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FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers — some already skeptical of government surveillance — that the feds may need additional powers to track down criminals who hide their activities online.
Buried in his prepared testimony June 19 to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mueller reaffirmed the Obama administration’s long-held view that there’s a “growing gap between law enforcement’s legal authority to conduct electronic surveillance, and its ability to conduct such surveillance.” “The rapid pace of advances in mobile and other communication technologies continues to present a significant challenge for conducting court-approved electronic surveillance of criminals and terrorists,” Mueller noted. “Because of this gap, law enforcement is increasingly unable to gain timely access to the information to which it is lawfully authorized and that it needs to protect public safety, bring criminals to justice and keep America safe,” added the FBI director, acknowledging there still exists a need to balance security and privacy.
FBI’s Robert Mueller: Feds need broader surveillance powers
As other broadcasters urged the Federal Communications Commission to ease up on indecency regulations, Fox urged it to quit regulating broadcast indecency altogether.
“Fox urges the commission to conclude it is legally required and logically bound to cease attempting broadcast indecency limits once and for all,” Fox Entertainment Group and Fox Television Holdings said in a filing. “Time and technology have moved inexorably forward, but the commission’s untenable effort to define indecent content through a hodgepodge of inconsistent and uneven rulings remain stuck in a bygone era.” Fox also said that if the FCC "defies the Constitution and common sense" and continues to regulate indecency, it should do so narrowly.
Fox to FCC: Get Out of Indecency Regulation
Nearly four in ten U.S. adults (39%) are caring for an adult or child with significant health issues, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Caregivers are highly engaged in the pursuit of health information, support, care, and advice, both online and offline, and do many health-related activities at higher levels than non-caregivers. Indeed, being a caregiver is independently associated with key health-related activities.
When controlling for age, income, education, ethnicity, and good overall health, caregivers are more likely than other adults to:
- Gather health information online, particularly about medical problems, treatments, and drugs.
- Gather health information offline, from clinicians, friends, family, and others who share the same health condition.
- Go online specifically to try to figure out what condition they or someone else might have.
- Consult online reviews about drugs and other treatments.
- Track their own weight, diet, exercise routine, or other health indicator.
- Read online about someone else’s personal health experience (which, in the case of caregivers, could be related to their own or their loved one’s condition).
- Go online to find others with similar health concerns (again, there may be dual motivations to connect — to find more information about handling caregiver stress, for example, or about their loved one’s health challenges).
Family Caregivers are Wired for Health
Analytics Media Group (A.M.G.) was founded in late December by a splinter group of longtime Obama advisers: Larry Grisolano, who oversaw how the campaign spent its advertising dollars; Grisolano’s direct-mail partners Terry Walsh and Pete Giangreco; Jeff Link, a seasoned Iowa veteran who was an outside adviser in 2012; and Erik Smith, an advertising consultant for the 2012 campaign, whose work running one of the biggest 2004 pro-Kerry outside groups gave him an inside track with party donors from the corporate world. A.M.G.’s relatively grand promise: to deliver to commercial advertisers some of the Obama campaign’s secret, technologically advanced formulas for reaching voters.
The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In
France is giving Google three months to be more upfront about the data it collects from users — or be fined.
The legal action accelerates a Europe-wide fight against Google over its use of personal data. While the fines threatened are small by the standards of one of the world's richest companies, the move puts new pressure on Google as it smarts from recent criticism over providing customer data to U.S. government surveillance efforts. The French agency that regulates information technology says that five other European countries are taking similar steps in a staggered offensive against Google's privacy policy between now and the end of July. The French National Commission on Computing and Freedom, known as CNIL, says Spain has joined France in the first wave of legal action, and that Britain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands will join in the coming weeks.
France threatens Google with privacy fines Google Gets 3 Months to Fix Privacy or Face French Fines (Bloomberg)
Ofcom, Britain's telecom regulator, will launch an investigation into satellite TV firm BSkyB over the wholesale supply of its sports channels after a complaint by Sky's increasingly bitter rival BT.
Ofcom said the probe would center on BT's claims that the terms on which Sky offered its sports channels, Sky Sports 1 and Sky Sports 2, to BT's YouView platform amounted to an abuse of Sky's market dominance. BT has complained to Ofcom that Sky is making the supply of the two channels conditional on BT making its own sports channels available to Sky for retail on Sky's platform.
Ofcom to probe BSkyB over sports channel supply
People have become much more willing to pay for online news during the past year, according to a survey of 11,000 internet users in nine countries.
The Oxford university study found that across the UK, the US, Denmark, France and Germany, 11 percent of respondents had paid for online news in the past year – an increase of more than a third from the previous year. Across Spain, Italy, Japan and urban Brazil, which were included in the survey for the first time this year, the proportion of people paying for digital news was closer to 20 percent. The figures include everything from annual subscription payments to small fees for single articles.
More people willing to pay for online news
Now that the video rental store is all but dead, many people are turning to Internet services to get TV shows and movies. By some measures, Apple is No. 1 in online video, but by others, Netflix is leading.
Apple released new statistics on the videos it provides in the iTunes Store. The company said customers were downloading 800,000 television episodes and 350,000 movies a day. In a recent study, the NPD Group, a research firm, said Apple was by and large the leader for home video downloads. For television shows, iTunes accounted for 67 percent of this market in 2012, and Microsoft’s Xbox video service was a distant second with 14 percent of the market, NPD said. For movies, iTunes had a 65 percent share of the market, with Amazon and Microsoft far behind at 10 percent each, it said. Another popular method for watching movies and TV online is paying a subscription and streaming as many as you want. In the subscriptions-based video streaming market, Netflix is dominant, with a 90 percent share, and Hulu Plus and Amazon are still hardly relevant. To put things in perspective, subscription-based streaming is the most popular method for watching online video. For all the movies watched at home in the first quarter of 2013, 19 percent of consumers watched a movie using a subscription-based service like Netflix, and 5 percent downloaded a movie rental from an on-demand service like iTunes, according to Russ Crupnick, an NPD analyst who follows the online video industry. About 74 percent of consumers watched a movie on a DVD or Blu-ray disc they bought or rented, he said.
Apple and Netflix Dominate Online Video
In a letter to Acting Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn, Sens John McCain (R-Z) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) ask the FCC to act on a longstanding petition to lift its sports blackout rule.
The rule prevents cable or satellite providers from carrying an NFL game when the over-the-air broadcast is blacked out due to lack of attendance at the game. In October 2011, the Sports Fan Coalition asked the FCC to lift the ban, saying it would be a "pro-fan, pro-consumer, deregulatory action serving the public interest by expanding the availability of sports to the public without adding any regulatory compliance costs to the private sector."
Senators Ask FCC Chairwoman Clyburn to Issue NPRM on Sports Blackout Rule
[Commentary] Since people rely on the Internet for such a wide range of services today, it's important that their Internet connections work well. This means that people should be able to access the broadband services of their choice using the connections they pay for--and those services should be fast, reliable, and low-latency.
To some extent, this means that consumer Internet service providers (ISPs) need to do what it takes to make sure the popular services their customers demand--the reason they subscribe to broadband to begin with--work well. This is not about an ISP looking into the traffic a customer has requested (or is sending upstream) and giving it differential treatment. It's one level higher, and it's about whether an ISP will connect with other networks on the Internet in a way that's designed to enhance its customers' experiences, or in a way that is motivated by business interests that do not align with those of the customer. In some sense, to a customer, these are distinctions without a difference. All that matters to a customer is whether she can access the Internet and use the services she wants to use without having to know the details of what makes it all work. But ISPs should always remember that they are paid by their customers to provide Internet access and that they have a positive responsibility to make the experience a good one.
ISPs Should Do The Job They Are Hired to Do