Return of Visitor Badges, Sending Data to GPO, Device Certification Self-Declaration Sought From FCC

The FCC got maybe 20-25 responses to the process-reform blog query, with some still “trickling in,” said Cornell. The agency will release them before finishing the review, she said. The review is focusing on process and not “substantive rules,” and keying on things like “the efficiency of how the FCC conducts business” such as tracking systems, “outdated rules and data collection requirements,” and decisionmaking efficiency, she said. The review is “trying to figure out ways to attack backlogs, for example, are there more streamlined ways” of reaching decisions, asked Cornell. The goal is to “make the decisionmaking process not only better, but faster,” she continued. The last substantive FCC procedural change she’s aware of was to ex parte rules in 2011 (CD Feb 4/11 p2) (http://fcc.us/ILy4eH).

To prevent device certifications from being held up as occurred two months ago (CD Oct 9 p2), the agency should change procedure to allow self-certification, said TIA (http://bit.ly/1hANC3N). While a third-party, private telecom certification body “may have granted a certification, the equipment would not officially be considered ‘approved’ until entered into the database” hosted by the FCC, said the association. That requires “manufacturers and vendors to wait while the approval database server hosts were offline, a purely rudimentary step that could easily be addressed by simply changing the procedural rules,” said TIA.

Some of the group’s members have also sought improvements to fcc.gov, along the lines of the spectrum dashboard started in recent years, said TIA Vice President-Government Affairs Danielle Coffey in an interview. “The website in general is something that our members have voiced that that’s something that they would like to see improved and updated.” When it comes to getting feedback, the FCC is “one of the best agencies” and the “most interactive agency,” according to TIA members’ comments to Coffey, she said. TIA members include Alcatel Lucent, Corning, EchoStar, Ericsson and Motorola Solutions. A “very popular gripe” generally among all the associations’ members is the end of the FCC visitor badge policy, said Coffey. The association’s members “have complained about that over the years,” and it’s “frustrating,” she said.

The old badge policy, begun in 1999 and allowing frequent visitors to enter the FCC’s main entrance “without having to stop at the Guard Desk to sign in,” changed when the agency “refused to process any new requests for these passes,” wrote TIA. The policy changed in recent years, and those with visitors’ badges could renew them every six months but would lose them if they didn’t get a new one before the existing one expired, we've been told by commission security staff. “Re-opening the processing of new applications for frequent visitor passes would relieve security guards of unnecessarily processing frequent visitor entrances and Commission staff of unnecessarily having to escort these visitors, contributing to improved operations,” said TIA.

The FCBA Access to Government Information Committee is “working with them to find a solution that works for everybody,” said co-Chairman Jason Rademacher about the agency. “For folks who are frequently there, and the FCC vets them, it makes sense to us that they have freer access. But we're communications lawyers, not security experts.” The committee has “had inquiries from a number of members of the communications bar who would love to see the program reinstated, particularly the practitioners who have practiced for many years and got used to the system as it was before,” said the communications lawyer at Dow Lohnes. “But so far the FCC has not been inclined to reconsider this decision. We intend to continue talking with them about it. We're not pressing them, we're not fighting with them about it."

Several library groups said they want the FCC to give what’s “exclusively” on its website to the Government Printing Office, so GPO can in turn make it available to its Federal Digital System (FDsys) which provides data from various agencies’ websites to the Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe consortium of research libraries. The government shutdown “denied the public access to primary legal materials available exclusively on the Commission’s website, such as orders not yet published in the FCC Record, as well as public comments available exclusively on the Commission’s Electronic Comment Filing System” and other commission systems, said associations led by the CU’s Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law and Policy Clinic. “FDsys stayed accessible during the shutdown, affording the public access to authentic government information such as the Congressional Record, the Federal Register, and bills and laws.” The American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, Special Libraries Association and several librarians joined the filing.

FDsys’s advantage is redundancy in case government websites shut down again, as various libraries mirror agency data kept by the GPO through its document program, said Assistant UC Professor Blake Reid, who made the libraries’ filing and directs the Samuelson-Glushko clinic, and James Jacobs, a librarian who signed it, in interviews. They said the GPO service also offers some document searchability and allows for some data mining. The libraries’ system, with about 1.3 terabytes of data, is made publicly available if there’s a “trigger event,” such as a government shutdown, said Jacobs. “This just adds a layer of preservation to the whole system.” Had GPO gone offline during the shutdown, the libraries’ system would have been available online, said Jacobs, head of the Free Government Information librarians’ advocacy group and Stanford University government information librarian.

"There is definitely demand for FCC content, and the more places it’s at, the better chance that the public will get access to it,” said Jacobs. Media scholars and activists might have a particular interest in the documents, as would those interested in net neutrality, media ownership and other communications issues, he said. “There is interest from a small and active group of people, both researchers and activists.”

Samuelson-Glushko separately sought a “centralized, publicly accessible repository of information on the status of petitions, including their filing date, Commission actions taken to date, links to public comments filed on the petitions, and so on.” That “would provide both businesses and investors with a transparent source for essential information about critical petitions and serve as a reference point for how similar petitions are progressing,” it said. Until a petition is docketed, it’s hard to track it and even after requests are numbered, there’s no one way to track such requests generally, said Reid in an interview. His clinic also sought a 90-day shot clock for the FCC to put petitions for rulemaking on public notice. Wheeler seems to “want to take a look” at potential process reforms, said Reid. “I think it’s a real priority.” -- Jonathan Make (jmake@warren-news.com)