August 2013

GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS

NSA DENIES UNFETTERED ACCESS
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Brendan Sasso]
The Obama administration is denying news reports that the National Security Agency has "unfettered access" to 75 percent of all U.S. Internet traffic. In a joint statement, the National Security Agency and the Director of National Intelligence said that media reports based on a recent Wall Street Journal article "provide an inaccurate and misleading picture of NSA's collection programs." "The NSA does not sift through and have unfettered access to 75% of the United States' online communications," the agencies said. But the statement does not address the accuracy of The Wall Street Journal article itself — only the other media reports based on it. In their statement, the agencies said that the NSA "touches" 1.6 percent of world's Internet traffic and only looks at .00004 percent of it. They said the NSA obtains information based on "specific identifiers," such as email addresses and telephone numbers of foreigners. If the surveillance involves a person in the U.S., the NSA must follow court-approved privacy protection procedures.
benton.org/node/157790 | Hill, The
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HOW PRIVACY ADVOCATES SHINED LIGHT ON NSA
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Andrea Peterson]
A Q&A with Mark Rumold, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). After a legal battle that went on over a year, the federal government was forced to reveal a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (FISC) opinion that showed the National Security Agency (NSA) engaged in unconstitutional surveillance practices, including the collection of tens of thousands of Americans’ online communications. Rumold worked on the case. He concludes: “The one takeaway that I’d like folks to have is that the issues may be complicated, there may be a lot of new information that comes to light on different days and it may be difficult to keep track of, but it’s really important that we get this right and we get it right now. People, if they’re uncomfortable with the type of surveillance that’s going on, with the things that they hear about, they need to speak up and they need to let their elected officials know that this kind of dragnet collection and bulk collection of their communications information just isn’t acceptable. It’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional, and we have to put an end to it now.”
benton.org/node/157789 | Washington Post
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INTERNET/BROADBAND

WE DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT DATA CAPS
[SOURCE: Public Knowledge, AUTHOR: Michael Weinberg]
The Open Internet Advisory Committee – a group formed by the Federal Communications Commission to provide advice about the Commission’s Open Internet Order (also known as the network neutrality order) – released its first report. The Committee examined a host of thorny issues left unresolved in the FCC’s 2010 Order. The overall, but unstated, conclusion was clear: in the almost three years since the Order, the FCC has done almost nothing to improve its understanding of the issues in question. It, and the public, is almost three years older but far from three years wiser. Nowhere was this inaction more striking than in the report’s discussion of usage based billing and data caps. The report’s observation that “much information about user understanding of caps and thresholds is missing” should be the subheading for the entire data caps section. The section is shot through with clauses like “may require future monitoring,” “lack of definitive data,” “no definitive standard,” “these questions require more information,” “questions cannot be answered because there is no quantitative evidence,” and “little public analysis.” The Committee is diverse, with representatives from ISPs, content creators, edge providers, consumers, and more. Finding consensus on an issue as divisive as data caps would be hard under any circumstances. But doing so in a largely data-free environment was probably doomed from the outset. With no data to test assertions, the discussion could have been little more than competing assertions.
benton.org/node/157784 | Public Knowledge
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CONNECT AMERICA FUND
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: Press release]
Up to 600,000 homes and small businesses that lack broadband will get access to this basic necessity as a result of additional support from the Federal Communications Commission’s Connect America Fund. Providers in 44 states and Puerto Rico requested over $385 million from the Fund – which will be matched with hundreds of millions of their own dollars in many areas – to quickly expand broadband infrastructure to rural communities in every region of the nation. Deployment must be completed within three years. Currently, about 15 million U.S. residents, mostly rural, lack access to broadband and the opportunities it provides. This second round of funding from Phase I of the Connect America Fund marks the continuation of the most significant public-private effort in history to ensure that every American home and business has access to broadband by the end of the decade, which will spur economic growth and boost the nation’s global competitiveness.
benton.org/node/157805 | Federal Communications Commission
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BUSINESS DRESSED UP AS CHARITY
[SOURCE: The Verge, AUTHOR: Ben Popper]
Mark Zuckerberg announced the formation of Internet.org, a partnership with some of the biggest players in the smartphone space, to bring internet connectivity to poor people in the developing world who can't afford or access it yet. The group positioned itself as a charitable effort, but make no mistake: this is also a sober business move that puts Facebook and its friends in the smartphone world front-and-center to court the biggest group of untapped customers left on planet earth. The idea that Facebook and these other public companies are working to spread the internet without any thought or promise of eventual profit seems unlikely, to say the least. Facebook has already saturated the industrialized world, so developing countries have created Facebook's fastest growing source of revenue. Over the last year, the company's revenue has grown 43 percent in North America and 45 percent in Europe. In Asia and the rest of the world, by contrast, Facebook's revenue grew 82 percent and 88 percent. The most important piece of this project to unpack is that Facebook wants to ensure its model of the web, in which your identity is leveraged to target advertising, is the paradigm powering internet access.
benton.org/node/157786 | GigaOm | Jen Schradie
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HOW MUCH GOOD WILL PLAN DO?
[SOURCE: The Atlantic, AUTHOR: Rebecca Greenfield]
Facebook along with six other telecom and tech companies has unveiled a grand plan to bring Internet connectivity to the 4 billion humans who don't yet have access, a move that "tries to pair humanitarian goals with the profit motive." What doesn't get much discussion is what benefit the 4 billion people Facebook hopes to connect will get from all this. Even that is cast in business benefit. "Giving everyone the opportunity to connect is the foundation for enabling the knowledge economy." If we look at this Internet for All plan through this admittedly skeptical lens, it's not so hard to see how this could turn from great humanitarian effort into something more self-interested. What does it really mean to have Facebook control the world's Internet connections? If this were truly devoid of self-interest, then why is Google notably missing from the roster of Internet.org's partners. It has its own efforts to get Internet to developing countries, like its wireless broadband balloons. These companies see a benefit to owning the yet-to-be-developed airwaves. If they didn't and just wanted uplift the poor, they might invest in other things, as Bill Gates recently argued. "When you're dying of malaria, I suppose you'll look up and see that balloon, and I'm not sure how it'll help you," he said.
benton.org/node/157787 | Atlantic, The
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WIRELESS/SPECTRUM

CHAIRWOMAN MIGNON CLYBURN ISSUES STATEMENT ON THE IMPORTANCE OF CELLPHONE UNLOCKING TO CONSUMERS
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: FCC Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn]
I support policies that enable consumers to lawfully unlock their mobile telephones, so they can seamlessly move from one carrier to another. While wireless carriers should be able to enforce their valid customer contracts, the unlocking provisions need to be grounded in common sense and practical application. Consumers, who satisfy the reasonable terms of their contracts, should not be subject to civil and criminal penalties if they want to take their device to a new carrier. Months ago, the Commission began meeting with carriers and representative trade associations to reach an industry standard policy for unlocking cell phones. As the 114,000 people that signed on to the White House petition earlier this year demonstrate, this issue is too important to consumers for us to not find a solution and I firmly believe a voluntary approach that promotes competition and consumer choice is still possible. Some providers have already adopted consumer-friendly cellphone unlocking policies, and I applaud them. The FCC, industry, and other stakeholders should continue to work towards an industry-wide cellphone unlocking solution that best serves the public interest. Therefore, I've directed the FCC staff to redouble our efforts with partners across the administration and industry to explore all of our available options for a quick resolution.
benton.org/node/157804 | Federal Communications Commission
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OWNERSHIP

KOCH AND TRIBUNE
[SOURCE: USAToday, AUTHOR: Roger Yu]
The Koch brothers have dropped their controversial pursuit of Tribune Company's newspapers. But "Koch continues to have an interest in the media business, and we're exploring a broad range of opportunities where we think we can add value," Koch Industries, a conglomerate controlled by Charles and David Koch, said in a statement. The billionaire brothers, known for their generous support of conservative causes, conducted a due diligence assessment of the eight daily newspapers that Tribune has put up for sale, including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. But they concluded that a deal wasn't financially viable.
benton.org/node/157809 | USAToday
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FREE PRESS OPPOSITION TO GANNETT/BELO
[SOURCE: Multichannel News, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Free Press told the Federal Communications Commission that it should not hesitate to make policy via merger review, in this case that it is not in the public interest for a broadcaster to spin off a station to comply with local ownership caps if it continues to provide services to those stations through sharing agreements. Consolidation critic Free Press -- joined by National Hispanic Media Coalition, Common Cause, and the United Church of Christ -- were defending their petition to block the spin-off transfers portion of the Gannett's $2.2 billion purchase of Belo stations. While Gannett and Belo argued that the FCC's open retransmission consent docket was the place for a referendum on coordinated retrans negotiations, Free Press suggested the place was wherever the FCC was charged with protecting the public interest.
benton.org/node/157783 | Multichannel News
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TELEVISION

ACA ON BLACKOUTS
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
In a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn, American Cable Association President Matthew Polka asked the FCC to adopt a rule mandating carriage during retransmission impasses, saying the FCC prevents blackouts that disadvantage broadcasters, so it should certainly do so when they hurt consumers. He proposed what he said was a narrowly tailored solution, which is that the FCC adopt "a rule mandating that broadcasters and MVPDs continue to offer a broadcast station's signal to consumers after an existing retransmission consent agreement expires and while the terms of a new agreement are pending resolution of a dispute. Under this proposed rule, the parties' existing retransmission consent agreement would automatically be extended past its expiration date, and an MVPD would continue to pay the broadcaster for retransmission consent rights per such contract."
benton.org/node/157803 | Broadcasting&Cable
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CBS-TWC UPDATE
[SOURCE: TVNewsCheck, AUTHOR: ]
CBS CEO Leslie Moonves says its newly signed retransmission consent agreement with Verizon FiOS shows that CBS is "prepared to move decisively and thoughtfully to achieve a good conclusion" with all cable and satellite operators. "This important deal was reached swiftly and amicably in just a few days after our conversations began," Moonves says in a staff memo released to the media. "In it, we achieve fair value for our over-the-air rights, while preserving our streaming rights as well." In contrast, what’s holding up the CBS-Time Warner Cable negotiations? Consider three possible explanations:
1) Plenty of people can just turn off their cable boxes and pick up CBS with an antenna. Sales of digital antennas are up in Dallas, New York and Los Angeles, according to Radio Shack. Time Warner, obviously, feels that the clock isn't ticking on this dispute in the same way it might if its customers were missing, say, new episodes of Breaking Bad; even if the dispute does continue into football season, it won't have the same impact of blacking out a pure cable network.
2) Time Warner is serious about cutting costs through whatever means necessary, and that includes cutting features, raising prices and, obviously, wars of attrition with content publishers. The U.S. cable market is mature, and Time Warner is a publicly traded company: It has to show year-over-year increases in profits in order to keep paying out dividends, and there's nowhere else to expand. Retrans fees are consistently on the rise, and they've been a sore spot with MSOs since they came into being in 1992; the content used to be free, and now it's getting less free all the time.
3) Among broadcasters, CBS has the smallest number of sister cable channels to leverage in a fight like this—there's only premium cable net Showtime. Showtime isn't insignificant, of course, especially not with its boxing package—fans are already biting their nails about the Sept. 14 Mayweather-Canelo match, and that's the sort of thing that could shift subscribers over to a service like good cop FiOS. But in the broadcasting pantheon, pretty much everyone else can strong-arm an MSO into signing a hefty retrans hike without too much trouble. NBC has high-rated cable networks like USA and Bravo alongside niche networks such as Syfy and E!; ABC has the Disney family of cable nets and the vital ESPN; Fox has powerhouses like FX and the upcoming FS1. Granted, not all these networks even share a division, but you can bet they're all on the table when it comes to making these deals. If half your cable package goes dark when you black out a broadcast network, you're in a hurry to patch things up with them.
benton.org/node/157799 | TVNewsCheck | AdWeek
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PRIVACY

TEENS AND MOBILE APP PRIVACY
[SOURCE: Pew Internet and American Life Project, AUTHOR: Mary Madden, Amanda Lenhart, Sandra Cortesi, Urs Gasser]
As teens gain access to mobile devices, they have embraced app downloading. But many teen apps users have taken steps to uninstall or avoid apps over concern about their privacy. Location information is considered especially sensitive to teen girls, as a majority of them have disabled location tracking features on cell phones and in apps because they are worried about others’ access to that information. Here are some of the key findings in a new survey of U.S. teens ages 12-17:
58% of all teens have downloaded apps to their cell phone or tablet computer.
51% of teen apps users have avoided certain apps due to privacy concerns.
26% of teen apps users have uninstalled an app because they learned it was collecting personal information that they didn’t wish to share.
46% of teen apps users have turned off location tracking features on their cell phone or in an app because they were worried about the privacy of their information.
benton.org/node/157782 | Pew Internet and American Life Project | WSJ | LATimes
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EDUCATION

10TH GRADE ONLINE
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Sophia Pink]
[Commentary] Last year, while my classmates at Washington International School sat at their desks by day and did their homework by night, I skipped school. And not just once. I didn’t attend a single day of 10th grade. In ninth grade, I was frustrated. In school, I marched to other people’s orders, leaving little time to complete projects I was really interested in. So I arranged with my parents and my school to take a year off — my own sabbatical. I knew that I’d probably go back to my regular school the following fall, and I had to cover academic subjects — math, science and English — that I’d need in 11th grade. So I plunged into online education. Based on my year away from traditional school, I think we’re looking at a new method too narrowly. Classroom education is not a relic. And online learning isn’t a pale imitation of “real” education, a dumbed-down version that endangers quality and excellence. The reality lies where it usually does — somewhere in between. Classroom education won’t and shouldn’t be fully replaced by Web courses, but it could draw on what works online. For instance, in many high school courses, students could watch short video lectures at home to understand key concepts and then use class time more for discussions and group projects. Huge online courses have many virtues, but they need to do better at fostering the side-by-side collaboration that my generation will need on the job. In the end, each approach could strengthen the other. That’s been true for me. I learned a lot studying online, but on Monday I’ll return to my school for 11th grade. Yet I’ll be returning as a different kind of student, one who sees the good points of the classroom more clearly but who also knows that virtual classrooms can be just as important as blackboards and desks.
benton.org/node/157806 | Washington Post
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LABOR

PENTAGON AS SILICON VALLEY INCUBATOR
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Somini Sengupta]
In the ranks of technology incubator programs, there is AngelPad in San Francisco and Y Combinator about 40 miles south in Mountain View. And then there is the Pentagon. In the last year, former Department of Defense and intelligence agency operatives have headed to Silicon Valley to create technology start-ups specializing in tools aimed at thwarting online threats. Frequent reports of cyberattacks have expanded the demand for security tools, in both the public and private sectors, and venture capital money has followed. In 2012, more than $1 billion in venture financing poured into security start-ups, more than double the amount in 2010, according to the National Venture Capital Association. For years, the Pentagon has knocked on Silicon Valley’s door in search of programmers to work on its spying technologies. But these days, it’s the Pentagon that is being scouted for expertise. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are finding it valuable to have an insider’s perspective on the national security apparatus when trying to find or prevent computer vulnerabilities or mine large troves of data.
benton.org/node/157813 | New York Times
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August 2013

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August 23, 2013 (How Much Do We Know About Data Caps?)

The Pentagon as Silicon Valley’s Incubator

For Privacy, Phone Texts Pushed Over Encrypted Email

Tired of cable TV disputes, bills? More are cutting the cord

The FCC expands plans for broadband

Koch brothers lose interest in Tribune papers

GAO study calls for tougher patent reviews