Microsoft did not release customer data in either “content” or “non-content” form in response to the vast majority of law enforcement requests in 2012, the company said Thursday in releasing its first “transparency” report (http://bit.ly/Xs2y6D). Microsoft collects such data as a member of the Global Network Initiative. Google has been releasing the reports periodically since 2010, and in its latest report for the first time segmented law enforcement requests by the legal process used. The Microsoft data cover its online and cloud services including Hotmail and Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Xbox Live, Microsoft Account, Messenger and Office 365, it said. Skype data are included but reported separately since Skype collected data in a different format before Microsoft’s acquisition of the service in late 2011 and because Skype continues operating under Luxembourg law, Microsoft said. Microsoft and Skype together received 75,378 law enforcement requests that “potentially impacted” 137,424 accounts, which Microsoft said was “likely” less than 0.02 percent of active users. Its compliance teams provided “no customer data” in response to 18 percent of requests, “non-content information” only for 79.8 percent, and content information for 2.2 percent. Non-content data refer to “basic subscriber information, such as the e-mail address, name, location and IP address captured at the time of registration,” while content data are created by customers, such as email text, it said. The company gave only broad ranges for the number of national security letters it has received from the FBI in recent years: 0-999 in 2012, 1,000-1,999 each in 2011 and 2010, and 0-999 in 2009. The top 5 countries for law enforcement requests (http://bit.ly/13fHl7R) were Turkey (11,434), U.S. (11,073), U.K. (9,226), France (8,603) and Germany (8,419). The U.S. was the only country with any significant number of its requests approved for content data -- 13.9 percent, or 1,544 of its requests. Requests that disclosed no customer data were segmented by those for which no customer data were found and those rejected for “not meeting legal requirements.” Only a handful of countries had more than a few rejections on legal grounds, led by the U.S. with 759 rejections, or 6.9 percent of its total. Skype received 4,713 requests on 15,409 accounts or identifiers in 2012, led by the U.K. (1,268), U.S. (1,154), Germany (686), France (402) and Taiwan (316), and none involved disclosure of content, Microsoft said. It provided data only from July through December 2012 on “accounts specified in requests where compliance team found no data” -- 2,847, led by the U.S. (1,032) and Germany (475) -- and “provided guidance to law enforcement” in 501 requests, again led by the U.S. (210) and Germany (70). Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said in a blog post (http://bit.ly/Y1iqR2) it would update the report every six months. He said Microsoft is publishing more than just total requests and affected accounts, which “we hope will provide added insights for our customers and the public who are interested in these issues,” and said Skype data will be reported in the same format as other Microsoft services in future reports. Smith emphasized that 99 percent of content disclosures were in response to “lawful warrants” from U.S. courts and only four other countries -- Brazil, Ireland, Canada and New Zealand -- got content, and nearly two in three non-content disclosures apart from Skype went to just five countries. It received only 11 requests in 2012 for enterprise customers, either rejected or redirected to the targeted company in seven of those requests, and in the four disclosures it either got the customer’s consent first or released data “pursuant to a specific contractual arrangement” with the customer, Smith said. He invited users to provide feedback or suggestions to mcitizen@microsoft.com. The Electronic Frontier Foundation saw vindication in Microsoft’s release of law enforcement request details, as EFF was part of a coalition in January calling for Microsoft to publish requests for Skype user data. The digital rights group said (http://bit.ly/16NBPIA) Microsoft’s report “goes beyond” that of Google in reporting the number of non-Skype requests for “subscriber/transactional data,” which is a “great step forward,” and it urged “Google and others to match Microsoft on this one.” The fact that Microsoft says there weren’t any content disclosures for Skype “may appear reassuring, although some have raised good questions about” such figures, EFF said. It noted Microsoft made an “important caveat” about Skype, that “some users of our services may be subject to government monitoring or the suppression of ideas and speech” and that despite using encryption for Skype-Skype calls, “no communication method is 100% secure,” especially if it touches the public telephone network. EFF said one “troubling question” in the report is whether falsified Skype certificates or disclosure of cryptographic secrets counts as “disclosure of content” for Skype: “It’s important for Microsoft to clarify this point to make the information reported about Skype meaningful.” The group said nonetheless Microsoft deserves “big credit” for publishing such broad information: “We hope that 2013 is the year that transparency reports become to new normal."
JSC Global Contact Consulting selected Eutelsat for a new satellite broadcasting platform. JSC, a Georgian company, signed a multi-year lease for capacity on Eutelsat 36B, Eutelsat said in a press release (http://bit.ly/ZhLeAE). To accelerate access to the platform, JSC “plans to install several thousand dishes across Georgia over the next two years that will be pointed to EUTELSAT 36B at 36 degrees east.”
The European Commission wants input on how to protect media freedom and whether audiovisual regulatory bodies should be independent, it said in consultations launched Friday. The audiovisual and media services directive was enacted to create a single market for such services and to give Europe’s audiovisual and TV industries legal certainty, but the EC now wants to know whether that measure should be revised to ensure the independence of audiovisual regulators (http://bit.ly/13ivXIf). In a second consultation document (http://bit.ly/15AdulU), the EC asks: (1) Whether the EU can legally act under the EU Treaties to safeguard media freedom and pluralism. (2) Whether more harmonization of laws in areas such as libel and data protection would help cross-border online media activities. (3) How EU and national competition authorities should monitor online access to information to ensure that dominant network access providers or Internet information providers don’t restrict media freedom and pluralism. (4) Whether net neutrality and the Internet end-to-end principle should be enshrined in law. Comments in both consultations are due June 14.
The FCC granted CenturyLink’s request to withdraw its petition for forbearance of dominant carrier regulation and the Computer Inquiry tariffing requirement with respect to its packet-switched and optical transmission services. The commission had issued a public notice inviting submissions of competition data to assist the commission in evaluating CenturyLink’s petition. Granting CenturyLink’s request to withdraw is in the public interest, the commission said, “because it will avoid expenditures associated with responding to the Commission’s voluntary data request.” A CenturyLink spokeswoman said the telco “believes that the regulatory flexibility it sought in its forbearance petition is fully justified. However, the company has decided to explore other means of obtaining the flexibility necessary to meet its customers’ needs and compete effectively in the highly competitive marketplace for enterprise broadband services."
An appeals court declined to overrule a Mississippi Public Service Commission interpretation of an interconnection agreement (ICA) between two local telcos. “It is binding law in this circuit that a federal court reviews a state utility commission’s interpretation of an ICA under an arbitrary and capricious standard,” the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote Thursday (http://1.usa.gov/103filG). Dixie-Net Communications and AT&T Mississippi had differing interpretations of their 2007 ICA, and the MPSC had determined that AT&T was not required to pay intrastate switched access fees to Dixie-Net for those calls (http://bit.ly/14ay14f). The circuit court agreed with a lower court’s finding that MPSC’s ruling was not arbitrary and capricious.
Angela Simpson was named acting deputy NTIA administrator, replacing Anna Gomez, who’s leaving the agency. Simpson is currently NTIA chief of staff and is a veteran of the 2008 Obama campaign. She previously worked at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, Covad, and as an associate at Squire Sanders.
The FCC and its Intergovernmental Advisory Committee may not be communicating enough, committee member Ken Fellman told the SouthEast Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors at their meeting in Charlotte, N.C., Thursday, during a panel on wireless siting issues. Fellman is a past president of NATOA, works as an attorney in Colorado and is the one town attorney representative on the FCC Intergovernmental Advisory Committee. He pointed to the FCC’s January advisory on such wireless issues (http://fcc.us/13g5Q4P) and said the committee “frankly was shocked” to see it, having heard no advance notice it was coming. “The FCC did not tell their own advisory committee,” Fellman said, referring to an opportunity two weeks before the advisory was issued to do so. The committee is meeting again in April, and he remains “somewhat hopeful we will have a more frank discussion” but is also “concerned” given there’s no guarantee the FCC will keep the committee informed, he told SEATOA. “We ought to be concerned that there’s another wave coming,” he said, referring to some talk of a potential FCC rulemaking on these issues.
The Department of Defense recently signed memorandum of understanding agreements (MOU) with T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon to assess the feasibility of sharing the 1755-1850 MHz band among selected Defense operations and commercial mobile broadband planned use, a Defense spokesman said Thursday. “The selected DoD operations include satellite command and control links, air combat training system[s], small unmanned aerial system[s], and aeronautical mobile telemetry and represent the most significant cost, time, and comparable spectrum challenges as documented in the NTIA 1755-1850 MHz report,” the spokesman said via email. “At this time, the Department cannot provide details or speculate on the outcome of this effort since the work under the MOU is still ongoing. However, it is important to note that this is a very good example of the cooperation that is occurring between the DoD and the commercial wireless industry,” the spokesman said.
Charter lawyers met with an aide to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and a Media Bureau official to push for its requested CableCARD waiver, an ex parte notice shows (http://bit.ly/11kIiXx). They said the waiver would save customers $50 million to $100 million in equipment costs, “costs which are entirely unnecessary given that Charter has more than enough CableCARDs to assure common reliance support for CableCARDs for years to come,” it said.
Public television will produce less local programming over the next year while under sequester, said Patrick Butler, president of the Association of Public Television Stations. Local issues and some community programs “will be curtailed by the sequester,” he said Thursday in an interview for C-SPAN’s The Communicators. The effect “will hurt and the quantity of our service will be diminished,” he said. The sequestration will reduce Corporation for Public Broadcasting grants by about 5 percent, which is about $22 million, he said. “It hurts but we understand we've got to be contributors to the solution and so we have saluted smartly and taken our medicine with everybody else,” he said. To evaluate options for public TV stations on the broadcast incentive auctions proceeding at the FCC, APTS created a spectrum opportunities task force, he said. “We think this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get all of the efficiencies and revenue opportunities that we've been dreaming about for the last several years actually accomplished over the next three or four or five years.” Some public TV stations may be in a position to move channels to VHF, he said. Others may be interested in combining some of their back office operations and joint master control rooms with other public or commercial TV stations, he said. “It may be that most of our stations don’t have any impact at all through this except for the repacking that will probably affect virtually everybody in the television industry.” Butler said APTS is focused on “letting Congress understand better that we are public service media,” in making its case to keep the CPB government allocation intact. “Not only do we provide this high-quality programming on television, but … we are very actively engaged in the education enterprise, homeland security and other things in which a public investment is well-justified.” It’s not a matter of the federal government sustaining Sesame Street, he added: “What the federal government does is sustain the distribution system over which Sesame Street can reach every American home.”