July 2013

Judge: Patriot Act snooping was accepted by phone companies

Verizon and other telephone companies didn't protest when a secret surveillance court demanded that they turn over records on all of their customers. In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders, Judge Reggie Walton of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) revealed that no telephone company or other service provider has ever resisted a court order under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

Judge Walton acknowledged that in 2007 Yahoo fought a FISC order issued under a different law, the Protect America Act. The court received briefings from both sides and issued a classified decision in 2008. Recently, Google and Microsoft have filed motions with the FISC for permission to declassify how many users have been affected by the surveillance orders. Privacy advocates including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have also filed legal requests for more transparency. Judge Walton also explained details about how FISC judges review surveillance requests from the government. He said that although the court rarely rejects government requests, it often requires changes to the government's proposed surveillance.

Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash

The numbers tell the story — in votes and dollars. The House voted 217 to 205 not to rein in the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters. That’s the upshot of a new analysis by MapLight.

The investigation shows that defense cash was a better predictor of a member’s vote on the Amash amendment than party affiliation. House members who voted to continue the massive phone-call-metadata spy program, on average, raked in 122 percent more money from defense contractors than those who voted to dismantle it. Overall, political action committees and employees from defense and intelligence firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies, Honeywell International, and others ponied up $12.97 million in donations for a two-year period ending December 31, 2012, according to the analysis, which MapLight performed with financing data from OpenSecrets. Lawmakers who voted to continue the NSA dragnet-surveillance program averaged $41,635 from the pot, whereas House members who voted to repeal authority averaged $18,765.

Here’s why ‘trust us’ isn’t working for the NSA any more

For the last decade, the National Security Agency’s argument has been, “trust us.” But recent events have put that trust under strain.

Particularly damaging was Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s March statement to Congress denying that the government was collecting information about millions of Americans. We now know Clapper’s statement was untrue, and that has made many people skeptical about the NSA’s other assurances about its secret surveillance programs. To allay the fears of Congress and the public, the NSA has been forced to release more and more information about its spying program. But each disclosure seems to raise as many questions as it answers. Last month, the NSA claimed that its programs had thwarted more than 50 terrorist attacks. But reporters have been asking tough questions about that claim; noting that, in most of the cases, the NSA’s domestic spying programs played a tangential role at best. The government will have another opportunity to allay public fears at a hearing July 31 before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Four senior Obama Administration officials will speak on the first panel, while the second panel will include Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union. But the spy agency will have an uphill fight to regain the trust of Congress and the public.

MIT asserts “no wrongdoing” in Aaron Swartz case

The long-awaited Massachusetts Institute of Technology review of its processes and procedures up to and after Aaron Swartz’s suicide is out.

The 180-page report spearheaded by MIT Professor Hal Abelson was authorized by MIT President Rafael Reif in January. An initial glance shows that the report found no wrongdoing on the part of the university or its employees. Abelson said the report is not edited and that MIT officials had no advance knowledge of the report The report seeks to distance MIT itself from Swartz’s federal persecution. The school called in Cambridge police when it found out about the massive downloads and did not know Swartz was involved. Moreover, the school did not ask that federal charges be brought, and was not consulted about appropriate charges. Nor was MIT involved in plea negotiations and adopted a “position of neutrality” over the case, refusing to issue public statements. But MIT did not consider factors including “that the defendant was an accomplished and well-known contributor to Internet technology”; that the law under which he was charged “is a poorly drafted and questionable criminal law as applied to modern computing”; and that “the United States was pursuing an overtly aggressive prosecution.” While MIT’s position “may have been prudent,” the report says, “it did not duly take into account the wider background” of policy issues “in which MIT people have traditionally been passionate leaders.”

We’re using a ton of mobile data. With Google Glass, we’re about to use a whole lot more.

When Google Glass opens up to the public, it’s going to be pricey in more ways than one.

Naturally, there’s the upfront cost of buying the thing, which likely won’t be subsidized by wireless carriers the way cellphones are now. But a Glass-enabled population will also impose other costs, too. Consumers will need to start buying larger and faster data plans just to feed these devices. And by doing so, they’ll be putting enormous new burdens on the country’s Internet infrastructure. Glass doesn’t have a cellular radio of its own. Instead, the way it links to the Web (when it’s not on Wi-Fi) is through your cellphone or tablet’s data plan. You might know this as tethering — using your data-enabled device as a mobile hotspot. Carriers have all sorts of rules about tethering, and sorting through them can be like feeling your way down a dark alley.

Bid to deny Pandora an FM station reflects out-of-date music royalty system

The town of Box Elder, South Dakota, is an unlikely battleground in the ongoing clash between the music industry and streaming service Pandora.

A group representing musicians asked the Federal Communications Commission to deny Pandora a license to operate an FM radio station there because the company will not serve the “needs and interests of the residents of Box Elder.” The good folk of Box Elder — nestled between the Black Hills and the Badlands — may wonder how their airwaves became the subject of a tussle between a controversial Silicon Valley company and the Washington-based ASCAP, a group that collects copyright royalties for songwriters. But in the larger fight over the price of music in the digital age, the dispute over Box Elder’s FM station makes a weird kind of sense.

Sprint lost 2 million subscribers after Nextel network went dark

Sprint’s first earnings report as a SoftBank-owned company wasn’t exactly a positive one. Sprint shed 2 million customers in the second quarter, nearly 4 percent of its subscriber base.

The big reason was Nextel, which Sprint shut down completely at the end of June. The network shutdown resulted in 1.3 million iDEN subscriber losses, but that wasn’t Sprint’s only pain point. Its retail prepaid and its wholesale connection businesses also took big hits. The only area where Sprint saw growth was in postpaid contract customers, which increased by 194,000. That customer exodus contributed to the widening of its quarterly net loss to $1.6 billion from $1.4 billion a year ago. Sprint’s revenues, however, remained steady at $8.9 billion both quarter over quarter and year over year.

Squeezed by wireless giants, have the regional mobile carriers just given up?

Back in the mid-2000s, there was a pretty vibrant community of mid-sized regional mobile providers in the US. Alltel ruled over the rural providers with 12 million subscribers and a bigger coverage area than even the nationwide carriers, while multiple operators — from Dobson Communications to Centennial Wireless — boasted millions of subscribers and were forces with which to be reckoned in their corners of the US. No more. In the last five years all of those carriers and many more have been gobbled up by the national carriers. And the Big 4 have only come back to the operator buffet for more. Have the smaller operators just given up on the mobile business?

AT&T’s latest home broadband service isn’t DSL or fiber. It’s LTE

AT&T has found another use for its LTE and HSPA networks besides connecting iPhones and Android devices to the internet. It’s connecting homes. Ma Bell has started offering a residential broadband and voice service that relies on a 3G/4G modem for its link back to the network rather than traditional wireline access technologies.

The service is available in Delaware; Maryland; New Jersey; Pennsylvania; Virginia; West Virginia, Washington, D.C.; and parts of eastern Kentucky on the West Virginia border. If those locations sound a bit odd, that’s because they’re all — with the exception of Kentucky — outside of AT&T’s traditional wireline operating territory. In fact, they’re squarely in the middle in of Verizon Communications’ turf. This home router is clearly the tool AT&T plans to use to expand beyond its wireline footprint, giving it a means to sell residential broadband and phone services to its mobile customers nationally as well as an access component to its Digital Life connected home platform. The question is whether customers will pay. This service isn’t cheap and would likely appeal to customers with few other broadband options.

Whatever happened to municipal Wi-Fi?

While large-scale Wi-Fi sputtered, mobile carriers in America and Canada appear to have been prodded into action.

Together with their wired divisions they vociferously denounced any public money assigned to private city-wide networks, even lobbying for laws banning it. By 2008, however, 3G networks were everywhere, and by 2012 3G+ followed across the full footprint of AT&T and T-Mobile (albeit in fits and starts). Verizon lagged, then leapt forward with 4G LTE. Carriers now compete for the broadest LTE rollout, which provides data rates as fast as cable modems, though at a high price. Wander the streets of San Francisco today, or any city in the developed world, for that matter, and you find it hard not to stumble on a free network. Every cafe, convention center and airport has Wi-Fi, as do academic campuses, many city canters and retail districts. Telecoms firms like AT&T supplement mobile spectrum with Wi-Fi hotspots and zones, and most of the Wi-Fi equipment firms that survived the metro-network days sell hardware both for corporate networks and for outdoor deployment by carriers.

Benton

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