June 2014

DataBank plans Eagan site, with $50 million upgrade

Eagan's push to attract a telecommunications and data-storage center has paid off. DataBank, which operates data co-location facilities in Edina, Dallas and Kansas City (MO), plans to turn the former 88,000-square-foot Taystee Foods building into a data center to serve the region.

The company estimates it will spend about $9 million in site and building improvements and almost $40 million more in equipment costs. The center will work as a sort of data hotel, giving companies space to deploy their servers and equipment. Likely tenants would be telecommunications providers, as well as companies that are seeking a regulatory compliant space in the energy, financial, health care and managed service industries, DataBank spokesman Aaron Alwell said.

Eagan was attractive to DataBank because of the diverse power grid from Dakota Electric and Great River Energy, as well as the city's high-capacity, fiber-optic network that boasts a number of tier-one carriers already interconnected, Alwell said.

Two Decisions Shed Light on the Supreme Court's Role in Telecommunications Policy

[Commentary] The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) released two big communications-related decisions on June 25. First, the Court unanimously ruled that the police need warrants to search the cellphones of people they arrest. That ruling will have the most immediate impact on the approximately 12 million people -- yes, 12,000,000 -- who are arrested in the US each year. But its impact will most likely be much broader: the ruling almost certainly also applies to searches of tablet and laptop computers, and its reasoning may apply to searches of homes and businesses and of information held by third parties like phone companies. In the second case of note, SCOTUS ruled that Aereo, a television streaming service, had violated copyright laws by capturing broadcast signals on miniature antennas and delivering them to subscribers for a fee. The ruling blocks a company whose goals were to upend long-standing models for how broadcast programming is delivered to consumers. The 6 to 3 decision handed a major victory to the broadcast networks, which argued that Aereo’s business model was no more than a high-tech approach for stealing their content.

Dems back FCC chief in local Internet push

A group of Democratic lawmakers is backing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler as he pushes for municipal broadband networks, despite state laws that may stand in the way.

“Communities are often best suited to decide for themselves if they want to invest in their own infrastructure and to choose the approach that will work best for them,” the lawmakers said. Signatories include Sen Ed Markey (D-MA), Reps Mike Doyle (D-PA), Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA).

Rather than being inhibited by state laws, “local communities should have the opportunity to decide for themselves how to invest in their own infrastructure,” including working with incumbent Internet providers, creating public-private partnerships and creating their own networks.

Does the US Supreme Court's Decision on the 4th Amendment and Cell Phones Signal Future Changes to the Third Party Doctrine?

[Commentary] The US Supreme Court handed down a decision on two cases involving the police searching cell phones incident to arrest. The Court held 9-0 in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts that the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant to search a cell phone even after a person is placed under arrest.

The two cases are Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie, and they are decided in the same opinion with the title Riley v. California. I applaud the Supreme Court's decision.

The Court's reasoning in Riley suggests that perhaps the Court is finally recognizing that old physical considerations -- location, size, etc. -- are no longer as relevant in light of modern technology. What matters is the data involved and how much it reveals about a person's private life.

If this is the larger principle the Court is recognizing today, then it strongly undermines some of the reasoning behind the third party doctrine.

[Solove is the John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School]

NSA queried phone records of just 248 people despite massive data sweep

The National Security Agency was interested in the phone data of fewer than 250 people believed to be in the United States in 2013, despite collecting the phone records of nearly every American.

As acknowledged in the NSA's first-ever disclosure of statistics about how it uses its broad surveillance authorities, the NSA performed queries of its massive phone records troves for 248 "known or presumed US persons" in 2013. During that year, it submitted 178 applications for the data to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during that period, which, as first revealed by the Guardian thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden, permitted the ongoing, daily collection of practically all US phone records.

The number of "selectors" NSA queried from that data trove, a term referring to an account and not necessarily an individual user, was 423 in 2013, an increase from the "less than 300 times" it searched through the data trove in 2012, according to former deputy NSA director John Inglis.

Groups Target Hill Votes On NSA Bills

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sunlight Foundation, and Greenpeace have teamed on a new online scorecard to grade members of Congress on their votes on communications privacy legislation the groups are monitoring.

The interactive site, http://StandAgainstSpying.org, will also encourage online activism targeted at those who don't make the grade. The goal is reform of the National Security Agency data collection apparatus and to "inspire constituents to hold their elected officials accountable on mass surveillance reform," including by encouraging Web surfers to tweet their members either thanking them or asking them to do more.

Of the 100 senators and 433 representatives graded, 241 of them (45%) received “A” grades, while 188 flunked. Another 77 members (14%) received question marks for "no measurable action." The site also includes an open letter to the President to end mass surveillance now, without waiting for Congress to act.

Foursquare to Begin Charging Fees

Foursquare Labs said it would begin charging some businesses for access to its database of restaurants, shops and other local venues, as it tries to make money from information it has gathered from user "check-ins" in the five years since its founding.

The New York startup is negotiating with the heaviest users of its data to pay fees or offer services in return, Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Glueck said. Deals will be reached on an ad-hoc basis with each developer and will affect under 1% of the 63,000 companies that use Foursquare's database, said Glueck, a longtime Internet executive who recently joined Foursquare.

The change in policy could jeopardize Foursquare's relationship with outside developers that rely on the service to pull the names and coordinates of local places of interest into their own apps. Popular applications including Pinterest, Twitter's Vine, and Yahoo's Flickr use this service to help users match content they post online to their geographic location. But the data fees could also help Foursquare create a new revenue stream to support its free mobile apps.

Fox moves to use Aereo ruling against Dish streaming service

A day after a surprise Supreme Court decision to outlaw streaming TV service Aereo, US broadcaster Fox has moved to use the ruling to clamp down on another Internet TV service.

Fox has cited the ruling -- which found Aereo to be operating illegally -- to bolster its claim against a service offered by Dish, America’s third largest pay TV service, which streams live TV programming over the Internet to its subscribers and allows them to copy programs onto tablet computers for viewing outside the home.

The move has fueled criticism of the Aereo ruling from groups that have argued the decision will limit consumer choice, hand more power to broadcasters and stifle innovation.

Immediately after the Aereo ruling, Fox’s legal team submitted the Supreme Court’s Aereo decision to bolster its case against Dish. Oral arguments in the case are scheduled before the ninth circuit court of appeals on 7 July in Pasadena, California.

The impending death of the YouTube mashup

[Commentary] The days of the video remix on YouTube may be numbered.Like many other remixers, culture critics, and journalists, I rely heavily on something called "fair use," a section of copyright law that permits the use of pop culture source materials without the permission of the copyright holder for a variety of uses: comment, critique, satire, homage, or to further a cultural discussion.

Not needing permission is important because it means that I (and other cultural critics) are free to criticize and reimagine pop culture in ways that the copyright holder may not be comfortable with. According to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- the law that governs copyright online -- a simple counter-notification outlining why a remix creator believes her video to be a fair use should be enough to keep a video online, even if the original copyright holder objects. But it turns out no defense would have revived my video.

YouTube had cut a private deal that gave Universal Music Group the power to take down any video, even those videos that didn’t require Universal’s permission in the first place. Yes, you read that right: YouTube’s private agreement with Universal Music Group eliminates creator’s fair use rights on the site.

[Kreisinger is artist-in-residence, Public Knowledge]

No, Cable TV is Not a Net Neutrality Violation

No, cable TV is not a network neutrality violation. Yet.

So I think it’s finally worth explaining the various reasons why cable TV, even when it’s carried on the same wire that also provides broadband, does not violate net neutrality.

It's not on the Internet.

Cable TV was there first. Yes, cable TV and broadband share the same wire. But it's not like bandwidth was taken away from the Internet to make room for TV. They are distinct services with a separate history.

Cable TV is separately regulated.

Cable TV meets the only reasonable definition of a "specialized service." The 2010 Open Internet rules had a broad exception for "specialized" or "managed" services.

Yet? It may be the case that someday soon, technology will improve to the point where one-to-many distribution does not offer a real advantage over one-to-one services. This may change the analysis for "same wire" services like cable TV. But we're not there yet.

Benton

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