John Orlando has been tapped to head up CBS's government affairs as executive VP, reporting directly to CBS President Leslie Moonves. Orlando's promotion -- he has been senior VP of government affairs since 2006 -- follows the retirement of long-time government affairs chief Marty Franks.
[Commentary] Admittedly, national budgetary policy is more complex than most (but perhaps not all) retransmission negotiations, but then the adverse impact of the accompanying disruption is vastly greater as well. Unlike a retransmission dispute, however, where the public can fully restore service with a set of rabbit ears, nothing I can buy at my local Radio Shack will open the national parks or allow Federal Communications Commission staffers to return to their desks to process my applications.
Given the high stakes, it is interesting that there are actually far more protections against failed negotiations in the retransmission context than in the congressional context. For example, unlike Congress, parties to retransmission negotiations are subject to the FCC's rule requiring good faith negotiations. While those who assert that the current retransmission process is broken frequently argue that merely policing the negotiation process to ensure the parties are negotiating in good faith is not enough, it seems like those rules might actually be fairly useful in the current congressional conundrum. For example, a party violates the FCC's good faith rule if it refuses to show up for negotiations, unreasonably delays negotiations, refuses to put forth more than a single unilateral proposal (the "take it or leave it" approach), or fails to respond to a proposal by the other party. Some might argue that such restrictions limit a party's freedom to negotiate, but all retransmission negotiations are conducted within that regulatory framework, making retransmission negotiations more regulated than most, and giving proponents of adding yet further layers of restrictions a high hurdle to jump.
The National Security Agency in 2010 and 2011 conducted a secret pilot project to test the collection of bulk data about the location of Americans’ cellphones, but the agency ultimately decided against putting such a program into play for now, according to intelligence officials.
The existence of the pilot project, which has not previously been reported, was recently declassified by James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, but it has not been publicly disclosed. His statement to be read at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing if he is asked is one paragraph long and contains scant details. The response says that the NSA does not currently collect locational information under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the provision that forms the asserted legal basis of its once-secret program that is collecting logs of all domestic phone calls from telephone companies. “In 2010 and 2011, NSA received samples in order to test the ability of its systems to handle the data format, but that data was not used for any other purpose and was never available for intelligence analysis purposes,” the draft response says, adding that the NSA has promised to notify Congress and seek the approval of a secret surveillance court in the future before any locational data was collected using Section 215.
The billions of dollars of “rolling M&A thunder,” as Nexstar CEO Perry Sook put it, that has shaken the local broadcast television industry could be muffled a bit by the government shutdown.
Among the government agencies affected by the shutdown is the Federal Communications Commission, which is in the midst of reviewing the biggest broadcast mergers in 2013. (Think Gannett’s $1.5 billion purchase of Belo, Tribune’s $2.7 billion deal to buy Local TV, or Sinclair’s $985 million takeover of Allbritton Communications.) The FCC announced that it was suspending the informal 180-day time clock for reviewing transactions as a result of the shutdown.
A Q&A with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) who is joining with Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) to sponsor legislation that would introduce an adversarial "Constitutional Advocate" into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court -- the secret court that rules on the legality of National Surveillance Agency (NSA) spying programs.
Rep Jordan is one of the most conservative members of the House. He's a former chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, and he earned a perfect rating from the American Conservative Union in 2012. When asked how he learned about the legislation, and why he is supporting it, Rep. Jordan told the Wall Street Journal: “It's consistent with our constitutional form of government, this is about checks and balances, this is about equal treatment under the law, this is about respect for the Fourth Amendment, so we said 'yeah, we like this idea, and we're happy to work along in a bipartisan way with our friends on the other side.'”
"Defending the Constitution is expensive!" That's how Ladar Levison closes out his newly launched crowdfunding pitch. The Lavabit founder — whose encrypted e-mail service was allegedly used by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden — has raised more than $24,000, putting him at more than halfway to his goal of $40,000.
Levison shut down his company in August in the face of pressure from the US government. He couldn't say why, leading some to suspect that the Obama administration was targeting Lavabit with a secret court order for information on Snowden's activities. Now Levison is asking the Internet to pay for his legal appeal — and it's working. Most of his donations so far have come in small denominations of $100 or less, though at least one generous donor poured $1,000 into Levison's defense fund.
President Barack Obama's reelection campaign famously sent different e-mails to randomized groups of followers to determine which language would generate the best response. It also, to a lesser extent, helped popularize the idea of Web site testing — diverting a fraction of a site's visitors to an alternate version whose performance can be measured against the standard. Now we've reached the next evolution of that political strategy: applying those same sorts of tests to social media.
"Testing is critical, especially for smaller clients," said Serenety Hanley, a former Republican National Committee technology director who now runs a boutique social media consulting firm. "The smaller the client, the more vital it is to maximize their dollars." Serenety works with nonprofits and campaigns designing targeted Facebook ads and promoted posts. She then compares the performance of those posts against one another using tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights — information that helps campaigns understand which tactics are the most effective. Other groups have resorted to building their own social testing programs in-house. Among them is MoveOn.org, the progressive advocacy organization. While it doesn't seem as though Facebook supports segmenting your audience for more targeted tests, MoveOn can still pool together the aggregate data on links A and B and compare them at a high level.
Amazon founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos formally took over as the owner of The Washington Post, officially ending 80 years of local control of the newspaper by the Graham family.
Bezos’s $250 million purchase was completed as expected with the signing of sale documents. The signing transfers the newspaper and other assets from The Washington Post to Nash Holdings, Bezos’s private investment company. Bezos, who founded the online shopping company in 1994 and became a billionaire in the process, has vowed to continue the newspaper’s long history of independent journalism. His technical and marketing savvy, long-term outlook and lack of an apparent ideological agenda made him an attractive steward for the paper, Post chief executive Donald E. Graham said in August, when an agreement in principle was first disclosed. At the same time, Bezos, 49, has the deep pockets to sustain an enterprise that has been buffeted for years by declining readership and advertising, especially in the printed Post.
The majority of US consumers freely admit to sharing personal details online that put them at risk. That's the not-so-surprising finding of a new national survey from Visa.
The results showed that more than 58 percent of consumers surveyed admitted to sharing personal details over social media that could put them at risk for fraud and identity theft. Close to half of respondents shared their birthdate; 29 percent posted their phone number; and 14 percent shared their mother's maiden name. Some 20 percent of respondents provided their home address on social media; 15 percent posted their upcoming travel dates; and 7 percent even posted their social security number over social media. This is type of personal data, of course, is regularly harvested and put to use in a wide variety of identity theft scams. So posting it on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or LinkedIn is like stocking candy on the shelf for cybercriminals.
Three major investors in Microsoft reportedly want Bill Gates to step down as company chairman. A report from Reuters cites three unnamed investors whom it identifies as among the company's "top 20 investors." The anonymous sources "familiar with the matter" say investors want Gates out as chairman because they feel his presence hinders innovation. They are also concerned about Gates' placement on a committee searching for a replacement for outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer.
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