The Senate Judiciary Committee should bar immunity for telecom companies, in the electronic surveillance bill set for markup Thursday, privacy groups said in a conference call Monday. “The best outcome would be to see the whole thing collapse,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. The committee faces a contentious markup Thursday on a bill (S-2248) that the Senate Intelligence Committee approved two weeks ago. It offers targeted immunity for any phone companies that helped in the president’s surveillance program.

Basing industry contributions to the Universal Service Fund on telephone numbers rather than revenue not only would make the fund more stable but also would benefit consumers, George Mason University’s Mercatus Center said in a Nov. 2 letter to the FCC. The center said its comments are based on its own views and not those of any interest group. The current revenue-based system acts like a usage tax, Mercatus said. It raises consumer costs, leading to reduced consumer use of services and lower industry revenue, a cycle that economists call “deadweight loss,” Mercatus said. On the other hand, a numbers-based system “would have little effect on subscription rates,” at least for wireline services, it said. That’s because “demand for wireline service is almost completely inelastic, meaning that customers will generally continue to purchase the service, regardless of price changes,” the letter said. The group said “wireless service is more complicated but careful analysis still suggests benefits from changing the assessment methodology.” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin long has championed changing the contributions system to one based on telephone numbers.

University students targeted by the RIAA on file-sharing allegations are getting help from two unexpected sources: their own university, and their state’s top law enforcement officer. Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers (D), on behalf of the University of Oregon, filed a motion to quash a subpoena to the school for the identities of 17 John Doe defendants in Arista v. Does 1-17 in U.S. District Court, Eugene. It appears to be the first time either a university or state attorney general has intervened in a RIAA file- sharing case, said Ray Beckerman, a P2P defense lawyer who runs the Recording Industry vs. the People blog.

The FCC launched a rulemaking that proposes a single rate for pole attachments, to be paid by wireline carriers, cable operators and competitive local exchange carriers alike. That would be bad news for cable operators, which generally pay the lowest rates. Incumbent local exchange carriers generally pay the highest rates. The rulemaking also asks an extensive series of questions on matters that have been raised by telecom carriers and cable companies.

The FCC approved Wednesday an order 5-0 expanding local number portability (LNP) requirements to interconnected VoIP providers. The order seems to be a victory for wireless carriers that have complained about excessive data requests from their wireline competitors to port numbers, saying future ports will require only four data points. Only a news release and commissioners’ statements had been released at our deadline. The FCC also asked questions about porting rules in an accompanying rulemaking.

A theme quickly developed at a Tuesday event at which chief information security officers for federal agencies discussed emerging threats: Nobody is focusing on them. CISOs remain preoccupied with known problems like poor worker training, an explosion of service-oriented architectures, and add-on security to systems not built with security in mind, they told the Information Technology Association of America’s annual CISO workshop in Falls Church, Va.

A House of Lords committee accused the U.K. of “putting its head in the sand” by dismissing key recommendations by a parliamentary body investigating personal Internet security. The Science and Technology Committee called a “huge disappointment” the government response to evidence of e- crime and many users’ inability to protect themselves. The response was made public Tuesday.

Rent-a-Center will pay about $3.6 million to settle a class action suit alleging the chain tried to inflate its stock price in 2001 to complete a secondary stock offering. Terry Walker sued the chain in U.S. District Court, Texarkana, Tex., in 2002, on behalf of those who had bought stock April 25 to Oct. 8, 2001.

Freeing Verizon from requirements that it provide unbundled network elements to competitors at regulated rates would cost customers $2.4 billion in six major markets in just one year, QSI Consulting said in a report released Monday and paid for by XO and other competitive carriers. Costs will soar $1.4 billion in the New York market alone as costs for these elements grow 200 to 300 percent, QSI said. The average household would pay $114 more annually for service. Verizon disagreed.

A federal court in Connecticut ruled that it can hear a 2004 interconnection dispute between AT&T (formerly Southern New England Telephone) and competitive carrier Global NAPS without first having the dispute heard by Connecticut state regulators, because Global forfeited its opportunity to have the quarrel referred to the state commission. U.S. District Judge Janet Hall in New Haven said (Case 3:04-CV-2075 JCH) federal courts usually grant a party’s request to defer hearing interconnection disputes until state administrative remedies have been exhausted, but “there is no language in [the federal Telecom Act] that expressly proscribes a district court from hearing a dispute concerning an interconnection agreement.” She said the Telecom Act expressly allows federal court to step into interconnection disputes when a state has failed to act, but said the act is “somewhat silent” on whether a federal court can hear other interconnection disputes without first referring the parties to the state commission. She said Global should have raised the issue of state regulators’ primary jurisdiction over this quarrel early in the proceeding, instead of waiting three years to bring it up. She cited federal appeals court rulings that failure to exhaust state administrative remedies doesn’t automatically block federal litigation. She said Global’s failure early on to seek a referral to the state commission amounted to tacit acceptance that the federal court was the appropriate place to hear the dispute.