standards. But they should be
wary of buying a cheap router that isn’t any good, or spending too much on one that is too
complex for their needs.

Why Your Wi-Fi Stinks

Wi-Fi headaches start with how the technology has evolved. For years, router makers like
Netgear, Linksys and Cisco focused on making Wi-Fi technology transmit data at higher
speeds and over longer distances.

That did little to prepare people for the explosion of Internet-connected mobile devices. In
buildings crowded with smartphones, computers, smart TVs and tablets, the devices’
signals are now fighting for room on the same radio channels. And routers are spewing out
energy for longer distances that may be bumping into neighbors’ signals.

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“The router manufacturers are kind of brain-dead,” said Dave Fraser, the chief executive of
Devicescape, which develops technology for making public Wi-Fi networks usable for
mobile phone service. “All they were thinking about was supporting people with laptops in
their homes and commercial environments. All of a sudden Wi-Fi is in everything and
everywhere, and we’re moving around our homes much more.”

Router manufacturers have more recently improved Wi-Fi technology with mobile devices
in mind, said Mr. Fraser. New routers often include smarter antennas that do a better job of
assembling signals and beaming energy toward devices that are moving around.

Some features inside newer routers also help reduce signal interference. Newer routers
typically can transmit data over two radio frequencies — 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz — and give
you the option to split them up into two separate Wi-Fi networks. In general, the 2.4 GHz
band transmits data farther and is more crowded because many types of devices, like
cordless phones and microwaves, use that frequency. The 5 GHz band is less congested but
typically travels a shorter distance.

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Consumer behavior is also to blame for Wi-Fi headaches. People may wait years before
buying a new router, so their devices might be more up-to-date than their infrastructure. An
outdated router becomes a bottleneck that hinders the speeds of web downloads and file
transfers between connected devices.

Some people never upgrade routers, especially those who still use the router that their
Internet service provider lent them years ago. Those routers, which often double as
modems, are often slow and short-ranged. That means it is time to buy a newer, faster
router.

Test Results

The Wirecutter performed a battery of tests on two top-performing routers with six devices,
and the results were unmistakable: If your current router is at least three years old, there is
no reason not to upgrade to a new router.

Not only can a newer router improve the speed and range for users, the routers typically
have upgraded internal components and strong external antennas. Many also support the
latest Wi-Fi standard — 802.11ac — which has top speeds that are nearly three times faster
than the previous standard, 802.11n, for the fastest wireless devices you can buy today.

Many smartphones, tablets and laptops released since 2013 support 802.11ac. But even
older devices that support only the previous standard, 802.11n, can enjoy faster speeds at
long range with a newer 802.11ac router.

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The Wirecutter

This is the first in a series of collaborations with The Wirecutter, a buyer’s guide to the best
technology products.

For these tests, The Wirecutter used two routers: its top 802.11ac router recommendation,
TP-Link’s Archer C7, and an older 802.11n router, Netgear’s WNDR3700. It tried them
with a 2012 iPhone 5, a 2014 iPhone 6 Plus, a 2013 HTC One M7, a 2015 Samsung Galaxy
S6, a 2012 MacBook Air and a 2014 MacBook Air.

To get an idea how each device performed with each router, The Wirecutter’s Wi-Fi expert,
David Murphy, tested file transfer speeds, video streaming speeds, music streaming quality
and video call quality at a short range of 11 feet and a long range of 43 feet.

Most tested devices had 19 percent to 54 percent faster download speeds and shaved 3 to 48
percent off their file-transfer times when paired with the Archer C7 compared with the
older 802.11n Netgear router. The devices also did better on the Archer C7’s 5 GHz Wi-Fi
network than on its 2.4GHz network at the same locations. In comparison, The Wirecutter
could not connect to the Netgear router’s 5 GHz Wi-Fi at its long-distance test location.

The Archer C7’s exceptional performance on a 5 GHz signal is its strength. Devices often
had the same download speeds at long range as short range when connected to the Archer
C7’s 5 GHz Wi-Fi. But at the longer distance, when switched to the Archer C7’s 2.4GHz
network, each device’s download speeds dropped, sometimes by more than 80 percent.

In summary: For a stronger, faster wireless connection, stay on the router’s 5 GHz band for
as long as you can. Older routers aren’t the best at that; a newer router like TP-Link’s
Archer C7 is a much better option.

Buying Advice

The best router for most people is the Archer C7 ($100). It’s a dual-band 802.11ac router,
meaning it can run both 2.4GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi networks, and it supports the fastest Wi-
Fi speeds of every wireless device you can buy, including the MacBook Pro, the Samsung
Galaxy S6 or the brand-new iPhone 6s. The Archer C7 is faster over longer distances than
most routers that cost $150 or more, and it’s the best value of the more than two dozen
routers The Wirecutter tested in the last two years.

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The Archer C7 isn’t for everyone. So The Wirecutter also combed through test results and
picked some routers for different living situations, such as small apartments or homes
where people primarily use Apple devices.

Generally, we recommend you upgrade to a new router every three to four years. That
accounts for how often people typically upgrade devices like smartphones (every two
years) and computers (every three to four years).

Yet whether your smartphones, computers and tablets are one, two or five years old, now is
a good time to buy a new router if you haven’t in the last three years. Newer devices are
probably using the 802.11ac standard, so you will get the fastest speeds at long distances
with an 802.11ac router. If you hoard old devices, you will also get faster speeds and
greater range. These benefits will be especially clear if you stay on a 5 GHz Wi-Fi network
for as long as you can.

One caveat: If you use a slower Internet service like DSL, you can probably hold on to a
router for longer than three years. A newer router can still be useful because of the
improved wireless range, but you won’t experience a big difference in speeds.

If your house is so large that a new router won’t be able to cover every inch with a great
Wi-Fi signal, you could install a Wi-Fi extender, which enhances an existing Wi-Fi
connection to increase coverage. Powerline networking, which converts a house’s electrical
wiring into a wired Internet connection, is another option, but you’ll have to check if your
home supports it.

As for Mr. McConnell, the retired engineer eventually solved his Wi-Fi headache by setting
up his devices to stay on the 5 GHz radio band. To get a Wi-Fi signal to his iPad in the
bedroom, he also set up an extender. Now everything is smooth sailing, he said.

“I’ve got my life back,” he said.