November 2012

INTERNET/BROADBAND

OBAMA’S MOMENT
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Thomas Friedman]
[Commentary] Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield says city elders looked themselves in the eyes 15 years ago and realized that “we were a dilapidated city going the way of the Rust Belt.” But, by coming together to make the city an attractive place to live and getting both parties to agree to invest in a fiber-to-every-home-and-business network in a 600-square-mile area, Chattanooga replaced its belching smokestacks with an Amazon fulfillment center, major health care and insurance companies and a beehive of tech start-ups that all thrive on big data and super-high-speed Internet. “We’ve gone from being a slowly declining and deflating urban balloon, to one of the fastest-growing cities in Tennessee,” said Mayor Littlefield. The fiber network now attracts companies that “like to see more and more of their employees able to work some of the time at home, which saves on office space and parking,” the mayor said. How fast is that Chattanooga choo-choo? The majority of Chattanooga homes and businesses get 50 megabits per second, some 100 megabits, a few 250 and those with big needs opt for a full gigabit per second, explained Harold DePriest, the chief executive of EPB, the city’s electric power and telecom provider, which built and operates the network. “The average around the country is 4.5 megabits per second.” So average Internet speed in Chattanooga is 10 times the national average. That doesn’t just mean faster downloads. The fiber grid means 150,000 Chattanooga homes now have smart electric meters to track their energy consumption in real time. More important, said DePriest, on July 5, Chattanooga got hit with an unusual storm that knocked out power to 80,000 homes. Thanks to intelligent power switching on the fiber network, he said, “42,000 homes had their electricity restored in ... 2 seconds.” Old days: 17 hours. That network was fully completed thanks to $111 million in stimulus money. Imagine that we get a grand bargain in Washington that also includes a stimulus of just $20 billion to bring the 200 biggest urban areas in America up to Chattanooga’s standard. You’d see a “melt-up” in the U.S. economy. We are so close to doing something big and smart. Somebody needs to tell the Congress.
benton.org/node/139919 | New York Times
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BROADBAND INDEPENDECE
[SOURCE: Government Technology, AUTHOR: Brian Heaton]
A small town nestled away in southern Minnesota doesn’t sound like the description of a high-tech battleground between local government and Internet service providers. But that’s reality in Winthrop (MN) (pop 1,400), where the city’s fight to light up a municipally-owned broadband network is the latest skirmish in a national war for access to high-speed Internet connectivity. For Winthrop, the idea to launch a community broadband network was hatched four years ago at a city council meeting. While the city has made progress, obstacles have cropped up, preventing the project from breaking ground. Problems range from private provider opposition to municipal partners dropping out of the project. The snail’s pace isn’t surprising, however. To date, only 150 communities have created city-wide cable or fiber-to-the-home networks in the U.S., according to Christopher Mitchell, an expert on community broadband networks and director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative, a nonprofit economic and community development consulting group.
benton.org/node/139901 | Government Technology
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COMMUNITY CONNECT BROADBAND
[SOURCE: Telecompetitor, AUTHOR: Joan Engebretson]
The Community Connect broadband grant program administered by the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service could have a broader impact on local communities as the result of proposed changes to the program. Traditionally that program has provided grants for small scale broadband network projects that also include two public computer terminals and wireless computer connectivity in communities that cannot get broadband today. Under proposed changes, funding recipients would be able to use their 15% matching funds toward the operating costs of broadband projects – something they can’t do today—and would be able to use grant funds for larger geographic areas rather than for a single community. In addition, the application process would be streamlined and funding applications would be prioritized based on a variety of factors.
benton.org/node/139889 | telecompetitor
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NEBRASKA MEASURES BROADBAND SPEEDS
[SOURCE: Government Technology, AUTHOR: ]
Nebraska state government is using data analytics to make decisions about broadband upgrades, and it needs the public's help. The Nebraska Public Service Commission (PSC) is asking Nebraskans to participate in an online test that will capture their current Internet speed to help the state identify unserved and underserved areas. According to the McCook Daily Gazette, the data will be used to update the state broadband map.
benton.org/node/139899 | Government Technology | McCook Daily Gazette
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WV BROADBAND PROJECT
[SOURCE: Charleston Gazette, AUTHOR: Eric Eyre]
West Virginia spent $512,000 in federal stimulus funds last year to pay a consultant who's helping to manage the state's high-speed Internet expansion project while living in Colorado. The state is on pace to spend another $329,000 for the consultant's services this year. The state didn't start paying the Denver-based consultant, Perry Rios, through a contract with Verizon until February 2011, even though the state Office of Technology approved Rios' contract in July 2010. He began work on the statewide broadband project two months later. The state has paid $196 an hour for Rios' services, or $731,770 through the end of last month. Rios isn't the only high-dollar consultant hired through Verizon.
benton.org/node/139974 | Charleston Gazette
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WIRELESS/SPECTRUM

THE SPECTRUM CRUNCH THAT NEVER REALLY WAS
[SOURCE: Technology Review, AUTHOR: David Talbot]
Part of the problem is simply hoarding: some companies have rights to more than they need, at times because business models didn’t pan out. For example, Clearwire, of Bellevue, Washington, held spectrum rights that it did not use, leading Sprint Nextel to buy a big stake in the company this year to expand its own network. Indeed, companies are keen to gobble up spectrum where they can. AT&T said its proposed merger with T-Mobile was needed to merge the two companies’ spectrum resources. There’s a great deal of idle government-controlled spectrum, too. Furthermore, there are plenty of ways that existing spectrum can be used more efficiently to address the crunch sometimes felt by end users. At ball games or concerts, for instance, you’ll often find milk-carton-sized Wi-Fi receivers tucked away in the rafters. Those receivers, operating on unlicensed spectrum, already handle 60 percent of all data traffic on AT&T’s network (your phone can send data on both Wi-Fi and cellular frequencies but will opportunistically choose Wi-Fi). The boxes mop up traffic from choke points like stadiums and train stations and send it directly to fiber backhaul, putting no demand whatsoever on the cellular network. The rise of Wi-Fi shows how working flexibly with existing spectrum can deal with the problem of capacity crunch.
benton.org/node/139921 | Technology Review
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APPLE AND THE DESIRE FOR CONTROL
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: David Streitfeld]
Apple did not invent the notion of using cellphones to play games and carry out small tasks, but it certainly made the concept its own. Its app store is the one all developers want to get into, despite the much larger market share claimed by Google’s Android. There are so many competing devices using Android that developers say they have a hard time optimizing their app for that system. Besides, customers are used to spending money for Apple apps, but they tend to want Android apps for free. All this gives Apple power far beyond its operating system’s 20 percent share of the mobile market. At some point, however, that power might be detrimental for the Internet as a whole. The big Internet companies — Apple, Amazon, Google — are all pursuing a “walled garden” approach, where they hope to do so much for their customers that they will never leave. Internet policy experts did not like walled gardens when America Online built one in the 1990s, and they do not like the prospect of another one triumphing now.
benton.org/node/139879 | New York Times
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ELECTIONS AND MEDIA

TECH AND THE ELECTION
[SOURCE: Government Technology, AUTHOR: Noelle Knell]
Few analysts would describe the recent elections as an upheaval. President Obama’s election to a second term, accompanied by Republicans retaining control of the House and Democrats maintaining the majority in the Senate, means the government will look much like it did pre-election. During a webinar on November 19, TechAmerica public policy analysts offered up their assessment of how the nation-wide contest on November 6, deemed the “status quo” election, will impact technology policy. Technology was called “transformational” in the 2012 election, as evidenced by the sharp spike in election-related social media activity, cited as a critical voter outreach tool. Not surprisingly, 2012 was the most tweeted U.S. election to date, with 327,000 tweets per minute on election night. TechAmerica analysts noted that official party platforms from both Republicans and Democrats devoted more space than ever before to technology and telecommunications policy. Technology issues are expected to continue as a major focus area in Obama’s second term. Technology priorities are expected to remain fairly consistent over the next two years, since the election did not bring a major shift in power for the executive or legislative branches. Divided government, however, will continue to hamper the passage of major policy changes related to technology.
benton.org/node/139898 | Government Technology
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OBAMA’S TECH TEAM
[SOURCE: The Atlantic, AUTHOR: Alexis Madrigal]
The Obama campaign's team of technologists had elite and, for tech, senior talent -- most of them were in their 30s -- from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago's own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Harper Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe *especially* these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. "I think the Republicans fucked up in the hubris department," Reed told me. "I know we had the best technology team I've ever worked with, but we didn't know if it would work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened." "We knew what to do," Reed maintained, no matter what the scenario was. "We had a runbook that said if this happens, you do this, this, and this. They did not do that with Orca."
benton.org/node/139876 | Atlantic, The
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OWNERSHIP

TRIBUNE DECISION
[SOURCE: Associated Press, AUTHOR: ]
The Federal Communications Commission has given the Tribune Company key clearances as it prepares to leave bankruptcy protection and transfer the company to new owners. The FCC is approving the transfer of Tribune’s broadcast licenses to the new owners. It’s also giving the new owners a waiver on a federal ban on owning newspapers and TV stations in the same market. It’s one of the final hurdles in a years-long bankruptcy process that is expected to conclude in the next several weeks. Tribune CEO Eddy Hartenstein said in a statement Friday that the company is “extremely pleased” by the action.
benton.org/node/139874 | Associated Press | read the FCC decision
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CONTENT

INTERNET SEARCHES
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Quentin Hardy, Matt Richtel]
There are the questions you ask friends, family and close confidants. And then there are the questions you ask the Internet. Search engines have long provided clues to the topics people look up. But now sites like Google and Bing are showing the precise questions that are most frequently asked, giving everyone a chance to peer virtually over one another’s shoulders at private curiosities. And they are revealing interesting patterns. Frequently asked questions include: When will the world end? Is Neil Armstrong Muslim? Was George Washington gay? The questions come from a feature that Google calls “autocomplete” and Microsoft calls “autosuggest.” These anticipate what you are likely to ask based on questions that other people have asked. Simply type a question starting with a word like “is” or “was,” and search engines will start filling in the rest. People who study online behavior also say the autocomplete feature reveals broader patterns, including indications that the questions people ask of search engines often veer into the sensitive and politically incorrect.
benton.org/node/139918 | New York Times
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PRIVACY

FACEBOOK PRIVACY CHANGES
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Jessica Guynn]
Two consumer watchdogs are urging Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to back off proposed changes to its policies that they say would curb the rights of its 1 billion-plus users and make more personal information available to advertisers without users' explicit consent in violation of a privacy settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. In a letter sent to Zuckerberg, the groups asked Facebook to be "responsive to the rights of Facebook users to control their personal information and to participate in the governance of Facebook." Most controversial to privacy watchdogs: Facebook's plans to begin sharing users' data between its own services and affiliates, most notably Instagram, which it bought earlier this year for about $715 million. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, allege that the proposed changes invade the privacy of Facebook users and "implicate" the terms of the privacy settlement Facebook reached with the FTC. European regulators also said that they expect Facebook to give European users the right to accept or reject whether they want to share their personal information with Facebook affiliates such as photo-sharing service Instagram.
benton.org/node/139977 | Los Angeles Times
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ICONOGRAPHY FOR DIGITAL PRIVACY
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Somini Sengupta]
Web site privacy policies are usually long, vague and notoriously neglected by most of us. Or as Alex Fowler, chief privacy officer at Mozilla, put it, “We have long upheld that privacy policies suck.” Now, an experiment is under way to make those privacy policies somewhat more palatable. The idea is to have lawyers and coders muddle through thousands of words of legalese and distill their meaning into a set of graphic icons. In effect, the pros will read those notoriously unreadable policies, so the rest of us don’t have to. The experiment began Nov 16 in Mozilla headquarters in San Francisco, under aptly dark clouds overhead. It was fueled by chicken-and-bacon sandwiches supplied by disconnect.me, a start-up that offers Web users tools to control how and with whom their personal data is shared. The assignment was to vet the policies of 1,000 Web sites.
benton.org/node/139884 | New York Times
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GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS

ELECTRONIC PRIVACY DESERVES UPGRADE
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Grover Norquist, Laura Murphy]
[Commentary] Today, if the police want to come into your house and take your personal letters, they need a warrant. If they want to read those same letters saved on Google or Yahoo they don’t. The Fourth Amendment has eroded online. Americans for Tax Reform and the American Civil Liberties Union are members of the Digital Due Process Coalition, a wide-ranging group of privacy advocates, think tanks and businesses, like Microsoft, Google, Apple, AT&T, that often disagree on different issues. However, we can agree on consistent privacy protection for digital documents. We agree that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), though forward-thinking in 1986, has become outdated as we head in to 2013. On Nov 29, the Senate Judiciary Committee will reexamine an amendment to H.R. 2471 put forth by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that requires a warrant to collect data from a technology companies and individuals. This is the kind of measure all committee members should be able to support without reservation. We believe email and information stored in the cloud should have the same legal protection as letters or information held by an individual in their home. This is clear, consistent, reasonable privacy protection for the digital age. It is our hope and expectation that all committee members will oppose any weakening amendments and vote to report the bill with Senator Leahy’s warrant for content standards intact.
benton.org/node/139975 | Hill, The
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JUSTICE EXPANDS HUNT FOR DATA ON CELLPHONES
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Somini Sengupta]
Cellphones seem to be increasingly attractive to the Department of Justice, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union show. Agencies affiliated with the department used more than 37,600 court orders in 2011 to gather cellphone data, a sharp increase from previous years. They were almost equally divided between “pen register” data, which captures outgoing phone numbers, and “trap and trace” orders, which refer to incoming phone numbers, which means one phone could have two separate orders associated with it. The total number has roughly doubled since 2007, when cellphone communications were more limited. By law, the data can be obtained without a search warrant establishing probable cause, though the authorities do need to tell a court that it is relevant to an investigation. To get a wiretap that allows authorities to actually listen in on the contents of a call has higher legal barriers; law enforcement officials have to convince an impartial judge of probable cause. The lower legal threshold allows law enforcement agencies to capture crucial information, including the time and date of calls and their length, helping law enforcement officials deduce important associations among callers.
benton.org/node/139916 | New York Times | The Atlantic
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LABOR

APP CREATORS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: David Streitfeld]
Even as unemployment remained stubbornly high and the economy struggled to emerge from the recession’s shadow, the ranks of computer software engineers, including app writers, increased nearly 8 percent in 2010 to more than a million, according to the latest available government data for that category. These software engineers now outnumber farmers and have almost caught up with lawyers. Much as the Web set off the dot-com boom 15 years ago, apps have inspired a new class of entrepreneurs. These innovators have turned cellphones and tablets into tools for discovering, organizing and controlling the world, spawning a multibillion-dollar industry virtually overnight. The iPhone and iPad have about 700,000 apps, from Instagram to Angry Birds. Yet with the American economy yielding few good opportunities in recent years, there is debate about how real, and lasting, the rise in app employment might be. Despite the rumors of hordes of hip programmers starting million-dollar businesses from their kitchen tables, only a small minority of developers actually make a living by creating their own apps, according to surveys and experts. And programming is not a skill that just anyone can learn. While people already employed in tech jobs have added app writing to their résumés, the profession offers few options to most unemployed, underemployed and discouraged workers.
benton.org/node/139886 | New York Times
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CYBERSECURITY

WHITE HOUSE MOVES ON CYBERSECURITY
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Tony Romm]
The White House’s strategy on cybersecurity: Co-opt the opposition. The Obama administration is crafting an executive order designed to keep the country’s most important digital systems safe from hackers and spies. So the White House is bringing in key players for meetings now — getting early input that the feds hope will make any new rules easier to enforce and voluntary pieces more likely to produce results. “We kicked off a robust sort of outreach, and I would almost frame it as a listening session tour over the past couple months,” said Michael Daniel, cybersecurity coordinator at the White House. He acknowledged the effort is “highly unusual” for an executive order, but a necessary process on cybersecurity “due to the important role all of these partners are going to play, to carry out what we’re trying to achieve.” Many of the administration-led meetings have been with the operators of power plants, water systems, key financial sector assets and other businesses that would be impacted directly by an executive order, sources told POLITICO. Top tech trade groups, including the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents companies like Apple and Google, had their own sessions, as did public-interest groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy and Technology. Even the recalcitrant U.S. Chamber of Commerce — a fierce opponent of the administration’s plans — met with top Obama cyber advisers at the end of last month. Together, the meetings are but a page from the playbook already guiding the Administration’s efforts on the fiscal cliff and other high-profile policy pushes that have failed to clear a Congress still overwhelmed by partisan obstruction.
benton.org/node/139983 | Politico
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STORIES FROM ABROAD
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INDIA’S INTERNET LAW
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Niharika Mandhana]
Civil rights activists, free speech advocates, lawyers and politicians have spoken out in recent days against India’s controversial Internet laws, after two women were arrested in Mumbai for criticizing in a Facebook post the city’s shutdown after the Hindu leader Bal K. Thackeray’s death. A particular target for criticism is Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, an amendment added in 2008, which, among other things, makes it a crime to digitally send “any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character.” Even a senior government official acknowledged recently that there may be flaws in the way the law is being used.
benton.org/node/139867 | New York Times
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Daily Digest

Analysis

November 2012

New Report Finds E-Prescribing is on the Rise

Five Ways The Government Can Create Sustainable Innovation

'The Hobbit' will usher in a new technology at movie theaters

November 27, 2012 (The Spectrum Crunch that Never Really Was)

White House moves on cybersecurity

Contractors move to save cybersecurity funding

Maryland lawmakers build 'Fort Cyber'

CyberCity allows government hackers to train for attacks

Two consumer groups urge Facebook to back off privacy changes