Failing to address the overreach of U.S. government surveillance will create long-lasting damage for the digital economy, said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and tech executives from Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Facebook and Microsoft during a Wednesday discussion at Palo Alto High School, where Wyden went to high school in Palo Alto, California. “The cost,” said Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, “is huge in terms of knowledge, discovery, science, growth, jobs.” Countries around the world will start implementing data localization requirements, said Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith. In the last few months alone, 20 governments have either proposed or discussed such laws, said Dropbox General Counsel Ramsey Homsany. Cloud storage services like Dropbox rely on the ability to store data anywhere, the industry officials said. Requirements to keep individuals’ data stored locally would kill cloud-based storage, they said. In turn, the Internet slows down, becomes less personalized and costs are driven up as companies are required to put data centers in each country, said Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch. Data localization also is a threat to civil liberties, he said. Insisting on local data storage could “result in quite possibly more access by state sponsored surveillance,” he said. Governments have been able to sell data localization as a consumer protection measure, Schmidt said, when in fact localization erodes “the architecture that all these companies and all the startups really need to have.” Wyden touted his industry-supported Digital Trade Act (S-1788), which would prevent cross-border data flow restrictions and prohibit localization requirements, as a first step toward ensuring the continued health of the digital economy. But it’s no fix for the “reckless broad surveillance,” which “hampers our ability” to convince countries to accept the free flow of data, Wyden said.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler assured lawmakers that he’s taking security into account in the agency’s selection of the local number portability administrator. “Security is at the forefront of the Commission’s mission in overseeing our nation’s communications infrastructure,” and the administrator “is of vital importance to the national security and the country’s communications networks, and we recognize the need to preserve the effective, reliable, and secure operation of the LNP system and protect it from rapidly evolving future cyber threats,” Wheeler said in a Sept. 30 letter released Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1vWLXJu). “I can assure you that, throughout this [selection] process and thereafter, we will do whatever is necessary to ensure the LNP system meets highly rigorous standards for security and reliability for our Nation.”
House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., formally announced Wednesday that committee staffers are engaging in bipartisan briefings from industry stakeholders this month, as expected (CD Oct 2 p6) and initiated last week (CD Oct 7 p6). The briefings are part of Walden’s initiative to overhaul the Communications Act. “Although Congress may not be in session this month, our work continues full speed ahead,” Walden said in a blog post (http://1.usa.gov/1vWwcm5), referring to “recently commenced” briefings he termed listening sessions. The first session was last Thursday and at least two were scheduled for this week. “These meetings provide our bipartisan staffs an opportunity to dive deeper on specific topics and better understand the issues facing the modern communications marketplace,” Walden said. “We are interested in pursuing pro-innovation policies that reflect our evolving economy. It is important to have a firm grip on how our laws impact consumers, job creators, and the market as a whole, and hear directly what ideas are worth pursuing as well as identifying potential landmines to avoid.” The sessions are intended to “round out the information” that the committee has acquired from white paper responses and hearings, he said.
House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., plans to release “a Cures legislative discussion draft in early January 2015,” looking to “swiftly move the legislation early in the next Congress,” he said in an opening statement at a roundtable in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Tuesday (http://1.usa.gov/1t1Bakz). He was referring to the committee’s 21st Century Cures initiative, which Upton has framed as a natural companion initiative to the overhaul of the Communications Act he also backs. Telehealth is one dimension that lawmakers involved in the 21st Century Cures initiative have examined, and groups such as the Telecommunications Industry Association have weighed in on that front as the committee considers any legislation.
Civil liberties advocates told Congress to pass the latest Senate version of the USA Freedom Act (S-2685), which they have loudly backed in recent months. Several groups, including the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Libertarian Party, National Lawyers Guild and National Network for Arab American Communities, sent lawmakers a letter Monday. “The passage of the USA FREEDOM Act would be an important first step in curtailing the NSA’s abuses of fundamental constitutional rights, but it would not be enough,” the letter said (http://bit.ly/1t1yuU7). It called for further steps such as overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702, limiting any “backdoor” surveillance searches and creating a stronger adversarial process in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., is gathering supporters to oppose the NFL’s blackout policies. “Tell Congress: Demand more from the NFL!” said a petition on his campaign website (http://bit.ly/1s8TveB). “The National Football League has been permitted to earn $9 billion annually through its negotiations with television broadcast networks without competition. Normally this would be considered collusion and would be prohibited under antitrust laws.” The website asks people to add their names to a list telling Congress to “pass legislation ensuring the NFL upholds its public trust and public obligation.” Blumenthal, who’s not up for re-election until 2016, promoted the petition on his campaign Facebook page Tuesday. The petition website and the Facebook page are affiliated with the Blumenthal for Connecticut political action committee rather than his official Senate site and Facebook page. Blumenthal introduced legislation last year that would remove the NFL’s antitrust exemption and he has said this fall he may still want to advance that in Congress, which he says is necessary even after a recent FCC vote to end its sports blackout rule (CD Oct 1 p2). The league had no comment Tuesday.
Net neutrality is a crucial right that requires congressional leadership, said Ro Khanna, a Democrat, Monday in a debate between candidates for the 17th congressional district seat in Silicon Valley. An attorney who was deputy assistant secretary of Commerce during President Barack Obama’s first term, Khanna is competing against Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., a senior member of Congress who backs net neutrality. The candidates emerged on top in an open primary earlier this year -- with Honda winning far more votes than Khanna -- and will go on to compete against one another in the November midterm elections. Khanna, who has backing from the technology industry, said Congress is “dysfunctional” and “slow-moving.” “The frustration people have, though, is nothing is getting done,” Khanna said of Honda’s tenure. “He has passed one bill in 14 years.” House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., has passed several bills, Khanna added. He lamented in the debate in San Jose what he called Honda’s connection to special interests and how people in Washington are “all bought and sold by lobbyists.” Khanna would seek Republican co-sponsors and meet with those who disagree with him, he said. Honda “is not bipartisan,” Khanna argued. “That is not who he is.” Honda defended his record, saying he has worked with Republicans: “I'm not burnt out. I've got a lot of gas in this tank, and I'm not even a hybrid.” Honda said he helped expand the presence of the Patent and Trademark Office in California. Both candidates criticized the Obama administration’s policies of government mass surveillance. Khanna slammed Honda for not being more outspoken on the issue and touted his own so-called Internet Bill of Rights. “First, a right to net neutrality, because we shouldn’t have people who pay special money get special access to the Internet,” Khanna said. “Every person should be free of mass surveillance.” People also have a right to know how companies use their data, he added. “Privacy of the individual is paramount,” Honda agreed, saying he believes Congress can resolve the challenge and citing his vote against the Patriot Act.
The departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and of Homeland Security (DHS) must coordinate and help hospitals battle cyberattacks, said Rep. Krysten Sinema, D-Ariz., in a letter sent Friday to both agencies (http://1.usa.gov/1rdD76b). “The combination of comparably lower spending on cybersecurity than other industries and the extremely valuable data possessed by hospitals and healthcare networks makes the healthcare industry a more attractive target for cybercrime,” Sinema said. She requested information on how DHS and HHS create and inform hospitals of cybersecurity best practices, how they ensure safe transmission of data between hospitals, and what resources hospitals can use to improve their cybersecurity. “As we increasingly rely on digital health innovations to control rising healthcare costs, it is important that DHS and HHS support hospitals’ and healthcare networks’ efforts to improve their cybersecurity systems,” Sinema said. DHS and HHS did respond to requests for comment.
A recent GAO request on low-power TV could give the next Congress “the basis it will need to craft legislation to help LPTV and TV translators deal with the impacts … from the auction and subsequent displacements and repacking,” said Mike Gravino, head of the LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition, in a widely circulated Monday email. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., requested the study, aimed at getting a sense of the media landscape and how the FCC’s incentive auction would affect LPTVs and translators (CD Oct 2 p20). Gravino called the request “excellent” and recanted from his previous strong criticism of a draft Barton bill, which aimed to protect LPTV interests in the upcoming auction. “I will be the first here to make a public apology for calling out the House Subcommittee members when the bill this summer was being proposed,” Gravino said. “While the bill sucked big time, and as written could have totally given up the last defense LPTV had in the FCC process, the resulting firestorm around it has definitely changed the dynamic.” Barton “decided to postpone” any official introduction of his draft LPTV and Translator Preservation Act “for now,” his spokesman told us Monday, citing “the end of Congress looming and little to no action on telecom issues expected during the lame duck.” But Barton and Eshoo thought “the issue was important enough to warrant some sort of action,” hence the GAO request, the Barton spokesman said. Gravino said there has “been a lot of activity behind the scenes in the Senate about this issue” but thinks “the House is better set up to make the GAO request.”
NetCompetition Chairman Scott Cleland said a net neutrality proposal from House Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., is illegal. Waxman outlined his proposal -- calling for hybrid net neutrality authority using Communications Act Section 706 and Title II -- in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Friday, provoking immediate outcry from NCTA and USTelecom (CD Oct 6 p2), both of which belong to NetCompetition. The Waxman proposal is “a call for FCC double-regulation of the Internet using both Title I and Title II,” not a compromise, Cleland said in a Sunday blog post (http://bit.ly/1xhwOE7). He said the “fatally-flawed tent-pole assumption” revolves around the idea “that the FCC can somehow deem previously mutually-exclusive services under precedent and the law to now be inclusive” simultaneously. “Congress did not grant the FCC statutory authority to unilaterally combine heretofore mutually-exclusive, congressionally-defined, regulatory classifications, let alone for the purpose of imposing more restrictive regulation than Congress imposed in either Title I or Title II authority, or for the purposes of regulating competitive providers in the 21st century more restrictively than Congress and the FCC regulated the telephone monopoly in the 20th century,” Cleland said. Free State Foundation President Randolph May also criticized the proposal. “The notion of adopting new net neutrality rules is problematic enough if the Commission relies only on Section 706,” he told us. “But were it to cook up some ‘hybrid’ approach a la Waxman, the result would be even worse in light of the dubious assumptions incorporated into Waxman’s recipe. The only good thing about the proposal from my perspective is that, if it were adopted, it would most likely be rejected by the courts. Maybe three strikes would convince the Commission that it’s time to await further direction from Congress."