Senators showed support for televising the U.S. Supreme Court, but at a hearing Tuesday some voiced reservations that it may be unconstitutional for Congress to make rules for an equal branch of government. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts debated S-410, a bill requiring cameras in the courtrooms. There’s “nothing I would love more than to watch Supreme Court arguments on television,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said at the hearing. “At the same time, as a coordinate branch of government, the Supreme Court is entitled … to determine how it operates."

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, may add spectrum auction authority to a larger spending package that’s to be voted on this week on the House floor, a Boehner spokesman told us Friday. Boehner is discussing using spectrum as a “pay-for” for a payroll tax extension, the yearly pay correction for doctors serving Medicare patients and other items in the package, the spokesman said. If the spectrum proposal goes straight to the floor, it would skip a vote by the full Commerce Committee that had also been expected for this week. The House Communications Subcommittee approved draft spectrum legislation on Thursday (CD Dec 2 p1) amid objections by Democrats.

The FCC will soon open a proceeding taking off from BART’s adoption of a policy for cutoffs of wireless service, a commission official said Friday. The Wireless and Public Safety bureaus and the general counsel have been involved in the issue and will continue to be, the official said in an interview. He wouldn’t specify the nature of the proceeding or when the notice might be issued. And he wouldn’t say whether it would wrap in the handling of petitions that have challenged a shutdown by BART in August, before it had a policy.

The FCC will soon open a proceeding taking off from BART’s adoption of a policy for cutoffs of wireless service, a commission official said Friday. The Wireless and Public Safety bureaus and the general counsel have been involved in the issue and will continue to be, the official said in an interview. He wouldn’t specify the nature of the proceeding or when the notice might be issued. And he wouldn’t say whether it would wrap in the handling of petitions that have challenged a shutdown by BART in August, before it had a policy.

In the November 30, 2011 issue of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Bulletin (Vol. 45, No. 49), CBP published two notices that propose to modify one ruling and revoke two rulings and similar treatment regarding the tariff classification of play paper money and porcelain travel coffee cups.

The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) threw cold water on a new House cybersecurity bill, HR-3523, and raised concerns about the privacy implications inherent in the legislation’s broad language. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Ranking Member Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., introduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act on Wednesday, calling it a means to increase cyberthreat information sharing between national intelligence agencies and the private sector (WID Dec 1 p1). But CDT said it had four concerns with the bill: It has a “very broad, almost unlimited” definition of the information that can be shared with government agencies; it is likely to expand the government’s monitoring of private communications; it is likely to shift control of government cybersecurity efforts from civilian agencies to the military; and government agencies could feasibly use the information for any purpose, wrote Greg Nojeim, CDT’s senior counsel, in a blog post Thursday (http://xrl.us/bmjx7h). “The bill permits essentially unfettered sharing with the government and in particular with the military side of the government,” Nojeim said. Furthermore, the bill permits the Director of Intelligence to “use the certification process for government-to-private sharing in order to incentivize the private sector to share more with the military side of government without restrictions, thus expanding the role of the [Department of Defense] in private sector cybersecurity.” The criticism came prior to a House Select Committee on Intelligence markup of the bill on Thursday, which was closed to the public and press. The bill alternately got a boost from the Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance, which represents mid-size local exchange carriers. The lawmakers have moved “aggressively ... to tackle daily threats to the nation’s broadband networks,” said alliance President Genny Morelli. Her members “spend substantial capital every day” protecting residential, business and government customers from cyberthreats, but “absent the ability for private network owners and the government to exchange intelligence on cyber threats, our national security and economic well-being will remain vulnerable to attack,” Morelli said. The leader of the House Republican Cyber Security Task Force, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, confirmed his support for the legislation but told us he didn’t think “it’s going to be the final answer” (see separate report in this issue). Thornberry described the bill as a “good start” that “deals with one of the central issues we talked about in the task force and that is information sharing.”

New FCC ex parte rules were violated at least 11 times since taking effect June 1, a Communications Daily review of all filings and the agency’s own checks found. Some filings were made late -- from a day in many instances to a few weeks -- and others didn’t contain enough information on what was discussed during lobbying meetings. The filings were made by companies and associations big and small. They covered proceedings ranging from changing the Universal Service Fund to pay for broadband deployment to retransmission consent, ISP speeds, disabilities access legislation passed in 2010 and getting low-power TV stations to fully vacate the 700 MHz band for wireless broadband in the small portion they occupy.

The FCC should not act on an order permitting the sale of Qualcomm spectrum to AT&T while AT&T is still pushing forward on its buy of T-Mobile, the Rural Telecommunications Group said in a letter filed at the FCC Wednesday. “So long as AT&T doggedly pursues a takeover of T-Mobile, the Commission needs to put the Qualcomm transaction on ice given the vast amounts of nationwide spectrum involved in each transaction,” said RTG General Counsel Carri Bennet. Last week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski circulated draft orders the same day approving the Qualcomm deal while sending AT&T/T-Mobile to an administrative law judge for hearing (CD Nov 23 p1). Tuesday, the FCC allowed AT&T to withdraw the latter application (CD Nov 30 p1). “RTG respectfully requests that the AT&T-Qualcomm applications be held in abeyance so the Commission can continue to consider AT&T’s acquisition of the Qualcomm spectrum and AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile in a coordinated manner,” RTG said (http://xrl.us/bmjvtm). “The Commission has already stated that its review of the two proposed transactions ‘raise[s] a number of related issues.'"

Letting cable operators scramble broadcast TV and other basic channels in all-digital systems was largely backed in comments at the FCC. Scrambling is designed to cut down on signal theft and reduce pollution by eliminating the need for technicians to visit households to turn on and off video. Operators large and small, two nonprofits that had concerns with a first-of-its-kind waiver request made two years ago by Cablevision and local regulators each backed at least some of an FCC basic-tier encryption proposal. The regulators sought more conditions than what the commission’s October rulemaking notice proposed.

Facebook settled with the FTC on allegations that it made deceptive claims about user privacy. The agency alleged that Facebook committed numerous violations of the FTC Act, including when it made changes in December 2009 that made public certain information that users had designated as private, said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. The company wasn’t fined but will have to put in place a major new privacy program.