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  2. February 2014

February 2014

Rural Broadband Workshop

Federal Communications Commission
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2014/db0227/DA-1...
Updated agenda: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-14-365A1.pdf

The Rural Broadband Workshop will focus on the importance of broadband in rural America and include presentations designed to elicit information to help develop “ideas about how to structure experiments that will inform our policy decisions regarding the deployment of next generation networks in rural, high-cost areas.

The workshop will include an examination of the broadband needs of rural populations and the unique challenges of both broadband deployment and adoption in rural areas. In addition, the discussion will highlight the economic, educational, and healthcare benefits that can be realized through broadband deployment and adoption. The workshop will also examine different business models that have been used to deploy broadband in rural areas, including a discussion of the factors that drive investment decisions and technology choices of different types of providers in rural communities. Finally, the workshop will examine the role that states have played, and can continue to play, in meeting the rural broadband challenge.

Agenda

9:15 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Welcome and Opening Remarks – Chairman Wheeler

9:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Panel 1: Broadband Needs, Challenges and Opportunities in Rural America
This panel will discuss the critical need for high-speed broadband in rural areas for individual consumers, businesses, and community anchor organizations. The panel will focus on the specific impact that access to broadband has on education, healthcare, and economic development.

Introductory Remarks:

  • Commissioner Mignon Clyburn
  • Steve Rosenberg, Chief Data Officer, Wireline Competition Bureau, FCC

Moderators:

  • Shirley Bloomfield, CEO, NTCA – The Rural Broadband Association
  • Dr. Peter Stenberg, Senior Economist, USDA-Economic Research Service
  • Julie Veach, Chief, Wireline Competition Bureau, FCC

Panelists:

  • Jeff Fastnacht, Superintendent, Ellendale School, Ellendale, ND
  • Charles Fluharty, President and CEO, Rural Policy Research Institute
  • Brian Kelley, CEO, Ag Technologies
  • Thomas F. Klobucar, Ph.D., Deputy Director, Office of Rural Health, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
  • Linda Lord, Maine State Librarian
  • Don Means, Coordinator, Gigabit Libraries Network
  • Peter Morris, Senior Advisor to the Executive Director, National Congress of American Indians

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Panel 2: Rural Broadband Buildout - Effective Strategies & Lessons Learned
This panel will examine issues that incentivize different types of providers to deploy broadband in rural communities, factors that determine the type of technology deployed, and the current and future capabilities of different technologies.

Introductory Remarks:
Commissioner Michael O’Rielly

Moderators

  • Jonathan Chambers, Chief, Office of Strategic Planning & Policy Analysis, FCC
  • Carol Mattey, Deputy Chief, Wireline Competition Bureau, FCC
  • Alex Minard, Deputy Chief, Telecommunications Access Policy
  • Division, Wireline Competition Bureau, FCC

Panelists:

  • Will Aycock, General Manager, Greenlight Community Broadband, City of Wilson, NC
  • Michael Cook, Senior Vice President, North America Division, Hughes Network Systems
  • Jimmy Copeland, Director of Special Projects, Troy Cablevision, Inc.
  • Randy Klindt, General Manager, Co-Mo Comm, Inc. (a subsidiary of Co-Mo Electric Cooperative, Inc.)
  • Cecil Lara, Director Network Planning, AT&T
  • Denny Law, General Manager/CEO, Golden West Telecommunications
  • Ben Moncrief, Director, Government Relations, C Spire
  • Alex Phillips, CEO, Highspeedlink.net

12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Lunch Break

1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Panel 3: State Strategies to Meet the Rural Broadband Challenge
This panel will examine the important role that states can play in ensuring the availability and adoption of broadband in rural communities.

Moderators:

  • Joanne Hovis, President, CTC Technology and Energy
  • Kim Scardino, Chief, Telecommunications Access Policy Division, Wireline Competition Bureau, FCC

Panelists:

  • David Salway, Director, New York State Broadband Program Office
  • Catherine Sandoval, Commissioner, California Public Utilities Commission
  • Lori Sorenson, Chief Operating Officer, Bureau of Communications & Computer Services, Illinois Central Management Services
  • Ray Timothy, Ph.D., CEO/Executive Director, Utah Education Network

FCC Announces March 19 Rural Broadband Workshop

The Rural Broadband Workshop will be held on March 19, 2014.

The workshop will include an examination of the broadband needs of rural populations and the unique challenges of both broadband deployment and adoption in rural areas. In addition, the discussion will highlight the economic, educational, and healthcare benefits that can be realized through broadband deployment and adoption. The workshop will also examine different business models that have been used to deploy broadband in rural areas, including a discussion of the factors that drive investment decisions and technology choices of different types of providers in rural communities. Finally, the workshop will examine the role that states have played, and can continue to play, in meeting the rural broadband challenge. Additional details concerning the workshop agenda and panelists will be forthcoming.

Spy chief: 'We're not ready'

Gen Keith Alexander, the head of head of the National Security Agency (NSA)and the US Cyber Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the country needs a “reset” in terms of how it thinks about cyber threats.

“I think we have to get on with cyber legislation,” he said. “Those attacks are coming, and I think those are near-term and we’re not ready for them. The nation needs an agency like NSA with its technical capabilities to help ensure that we can evolve to that future space to where we need to be.” Cyberspace, he said, “is changing so rapidly that our policy and laws lag behind it,” which could pose a threat to government and critical networks that are vulnerable to attack. “We should protect these networks better than we have protected them today, not just within the Defense Department but within our critical infrastructure.”

The FCC is staying out of our newsrooms, thanks to Commissioners Pai and Genachowski

[Commentary] You don’t need a PhD in economics to question whether the Federal Communications Commission is using a seemingly unrelated report obligation to get at their real focus -- speech.

And voluntary?! The FCC holds the broadcasters’ licenses -- they are out of business without them. The broadcasters have as much volition to say no as a husband does when his wife says, “Honey, would you mind taking out the garbage?” This newsroom survey conjures memories of when the FCC examined not “critical information” but “views of public importance.” The language comes from the Fairness Doctrine -- an FCC regulation from 1949. The doctrine had a process similar to that proposed in the newsroom survey -- under the Fairness Doctrine a newsroom needed to decide when something was of “public importance” and then present opposing views (whatever those were determined to be). If the newsroom could not so determine what fit in the public importance category, the FCC was happy to do it for them -- only the broadcasters’ licenses hung in the balance.

[Boliek is associate professor of law at Pepperdine University School of Law]

Why civil rights groups are warning against ‘big data’

The backlash against the government's use of bulk phone records for intelligence purposes has been led mostly by technologists used to speaking the language of privacy. But a new push by civil rights organizations to challenge "big data" -- both in the public and private sectors -- is highlighting how the abuse of data can uniquely affect disadvantaged minorities. More than a dozen groups are backing a set of principles targeting the widespread use of data in law enforcement, hiring and commerce.

The list includes some of the country's biggest civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP and the National Council of La Raza. The signers feel big data is a threat to racial and religious minorities, vulnerable seniors and other groups who may be unfairly targeted due to the increasing collection of data that could allow for discrimination. The principles commit supporters to work toward ending "high-tech profiling," the addition of built-in protections in computerized decision-making systems, putting pressure on commercial entities for greater data disclosures and "protect[ing] people from inaccurate data," among other steps. The concern isn't just racial discrimination, civil rights advocates say, citing a Senate report on credit reporting agencies and third-party data vendors. The information collected by these businesses leads to the creation of demographic profiles, such as "Ethnic Second-City Strugglers" and "Zero Mobility," stereotypical categories that could be used to market predatory financial instruments -- or deny access to premium ones -- to underprivileged groups. While government and commercial surveillance potentially affect all Americans, minorities face those risks at disproportionate rates, according to the coalition's data principles.

New chapter begins in network neutrality fight

The battle for the open Internet has entered a new phase.

On one side, federal regulators and content providers are trying to preserve competition and keep all websites equally accessible. On the other, Internet service providers want to hold down their costs while keeping up with Americans' ever-increasing demand for digital content. These goals may be mutually exclusive, and it isn't yet clear which side will emerge victorious. The Federal Communications Commission now faces the challenge of crafting new network neutrality regulations that will withstand legal scrutiny. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said that the agency plans to do just that. The FCC is currently collecting public comments before issuing its new set of regulations. Chairman Wheeler said those rules would prohibit ISPs from blocking websites, force them to disclose how they manage traffic and prevent them from favoring some kinds of traffic over others -- for example, loading Amazon faster than eBay. The agency also wants to enhance competition among ISPs by reversing restrictions on broadband services from local governments.

Key ways to support your district’s digital transition

Planning, enlisting stakeholder support, and identifying the “why” are chief among the most important steps when it comes to moving from traditional classrooms to digital, connected classrooms. In fact, according to education technology experts and school leaders, technology decisions and purchases should come later, after those crucial steps.

How San Francisco Does Innovation: 5 Tips Your City Can Use

Hundreds of tech leaders from California and beyond gathered in Sacramento at the California Public Sector CIO Academy for a series of panels offering practical advice for the information technology leaders of today and tomorrow.

Keynoting the event lunch on day two of the conference was San Francisco's Deputy Chief Innovation Officer Shannon Spanhake, who works alongside Jay Nath in Mayor Ed Lee's Civic Innovation Office. Spanhake offered some tips based on San Francisco's path to its current position as, according to Spanhake, the most innovative city in the world.

  • There's More To It Than Technology. Champion new ideas and new approaches -- not just new tools. The Civic Innovation Office certainly promotes the use of new technologies, but that’s not its only mission. Ultimately the goal is to surface ideas that make San Francisco city government more accountable, accessible and responsive.
  • Turn Your Data Into Jobs. San Francisco is creating new companies and new employment through an aggressive open data campaign. The city has opened more than 500 government data sets, which have spawned more than 100 apps, along with new businesses built around them.
  • Rethink Your Hackathon. Start your event by having government stakeholders frame the civic problem, in all its complexity. This approach, deployed at an "unhackathon" event focused on transportation, gave San Francisco some apps it could use.
  • Put The People In Partnerships. Spanhake pointed to San Francisco's Living Innovation Zones project as evidence of the city's commitment to engaging the people with dynamic public installations that inspire exploration, innovation and play.

A Key NSA Overseer's Alarming Dismissal Of Surveillance Critics

National Security Agency Inspector General George Ellard was asked what he would have done if Edward Snowden had come to him with complaints. Ellard says would have said something like, ‘Hey, listen, fifteen federal judges have certified this program is okay.’

“I would also have an independent obligation to assess the constitutionality of that law," Ellard stated. "Perhaps it’s the case that we could have shown, we could have explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do.” And if Snowden wasn’t satisfied, Ellard said the NSA would have then allowed him to speak to the House and Senate intelligence committees. ”Given the reaction, I think somewhat feigned, of some members of that committee, he’d have found a welcoming audience,” Ellard said in a reference to outspoken NSA critics on the panel, including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO). “Whether in the end he’d have been satisfied, I don’t know,” Ellard added. “But allowing people who have taken an oath to protect the constitution, to protect these national security interest, simply to violate or break that oath, is unacceptable.”

Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by GCHQ

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of Internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not. In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery -- including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications -- from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally. The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place. Programs like Optic Nerve, which collect information in bulk from largely anonymous user IDs, are unable to filter out information from UK or US citizens. Unlike the NSA, GCHQ is not required by UK law to "minimize", or remove, domestic citizens' information from its databases. However, additional legal authorizations are required before analysts can search for the data of individuals likely to be in the British Isles at the time of the search. There are no such legal safeguards for searches on people believed to be in the US or the other allied "Five Eyes" nations -- Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

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