The House Commerce Committee does plan to post comments it receives as part of its effort to update the Communications Act, a Republican aide told us. Comments responding to questions in the committee’s first white paper (http://1.usa.gov/1iVVvBE), issued earlier in January, are due Friday. The committee expects to release more white papers on the overhaul process, the committee leaders have said. The aide declined to specify how soon the comments may be posted.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler must restore net neutrality rules, said an Iowa candidate for Senate who’s currently a member of the House. Rep. Bruce Braley, a Democrat, launched a petition this week directed at Wheeler, asking people to sign the letter he plans to send. “Net neutrality is an important aspect of the Internet -- and it must be protected,” Braley said in the letter on his Senate campaign website (http://bit.ly/1f7Ucf5). “In light of the recent court decision striking down net neutrality rules, I urge you to take immediate action on new rules designed to protect net neutrality.” He’s running for the Senate seat of fellow Democrat, Tom Harkin, who has said he will retire at the end of his current term.

The Senate Commerce Committee will hold what it called a summit on distracted driving Feb. 6, it said Tuesday. The summit will start at 10 a.m. in 253 Russell. There are three roundtable discussions planned, it said: First a talk on the state of the issue, with “representatives from the automobile, consumer electronics, and wireless industries, as well as government agencies and safety groups,” then a talk on the state of the technological solutions, then a final talk led by Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., on possible best solutions. The second discussion is set to begin at 11:15 a.m. and the third at 2:30 p.m.

Fire Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, six members of the House told President Barack Obama in a letter Monday. Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., led among the letter’s signatories -- all Republicans except Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla. -- and released it (http://1.usa.gov/1i4SfkL). “The continued role of James Clapper as Director of National Intelligence is incompatible with the goal of restoring trust in our security programs and ensuring the highest level of transparency,” the members wrote. Clapper is guilty of “lying to Congress, under oath, about the existence of bulk data collection,” the members said. They called Internet freedom indispensable and mentioned with concern details of the U.S. government’s phone and Internet surveillance. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has denied this charge of lying, with General Counsel Robert Litt stating in early January that Clapper had no intention to lie or misrepresent the government surveillance programs (CD Jan 7 p8).

Two House Democrats released draft legislation Monday that would update how the federal government handles “mission-critical” information technology systems. Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, Calif., and the Oversight Committee’s Government Operations Subcommittee ranking member Gerry Connolly, Va., are responsible for the draft, called the Reforming Federal Procurement of Information Technology (RFP-IT) Act. “Our draft bill puts proven best practices to work by instituting a White House office of IT procurement and gives all American innovators a fair shake at competing for valuable federal IT contracts by lowering the burden of entry,” Eshoo said in a statement. Connolly emphasized that there’s a lot of waste in procurement despite small improvements in recent years. “Our RFP-IT discussion draft recognizes that transforming how the federal government procures critical IT assets will likely require bolstering ongoing efforts to comprehensively strengthen general federal IT management practices with targeted enhancements that promote innovative and bold procurement strategies from the White House on down,” Connolly said. The proposed bill would create an office in the executive branch to assess big IT projects early on and allow smaller businesses to bid on federal IT contracts without the significant sums associated with compliance. In a provision intended to give small businesses simplified acquisition procedures, with less paperwork and fewer layers of approval required, the purchase threshold that triggers higher requirements would be raised to $500,000 from $150,000, the members said in a press release (http://1.usa.gov/1cmN8vb).

The Republican National Committee passed a resolution condemning National Security Agency surveillance, according to both its author and Diana Orrock, the Nevada national committeewoman who introduced it. The resolution was passed unanimously at the RNC meeting Friday in Washington. Conservative blogger Bryan Daugherty wrote the resolution, which had failed to pass at a previous RNC meeting. The resolution urges Republican members of Congress to back legislation amending Patriot Act Section 215, the state secrets privilege and the FISA Amendments Act “to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity, phone records and correspondence -- electronic, physical, and otherwise -- of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court,” it said (http://bit.ly/1d0Ts7b). Republicans in Congress should “call for a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying,” the resolution said. Members should try to stop the surveillance programs, it said. “Now, armed with the new information fresh from the Snowden leaks as well as growing support from headlines created by politicians like Rand Paul and his class-action lawsuit, Diana Orrock will once again ask the RNC to request that Republican lawmakers support the effort to renounce the NSA’s unconstitutional surveillance program,” Daugherty wrote on the conservative website LibertyRoll last week (http://bit.ly/1mDf4vZ), saying Orrock now had 12 co-sponsors in introducing the resolution. “She says she has resubmitted this Resolution for consideration ‘because in these times of losing a little bit more of our freedom incrementally every day, we must continue to fight for and protect our constitutionally guaranteed 1st and 4th Amendment rights. I will never be content to trade my constitutional rights for what the government wants us to believe is security.'” The resolution had unanimously passed the RNC Resolution Committee earlier last week, Daugherty said.

NCTA was the fourth-biggest Capitol Hill lobbying spender of 2013, the Center for Responsive Politics said in a blog post Thursday (http://bit.ly/1jJDNiJ). Q4 lobbying reports for 2013 were due last week and showed a spike in lobbying among many companies and associations with video interests, which observers told us likely involved preparation for the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act reauthorization process happening this year (CD Jan 23 p7). The trade association of cable companies had “increased its spending on lobbying from $4.4 million in the third quarter to $6.6 million in the fourth, and jumped its annual total 5.1 percent, from $18.8 million in 2012 to $19.8 million in 2013,” said the center, a nonprofit that tracks lobbying and campaign finance issues. NCTA had spent $5.88 million in 2012’s Q4. The center, speaking broadly, identified “no discernible pattern in terms of industry or areas of interest among this group of top spenders,” based on the recent lobbying disclosure reports. “Likewise, in the high-tech world, Microsoft increased its lobbying expenditures by 29.7 percent year-to-year, from $8 million to $10.4 million, and Google (which had been rapidly packing on extra K Street help for the last few years) cut back 15.2 percent from $18.2 million in 2012 to $15.4 million in 2013,” the center said.

Many of the legislative initiatives in the Telecom Act of 1996 fell flat because lawmakers failed to understand “reasonable expectations of market structure, the effect of the legislation on stakeholder incentives,” and “the potential for technological change,” said Phoenix Center President Larry Spiwak in a blog post Thursday (http://bit.ly/1dSIgQ5). The experiment of unbundling -- the “signature legislative initiative” in the act -- was “effectively over” when the FCC in 2005 issued its Triennial Review Order that “rendered most business plans based on unbundled network elements financially unviable,” Spiwak said. Congress’s attempt to create a retail market for set-top boxes similarly failed because such a market is inefficient, “and markets abhor inefficiency,” Spiwak said. Before passing legislation, Congress must understand the “underlying economics of the problem,” and have “reasonable and realistic expectations of market structure,” he said. Successful legislation must also “make sure that the incentives of all the stakeholders are aligned,” lest “sabotage against the paradigm” run rampant, he said.

The National Retail Federation is “committed” to fighting data breaches and other cyberattacks, said CEO Matthew Shay in a letter to congressional leadership Tuesday, according to an NRF news release (http://bit.ly/1in5yQg). The NRF called for a “uniform federal breach notification law,” the implementation of chip- and PIN-based encryption technology for credit and debit cards, and the passage of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (HR-624), which allows commercial businesses to “quickly share information about threats.” Increasing the use of chip and PIN encryption will be an important tool for curbing data attacks, “but the fact remains that retailers cannot do this alone,” said Shay, in the letter.

One House Democrat prefers the approach of President Barack Obama’s surveillance review group to that of Obama himself. Following Obama’s talk on surveillance Friday, Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, announced the introduction of HR-3883, the Big Brother Is Not Watching You Act. The bill would direct the president to implement the 46 recommendations that the five-member review group offered Obama in December. “The Review Board’s proposals are a coherent and comprehensive plan to help eliminate ubiquitous and unnecessary domestic surveillance by the government, and should be treated as such,” Grayson said in a statement (http://1.usa.gov/19LdtUf). “They shouldn’t be implemented in a piecemeal fashion.” The legislation has no co-sponsors and has been referred to the committees on Intelligence, Judiciary, Oversight and Government Reform, Armed Services and Foreign Affairs.