Reports the National Security Agency is secretly tapping the links between Google and Yahoo’s data centers have “misstated facts, mischaracterized NSA’s activities, and drawn erroneous inferences about those operations,” said the NSA Public Affairs Office in a Thursday statement (http://bit.ly/1f79EYi). The statement was the first official agency rebuttal of a project, known as MUSCULAR, that reportedly skirts Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court jurisdiction by collecting U.S. citizens’ communications overseas (CD Oct 31 p9). “NSA works with a number of partners and allies in meeting its foreign-intelligence mission goals, and in every case those operations comply with U.S. law and with the applicable laws under which those partners and allies operate,” the statement said. NSA’s communications collections systems “target communications links that contain” email addresses, phone numbers or other selectors “of foreign intelligence interest,” said the statement. “When a validated foreign intelligence target uses one of those means to send or receive their communications, we work to find, collect, and report on the communication.” Speaking at an American Bar Association event Thursday, Office of the Director of National Intelligence General Counsel Robert Litt said the media reports don’t tell the full story (http://bit.ly/18Kq1nQ). “The media reports are often based on documents that are exceptionally complicated, dense and jargonized, and require a level of technical knowledge that most people, including me, don’t have,” he said. “And the documents often present only part of the story.” Unfortunately, he said, “we frequently cannot correct their mistakes without compromising sensitive sources and methods.” But it’s important the public “differentiate between technical capacity and actual practice ... between what we can do technically and what we can do legally,” he said.
Enterprise Wireless Alliance President Mark Crosby said the FCC should “examine the licensing and ancillary regulatory activities” tied to Private Land Mobile Radio licensees and ask whether they are paying an appropriate percentage of FCC regulatory fees. EWA said in an ex parte filing that Crosby recently met with staff for the FCC Office of Managing Director (http://bit.ly/16sGpwH). “EWA agreed with the FCC’s decision that changes in the telecommunications marketplace since the regulatory fee structure was enacted warranted a review of the data on which those fees are based through a comprehensive analysis of the regulatory fee program,” the filing said.
UltiSat, a Danish communications provider, partnered with Eutelsat to provide nongovernmental organizations with managed satellite network solutions. Under contract, UltiSat will use capacity on Eutelsat 5 West A and take advantage of the satellite’s C-band coverage of Africa, Eutelsat said in a news release (http://bit.ly/1aZTR9n). With its teleport in Denmark and secure network operations in Maryland, “UltiSat will provide data and voice services between remote sites and its customers’ headquarters and data centers,” it said. “Service can also be scaled up to support on-demand videoconferencing and other surge services as required.”
The U.S., Mexico and Chile will host Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations with TPP participant nations throughout this month on unresolved issues, said the U.S. Trade Representative in an Oct. 31 statement. Meetings include one Nov. 6-9 on investment in Washington, and in Salt Lake City Nov. 12-18 on rules of origin and Nov. 19-24 on chief negotiators and key experts. USTR said it will announce phone briefings for U.S. stakeholders to be held around the Salt Lake City meetings.
Poor quarterly results for Time Warner Cable could make a takeover attempt likely, but could also leave potential buyers Charter and Liberty unwilling to pay the price of TWC’s shares, said analyst Craig Moffett of Moffett Nathanson in an email to investors. TWC losses in subscribers to video, broadband and phone, plus rising programming costs, left the company’s results “just horrible,” he said. The analyst had previously said “bad news would be good news for TWC, on the idea that bad results would only make a takeover more likely. … But this bad?” TWC’s retrans negotiation with CBS also hurt its position and the entire cable industry, said Moffett. “Every cable operator now goes to the table knowing that CBS not only won the war, but left TWC badly damaged even for having fought the fight,” said Moffett. He said the TWC losses have left the company’s shareholders “more levered than ever to a takeover."
The Federal Aviation Administration approved a rule change that will allow use of portable electronic devices during all aspects of flight and that’s good news for travelers, Mitchell Lazarus of Fletcher Heald wrote on the firm’s blog. “A lot of us hate turning off our electronic devices for take-off and landing,” Lazarus said (http://bit.ly/1dYePvH). “We have to sit there, bored, and leaf through the SkyMall catalogue, hoping the pilot knows what he’s doing.” The technical argument for forcing people to turn off their tablets was always thin, Lazarus said. “The alleged reason was that emissions from a Kindle reader or other personal electronic device somehow interfered with the cockpit equipment and would take the plane off course, or something like that,” he said. “We were always suspicious of that argument; the maximum emissions from a device in Airplane Mode are extremely low, measured in nanowatts. The argument sounded even thinner when we learned the pilots were allowed to use iPads in the cockpit. Right next to all the supposedly interference-prone equipment."
Price cap carriers may use their frozen high-cost support either to recover the costs of past network upgrades or to extend broadband-capable networks in areas substantially unserved by an unsubsidized competitor, or to maintain and operate existing networks in such areas, or a combination of the two, the FCC Wireline Bureau said in an order Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1csYRtQ). “Price cap carriers are not required to use one-third of their frozen support for new capital investment occurring in 2013.” The bureau was responding to petitions for clarification on the new frozen support rules, filed by USTelecom, FairPoint and Alaska Communications Systems. The obligation to use frozen high-cost support for broadband-capable networks in areas substantially unserved by an unsubsidized competitor applies to carriers at the holding company level, the bureau said. The bureau also clarified that the interstate access support amount for which each carrier was eligible in 2011 “should be implemented as a frozen per-line amount” in calculating subscriber line charges.
EAGLE-Net will answer questions from a letter by Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo. (http://1.usa.gov/HuNXpT), to NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling on the company choosing Affiniti to operate and expand its network, said Chip White, EAGLE-Net vice president-business development. Gardner said the recent agreement between EAGLE-Net and Affiniti could continue or enhance the current problems experienced by EAGLE-Net. Affiniti was formed in a merger between Trillion Partners and Sting Communications, said Gardner. Trillion Partners has been investigated for “numerous violations of the law, including anti-trust violations and E-rate program rule violations,” said Gardner. He asked NTIA to look into how Affiniti was formed, how it plans to work with providers that have been overbuilt by fiber, the fiscal sustainability of Affiniti and detailed plans of where Affiniti plans to build to unserved and underserved in Colorado. Gardner said it’s his responsibility as a “steward of taxpayer dollar[s]” to make sure that the $100.6 million invested in EAGLE-Net does not “fall into the hands of a company that is financially unsound or unwilling to work with the incumbent providers.” An agency spokesman said “NTIA has received Congressman Gardner’s letter and will respond accordingly.”
Maximizing the benefits of high-speed Internet is “vital” to America, FCC Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn told the National Urban League Wednesday, according to prepared remarks. There’s a “direct link” between access to broadband and access to jobs, and an Urban League report showed that 77 percent of African Americans have used broadband to search for jobs, she said. The adoption gap between African Americans and whites has been reduced nearly 50 percent since 2009, she said. But too many Americans still find themselves “lost behind by the broadband revolution,” with about 100 million people without high-speed Internet at home, she said. “Broadband is no longer a luxury, it is essential.” FCC partnerships with the Urban League have helped jumpstart Connect2Compete to close the broadband adoption gap, and FCC reform of outdated USF rules has made significant new funding available for broadband buildout, she said. Commission efforts to modernize E-rate will further enhance Americans’ access to high-speed Internet, she said. But the challenges of closing the digital divide are “too great for any one person or organization to solve,” she said. “That’s why increased public-private sector collaboration is so important."
Michael Robertson, founder of cyberlocker pioneer MP3tunes, unveiled what he called “the world’s first radio search engine” Thursday (http://radiosearchengine.com). “A universal web player for the first time connects to and plays nearly every station offering immediate audio satisfaction and unprecedented user control,” he said in an email. By searching for an artist, or genre, a user can locate each station in the country currently playing a song by that artist or every radio station playing that genre. “Tens of thousands of stations are scanned every 3-5 seconds to get the currently playing song,” he said. “This index is used to construct a real-time library of ever changing music on the radio all of which [is] searchable.” While some might think of radio as passe, Robertson thinks “radio is the redhead step child [sic] of the media industries,” he said. “On the business side, radio is a bigger industry than recorded music, books and magazine, yet its [sic] seen only a small amount of innovation of those sectors. It seems like an ideal opportunity to me.” Last year, Robertson filed for bankruptcy protection after a protracted copyright infringement case brought by EMI over MP3tunes, in which a judge said MP3tunes qualified for Digital Millennium Copyright Act safe harbors but would have to remove infringing songs from its users’ digital lockers. Robertson does not anticipate any legal issues with his new venture, he said. “Many of my inventions have been completely trailblazing like an app store, syncing CDs, physical + digital bundles, but RadioSeachEngine is not quite as novel,” he said in an email. “While a radio search engine is new there are of course Bing and Google which index just about every other media sector (newspapers, books, photos, etc).”