October 2010

The Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security have breathed the same air on cybersecurity for seven years, but it's taken until now for the two executive branch departments to make their union official.

According to a recently-released memo, DHS will assign a senior officer to the National Security Agency, and a "Joint Coordination Element" will be set up to coordinate Defense Department and Homeland Security responses to domestic cyber emergencies. The NSA will in turn provided support elements to DHS, and will move a dozen personnel to DHS's main cybersecurity response campus in Fairfax County, Virginia. DHS cyber cops and managers will be permanently stationed at the headquarters of Cyber Command, at Fort Meade in Maryland. Several DHS analysts will be detailed to the NSA's National Threat Operations Center, which is the intelligence community's cybersecurity warning center. The goal is to "better protect against threat to civilian and military systems," a senior Defense Department official told reporters on a conference call. "The threats we face cross jurisdictional boundaries, and it's important that we bring together capabilities to respond as one nation." The new cooperation will make it easier for the NSA to lend its expertise to emergency domestic cyber threats under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, rather than through direct contact with the private sector entity under threat, officials said.

Saying the Internet has its own inherent "shaming culture," the Minority Media & Telecommunications Council (MMTC) has asked the Federal Communications Commission not to impose "draconian enforcement mechanisms" in its effort to protect consumers.

MMTC, which said it was speaking on behalf of two dozen minority and civil rights groups, said it supported five out the six proposed network neutrality guidelines the FCC is proposing to codify, but has issues with the nondiscrimination principle. As it has in the past, MMTC expressed reservations about applying the net neutrality rules to wireless and said it doesn't want the commission prohibiting "pro-consumer voluntary agreements for the provision of specialized services." MMTC also took the opportunity to tell the FCC it has a moral duty to ensure that its network neutrality rules, which MMTC has "deep concerns" about, do not "lock into place and perpetuate the vast and current racial disparities in broadband access, adoption, and informed use."

MMTC says the FCC should focus on transparency and disclosure. Which means requiring ISPs to tell subs how they are managing their service. That is when the shaming culture takes over, says MMTC, which is another way of saying marketing forces. "In the few cases of net neutrality violations over the past five years, each and every one was quickly corrected because of the transparent and interactive Internet culture, which forces broadband providers to serve the demands and wants of users or else suffer the penalties of lost subscribers," the group said in its comments.

With the first batch of the next round of broadcast renewals due by June 1, 2011 ­-- less than eight months from now ­-- the Federal Communications Commissionhas announced plans to tweak the renewal application form (FCC Form 303-S) in five discrete ways:

1. The revised form's instructions will include a new definition of "eligible entity" designed to reflect the FCC's "Equity Debt Plus" standard for determining the attributability of certain interests. The version of that standard currently in effect was announced in the FCC's Diversity Order adopted back in 2007.
2. Section II of Form 303-S will contain a required certification that the licensee's "advertising sales agreements do not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity and that all such agreements held by the licensee contain nondiscrimination clauses."
3. Section III of the form will include a new question (Item 4, with accompanying instructions) requiring the licensee to certify that, during the preceding license term, its station was neither silent, nor operating on less than the required minimum schedule, for any period of more than 30 days. If the licensee can't so certify, it will have to provide an exhibit specifying "the exact dates ... on which the station was silent or operating for less than its prescribed minimum hours."
4. The proposed revision of the form would eliminate the longstanding requirement that full power AM and FM licensees submit an exhibit to demonstrate compliance with RF limits.
5. Finally, Section V (Item 4) of the form would be changed to clarify that LPTV stations still need to file Form 396 with their renewal application, even though they might not have to file an EEO-related public file report and post that report to their website.

After two years of planning, construction is starting on a big upgrade to Maine's high-speed Internet system.

It's called the Three Ring Binder, and supporters say it will help grow Maine's economy and improve everything from education to health care. Leaders of the Maine Fiber Company, which is building the system, held a ribbon-cutting in Brunswick to celebrate construction of the first five miles of the binder system, and announce that work is about to start on several hundred more miles this fall. The Three Ring Binder is planned to build 1,100 miles of fiber optic cable in three "rings" or loops covering much of the state. The project was first conceived by researchers at the University of Maine, who then worked with the state and private business people to develop the plan. The project was awarded $25 million in federal stimulus funding, and Maine Fiber also raised $7.5 million in private investment. The Binder is designed to bring high speed, high capacity broadband service to areas of the state where it is unavailable, unreliable or prohibitively expensive.