April 2014

Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Travis LeBlanc, Acting Enforcement Bureau Chief of the Federal Communications Commission, announced the unsealing of two complaints seeking the forfeiture of radio transmission and production equipment allegedly used in the illegal broadcast of pirate radio stations on a total of four different FM frequencies, and further announced that on April 2, 2014, FCC agents and Deputy US Marshals, pursuant to warrants, seized the radio transmission and production equipment identified in the two complaints.

Anthony Wilhelm addressed the Broadband Communities Summit and spoke about the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, or BTOP and the State Broadband Initiative (SBI)...

Investing in broadband is investing in your community’s economic future. In 2009, local officials in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in North Georgia were worried about what the future might bring in light of the economic crisis facing the country at the time, as well as the broader, long-term decline of the industrial economy. So when the BTOP was announced, local leaders like Bruce Abraham brought together the local college, economic development agencies and electric cooperatives to apply for funds to build the North Georgia Network (NGN).

Vice President Joe Biden visited a company called Impulse Manufacturing, a metal fabrication shop that produces customized metal machine components for Fortune 500 companies. Impulse was forced to make do with slow, spotty DSL service that sometimes could not even hold a connection. Ron Baysden, Impulse’s President at the time, told us that the lack of reliable high-speed Internet became an impediment to doing business.

Abraham proceeded to tell me about how the twelve counties comprising the new network are being transformed. Now that the 1,100-mile network is built and delivering high-speed Internet connections to more than 300 businesses, 42 schools, five college campuses, six libraries and dozens of other community anchor institutions, the region is more economically vibrant and more globally competitive.

But for every North Georgia that has successfully deployed broadband, thousands of communities remain at risk of being left behind in the digital economy. There is too much at stake to allow these gaps to remain. If we zoom out from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to the national and global level for a minute, we get a good perspective on why broadband is so critical for communities to participate in the digital economy.

• First, getting better, faster, cheaper and more ubiquitous broadband is good for employment.
• Second, broadband is good for businesses.
• Third, broadband is good for economic development in general.

As NTIA successfully winds down the BTOP program, we have been evaluating our strengths and considering what we can offer stakeholders like you. We are examining strategies to build on the $4 billion in BTOP investments across the country and help communities drive further economic development through the use of broadband.

The White House’s directive to limit the use of software flaws by US intelligence agencies could require the disclosure of thousands of precious exploits now in the hands of elite spying units, intelligence professionals say.

The stockpile of exploits is derived from vulnerabilities not just in ordinary computer software, but also in industrial controllers, heating and cooling systems, printers, anti-virus software, video conferencing systems and encryption protocols.

The exploits, typically based on simple oversights and flaws in computer code that hackers can use to take control of most anything that runs with the help of a computer chip, are considered essential to gathering some of the most valuable US intelligence.

Growing public concern about student-data privacy is prompting fresh scrutiny of the ways technology vendors handle children's educational information -- and opening the gates for a flood of new questions and worries from advocates and school officials.

Take prominent education technology players Edmodo, Khan Academy, and Pearson. Each already has access to the information of tens of millions of US schoolchildren.

But a review of each group's privacy policies by two leading experts yielded concerns about the use of tracking and surveillance technologies that allow third parties to gather information on students; questions about the collection, use, and sharing of massive amounts of student "metadata"; and criticism of the growing burden on students and families, who experts maintain are being forced to navigate an ever-shifting maze of dense vendor policies on their own.

The concerns raised extend far beyond the direct serving of advertisements to students, which Joel Reidenberg, a law professor at Fordham University, described as "just one piece of the commercialization of children."