Reuters

President Barack Obama's plan for overhauling the National Security Agency's phone surveillance program could force carriers to collect and store customer data that they are not now legally obliged to keep, according to US officials.

One complication arises from the popularity of flat-rate or unlimited calling plans, which are used by the vast majority of Americans. While the Federal Communications Commission requires phone companies to retain for 18 months records on "toll" or long-distance calls, the rule's application is vague for subscribers of unlimited phone plans because they do not get billed for individual calls. That could change if the Obama Administration pushes through with a proposal to require carriers -- instead of the NSA -- to collect and store phone metadata, which includes dialed numbers and call lengths but not the content of conversations.

Under the Administration's proposal, the phone companies would be required to turn over the data to the NSA in response to a court-approved government request. US officials said the carriers might be forced to create new mechanisms to ensure that metadata from flat-rate subscribers could be monitored. They said these issues will require further discussion between the White House, Congress and industry.

Security industry pioneer RSA adopted not just one but two encryption tools developed by the US National Security Agency, greatly increasing the spy agency's ability to eavesdrop on some Internet communications, according to a team of academic researchers.

Reuters reported in December that the NSA had paid RSA $10 million to make a now-discredited cryptography system the default in software used by a wide range of Internet and computer security programs. The system, called Dual Elliptic Curve, was a random number generator, but it had a deliberate flaw -- or "back door" -- that allowed the NSA to crack the encryption.

A group of professors from Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois and elsewhere now say they have discovered that a second NSA tool exacerbated the RSA software's vulnerability. The professors found that the tool, known as the "Extended Random" extension for secure websites, could help crack a version of RSA's Dual Elliptic Curve software tens of thousands of times faster, according to an advance copy of their research shared with Reuters. While Extended Random was not widely adopted, the new research sheds light on how the NSA extended the reach of its surveillance under cover of advising companies on protection.

Florida and other US states will join the Justice Department in seeking to determine if Comcast's plan to merge with Time Warner Cable is legal under US antitrust law.

"We are part of a multistate group reviewing the proposed transaction along with the US DOJ (Justice Department) Antitrust Division," the Florida state attorney general's office said. It was not known how many states had joined the task force. Separately, Indiana officials were also looking at the deal to determine "the potential impact in Indiana."

Erin Reece, a spokeswoman for the Indiana attorney general's office, did not indicate if Indiana was part of the multistate group. The attorneys general group is focused on broadband rather than cable in assessing the $45.2 billion deal, according to a source familiar with the effort who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Brazil will drop a controversial provision that would have forced global Internet companies to store data on Brazilian users inside the country to shield them from US spying, a government minister said.

The rule was added in 2013 to proposed Internet governance legislation after revelations that the US National Security Agency had spied on the digital communications of Brazilians, including those of their President Dilma Rousseff and the country's biggest company Petroleo Brasileiro SA. Instead, the legislation will say that companies such as Google and Facebook are subject to Brazilian laws in cases involving information on Brazilians even if the data is stored abroad, congressional relations minister Ideli Salvatti said. She said the bill, which is opposed by Rousseff allies in the lower chamber of Congress, has enough support to be put to the vote.

Salvatti said the government will not negotiate a key provision in the bill on net neutrality, which has faced strong opposition from telecom companies in Brazil because it would bar them from introducing differential pricing according to Internet usage and speeds, such as higher rates for downloading videos. Regulation of the business aspects of the new legislation can be done later by executive decree, she said. The legislation dubbed Brazil's "Internet Constitution" protects freedom of expression, safeguards privacy and sets limits to the gathering and use of metadata on Internet users.

Tycoon Carlos Slim, under fire from regulators in his home country, has spent the last two years sniffing out deals in Europe to offset an impending regulatory shake-up of Mexican telecommunications.

But though the reforms are the furthest-reaching measures passed against Slim since he became the dominant force in Mexico's telecoms market more than two decades ago, they are likely to take years to erode his hold on the business.

Slim's America Movil, which controls 70 percent of the Mexican mobile market and 80 percent of its fixed lines, was singled out for tougher measures by the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT), the new market regulator. His Mexico phone units must now present plans to lower rates for rivals using America Movil's mobile network, eliminate roaming charges, open up the fixed-line network and share transmission towers, ducts and other nonelectronic infrastructure.

Facebook will allow more marketers to run video advertisements on its website, provided the world's No.1 social network deem them to be of high-enough quality.

Facebook and social media rivals like Twitter are increasingly trying to grab a slice of lucrative TV-marketing budgets as they try to sustain rapid growth. That market is considered crucial to supporting Facebook's growing market valuation and poses a potential long-term threat to traditional TV networks.

The 15-second video ads, which appear in newsfeeds and will play automatically with sound muted, will become available to a limited number of marketers over the next few months, Facebook said on its official blog.

The price that marketers pay to run a video ad on Facebook will be determined by the size of the audience as measured by measurement firm Nielsen, Facebook added. Marketers will be able to choose specific times of day for their spots and will be able to target ads according to age and gender.

Media companies plan to press Comcast for higher fees in 2015, seeing an opportunity to squeeze better terms from the US cable company as regulators review its planned takeover of Time Warner Cable.

Comcast and Time Warner Cable paid nearly $14 billion to content companies in 2013 for rights to distribute their films, television shows and sporting events. Broadcasters and cable television networks have "assignment clauses" in their contracts with Time Warner Cable that require the networks to sign off before Comcast can merge the two cable operators' agreements, according to people who have negotiated agreements in the past. Media executives say most programmers will push for higher rates in return for expanding their deals to cover digital distribution of their content.

Four of the biggest US technology groups collectively hold an estimated $124 billion in US Treasury debt, much of it offshore, earning them tax-free interest, the UK's Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) said.

The finding means Apple, Microsoft, Google and Cisco hold a large proportion of the $254.9 billion held in their foreign subsidiaries in US Treasuries, according to securities filings. Bringing the money home would trigger a tax bill, so the companies keep it offshore, partly to fund foreign expansion but also, executives say, to avoid the tax hit.

Sen Carl Levin (D-MI), who has campaigned for years against tax avoidance, was quoted saying that if US corporations invested offshore funds in US government debt, this income should face US taxes.

"Those funds ought to be treated as having been repatriated and subject to US tax," Sen Levin said.

The US Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Comcast's plan to merge with Time Warner Cable in April and another on retransmission issues in late March, the committee said. Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said the panel would meet on April 2 to discuss plans by Comcast, the No. 1 US cable operator, to buy TWC for $45.2 billion.

Comcast’s top lobbyist David Cohen is known to be a savvy political operator, having pushed through the No. 1 US cable operator's landmark acquisition of media giant NBC Universal in 2011.

But when it comes to getting approval for Comcast to buy its biggest rival, Time Warner Cable, Cohen must win over someone just as well versed in the ways of lobbyists and the cable industry: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler.

Comcast will formally request an FCC review of the $45.2 billion Time Warner Cable deal in late March 2014.

Cohen and Chairman Wheeler do not know each other well, according to Cohen, but their paths have crossed in senior political and industry circles. Both men are supporters of President Barack Obama, each helping to raise more than half a million dollars for his re-election campaign in 2012, according to disclosures.

Cohen is no stranger to Obama's White House. Visitor logs put Cohen, who is not a registered lobbyist, there for meetings and receptions 14 times since 2010, including twice at the Oval Office. People who know Cohen and Chairman Wheeler describe them in similar terms: steady negotiators with a strong grasp of the issues at stake, as well as the players at the table.