July 2015

Bowing to pressure from Republican Representatives, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler won't be holding a hotly anticipated vote on rules for a looming, high-stakes auction of wireless airwaves. TV industry advocates say the real reason the vote fell apart was because Chairman Wheeler couldn't find enough Democratic votes to move ahead, in an indication of how fragile the FCC's Democratic majority can sometimes be. The discord, according to those advocates, stems from fears that the draft auction rules could unintentionally lead to interference between mobile devices.

The FCC's proposal would have considered relocating some TV station channels into this gap. Mainly, these stations would be the ones that decided not to give up their airwaves to cell service providers such as Verizon and AT&T. But some within the FCC, such as FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, worried that plan would render some mobile technologies unusable, said Preston Padden, a former Disney executive who now leads a coalition of TV stations interested in selling their airwave rights. But because the FCC is not offering enough money to TV stations to entice them to sell, the FCC "is saying, 'Oh no, we're going to have to jam broadcasters in [the duplex gap] and that's what caused the fight," said Padden, whose coalition members would benefit from a higher auction price. (The auction works by having the government buy up the TV stations' airwave rights and then reselling them to cellular carriers.) Padden claimed that if the FCC offered 5 percent more money to broadcasters, more of them would agree to sell -- and fewer would need to be relocated. "They're being penny wise and pound foolish, and that's why they've got this problem," said Padden.

[Commentary] In Washington (DC), where a growing chorus is demonizing end-to-end encryption that permits people to have conversations that the government can never see, Sen Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has aired a particularly extreme anti-privacy position: Sen Whitehouse suggested that selling well-encrypted smartphones to Americans should be treated like dumping toxic waste in streams. They began with a hypothetical kidnapping. “A girl goes missing,” Sen Whitehouse told Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. “A neighbor reports that they saw her being taken into a van out in front of the house. The police are called. They come to the home. The parents are frantic. The girl's phone is still at home.” Naturally, everyone wants to search the phone for clues. But it is encrypted. Of course, the phone doesn’t necessarily hold any clues, and the victim is no worse off than every child kidnapped in the thousands of years before smartphones existed. Nevertheless, Sen Whitehouse feels that the phone maker bears some culpability for the girl’s fate, and should perhaps be made to pay up in a civil lawsuit.

Shaping encryption policy by way of dueling lawsuits and jury awards strikes me as one of the least efficient, least accurate methods imaginable to quantify the costs and benefits of different approaches to encryption and data security. And in a nation in which telecommunications companies were able to wrangle retroactive immunity for knowingly and illegally helping the government to spy on Americans, the notion that civil liability would be consistently applied to powerful corporations, even in the aftermath of black-swan events, is strikingly naive.

Sometimes fear is the best motivator. At the Interior Department, this was the case when computer hackers stole millions of federal employee records from an Office of Personnel Management database stored inside one of Interior's data centers. The assailants left Interior's data unscathed. But point taken, Interior Chief Information Officer Sylvia Burns said at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. The incident, part of a historic hack against the US government, prompted the department to expedite a goal of eliminating wimpy passwords as the only safeguard when signing in to agency systems.

"When I, as a CIO for the department, learned of the intrusion, it was horrifying to me and since that time, my team and I have been on high alert working probably seven days a week, long hours to take our lessons learned and do a mitigation plan around it," Burns said. Still, Burns clearly has her work cut out for her. Results of an information security audit presented to lawmakers laid out thousands of security vulnerabilities in Interior’s public websites. "We have to all own this problem and it will take all of us to fix the problem, “Burns said of the cybersecurity dilemma in general, across her department's distributed bureaus and offices. “And everybody has been taking it seriously so I’m very gratified by that.”

Five days after accusing The New York Times of bias, secrecy and foul play, Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) is finally getting what he wanted: a highly coveted spot on the paper's bestseller list. Sen Cruz's memoir, "A Time For Truth," will appear at No. 7 on the Times' list for hardcover nonfiction, reflecting its second-week sales, a Times spokesperson confirmed.

Sen Cruz's book had not been included on the list for its first week, on the grounds that its sales had been driven by "strategic bulk purchases." Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy said that the newspaper made no changes to its selection process, and so the fact that Sen Cruz's book is being included now suggests a rise in individual purchases, spurred by his public battle with the paper.