March 2013

Telecommunications companies want the Obama Administration to rethink a decision that may exempt Google’s Gmail, Apple’s iPhone software and Microsoft’s Windows from an executive order on cybersecurity.

The Feb. 12 order says the government can’t designate “commercial information technology products or consumer information technology services” as critical U.S. infrastructure targeted for voluntary computer security standards. “If e-mail went away this afternoon, we would all come to a stop,” said Marcus Sachs, vice president of national security policy at Verizon Communications, the second-largest U.S. phone company. “Hell yeah, e-mail is critical.” Technologies used in personal computers, software and the Internet “are the lifeblood of cyberspace,” Sachs said. “If you exclude that right up front, you take off the table the very people who are creating the products and services that are vulnerable.” Obama’s order is aimed at areas such as power grids, telecommunications and pipelines. The goal is to protect “systems and assets whose incapacitation from a cyber incident would have catastrophic national security and economic consequences,” White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in an e-mail. “It is not about Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat.”

Despite the rhetoric in Washington, no one really knows what effect the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts will have on the economy, consumers and business in general. But it's hard to believe that advertisers, media and telecommunications companies won't notice some differences at the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, agencies that have jurisdiction over their businesses.

Post-sequestration, the best advice for companies that do business with the FCC and FTC is to have some patience. Reports are bound to take longer and decisions are bound to drag on. The FCC, which is already nearly three years late on updating media ownership rules, called the $17 million in cuts to its $342 million budget "very significant." Though no layoffs or furloughs of staff are anticipated, the FCC said staff is already the lowest it has been in nearly 30 years. The Federal Trade Commission, which has jurisdiction over consumer protection and deceptive ad enforcement, is facing a $16 million cut to its $314 million budget. In its statement, the agency said it has made strategic decisions that have positioned it to be able to "sustain sequestration cuts" such as reshaping its workforce through voluntary early buyouts in order to "absorb these reductions."

Playing action video games may improve reading in children with dyslexia, Italian researchers have found.

The small study, published online last week in Current Biology, involved two groups of 10 dyslexic children. One group played action video games for nine sessions of 80 minutes each, while the other followed the same routine with nonaction games. The researchers bought the games in retail stores and have no financial interest in any video game company.

Google revealed statistics about the number of secretive national security requests for user data it receives every year from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The company said that for each of the past four years, it has received fewer than one thousand of the requests, known as National Security Letters. Those requests covered data on between 1,000 and 1,999 user accounts, except for 2010, when the requests covered between 2,000 and 2,999 accounts. Google said the requests only cover subscriber information, such as the names of the sender and receiver of an email. The company said it does not provide the contents of emails, search histories, YouTube videos or user IP addresses. Richard Salgado, Google's director of law enforcement and information security, said the company worked with government officials to provide greater insight into the process. Salgado said the company had to provide numerical ranges instead of exact figures to address the concerns raised by the FBI, the Justice Department and other agencies that exact numbers could reveal information about sensitive investigations.

Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the number of National Security Letters was not surprising but the fact that Google released them at all was "unprecedented."