April 2011

Privacy is an endangered species. Celebrities and politicians make their livelihoods by eschewing privacy and seeking full-frontal public attention. They are public figures by choice. But what about the rest of us? In today's Facebooking Twitterverse — with the proliferation of cellphone cameras, community-building websites, photo-sharing apps and ever-expanding companies dedicated to exposing as much of our lives and predilections as possible — we are all becoming public figures whether we want to be or not. And it's changing the rules we live by.

"People, now more than ever, have become increasingly uninhibited with the information they share via online social media," says David Hector Montes, former outreach director of the Pro Bono Research Group at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. "As a result, private citizens have large audiences to share information with, and public figures are more accessible." The prevalence of social media, Montes says, "has created a culture of over-sharing." And this "is blurring the lines between who is a public figure and who is not."

A Q&A with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.

The chairman danced around the most prominent item on his agenda, the proposed acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T. He also discussed spectrum re-allocation, his pragmatic approach, and what it was like being a law school classmate of President Obama.

On network neutrality he says, "[W]hen I was confirmed, we inherited a real mess around net neutrality. The agency had been enforcing net neutrality principles, but without ever adopting them as formal rules, and without any clarity on what the rules actually were. And it was a mess. Companies in any part of the broadband economy didn't have certainty. The rules in fact were a mess and were subsequently struck down by a court. I wanted to make sure that we had a framework to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet that has led to the incredible innovation that we've seen, that's empowered both businesses and speakers in the way that we all know for the last period of time, and that also encouraged the massive amount of investment we need in the infrastructure to have high speed broadband. And we ran quite a long process, 14 months, from notice of proposed rulemaking to decision. In December we adopted a framework, open Internet rules on the books. You can read them -- a little more than a page -- that lay out basic protections for Internet freedom and openness, and that bring certainty and predictability to an area that was a mess. So, the core issues are, from an FCC perspective, behind us. We've moved forward onto other issues. Basic protections for Internet freedom and openness are now in place."

The National Association of Broadcasters filed with the Federal Communications Commission a study by former FCC official Uzoma Onyeije questioning the existence of a spectrum crisis. The paper suggests alternative solutions to auctioning broadcasting spectrum to help alleviate mobile broadband congestion. In the paper, Onyeije shows that insufficient analysis and reliance on faulty information in the formation of the FCC's National Broadband Plan has led to the overstated assumption of a nationwide spectrum "crisis." The paper cautions that using flawed data to address the capacity crunch affecting only a handful of cities will lead to inadequate solutions. Onyeije calls for a comprehensive and quantitative analysis of the issue that is not based on preconceived assumptions.

"The factual basis for the 'spectrum crisis' claim is underwhelming," Onyeije said. "For example, the answer to the fundamental question of how much spectrum mobile carriers need remains uncertain. It appears that the notion of a need for large-scale spectrum reallocation to address a shortage of mobile spectrum is based on questionable assumptions designed to achieve a particular result."

The National Broadband Plan's conclusion of a spectrum shortage is based on little more than a wish list by wireless carriers, says the paper. Onyeije cites contradictory statements by high-ranking corporate officials to show the Plan's calls for making 500 MHz of spectrum available for broadband in ten years is a gross overestimate of the actual need.

Onyeije offers his support for innovative solutions that have been previously deployed and currently being developed to address capacity needs, and which can be

• utilized much faster and more efficiently than a reallocation of broadcast spectrum:
• deploying innovative network technology upgrades that promote spectral efficiency;
• leveraging consumer infrastructure such as femtocells and wi-fi;
• investing in infrastructure to enhance capacity through the deployment of smart antennas, picocells, sectorization and cell splitting;
• encouraging the development of bandwidth sensitive applications

The Justice Department has dropped its long-running criminal investigation of a lawyer who publicly admitted leaking information about President George W. Bush’s top-secret warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times -- disclosures that President Bush vehemently denounced as a breach of national security.

They also stoked a congressional debate about whether the government had overstepped its authority as it scrambled to respond to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The decision not to prosecute former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm means it is unlikely that anyone will ever be charged for the disclosures that led to the Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story in December 2005 revealing that, after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush ordered the interception of certain phone calls and email messages into and out of the U.S. without a warrant -- a move many lawyers contend violated the 1978 law governing intelligence-related wiretaps.