February 2014

The future of telecommunications federalism

[Commentary] One issue that has received little attention thus far is the role of states in the Communications Act of tomorrow. Today’s information networks are different than in the past. Now, they are national in scope. Calling plans long ago eliminated the distinction between local and long-distance calls, and the Internet routes packets over the most efficient route on a moment-by-moment basis, making it virtually impossible to determine whether a particular transmission crosses state lines en route to its destination. Neither providers nor consumers distinguish between interstate and intrastate communications -- and the law should not do so either. In terms of a principled allocation of authority between the federal government and the states must flow from an appreciation of the relative strengths of each policymaker, it seems natural that a new Communications Act should preempt most state economic regulation of telecommunications networks. However, this does not mean that states do not have a role to play under a revamped Communications Act.

[Daniel Lyons is an assistant professor at Boston College Law School]

Once, TV stations took stands during the news -- even against Beatles

[Commentary] Not long ago, before Fox News Channel and MSNBC wore partisanship on their sleeves, editorial commentary staking out positions on issues of the day regularly aired during local television newscasts around the country. The Federal Communications Commission deemed editorials "in the public interest" and, since stations used public airwaves, they were required to devote airtime to discuss controversial issues of public importance and offer opposing viewpoints. However, in 1987, the FCC's Fairness Doctrine was revoked, ending broadcasters' editorial obligations. Prior to that change, on-air editorials were once as common as cold-weather forecasts. Editorials were intended "to take an informed stand separate from objective news coverage" and were "aimed at improving things," said former WISN-TV news director Bunny Raasch-Hooten. Editorials were presented as the opinion of management and were usually delivered by station general managers.

[Duane Dudek is Journal Sentinel TV and film critic]

The real cost of connecting a school to Wi-Fi

As more schools move to equip all students with a computer, one cost is often overlooked -- getting those computers connected to the network grid.

The Los Angeles Unified school district is planning to spend over $500 million to upgrade servers, pull wire and connect antiquated schools to a data grid -- a necessary part of its huge effort to supply 700,000 students and teachers with an iPad. The price tag is high, says Joe Monaley, a network engineer at Caltech, because costs start far from the building, out on the street. It’s not as simple as plugging in a modem and router for a home connection: it's a challenge just to get high-capacity classrooms wired, much less connect whole schools directly to the grid. The district has 486 of its approximately 800 campuses scheduled for modernizations before the end of 2014 with an average sticker price of $736,000.

Secret hearings could allow UK police to seize journalists' notes if bill passes

The seizure of journalists' notebooks, photographs and digital files could be conducted in secret hearings, owing to a little-publicized clause in a UK government bill aimed at cutting red tape, media organizations have warned.

Requests for notebooks, computer disks, photographs or videos must currently be made in open court and representatives of news groups can be present. But the clause -- in the deregulation bill, which will be brought before the House of Commons -- significantly alters the way courts consider so-called "production orders", stripping out current safeguards. The underlying rules governing whether police can have access to material will remain the same but without media groups being present it is feared that judges will be more easily persuaded to authorize police seizures of journalistic material. A Cabinet Office spokesman said: "Every measure in the deregulation bill is intended to remove unnecessary bureaucracy. Clause 47 would bring the Police and Criminal Evidence Act into line with other legislation in this area and would allow the criminal procedure rules committee to make procedure rules that are consistent and fair. "However, the government has noted the concerns raised about this issue and Oliver Letwin is happy to meet with media organizations about this before the bill goes to committee."

Putting journalism cart before advertising horse

[Commentary] Journalists don't like advertising. It is both the corrupting influence and the hard taskmaster, to which they always dream of being free. But save for a few rare instances where information is so valuable or beloved that customers will pay for it, advertising is the only thing that has ever paid the news bill. We don't need journalists solving the problem of news. We need people with far more cunning and inventive commercial minds. But there are few of those.

Making Surveillance a Little Less Opaque

[Commentary] One of the most disturbing aspects of the surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden is how little we knew about the information federal agencies have collected about millions of people.

That is partly because these agencies have put severe limits on how much private telephone and Internet companies can disclose about the data they have been ordered to turn over to the government. The new rules will now allow companies to disclose the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act orders as well as the national security letters -- but, again, only in broad ranges. They can also disclose how many users were affected but not the nature of the information they turned over to the government. Simply put, the new rules will not appreciably improve the public’s understanding of the surveillance system or its ability to push back. What is clear is that government officials have not budged from their belief that Americans should simply trust them to do the right thing.

White House Added Last-Minute Curbs on NSA Before Obama Speech

On the day before President Barack Obama gave a highly anticipated speech on the National Security Agency, White House officials rushed to include additional surveillance restrictions to address concerns of privacy advocates and the President's own review panel, said people familiar with the process.

In one significant change made in the final hours before the Jan 17 speech, White House officials decided the President would require the NSA to obtain a court order each time it searched its database of information about American phone calls, a US official said. Some White House officials worried that earlier versions of President Obama's speech and corresponding plan of action, which lacked that element, could provoke a public protest from privacy groups and from members of his own review panel, the official said. But the added restrictions set off a scramble. Around 10 p.m. the night before the speech, White House officials were still working to query Justice Department lawyers about the question of court orders for database searches, the official said. The development of the President's prescription also underscored the potency of that debate. After trying for months to restore public trust in US spy programs, the administration appears to have been swayed by an 11th-hour appeal by members of the review panel.

Several cybersecurity initiatives lost after Snowden's NSA leaks

As Edward Snowden was preparing to disclose classified documents he had purloined from National Security Agency computers in Hawaii, the NSA director, Gen Keith Alexander, was gearing up to sell Congress and the public on a proposal for the NSA to defend private US computer networks against cyberattacks. Gen Alexander wanted to use the NSA's powerful tools to scan Internet traffic for malicious software code. He said the NSA could kill the viruses and other digital threats without reading consumers' private emails, texts and Web searches. But after Snowden began leaking NSA systems for spying in cyberspace that went public in June, Alexander's proposal was a political nonstarter, felled by distrust of his agency's fearsome surveillance powers in the seesawing national debate over privacy and national security. It was one of several Obama Administration initiatives, in Congress and in diplomacy, that experts say have been stopped cold or set back by the Snowden affair. As a result, US officials have struggled to respond to the daily onslaught of attacks from Russia, China and elsewhere, a vulnerability that US intelligence agencies now rank as a greater threat to national security than terrorism.

Android App Warns When You’re Being Watched

A new app notifies people when an Android smartphone app is tracking their location, something not previously possible without modifying the operating system on a device, a practice known as “rooting.” Even games and dictionary apps routinely track location, as collected from a phone’s GPS or global positioning system sensors. Existing Android interfaces do include a tiny icon showing when location information is being accessed, but few people notice or understand what it means, according to a field study done as part of a new research project led by Janne Lindqvist, an assistant professor at Rutgers University. Lindqvist’s group created an app that puts a prominent banner across the top of the app saying, for example, “Your location is accessed by Dictionary.” The app is being readied for Google Play, the Android app store soon.

A 96-Antenna System Tests the Next Generation of Wireless

Even as the world’s carriers build out the latest wireless infrastructure, known as 4G LTE, a new apparatus bristling with 96 antennas taking shape at a Rice University lab in Texas could help define the next generation of wireless technology.

The Rice rig, known as Argos, represents the largest such array yet built and will serve as a test bed for a concept known as “Massive MIMO.” MIMO, or “multiple-input, multiple-output,” is a wireless networking technique aimed at transferring data more efficiently by having several antennas work together to exploit a natural phenomenon that occurs when signals are reflected en route to a receiver. The phenomenon, known as multipath, can cause interference, but MIMO alters the timing of data transmissions in order to increase throughput using the reflected signals. Using scores or even hundreds of antennas increases capacity further by effectively focusing signals on individual users, allowing numerous signals to be sent over the same frequency at once. “If you have more antennas, you can serve more users,” says Lin Zhong, associate professor of computer science at Rice and the project’s co-leader. And the architecture allows it to easily scale to hundreds or even thousands of antennas, he says.

Benton

Search