May 2013

According to new figures from eMarketer, several markets worldwide reached a milestone in mobile usage last year. By the end of 2012, over half of mobile phone users in six countries had made the switch from feature phones to smartphones.

The coming years will see a domino effect hit regions around the world as smartphones become the norm in more places. The worldwide smartphone penetration rate among mobile users will remain just under one-third in 2013, eMarketer expects, and will approach the halfway point by 2017. In 2012, eMarketer estimates, six countries—South Korea, Norway, Sweden, Australia, the UK and the US—saw smartphone user penetration rates among mobile phone users rise above 50% for the first time. As a percentage of population, a majority of residents in South Korea, Australia, Norway and Sweden will also use smartphones this year, eMarketer estimates, though average penetration worldwide among the total population will come in under 20%. South Korea led the world last year in the share of mobile users who used a smartphone, at 60%. Australia, at 53%, was the only other country in Asia-Pacific to pass the halfway mark in 2012, with Japan set to follow in 2014.

The latest entity to offer gigabit service is a community owned network in Cedar Falls, Iowa that is managed by Cedar Falls Utilities. That organization also manages municipally-owned electricity, water and natural gas utilities.

The Cedar Falls network is different from gigabit networks in some other communities in that service in most cases can be turned up immediately, said Betty Zeman, marketing manager for Cedar Falls Utilities. “We’re in almost every property in town with an ONT [optical network terminal] already,” she explained. The new Cedar Falls gigabit network traces back to a hybrid-fiber coax network originally constructed in the 1990s with funding raised through a referendum.

The top two Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have initiated an investigation into whether Attorney General Eric Holder lied under oath during his May 15 testimony on the Justice Department’s (DOJ) surveillance of reporters.

Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-WI), the chairman of the subcommittee on investigations, sent a letter to AG Holder detailing specific aspects of his testimony that they say conflicts with subsequent media reports about Holder’s involvement in the surveillance of James Rosen, a reporter for Fox News. “The media reports and statements issued by the Department regarding the search warrants for Mr. Rosen’s emails appear to be at odds with your sworn testimony before the Committee,” the letter reads in part. “We believe — and we hope you will agree — it is imperative that the Committee, the Congress, and the American people be provided a full and accurate account of your involvement in and approval of these search warrants.”

[Commentary] I’m all for a shield law to protect journalists and their sources from government prosecutors. I hope Congress passes one. But I don’t have lots of faith that the ideas under consideration in Congress or any law can protect journalists adequately.

This is one of those areas where custom carries more weight than statute, the custom being the general good sense of prosecutors not to go after reporters for their information. For the most part prosecutors—and by that I mean everyone from county attorneys on up—have refrained from going after reporters, including the notable and obvious exception of the Obama Justice Department. Yes, there are cases where prosecutors have gone subpoena-happy, from the BALCO steroids case to the Aurora shooting to the CIA leak case, where I was caught up in the maelstrom. But, generally, prosecutors don't pursue reporters even when they can. This unspoken compact began to become undone during the Bush administration, and, of course, it has unraveled during the Obama years as the national-security state has expanded. Inevitably, prosecutors have to seek a balance. In the case of James Rosen, even if you grant that the leak of North Korean nuclear-testing information was a huge deal, and you imagine that it may have been dependent on human intelligence in Pyongyang and you fear its revelation led to us having to roll up networks or even harm coming to sources, you can see the fervor with which DOJ, along with the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, would want to go after such a leak. But from what we’ve heard about the case, it’s hard to see why you’d need to subpoena the reporters e-mails and phone records. The government already has extensive rights to look over the documents of employees with high security clearances. If you have their records, do you really need the Fox ones? Even if you do, is it worth it? For a long time, prosecutors answered the question “no”—not because they were saintly but because it was in their self-interest, and ours.