June 2011

OSTP's Deutchman to Join Neustar

Scott Deutchman will join Neustar as Vice President of Legal and External Affairs. Deutchman comes to Neustar from the Executive Office of the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where he serves as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Telecommunications. In his new role at Neustar, he will focus on a variety of Internet, telecommunications and innovation-related issues. Deutchman’s tenure at Neustar begins on July 5, and he will report directly to Executive Vice President of Legal and External Affairs, Scott Blake Harris.

Deutchman was responsible for advising the nation’s first U.S. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and other Administration officials on legal, policy and legislative matters involving telecommunications, innovation and technology policy. On behalf of the CTO and the OSTP, he worked on administration initiatives involving spectrum, public safety, and broadband.

Prior to joining the OSTP, Deutchman served at the Federal Communications Commission as Acting Senior Legal Advisor on broadband policy to then-Acting Chairman Michael J. Copps between January 2009 and July 2009. Deutchman joined Commissioner Copps’ office in April 2006 as Legal Advisor for competition and universal service issues. He previously worked for the law firm of Hogan Lovells and for LMG, a public affairs firm. He also served as a Democratic Counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

House Panel Suggests More Testing for LightSquared

The House Transportation Committee held a hearing on Global Positioning System (GPS) services and the potential impact of LighSquared's wireless broadband proposal.

House legislators may require the FCC to hold off on considering LightSquared's revised plan for its proposed hybrid satellite/terrestrial nationwide 4G broadband network until "comprehensive new tests make sure the FCC is not approving a system that would pose risks to aviation safety." LightSquared counters that it can proceed without interfering with aviation or maritime operations. It also says that if opponents got their way and blocked FCC authorization of the service, it could undermine the value of broadcast and other spectrum at auctions, which the FCC is teeing up and Congress is looking at to help boost the Treasury. Aviation Subcommittee Chairman Tom Petri (R-WI) said that the revised plan had not been subject to a "full evaluation." He said that based on the witness testimony provided for the hearing about LightSquared, and the importance of protecting GPS for aviation safety and innovation, the subcommittee "may request that the FCC allow time for full, comprehensive testing of the plan" for "potential harmful interference impacts."

Apple Gets Antitrust Approval for Nortel Bid

Apple got approval from U.S. antitrust regulators to bid for the assets of bankrupt Nortel Networks. The Antitrust Division of the Justice Department reviewed Apple’s request to bid for a number of Nortel patents. While Apple has won a green light to participate in the bidding, the Antitrust Division will continue to review any anticompetitive issues that could arise if an agreement is reached

How PARC wants to reinvent the Internet

Xerox PARC’s engineers developed the Ethernet, the mouse, the laser printer and many other staples of everyday computing back in the 1970s. Forty years later, the lab is back at it: Teresa Lunt, VP and director of the computing science lab at PARC, showed off a new networking technology dubbed Content-Centric Networking (CCN) at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco.

Networks used to be about getting messages from point A to point B, Lunt said. Today’s networks, on the other hand, are all about collaboration and sharing, be it with Dropbox or iCloud. Existing network technology wasn't made for this purpose, and companies have come up with patchwork solutions to make these new kinds of services work. PARC wants to replace all of this by putting the emphasis on the content, not points on the network it travels through. Content is automatically encrypted and cached all over the network, and queried by name and description. “Information is self-organizing, and you don't have to search for it,” explained Lunt. Think of it like a giant, autonomous mesh network of data. “With today’s network, data moves explicitly,” Lunt said. “With CCN, the data just moves.”

Cloud computing requires new thinking on privacy

The move to the cloud has broad implications on privacy and requires a lot of discussion on the boundaries and expectations for data in a cloud environment. The government’s approach to data privacy, in particular, is of great concern, from the legislation it enacts to the way law enforcement uses it, said Nolan Goldberg, senior counsel for IP and technology at law firm Proskauer.

Goldberg appeared at the GigaOM Structure conference and talked about the new challenges and issues emerging around privacy for the cloud. He said it’s complicated subject because it’s affected by an array of federal and state legislation and constitutional amendments and statutes. But he said the challenge is now in trying to understand how to best legislate privacy when data is stored in the cloud. The government has an existing law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which governs cloud computing. But it’s in need of updating, something Senator Patrick Leahy is undertaking. But Goldberg warned that the laws need to focus more on the data and not where it resides. He said the ECPA has become outdated because, for example, it treats opened and unopened e-mails differently. In the future, laws should provide protection uniformly for data, rather than being tailored for the cloud computing environment.

The 12 Elements of a Successful Health IT Project

[Commentary] These 12 health information technology best practices are recommended guidelines to help you and your team understand what’s required to achieve success, what you can influence (and what you cannot), and the partners and support systems needed for success.

Strategy and vision: Form follows function
Collaboration: Don't reinvent the wheel
Connectivity: Building the infrastructure needed for success
Implementation: Answering the question of ‘how’
Information: Quality improves outcomes
Support: Making it work every day
Measurement : Access real-time information for improved decision-making
Education: Shortening the divide from ‘have’ to ‘use’
Recruitment and retention: Increase and then meet demand
Credentialing and privileging: Care without borders
Reimbursement: Ensuring payment for the next generation of care
Policy: Top-down collaboration and support of the continuum

Climate of Denial

[Commentary] The news media is the referee in the current wrestling match over whether global warming is "real," and whether it has any connection to the constant dumping of 90 million tons of heat-trapping emissions into the Earth's thin shell of atmosphere every 24 hours. The contest over global warming is a challenge for the referee because it's a tag-team match, a real free-for-all. In one corner of the ring are Science and Reason. In the other corner: Poisonous Polluters and Right-wing Ideologues.

The referee — in this analogy, the news media — seems confused about whether he is in the news business or the entertainment business. Is he responsible for ensuring a fair match? Or is he part of the show, selling tickets and building the audience? The referee certainly seems distracted: by Donald Trump, Charlie Sheen, the latest reality show — the list of serial obsessions is too long to enumerate here. But whatever the cause, the referee appears not to notice that the Polluters and Ideologues are trampling all over the "rules" of democratic discourse. They are financing pseudoscientists whose job is to manufacture doubt about what is true and what is false; buying elected officials wholesale with bribes that the politicians themselves have made "legal" and can now be made in secret; spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on misleading advertisements in the mass media; hiring four anti-climate lobbyists for every member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Risen’s gripping affidavit

James Risen, one of The New York Times’s top national security reporters, filed an affidavit in a federal district court explaining why he refuses to comply with a subpoena demanding he give testimony that would identify his source (or sources) for a chapter in his 2006 book State of War. The chapter at question described a series of intelligence failures in the CIA’s attempts to keep tabs on Iran’s nuclear program.

And while that’s the subject of record for this leak investigation, Risen suggests in the filing that that’s not what he thinks kicked off the chain of events that has led to the government’s quest to force him to testify:

“I cannot help but think that the fact that I had written earlier, both in the Times and State of War, about the administration’s legally questionable domestic eavesdropping program, had something to do with the selective attention that was being focused on the Times and me.”

That story, of course, exposed a highly-controversial Bush administration program, won a Pulitzer, and kicked off congressional reforms of the surveillance system. Risen’s 22-page affidavit is a stirring defense of the value of his reporting, and of the need for journalists covering national security to be able to protect the confidentiality of their sources so that they may bring matters of public interest to light.

AT&T Scales Up Its Content Delivery Ambitions

AT&T has been in the content delivery business, broadly speaking, for a long time. Even when one refers to the nerdy niche business of “content delivery networks,” AT&T has still been doing that for quite a while. But now the carrier is apparently getting serious. Ma Bell is announcing an initiative to greatly expand the services it offers in this area. AT&T is hoping to take on folks like Akamai and Limelight Networks by offering what it claims will be a combination of faster speeds and lower prices.

FTC to Serve Google With Subpoenas in Broad Antitrust Probe

The Federal Trade Commission is poised to serve Google with civil subpoenas signaling the start of a wide-ranging, formal antitrust investigation into whether the search giant has abused its dominance on the Web.

The five-member panel is preparing within days to send Google the formal demands for information. Other companies also are likely receive official requests for information about their dealings with Google at a later stage. From Google's perspective, the FTC's embryonic antitrust probe is the most serious to date in the U.S. Although Google has faced numerous antitrust investigations in recent years, at least in the U.S., federal inquiries have so far largely been limited to reviews of its mergers and acquisitions. The new FTC investigation, by contrast, will examine fundamental issues relating to Google's core search-advertising business, which still accounts for the majority of its revenue. Those issues include whether Google—which accounts for around two-thirds of Internet searches in the U.S. and more abroad—unfairly channels users to its own growing network of services at the expense of rivals'.

Benton

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