May 2013

New York City’s 911 Operators Use Pen and Paper as Computers Fail

Emergency operators in New York City have been forced on at least three occasions recently to resort to using pen and paper to record 911 calls and dispatch workers after their computer system went dark.

Officials were quick to say that every call was answered and emergency workers continued to be dispatched across the city. However, the problem — which officials said halted the relaying of electronic messages between 911 operators and the dispatchers who send out police, fire and emergency workers — came on the first truly hot day of the year, when there is usually a spike in calls. As a result, calls were being prioritized to ensure that the most serious cases were dealt with first, according to fire officials. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, whose department is responsible for oversight of the 911 system, said every call that came in had been answered.

Rand Paul Seeks Silicon Valley Funds

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the libertarian-leaning Republican eying a 2016 presidential campaign, is making calls this week at Google and other Silicon Valley companies, part of his effort to make inroads among groups not associated with the GOP.

The Kentuckian is also visiting Facebook and eBay during a California fundraising swing that will tap wealthy tech donors. On May 30, Sen Paul held a private town hall for employees at Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus. The senator is betting his policy views—he believes decisions about gay marriage should be left to the states and is a strong supporter of civil liberties—could play well with an industry that pushes a laissez-faire approach to the Internet.

FCC Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn Makes Staff Announcements

Acting Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Clyburn appointed P. Michele Ellison, currently chief of the Enforcement Bureau, as Chief of Staff. Dave Grimaldi will serve as Chief Counsel and Senior Legal Advisor. She also named legal advisors, including Louis Peraertz for wireless, international, and public safety issues; Rebekah Goodheart for wireline issues; and Sarah Whitesell, currently Deputy Bureau Chief of the Media Bureau, for media issues. Drema Johnson will serve as Confidential Assistant. Dorothy Givens-Terry will serve as Special Assistant. Carol Lott and DeeAnn Smith will serve as Staff Assistants.

Ellison previously served as Chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, which is responsible for effectively carrying out the agency’s rules and orders. Previously, Ellison was Acting General Counsel of the agency, where she served as primary legal counsel to the Commission and prior to that, she served as Deputy General Counsel for twelve years. She has counseled the Commissioners and other senior staff on legal issues related to the regulation of the various communications industries, including advising on litigation risks associated with rulemaking and adjudicatory decisions.
Grimaldi previously served as Chief of Staff in then Commissioner Clyburn’s office after serving as Senior Counsel to House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-SC) on technology and telecommunications, foreign affairs, and financial services regulation. He previously counseled corporate, financial and non-profit clients as Senior Counsel at The Raben Group and served as Legislative Counsel to Representative Ed Towns (D-NY), on the House Commerce Committee and its Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.
Peraertz joined then Commissioner Clyburn’s staff in October 2009. Prior to this, he served as Special Counsel in the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau focusing on competition, spectrum allocation, and infrastructure policy issues. Peraertz began his communications career in the Office of General Counsel where, among other things, he represented the Commission in several cases before courts of appeal.
Goodheart has worked at the Commission since January 2008. She served as Deputy Director of the Technology Transitions Policy Task Force and Associate Chief of the Wireline Competition Bureau. Goodheart previously served as a Senior Policy Advisor for the Omnibus Broadband Initiative, developing many of the recommendations in National Broadband Plan. She also served as Assistant Division Chief in the Industry Analysis Division of the Media Bureau.
Whitesell previously served as Deputy Bureau Chief of the Media Bureau, where she shaped policies for the media marketplace on broadcast ownership, children's issues, and media transactions, among other matters. Prior to joining the Bureau in 2005, she served as Associate Chief of the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, Associate Chief of the Cable Bureau, Acting Legal Advisor to Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein on media issues and Legal Advisor to Commissioner Gloria Tristani for common carrier issues. Whitesell has also served as a member of the Telecommunications Task Force for the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division.
Johnson is responsible for managing the office as well as the Acting Chairwoman’s personal schedule and travel arrangements. She previously served as Special Assistant to former House Speaker Thomas S. Foley and as Confidential Assistant to former FCC Chairman William Kennard.
Smith joined the agency in 2009 and will continue to assist in carrying out the mission of the Clyburn office and the agency. She has an extensive administrative background, including experience in the legal and marketing industries.
Terry is an experienced researcher, interviewer, reporter and entrepreneur. She spent a number of years at Pepco Holdings, Inc., Computing Technologies, on the Hill and in the newsrooms of two daily papers.
Carol Lott brings more than 26 years of administrative and office management experience to the Acting Chief of Staff as a Special Assistant. The Administrative Management Specialist in the Enforcement Bureau previously served as a senior staff assistant in the Chairman’s office, the Executive Administrator and Office Manager for Temple Strategies and an Executive Assistant in the Office of General Counsel.

Is Venezuela's opposition TV channel bowing to government pressure?

[Commentary] What originally appeared as a visible but subtle change of direction at Venezuelan television station Glovovisión has in the last two weeks become a raucous turning point with multiple journalists being fired or resigning.

The turmoil leaves Globovisión’s role as an opposition outlet in doubt and appears to represent a new extension of the Venezuelan government’s control over broadcast media. Following Guillermo Zuloaga’s announcement in March that he had agreed in principle to the sale of Globovisión it was finally acquired at the beginning of May by a business group rumored to have ties with the Government. The announcement of the hiring of journalists Vladimir Villegas and Leopoldo Castillo as station directors generated considerable optimism about the new Globovisión and its independence. However on May 13, after a meeting with the new owners, Mr. Villegas surprisingly announced on Twitter that he would not be accepting the position after all.

Telecom Italia agrees to separate fixed-line network

Telecom Italia has agreed to separate its fixed-line network into a new business as the group continues to consider a proposal to merge its mobile operations with Hong Kong’s Hutchison Whampoa.

Broadcasters: Impact of Cross-Ownership on Minority/Female Ownership 'Probably Negligible'

In a study submitted to the Federal Communications Commission, the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council and BIA/Kelsey conclude that it appears that “cross-media interests' impact on minority and women broadcast ownership is not sufficiently material to be a material justification for tightening or retaining the [cross-ownership] rules.”

"The results of this study, while not dispositive, do provide evidence that the impact of cross-media ownership on minority and women broadcast ownership is probably negligible," said BIA/Kelsey. One reason they were not dispositive was that the survey was based on only 14 respondents (representing 31 stations) in markets with grandfathered cross-ownership combos and with stations owned by minorities and/or women. BIA/Kelsey conceded more responses would have been preferable, but argued that it was never meant to be a comprehensive, random sample survey of all cross-media combos in markets with minority and women owners. It said the answers it did get were "sufficiently compelling and unambiguous" to support its conclusion of, essentially, no harm, no foul. But there were caveats. MMTC President David Honig pointed out in a letter to the FCC that there was one market in which all the respondents mentioned cross-media interests as having a competitive impact. That came in a medium market with a combination of the only daily newspaper, a full-power TV station and radio stations. A second caveat was that the study only looked at the impact of cross-ownership on diverse ownership.

"MMTC based its conclusions on an opinion survey of existing media owners," said Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood. "This qualitative approach might have yielded some interesting anecdotes, but it's not a substitute for real analysis of likely outcomes from the disastrous rule changes pushed by former [FCC] Chairman [Julius] Genachowski. We'll review the survey, and take part if and when the FCC seeks comment on it. But there's nothing surprising about the fact that MMTC -- a group on the record as supporting more media consolidation -- would design and produce a survey claiming that no harm results from consolidation."

National Federation of the Blind, MPAA join forces to back book treaty

The National Federation of the Blind and the Motion Picture Association of America are working together to support a treaty that would allow published works that have been converted to formats more accessible to blind and visually impaired users — such as audiobooks — to be distributed around the globe.

“There is a book famine that affects the worldwide blind community,” said Chris Danielsen, the director of public affairs for the National Federation for the Blind. Copyright restrictions have made it difficult for the blind community to gain access to published works, Danielsen said, because even when someone has put the considerable work it takes into converting a book into a format that a blind person can use they're very limited in the way they can distribute the adapted work. While 57 countries, including the United States, have already made some exceptions in their copyright laws to make it easier to convert texts into formats for the blind, it’s illegal to distribute these texts across borders. That, Danielsen said, means that there’s a lot of duplication. The proposed treaty was crafted as a result of collaboration from blind advocates around the world and the World Intellectual Property Organization and would allow more accessible materials to be sent across national boundaries. The treaty is set to be discussed at a conference in Morocco in June.

Why cyberwarfare is the great equalizer

[Commentary] Today, information warfare, also called cyberwarfare, while still in its infancy, is disruptive.

Cyberattacks can include stealing valuable corporate research, intercepting military communications and the destruction of computer systems. These attacks can be used to augment traditional, kinetic attacks – those using troops and guns, or to destroy physical assets such as power generation facilities or systems used to control emergency services. Cyberattacks present a great risk to industrialized nations, which are highly connected and extremely dependent on computers from the electric grid and financial services to transportation and national defense. Developing nations, such as emerging and frontier countries throughout parts of Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia are less dependent on computers. As a result, they have a lower cyber risk profile. Many developing nations see cyber as an equalizer – a mechanism to shift advantage in the face of superior technology and numbers. As a result, these countries are making investments to develop talent, techniques and technology related to information warfare. For example, it's difficult to get empirical evidence about North Korea, but it has been sited that in North Korea approximately 500 "cyber warriors" graduate every year. We must build our security strategies with the understanding that despite having strong or weak security, given the proper resources, time and motivation, compromise is virtually imminent. Public and private sector organizations have been focused too long on incident prevention without adequate controls for incident detection and response.

[Brian Contos is chief security officer at forensics firm Solera Networks]

NAB Defends Joint Retransmission Negotiations

The National Association of Broadcasters is firing back at claims by the American Cable Association that broadcasters collectively negotiating retransmission consent in a market is consumer unfriendly.

While the FCC's two-year-old retransmission proposals are unlikely to be acted on anytime soon, the FCC has raised the issue of joint station agreements -- which often include joint retransmission negotiations -- in other proceedings, including its media ownership and program access rulemakings. ACA has long argued that the joint agreements are a way for broadcasters to skirt local ownership caps and give them undue market power in carriage agreements that wind up translating to higher cable bills for their customers. In a filing in the retransmission docket at the FCC, NAB said it was countering "erroneous contentions" by cable TV interests in recent submissions, then goes on to cite several ACA filings. NAB asserts that cable operators are misleading the commission about the impact of retrans and with claims of improper broadcast bargaining, are abusing their market power and are the ones hurting the public.

Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big Data Brains

During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama’s reelection team had an underappreciated asset: Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. He helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization. “On election night he was in our boiler room in Chicago,” says David Plouffe, then a senior White House adviser. Schmidt had a particular affinity for a group of engineers and statisticians tucked away beneath a disco ball in a darkened corner of the office known as “the Cave.” The data analytics team, led by 30-year-old Dan Wagner, is credited with producing Obama’s surprising 5 million-vote margin of victory.

Schmidt thought enough of the team that when the campaign ended, he put up several million dollars to keep its core together as a new consulting firm, Civis Analytics, run by Wagner and staffed by two dozen of his former employees. They share ownership with Schmidt, its sole investor. The plan is to bring the same Big Data expertise that guided the most expensive presidential campaign in history to companies and nonprofits.

Benton

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