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On February 21, 2013, Commissioner Ajit Pai of the Federal Communications Commission delivered remarks before a luncheon of the Federal Communications Bar Association. During his address, he emphasized the importance of the FCC being as nimble as the industry it oversees so that regulatory inertia does not impede technological progress or deter innovation. He then offered a number of proposals for improving the FCC’s internal procedures and allowing the FCC to act more efficiently.

He said the FCC should:

• Handle applications for review by instituting something similar to the U.S. Supreme Court’s certiorari process.
• Expand the categories of small transactions that qualify for streamlined treatment, including mergers of geographically adjacent rural carriers.
• Circulate draft order addressing forbearance petitions at least four weeks before the one-year statutory deadline and require a vote of the full Commission to extend that one-year deadline.
• Set internal deadlines.
• Create an FCC Dashboard on the Commission’s website to track the FCC’s performance on key metrics like waiver requests, license renewal applications, and consumer complaints.

He suggested Congress should:

• Consolidate the FCC’s reporting obligations to Congress.
• Prohibit the FCC from adopting new rules based on Notices of Proposed Rulemaking that are more than three years old.
• Modify the Sunshine Act to allow for more collaborative and efficient Commission decision-making.
• Modernize statutory provisions addressing application fees.

Whenever a new technology emerges that could help police officers or public safety workers do their job more effectively, it's almost inevitable that privacy concerns will arise. And Google, being at the forefront of Internet and technology privacy issues, stated on its blog that it will take a three-pronged approach to technology privacy -- one of which includes how the law currently views much of the content stored online. And this change could affect how officers of the law perform investigations.

Google will uphold its transparency policy and strict request for information process, but the company also stated it would advocate for updating laws such as the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), “so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents.” If implemented, this would likely require government investigators to obtain a search warrant when requesting access to old emails and messages stored online -- something the ECPA doesn't currently account for.

As part of the Obama Administration’s efforts to strengthen the United States’ cybersecurity defenses, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the availability of up to $20 million for the development of tools and technologies to enhance the cybersecurity of the nation’s energy delivery control systems for electricity, oil, and gas. As part of this funding, the Department of Energy (DOE) will require that award recipients collaborate with the energy sector to test the developed technologies so that they are best designed to meet the unique requirements of energy delivery systems.

The newly announced cost-shared investments are intended to address the following cybersecurity needs of the energy sector, among others:

• Protection of energy delivery control system software and firmware updates;
• Sustainability of critical energy delivery functions and remote access to field devices while responding to a cyber-intrusion; and
• Detection of compromises within the supply chain and manipulation of power grid components.

[Commentary] In the digital age, the matter of what stories are picked for front-page display in the print edition may seem archaic. Who cares, one might reasonably ask. But editors still take those daily choices seriously and, because they do, the decisions can provide a useful window into editors’ priorities.

“It’s not a move away from hard news, but more about something that is ‘only in The New York Times,’” said Dean Baquet, a managing editor who runs the afternoon news meeting and usually makes the front page choices. “It has more to do with what we think will interest a sophisticated reader. You can’t get away with giving that reader something they’re already aware of, unless you bring analysis or a different approach.” Something, in short, that makes it exclusive. The Times’s approach – favoring that which is exclusive – has a whiff of something I’ve noted before: The self-satisfied idea that “it’s news when we say it’s news.” But more positively, it offers readers a deeply interesting and original front page, not always driven by the events of the previous day.