December 2013

Chairman Rockefeller: 'Data brokers' worse than NSA spying

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) said tracking by "data brokers" is worse than surveillance by the US government.

During a hearing on the data broker industry, Chairman Rockefeller compared data brokers’ tracking of Americans to government surveillance of Americans, saying the latter is less concerning. “The [National Security Agency] is so secure in its protection of privacy as compared to this group that we’re talking to, these data brokers,” he said. “It’s not even close.” Chairman Rockefeller also repeated accusations that three data brokers -- Acxiom, Experian and Epsilon -- failed to turn over information to the committee as it conducted its investigation into the data broker industry. “I’m putting these three companies on notice today,” he said, for “continuing to resist oversight” and failing to provide the requested information about where companies get information about consumers and to whom they sell that information. Sen Rockefeller said he is “considering further steps, and I have steps ... that I can take to get this information.”

Sacramento Launches Open Data Portal

Joining the national push for open data, the city of Sacramento has launched an open data portal that provides access to building permit activity, crime reports, budget information, land-use data and more.

“This new Web site provides digital access to city hall in a way that has never been done before. It is our continued goal to be transparent and this is a great starting point for us,” City Manager John Shirey said. Sacramento officials described the site as a “one-stop shop” for city data and reports. The site offers more than 40 data sets, including detailed information on 311 service requests, finance and budget statistics, police department data, citywide contracts, and building permit numbers, according to the city. Users can view the data via charts, through an online dashboard, or in sortable spreadsheets. The city also intends for the portal to support civic IT projects and third-party civic app developers. “It is important to support and encourage innovation by providing access to information and encouraging residents and businesses to find ways of using public data. We are willing to add other data the community requests,” Sacramento chief information officer Maria MacGunigal said.

Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems For Massive Open Online Courses

Christopher Brinton at Princeton University studied the behavior in online discussion forums of over 100,000 students taking massive open online courses (or MOOCs). Participation falls precipitously and continuously throughout a course and almost half of registered students never post more than twice to the forums. What’s more, the participation of a teacher doesn’t improve matters. Indeed, there is some evidence that a teacher’s participation in an online discussion actually increases the rate of decline.

Brinton studied the discussion threads associated with 73 courses offered by Coursera. These involved 115,000 students who wrote over 800,000 posts in 170,000 different threads. The team then plotted how the volume of discussion varied through the course and what factors correlate with this decline. Brinton found various correlations with the drop. One of these is the amount of peer-graded homework on the course, a factor which moderately increases the rate of decline. More worrying is the discovery that teacher involvement in a thread seems to accelerate the decline (although it also increases the number of posts).

FCC Proposes Ending Sports Blackout Rules

In this Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), the Federal Communications Commission proposes to eliminate the Commission’s sports blackout rules, which prohibit certain multichannel video programming distributors (MPVDs) from retransmitting, within a protected local blackout zone, the signal of a distant broadcast station carrying a live sporting event if the event is not available live on a local television broadcast station.

The sports blackout rules were originally adopted nearly 40 years ago when game ticket sales were the main source of revenue for sports leagues. These rules were intended to address concerns that MVPDs’ importation of a distant signal carrying a blacked-out sports event could result in lost revenue from ticket sales, which might cause sports leagues to expand the reach of blackouts by refusing to sell their rights to sports events to all distant stations. The rationale underpinning the rules was to ensure to the greatest extent possible the continued availability of sports telecasts to the public. Changes in the sports industry in the last four decades have called into question whether the sports blackout rules remain necessary to ensure the overall availability of sports programming to the general public. In this proceeding, the FCC will determine whether the sports blackout rules have become outdated due to marketplace changes since their adoption, and whether modification or elimination of those rules is appropriate. The FCC seeks comment on whether it has authority to repeal the sports blackout rules. Next, it examines whether the economic considerations that led to adoption of the sports blackout rules continue to justify the intervention in this area. Finally, the FCC proposes to eliminate the sports blackout rules and seek comment on the potential benefits and harms of that proposed action on interested parties, including sports leagues, broadcasters, and consumers.

FCC Seeks Comment Public Knowledge Petition on Prohibitions on Selling Non-Aggregate Call Records Without Customers’ Consent

The Federal Communications Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau seeks comment on a petition filed by Public Knowledge et al. on December 11, 2013, requesting that the FCC issue a declaratory ruling that: Non-aggregate call records that have been purged of personal identifiers but that leave customers’ individual characteristics intact are protected as individually identifiable customer proprietary network information (CPNI), and telecommunications providers -- including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile -- are prohibited from selling or sharing such records with third parties without customers’ consent.

Interested parties may file comments by January 17, 2014 and reply comments on or before February 3, 2014.

(WC Docket No. 13-306)

Battle over Healthcare.Gov Paper Trail Reaches House Leadership

The battle over releasing contractor documents that may reveal security weaknesses in HealthCare.gov, the Obama administration’s online health insurance marketplace, reached the leadership level as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner requesting a classified briefing about the documents.

Rep Pelosi wants the Republican chairs of several House committees to sit down with the Administration’s top cybersecurity officials to hear their case for why documents subpoenaed by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep Darrell Issa (R-CA) should not be released. Contractors submitted unredacted copies of the documents, including a mid-October security review, to Rep Issa last week over the objection of officials at the Health and Human Services Department. They argued releasing the documents could give hackers a roadmap to interfere with HealthCare.gov’s operations or to steal insurance seekers’ personal information. Rep Issa has said he will not release any information that would endanger the site’s security, but he feels compelled to give Americans’ fair warning if their personal data such as social security numbers may be at risk.

Report Attacks Broadband Stimulus Award Process

The broadband stimulus program administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration was an “inefficient income transfer mechanism,” says a new report from the Technology Policy Institute. The report, titled “The Broadband Stimulus: A Rural Boondoggle and Missed Opportunity,” was authored by economists Greg Rosston and Scott Wallsten.

Many of the NTIA-administered projects were “middle mile” projects designed to bring connectivity from fiber backbone networks to community anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and libraries. In studying project effectiveness, the report authors ranked projects based on the cost per mile. And as Rosston noted, the per-mile cost of the least cost-effective projects was 100 times higher than the per-mile cost for the most cost-effective projects. The authors argue in the report that the NTIA’s method for selecting projects “appears to have been largely incoherent” and that the best approach would have been to award funding to the most cost-effective projects -- an approach the authors say the Federal Communications Commission used effectively in awarding funding through the recent mobility fund auction. The authors raise some good points about project cost-effectiveness, although it might have been more appropriate to rank projects based on the number of community anchor institutions connected per dollar.

I suspect any rural residents or advocates who read the report will have difficulty getting through it without grinding their teeth, however, as the authors have to some extent a rather anti-rural attitude. They argue, for example, that “rural subsidies take money from urban customers and give [it] to rural residents and companies serving rural residents,” that “there is little economic rationale for subsidizing rural areas” and that “subsidy money for rural areas ultimately results in either a transfer to rural landowners or rural service providers.”

Under Amazon's CIA Cloud: The Washington Post

News media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them. But the owner of the Washington Post is now doing big business with the Central Intelligence Agency, while readers of the newspaper's CIA coverage are left in the dark.

The Post's new owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO of Amazon -- which recently landed a $600 million contract with the CIA. But the Post's articles about the CIA are not disclosing that the newspaper's sole owner is the main owner of CIA business partner Amazon. Even for a multibillionaire like Bezos, a $600 million contract is a big deal. That's more than twice as much as Bezos paid to buy the Post four months ago. And there's likely to be plenty more where that CIA largesse came from. Amazon's offer wasn't the low bid, but it won the CIA contract anyway by offering advanced high-tech "cloud" infrastructure. Bezos personally and publicly touts Amazon Web Services, and it's evident that Amazon will be seeking more CIA contracts. In November 2013, Amazon issued a statement saying, "We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA."

"Fear And Concern" Keeping MSNBC Hosts Quiet In Union Dispute, AFL-CIO Suggests

The AFL-CIO urged MSNBC hosts to defy “fear and concern” and break their silence about NBC’s alleged anti-union “hypocrisy.” None of the five high-profile progressives they’ve targeted -- Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton, Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Hayes and Ed Schultz -- has so far directly and publicly addressed allegations that NBC-owned Peacock Productions exploited fear tactics and legal tricks to avert unionization.

Cable Must Embrace Binge Viewing, Better User Experiences, Study Finds

The rise of Netflix and Hulu and the ever expanding array of smartphones, tablets and mobile devices means that television viewers demand access to their favorite programs whenever, however and wherever they want. This has led to a dramatic shift in the power dynamic -- now consumers, not creators, are driving the television industry. In particular, binge viewing is having a profound impact on the business. It demands that companies do a better job of measuring viewership and personalizing programming, according to a new study on the future of television by EY (formerly Ernst & Young).

The use of mobile devices and streaming technology has substantially increased television consumption, meaning that Americans are never far from some sort of screen, Howard Bass, leader of EY’s Global Media & Entertainment Advisory Services, said. “We need better ways to measure viewing,” he said. These tectonic shifts in viewership are also requiring that television companies figure out new and more innovative ways to engage with viewers during live events such as the Super Bowl and the Oscars through the use of social media. There’s ample evidence to suggest that companies that incorporate Facebook and Twitter into their programs and promotional efforts benefit. Advertisers such as Pepsi, have seen users report a strong intent to purchase their drinks when they push out tweets targeted to people that saw their television commercials, and Nielsen data suggests that strong social media campaigns can lift the ratings for 29 percent of shows.

Benton

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