December 2013

Brazil delays vote on anti-spying Internet bill

A vote on a bill that would force Internet giants like Google and Facebook to keep Brazilians' information inside the country will be delayed until next year over disagreements about its content, a senior lawmaker said.

The bill would give President Dilma Rousseff powers to order Internet companies to store users' data in local servers, a move seen as response to allegations that the United States spied on her communications and that of thousands of regular Brazilians. The delay is a temporary relief for Google and Facebook, which oppose a requirement they say would increase costs and erect unnecessary barriers in one of the world's largest Internet markets. The postponement of the vote stems from disagreements among government allies in Congress over the requirement and a "neutrality" clause that bars telecom companies from charging different rates for Internet speed. "There are disagreements in the allied base over the neutrality clause and data centers," said the Eduardo Cunha, head of the country's largest political party, the PMDB, in the lower chamber of Congress. "Discussions are stalled. The vote was delayed till next year." The government says the legislation will protect the privacy of Brazilians after documents leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden showed the US National Security Agency spied on ordinary Brazilians, the country's biggest company Petrobras and even Rousseff's own communications.

Britain to give all-clear to Huawei security center

Britain will clear Chinese telecoms equipment firm Huawei to run a UK-based cyber security center if it agrees to tighter rules to allay spying and hacking fears, a person familiar with the matter said.

Huawei supplies software and equipment which channels phone calls and data around Britain and has found itself at the center of a debate, particularly in the United States, over whether it is a risk for governments to allow foreign suppliers access to their networks. Huawei, which denies any wrongdoing and maintains its work is secure, opened a technology center in Oxfordshire, southern England, in 2010 to test the security of its software and hardware to ensure that they won't expose the UK network to outside hacking or spying. The British government ordered a review in July 2013 of the site, known as The Cell, to ensure security procedures are strong enough. That review, led by Prime Minister David Cameron's national security adviser Kim Darroch, will give Huawei the all-clear, but will recommend tighter controls at the site, the person familiar with the issue told Reuters, without giving details of the extra checks.

Mexico Agency Said to Find America Movil, Televisa Dominant

Mexico’s telecommunications regulator has identified America Movil and Grupo Televisa as dominant companies in a preliminary finding, singling them out for closer scrutiny, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said. The two telecommunications giants are the only companies that have received notifications of a dominance finding, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is confidential.

Under a law passed earlier this year, the companies will have an opportunity to challenge the finding, which must be made final by March 9. The decision is the first legal step the Federal Telecommunications Institute must take to develop tighter regulations to make the market more competitive. America Movil, controlled by billionaire Carlos Slim, has about 70 percent of Mexico’s mobile-phone customers and about 80 percent of its landlines. Televisa gets about 70 percent of Mexico’s broadcast-television audience. This year’s telecommunications law allows the agency, known as IFT, to regulate prices, force network-sharing or even require a breakup of companies that are declared “preponderant” in their industries. Televisa has received documents from the IFT and is analyzing them so it can respond and participate in the process of identifying preponderant companies in telecommunications and broadcasting, a company official said. A press official with Mexico City-based America Movil declined to comment.

Fox Sells Out the Super Bowl

Fox has sold the last of its available in-game Super Bowl spots, securing an average rate of $4 million per 30 seconds of airtime for the Feb. 2 broadcast.

Media buyers said that latecomers who urgently wanted to break into the NFL’s marquee event invested as much as $4.5 million per :30. While much of the heavy lifting has been done in advance of the big game, Neil Mulcahy, evp of Fox Sports ad sales, said that there are still plenty of opportunities for marketers to pick up spots in pre- and post-game programming as well as in the network’s digital streaming service.

Protecting Sound Recording Artists and Getting It Right This Time

[Commentary] In an op-ed published in USA Today on Dec. 3, 2013, Rep John Conyers (D-MI), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, argued that federal copyright protection should be extended to pre-1972 sound recordings, which at present only receive copyright protection under state law. Extending federal copyright to pre-1972 sound recordings makes a lot of sense, but not for the exact reasons Rep Conyers articulates. But pre-1972 sound recordings are subject to confusing law.

While there is only one federal government, there are 50 state governments. Different states might have slightly (or sometimes very) different laws, making it very difficult to keep them all straight. Before the last major overhaul of federal copyright law, in 1976, dual federal and state copyright law systems were the norm, a situation that Congress described as “anachronistic, uncertain, impractical, and highly complicated.” So yes, we could use an update to the Copyright Act that brings pre-1972 recordings under the umbrella of federal law, if it’s written in such a way as to put a stop to the multiplying state lawsuits that threaten to limit the public’s access to the recordings.

Before we go and bless the application of federal copyright law to pre-1972 recordings, though, let’s think about what that might look like.

Lifetime terms. Why not bring older recordings under federal copyright protection for a shorter period of time than the term that new works receive?
Locating authors. Why not provide a window of time when artists must come forward to receive federal copyright protection of their pre-1972 works?
More robust statutory licensing. Why not provide for a streamlined licensing system so that licenses for pre-1972 recordings can be secured quickly and easily?
Reasonable damages. Why not do away with exorbitant statutory damages for the infringement of copyright in pre-1972 sound recordings?

Comcast Expands Data Capping Trials: Why You Should Care

[Commentary] Starting in December 2013, subscribers to any of Comcast’s broadband services in Atlanta or Maine will face a 300 GB limit. Customers who go over the cap will automatically be charged $10 and allocated 50 GB of additional data. Customers will be notified multiple times by email before hitting the cap, and alerted by phone when the 300 GB has been completely used. This trial also includes a “discount” plan just for Economy Plus subscribers, giving those who use 5 GB or less per month a $5 discount off the cost of the regular plan.

300 GB of data is still a lot for today’s median user. Comcast reports that median usage is 17 GB per month. According to the FCC’s 2013 Measuring Broadband America report, however, the median cable broadband user used about 40 GB per month. Many activities that used to happen offline, like watching movies, playing video games, and listening to music, are now moving online. Streaming HD video from Netflix uses up to 2.8 GB an hour and downloading a single video game can be 7 GB or more of your monthly data. And it’s not just entertainment that uses up data: online education including video lectures is just starting to take off. Though data usage is not going up exponentially, there is a clear trend towards higher data consumption by the median user. The fixed costs for Comcast are hardly high, and the system they propose is hardly fair. Digging up streets and installing wires do require a significant up-front investment, but cable providers paid off their fixed network construction costs a long time ago. Data transit costs have been falling for years and are now estimated to be at most a few cents per extra GB. Public statements from Comcast say that it has more than enough capacity for today’s demands as well as into the future. It’s clear that Comcast does not need increased revenue or huge investments to deal with additional capacity. Instead, these kinds of caps just help wireline providers rake in even larger profits and encourage a climate of broadband scarcity. If you don’t live in Atlanta or Maine, this trial expansion may not seem like a big deal at the moment. But it matters because this is a step in implementing a 300 GB cap as the nationwide policy of the largest cable company and internet provider in the US. And once you’re covered by this kind of cap, the fear of using up your monthly data allowance can limit possibilities for innovation in business, communication, the arts, and education.

[Katie Fiegenbaum is policy intern with the Open Technology Institute]

Apple, China Mobile Sign Deal to Offer iPhone

China Mobile has signed a long-awaited deal with Apple to offer iPhones on its network, a person familiar with the situation said, an arrangement that would give the US technology giant a big boost in the world's largest mobile market.

The rollout of iPhones on the world's largest mobile carrier by users, with over 700 million subscribers, is expected to start by the end of 2013, around the time of a Dec. 18 China Mobile conference in Guangzhou, according to two people familiar with the carrier's plans. China Mobile is one of the world's last major carriers that doesn't offer the iPhone. At the Dec. 18 event, China Mobile plans to unveil a brand for its fourth-generation, or 4G, network. China Mobile executives have said they would only begin to sell the iPhone after introducing 4G services. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said it gave licenses to China Mobile and its smaller rivals to operate the higher-speed mobile networks, clearing one of the last hurdles. A deal with China Mobile would give Apple access to a subscriber base that is seven times the size of Verizon Wireless, the US's largest carrier. Greater China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, is Apple's third biggest market after the US and Europe in terms of revenue.

NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with US intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals -- and map their relationships -- in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool. One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve US cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year. In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them.

The NSA says it ‘obviously’ can track locations without a warrant. That’s not so obvious.

[Commentary] In conversations with The Washington Post over Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani's recent story on cellphone location tracking, an intelligence agency lawyer told Gellman, "obviously there is no Fourth Amendment expectation in communications metadata.” But some experts say it's far from obvious that the 1979 Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, on which the Administration bases this view gives the government unfettered power to scoop up Americans' cellphone location data.

That Supreme Court case was a very different case in a very different time than the intelligence activities laid bare by documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Michelle Richardson, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, points out that the type of metadata collected in 1979 was much more limited in scope than what telecom companies have access to now. This is particularly true on the issue of location information, she argues. "It reflects who you know, what you do -- it can reflect if you attend a certain church, or a political rally, or AA meetings." So back then, location tracking was a much more onerous affair, requiring so many resources it was only used for the most serious investigations. Given these new capabilities, Richardson calls Smith v. Maryland "way out of date," adding "it was before cellphones, before the Internet, before services that collect intensely personal information." Until the Supreme Court hears a case applying Smith v. Maryland to location data, we won't know if the Constitution allows the government to obtain this kind of information without a warrant.

The NSA could figure out how many Americans it’s spying on. It just doesn’t want to.

[Commentary] Documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the information includes some data about the locations of Americans, but didn't provide specific estimates about how many Americans were affected. When asked about it, a National Security Agency spokeswoman claimed it would be impossible to come up with an estimate. This seems difficult to believe.

The metadata the NSA collects about mobile devices should contain more than enough information to make an educated guess about whether they are associated with an American. By examining a random sample of devices it is tracking, the agency should be able to come up with a reasonable estimate of how many of those devices are associated with a US person. That doesn't translate to a precise count of the number of Americans subject to surveillance. Some Americans own multiple cellphones, and some foreigners might sign up for US cellphone plans. But it should give at least a rough estimate of how many Americans are having their location data scooped up by the NSA.

Benton

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