May 2014

The House passed legislation to authorize intelligence activities through fiscal 2015.

Funding levels in the measure, passed 345-59, are classified. It would authorize spending for the CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency (DNI).

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI), who is retiring, said that the controversies over NSA spying had mischaracterized American intelligence activities. "We have somehow decided over the last year that our intelligence services are the problem," Chairman Rogers said. "They are part of the solution."

"For the sake of vigorous oversight and accountability over all US intelligence agencies, I urge my colleagues to support this bill," said Rep Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) of the Intelligence Committee. Due to the classified nature of many of its provisions, the intelligence authorization is marked up in committee behind closed doors. But Chairman Rogers maintained that members of the committee had engaged in rigorous debate on overseeing the nation's intelligence programs.

"There is no love fest when those doors close," Chairman Rogers said.

A decades-old law on emails is more of a threat to privacy than National Security Agency surveillance, according to Rep Kevin Yoder (R-KS). He expressed deep concern over the 1986 Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA), which allows police to obtain emails without a warrant.

“It’s much worse than the debates we’re having over whether the NSA should be able to theoretically review phone call” data, Rep Yoder said. “This is much worse in that they’re actually reading the emails,” he said.

Rep Yoder’s bill, the Email Privacy Act, would update the ECPA to require law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant before accessing digital communications including emails. Currently, officials can access any email that has been stored for more than six months without a warrant. The bill has wide support in the House, Rep Yoder said. He and co-sponsor Rep Jared Polis (D-CO) touted the bill’s 214 co-sponsors, just shy of half the members of the House.

“We’re very close to what we in Congress like to call a magic number,” Polis said, encouraging viewers to ask their member of Congress to support the bill. Yoder asked viewers to “differentiate this from the NSA issue” when contacting their members of Congress. While both issues deal with privacy, “it is different politically,” he said. No members have come out publicly against the bill, despite pushback from federal agencies, the lawmakers said.

As the proposed marriages of Comcast and Time Warner and AT&T and DirecTV move forward, this latest wave of consolidation is poised to have an effect on the telecommunications supplier market, creating a fresh batch of winners and losers.

That, of course, will extend to the realm of video gateways and set-top boxes, with at least one analyst believing that this new round of mergers and acquisitions will cause a shift in a market that is largely made up of Pace, Arris (thanks to its acquisition of Motorola Home in 2013), Cisco Systems, Technicolor and EchoStar.

“This mature, yet fragmented market, in which the top five vendors account for about 37% of the revenues, is ripe for further consolidation,” Sam Rosen, practice director at ABI Research, predicted, pointing out that Arris, with its focus on cable and IPTV, stayed ahead of Pace, which, in his estimation, is “over-weighted on satellite.”

On January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama issued the first executive memorandum of his Administration, entitled “Transparency and Open Government.”

This memorandum established three guiding principles for the conduct of government activities. Government should be transparent. Government should be participatory. Government should be collaborative. The Department of Commerce (the Department) is fully committed to these principles, and we are pleased to present the 2014 Department of Commerce Open Government Plan, version 3.0.

The Plan is updated annually, and this release represents its fifth publication. The Department will continue to encourage and strive for increased participation and collaboration among its employees, with other government agencies and the American people.

The 2014 plan provides an overview of the Department’s new 2014-2018 Strategic Plan, describes Department program and functional areas which are critical to Open Government, features three “flagship” Open Government initiatives, and highlights Open Government happenings of ongoing initiatives and activities across the Department’s Bureaus and Operating Units (BOUs).