January 2014

First-and-10 for tech in the classroom

[Commentary] Analysts are famous for "reading between the lines" of company earnings reports. But it doesn't take years of experience to connect two points in Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer's remarks about iPads to get a glimpse of our future classrooms: "And this football season, nearly every team in the NFL use iPads as playbooks, replacing their traditional three-ring paper binders. In the education market, schools continue to choose iPad and the great content available across apps, books and courses." Football players, airline employees from the cabin staff to the folks doing check in, sales managers at healthcare companies -- the list goes on.

Schools are lurching their way toward wired classrooms. Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has said that there were "5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003 but that much information is now created every two days." An "Exabyte" is 1 billion gigabytes -- an unfathomable amount of data. Pundits quibble about the numbers, but they don't disagree about this: More data is coming. And if our kids are going to flourish in a world in which data surrounds them like air, they will need every tool at their disposal to make sense of it. Just like football players are chucking three-ring binders for tablets, our schools will too.

[Betsy Corcoran is CEO of EdSurge, the leading news and information service on education technology]

Secure the Future of the Internet

[Commentary] In 2014, President Obama should pursue policies guaranteeing an open, free-market Internet. Instead of waiting out the international blowback from Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency revelations, the President needs to lead a new strategy against those governments who want to regulate the way the global Internet is run.

This is an important period for the future of global governance, the information economy and what the Internet means for how states relate to one another. If we allow embarrassment from the Snowden revelations to prevent us from taking a proper leadership role, we will not only exacerbate the already considerable damage done to US standing, but we will hand a gift to those who would diminish both US and global democratic interests.

This small loophole could give the FCC much greater control of the Internet

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is tipping his hand a bit more on network neutrality. While Chairman Wheeler wouldn't say outright how he intends to respond to a recent court decision overturning his agency's rule barring Internet providers from blocking Web traffic, he appears to be leaning increasingly toward using the FCC's existing legal authority to regulate broadband providers. Industry watchers say this approach would likely turn on a part of the Communications Act known as Section 706, which gives the FCC authority to promote broadband deployment.

"The court took a look at the anti-discrimination and non-blocking structure," Chairman Wheeler said, "not the concepts. ... I interpret what the court did as an invitation to us, and I intend to accept that invitation." The "invitation" to which Chairman Wheeler refers is that while the DC Circuit court showed the FCC how it could implement net neutrality regulations without running afoul of its charter, it placed no constraints on Section 706. Some insiders, including industry representatives and public advocates, now say that Section 706 actually gives the FCC much more power than we thought. While the agency can't lay down a blanket rule prohibiting ISPs from abusing their power, it could go after offending companies on a case-by-case basis. As long as the FCC can argue that a company is hindering the rollout of broadband or broadband competition (a pretty vague definition), the agency may be able to regulate ISPs, content intermediaries, and possibly Web services like Google and Netflix themselves. This means that even if Chairman Wheeler's FCC chooses not to regulate Facebook, the government of the future conceivably might.

“What we’re talking about is that the Internet is evolving so rapidly that we want to look at case sets as well as generic concept rules,” Chairman Wheeler said. “What we don’t want to do is to say that somehow we’re smarter than the net."

Sprint Takes Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technology to Rooftops with Help From Department of Energy

Sprint will deploy hydrogen fuel cell technology as backup power to rooftop network sites with financial assistance from the Department of Energy (DOE).

The solution should allow for lower network site maintenance and cleaner network energy sources and will increase network survivability during power outages. This is not the first time Sprint and the DOE have come together to deploy hydrogen fuel cells as an energy source for their network. Sprint pioneered the introduction of fuel cell technology to ground-based networks in 2005. In 2009 the DOE provided a $7.3M grant for Sprint to support fuel cell technology advances. Rooftop cell sites comprise almost 25 percent of Sprint’s total network locations for which fuel cells have not been an option for fuel cell deployment until now. As much as 30 percent of total network cell sites are located on rooftops in some major metropolitan areas. The technology, still in development, could enable innovative approaches to promote rooftop fuel cell deployments. One such approach is a modular and lightweight fuel cell solution that can be easily installed without heavy cranes and can be refueled from the ground -- overcoming the need to transport fuel to rooftops.

Wisconsin to Adopt Social Media Privacy Law

New legislation should shield Wisconsin job seekers from prospective employers who want access to their private social media accounts.

Authored by Rep Melissa Sargent (D-Madison), the bill prohibits employers, schools and landlords from requesting the passwords for applicant, student or potential tenants’ Facebook and other social media pages. The legislation was introduced in 2013, but was just passed by both the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate. Gov Scott Walker (R-WI) is expected to sign the bill into law later in 2014. Once law, the bill will protect people from being penalized or discriminated against by refusing to turn over personal Internet and social media account information. The legislation does not, however, prevent an employer from observing or acting on a person’s publicly-available social media data. Wisconsin would be one of several states to adopt this kind of legislation. Washington set social media privacy policy in early 2013, while a New Jersey bill on social media protection went into effect December 2013.

System error: How bad analysis poisons tech policy

[Commentary] Technology policy is especially difficult because it combines four complex disciplines: law, economics, engineering, and policy analysis. Very few people have comprehensive backgrounds in all four fields, so they tend to rely on the judgments of people with stronger grounding. But policy advocates often misstate facts in their own areas of expertise, either intentionally or as a result of subconscious bias.

If we are going to restrict free-market network service providers in some areas and subsidize them in others, our analysis needs to be thoughtful, thorough, and consistent. Good technology policy depends on the competent application of engineering, economics, and law to technology markets and on realistic assessment of policy consequences. Policy can go astray when errors of analysis are made on any of these fronts, so policymakers must be well informed across the board and must not privilege any one form of analysis over the others. It is not necessary for every policymaker to be skilled in the arts of engineering, economics, law and policy analysis, but it is helpful for them to possess the ability to recognize bad analysis where it exists.
[Bennett is an AEI visiting fellow]

Colorado Lawmakers Reject Journalist Protection Proposal

Lawmakers rejected a proposal to increase legal protections for reporters and their sources in Colorado, an idea that was prompted by the case of a New York reporter who was pressured to divulge sources in the 2012 suburban Denver theater shootings.

The proposal would have made it harder for reporters to be forced to reveal their sources in court because the legal standards to compel testimony would be higher. The bill was crafted because of Jana Winter, a Fox News journalist who reported that James Holmes, the suspect in the theater shootings, had mailed a notebook to a psychiatrist depicting violence. Holmes' lawyers tried to get Winter to name her sources. "Her situation was what gave me the impetus to do this bill in the beginning," said Colorado Springs Sen Bernie Herpin (R-CO), the bill's sponsor. "So of course I'm disappointed that we didn't strengthen the shield law because I think that freedom of the press acting as watchdogs of government is very important." Sen Lucia Guzman (D-CO), who voted against the bill, said that she needed to weigh the interests of the courts in some cases to get information from journalists, as well as the need to have a free press. "It's been a very difficult one for me," she said.

Rep Issa: Administration lying about HealthCare.gov

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) accused the Obama Administration of lying about the security of the HealthCare.gov website at a hearing.

Chairman Issa said the administration’s claims that the website was adequately tested before its launch, that it's tested on an ongoing basis, and that nobody in the administration pushed for a delay of the rollout over security issues conflicts with the Administration’s insistence Chairman Issa not release documents from a contractor, because they could be used as a roadmap for hackers. “It is this committee’s intent to err on the side of the assumption that the Administration continues to lie about the site being safe and secure,” Chairman Issa said. “We can find no other basis but to assume that they were lying about the vulnerabilities on the day they went live on Oct 1, and that they are still lying. I don’t use the word 'lie' without real forethought.”

Snowden docs reveal British spies snooped on YouTube and Facebook

The British government can tap into the cables carrying the world’s web traffic at will and spy on what people are doing on some of the world’s most popular social media sites, including YouTube, all without the knowledge or consent of the companies.

Documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden detail how British cyber spies demonstrated a pilot program to their US partners in 2012 in which they were able to monitor YouTube in real time and collect addresses from the billions of videos watched daily, as well as some user information, for analysis. At the time the documents were printed, they were also able to spy on Facebook and Twitter. Documents taken from the NSA by Edward Snowden detail how British cyber spies demonstrated a pilot program to their US partners in which they were able to monitor YouTube in real time. Click on the image to read the documents in pdf form. Representatives of Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, said they hadn’t given the British government permission to access data and were unaware the collection had occurred. A source close to Google who asked not to be identified when discussing company policy said the company was “shocked” to learn the UK could have been “grabbing” its data. National security experts say that both the US and British operations are within the scope of their respective national laws.

FTC's Rich Plugs Legislation, Pledges to Protect Privacy

In a speech at a National Cyber Security Alliance kick-off event for Data Privacy Day, the Federal Trade Commission's Jessica Rich, director of the Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, put in a plug for data privacy and security legislation. However, she said that the FTC will continue to work hard to inform and protect consumers. That includes new online parental guidelines, a report on data brokers and a 2014 agenda focused on big data, mobile, and protecting sensitive data.

FTC Commissioner Rich outlined the clear benefits of data collection and use, from providing discounts on purchases to social networking, saying it had made life easier in a myriad of ways. But the FTC will treat every day as Data Privacy Day because of the serious consequences about how that data could be accessed and for what purposes, she said. The same information that allowed someone to track their fitness or entertain themselves, or get a job or do their banking remotely, can be collected and sold to data brokers, aggregated into profiles that may paint an inaccurate portrait and can affect their ability to get a loan or insurance, or be resold to third -- or fourth -- parties over which they have no control.

Benton

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