The author of a wide-ranging surveillance overhaul vigorously defended the bill and called Tuesday for votes in both houses of Congress. Speaking at a Georgetown Law Center event, House Judiciary Crime Subcommittee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., criticized a series of what he considered abuses his USA Freedom Act, HR-3361, would fix. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., worked with Sensenbrenner and introduced its companion, S-1599. House and Senate leaders should “give Pat Leahy and me an up-or-down vote on the Freedom Act,” declared Sensenbrenner, the original Patriot Act author. “And I bet when we get that, we'll win.”
"A large majority” of the nation’s broadcasters will sit out the TV incentive spectrum auction, NAB Executive Vice President Rick Kaplan predicted Tuesday during a webinar sponsored by the Digital Policy Institute. Kaplan, a former FCC Wireless Bureau chief, also questioned why the FCC continues to push for a 2014 auction. Preston Padden, head of the Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition, said the auction should be a huge success as long as the FCC gets the rules right.
The author of a wide-ranging surveillance overhaul vigorously defended the bill and called Tuesday for votes in both houses of Congress. Speaking at a Georgetown Law Center event, House Judiciary Crime Subcommittee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., criticized a series of what he considered abuses his USA Freedom Act, HR-3361, would fix. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., worked with Sensenbrenner and introduced its companion, S-1599. House and Senate leaders should “give Pat Leahy and me an up-or-down vote on the Freedom Act,” declared Sensenbrenner, the original Patriot Act author. “And I bet when we get that, we'll win.”
The IP transition does not eliminate the public policy objectives of state regulators to provide affordable rates, high quality services, 911 access or broadband deployment, said a National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates paper Friday in response to an Internet Innovation Alliance paper from Anna-Maria Kovacs, visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Business and Public Policy. Kovacs’ paper (http://bit.ly/16vzCTf) argues that ILECs are not investing in broadband because of “alleged regulatory obligations that require wasteful investment in ‘duplicate’ copper-based circuit switched network,” said the NASUCA paper. She said the small volume of voice traffic, compared to all IP traffic, negates the importance of policy oversight of the IP transition, and competition gives consumers a “plethora of choices over various platforms” which undermines the need for regulatory oversight, said the NASUCA paper. Kovacs’ arguments on ILEC investment are based on the 2011 Atkinson study, and she misinterprets the study, said NASUCA. The study by Bob Atkinson, Columbia Institute for Tele-Information director-public policy research, came from a report on the state of broadband in the U.S. It shows that ILECs are targeting two-thirds of investment in next-generation technologies rather than the 47 percent identified in Kovacs’ paper, which ignored “substantial portions” of ILEC legacy facilities and investments shared by ILEC broadband facilities. The NASUCA paper said ILECs will operate on a single network during the IP-broadband transition rather than the duplicate networks needed to support broadband that Kovacs argues. Kovacs’ argument is that there are “so many non-voice bits circulating on IP networks” that the relevance of voice is diminished, which NASUCA thinks is unreasonable because the flood of IP-based video traffic does not diminish the importance of high-quality voice services. Kovacs’ assumption that consumers are capable of addressing issues of network reliability and access to emergency services on their own through the purchase of “multiple infrastructures” is unreasonable to NASUCA because not all consumers can afford multiple infrastructures, and wireless and next-generation IP-based technologies are not immune from simultaneous failure. Kovacs’ conclusion that “liberating” ILECs from regulatory oversight will produce additional investment and result in the optimal outcome is not reasonably supported, said NASUCA. Comptel also came out against Kovacs’ paper last month, saying the paper’s claims about ILECs were not supported by the underlying data (CD Oct 22 p6).
The FCC is committed to advancing 911 location accuracy rules beyond the last update approved in 2011, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said Monday during a day-long 911 location accuracy workshop at FCC headquarters. “I have been pro-911 and pro-911 location since the beginning of the location challenge,” said Wheeler, who paid an unscheduled visit to the workshop. States led by California have raised concerns that current requirements aren’t good enough. Carriers have been locked in a fight with the Find Me 911 Coalition, which they say is funded by technology provider TruePosition and has been spreading bad information to the states. On Monday, the FCC waded into the fight.
It’s up to broadcasters to embrace the nascent rollout of mobile DTV, with the expense of adding equipment to transmit to portable consumer electronics using that standard being minor compared with the opportunity cost of not “lighting up,” said advocates of the technology. One backer told us he’s frustrated at the pace of adoption, while others said in interviews last week and at an NAB event that they expect more stations to adopt the technology. “Mobile TV is already available in nearly 40 markets serving approximately 60 percent of the U.S. population,” said NAB incentive auction pointman Rick Kaplan at the event Wednesday. “This is all before mobile TV proponents have ever launched a large-scale coordinated promotional campaign.”
Google pressed for more disclosures of government data requests and updates to different laws in Congress. Google has posted transparency reports for years and seen government requests for its user data skyrocket -- they doubled over the course of three years, the company said in a blog post Thursday (http://bit.ly/19niZpp). Google received 10,918 requests from the U.S. government from January to June 2013, according to its latest data. Of the requests, 68 percent were subpoenas, 22 percent warrants, 6 percent “other court orders,” 2 percent pen register orders and 1 percent emergency disclosure requests, it said. It included a chart titled Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests, completely blacked out with a parenthetical message saying, “The U.S. government contends that we cannot share this information.” Google also included a chart comparing the number of U.S. requests to other countries over that same timeframe, with U.S. taking the lead by more than 8,000 requests. The U.S. is also the government yielding the highest percentage of data produced from its requests. Google produced some data in 83 percent of U.S. government requests, it said. “We want to go even further,” said Legal Director-Law Enforcement and Information Security Richard Salgado. “The U.S. Department of Justice contends that U.S. law does not allow us to share information about some national security requests that we might receive. .... But you deserve to know.” Salgado testified to that effect Wednesday before Congress (CD Nov 14 p8). Salgado wrote of Google’s federal case and letters of support for legislation in order to be more transparent about the government requests. Google also wants the Electronic Communications Privacy Act updated in this session of Congress, and “we urge Congress to expeditiously enact a bright-line, warrant-for-content rule,” Salgado said. “Governmental entities should be required to obtain a warrant -— issued based on a showing of probable cause -- before requiring companies like Google to disclose the content of users’ electronic communications.” Google’s latest transparency report “illustrates the government’s steadily growing appetite for more data from more users,” said Center for Democracy & Technology President Leslie Harris, in a statement. Laws to prevent warrantless searches should be updated, she said. “Reforming ECPA is an important step Congress can take to restore the checks and balances that are supposed to prevent government overreach into our private lives.”
Google pressed for more disclosures of government data requests and updates to different laws in Congress. Google has posted transparency reports for years and seen government requests for its user data skyrocket -- they doubled over the course of three years, the company said in a blog post Thursday (http://bit.ly/19niZpp). Google received 10,918 requests from the U.S. government from January to June 2013, according to its latest data. Of the requests, 68 percent were subpoenas, 22 percent warrants, 6 percent “other court orders,” 2 percent pen register orders and 1 percent emergency disclosure requests, it said. It included a chart titled Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests, completely blacked out with a parenthetical message saying, “The U.S. government contends that we cannot share this information.” Google also included a chart comparing the number of U.S. requests to other countries over that same timeframe, with U.S. taking the lead by more than 8,000 requests. The U.S. is also the government yielding the highest percentage of data produced from its requests. Google produced some data in 83 percent of U.S. government requests, it said. “We want to go even further,” said Legal Director-Law Enforcement and Information Security Richard Salgado. “The U.S. Department of Justice contends that U.S. law does not allow us to share information about some national security requests that we might receive. .... But you deserve to know.” Salgado testified to that effect Wednesday before Congress (WID Nov 14 p4). Salgado wrote of Google’s federal case and letters of support for legislation in order to be more transparent about the government requests. Google also wants the Electronic Communications Privacy Act updated in this session of Congress, and “we urge Congress to expeditiously enact a bright-line, warrant-for-content rule,” Salgado said. “Governmental entities should be required to obtain a warrant -— issued based on a showing of probable cause -- before requiring companies like Google to disclose the content of users’ electronic communications.” Google’s latest transparency report “illustrates the government’s steadily growing appetite for more data from more users,” said Center for Democracy & Technology President Leslie Harris, in a statement. Laws to prevent warrantless searches should be updated, she said. “Reforming ECPA is an important step Congress can take to restore the checks and balances that are supposed to prevent government overreach into our private lives.”
It’s up to broadcasters to embrace the nascent rollout of mobile DTV, with the expense of adding equipment to transmit to portable consumer electronics using that standard being minor compared with the opportunity cost of not “lighting up,” said advocates of the technology. One backer told us he’s frustrated at the pace of adoption, while others said in interviews Thursday and Wednesday and at an NAB event that they expect more stations to adopt the technology. “Mobile TV is already available in nearly 40 markets serving approximately 60 percent of the U.S. population,” said NAB’s incentive auction pointman Rick Kaplan at the event Wednesday night. “This is all before mobile TV proponents have ever launched a large-scale coordinated promotional campaign.”
NEW YORK -- Better communications between satellite companies and emergency response management teams is needed to improve how satellite communications are used to aid in emergency recovery, said Dwight Hunsicker, Globecomm vice president-government business development. Globecomm was involved in recovery operations after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Hurricane Katrina and the flooding this year in Colorado, he said Wednesday at SATCON in New York. Globecomm deployed equipment to provide communications because the primary infrastructure was flooded out, he said.