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The Obama Administration defended a warrantless wiretapping law before the Supreme Court. At stake in the case is whether civil liberties groups -- including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Amnesty International -- have the legal standing to challenge the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments, which former President George W. Bush signed into law in 2008.

The law authorizes the government to monitor phone calls and emails without a warrant as long as one of the parties to the communication is reasonably believed to be outside the United States. The civil liberties groups sued, arguing the law allows for "dragnet surveillance" of American citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Donald Verrilli, the solicitor general of the United States, argued that the civil liberties groups cannot challenge the law's constitutionality because it does not harm them. But Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the ACLU, argued that his organization has had to take expensive precautions to keep the government from listening in on phone calls with clients who are suspected of terrorist activity. He argued that those precautions, such as flying overseas to meet clients face-to-face, qualify as a harm of the law, giving the ACLU the right to sue. The court's liberal members appeared skeptical of the government's claim that the ACLU lacks standing.

Local television executives like to say it's all hands on deck when breaking news such as a lethal hurricane hits, and sometimes that even means the station general manager grabbing a camera and playing photographer for a few hours. Covering such a giant event presents a stiff challenge for station reporters. Within the CBS family, reporters, and equipment, from as far off as Minneapolis and Dallas headed east to pitch in with owned stations in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston. "It's probably the biggest storm we've experienced in more than a generation," said David Friend, senior VP of news at the CBS owned stations. Stations are making the most of technological and social media advances -- at times with resources that were not available, or not as widely available, as recently as when Irene rolled up the coast. CBS' Mobile 2 Weather Lab is an SUV equipped with weather technology, including wind meters and rain gauges, to provide street level weather updates. "It brings viewers closer to the action," says Friend. "At the end of the day, that's what we're here for."

[Commentary] American ingenuity is also creating an out-of-this-world experience right here on the ground. Today we are able to wirelessly download books and magazines to a tablet we can manipulate with our fingertips. We can access Spotify, the world's largest record store, from anywhere -- for free. We can chat with friends and loved ones with crystal clear video and audio quality. Our mobile phones now double as everything from credit cards to house keys. All of these technologies rely on America's robust high-speed Internet infrastructure, a network born in part from the kind of bipartisan political agreement -- in this case, the decision in 1996 to replace regulation with competition to spawn what would become high-speed data networks -- that almost seems alien to us today. Indeed the loss of this bipartisan consensus-building has, on telecommunications, created a fractured debate where the extremes get the attention, and where consensus on how to build the next phase of broadband revolution is lost. What's especially troubling is that these squeaky wheels are trying to drive a debate with -- shall we say -- a rusty fact checker.

Our broadband investment has helped new entrepreneurs find financial success in what the prestigious Progressive Policy Institute calls the "app economy," which has created half a million jobs and is the key to future productivity. Without investment in broadband, names like Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings and Larry Page would not be known in every U.S. household. Neither would Elon Musk -- the man who made millions inventing PayPal, the revolutionary online payment system, and turned it into SpaceX. By any measure, the Internet is a sturdy launch pad to new frontiers -- even the final frontier.

[Young is a professor of public administration at California State University, San Bernardino]

The United States is facing a year or more without crucial satellites that provide invaluable data for predicting storm tracks, a result of years of mismanagement, lack of financing and delays in launching replacements, according to several recent official reviews.

The looming gap in satellite coverage, which some experts view as almost certain within the next few years, could result in shaky forecasts about storms like Hurricane Sandy, which is expected to hit the East Coast early next week. The endangered satellites fly pole-to-pole orbits and cross the Equator in the afternoon, scanning the entire planet one strip at a time. Along with orbiters on other timetables, they are among the most effective tools used to pin down the paths of major storms about five days ahead. Experts have grown increasingly alarmed in the past two years because the existing polar satellites are nearing or beyond their life expectancies, and the launch of the next replacement, known as J.P.S.S.-1, has slipped to 2017, probably too late to avoid a coverage gap of at least a year. Prodded by lawmakers and auditors, the satellite program’s managers are just beginning to think through alternatives when the gap occurs, but these are unlikely to avoid it.