October 2016

In July, Rep Mike Doyle (D-PA) and I penned an Op-Ed which articulated a simple principle: consumers should know exactly what they will pay before they get their first month’s bill – and, in fact, this should be known and clear before being asked to provide sensitive personal information. We called on the nation’s communications providers to lead the way by voluntarily improving transparency and disclosure of these “below the line” fees so that when consumers sign up for service, either online or in-store, they will not have to wait for their first bill to learn what their service truly costs. So I am extremely pleased that three months later, the Federal Communications Commission’s Consumer Advisory Committee “No Surprises Task Force” has come up with a series of recommendations that address these very concerns.

Implementing these recommendations would be a huge win for consumers and an opportunity for providers to show how committed they are to putting customers first. So once again, to the Task Force, the Consumer Advisory Committee and the staff of the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, thank you for your tireless efforts on such an important consumer issue and as always, thank you for being a voice for those too seldom heard.

The Justice Department asked the full appeals court for the Southern District of New York to review a decision that upheld Microsoft’s refusal to comply with a search warrant for an alleged drug trafficker’s e-mails held in a server in Ireland. The July ruling by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in Manhattan was a win for Microsoft, which has argued that the court’s power to issue the warrant and the government’s authority to seize the data do not extend overseas. Microsoft, one of the world’s largest e-mail providers, received the warrant in December 2013. But what might ordinarily have been routine compliance with a federal law enforcement request has instead become a pitched battle over government access to digital data held overseas — one that might be headed to the Supreme Court.

The warrant came in the wake of disclosures that shed light on tech firms’ role in complying with US surveillance programs, damaging the burgeoning cloud computing industry. The law at issue is the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986. “Congress did not intend the SCA’s warrant provisions to apply extraterritorially,” US Appeals Court Judge Susan Carney wrote in the opinion. “The focus of those provisions is protection of a user’s privacy interests.” Prosecutors argue that the panel erred. They say the law’s focus is disclosure, not privacy. There is “widespread recognition that the limit of privacy is reached where the warrant begins,” US Attorney Preet Bharara argued in the petition to the full appeals court.