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February 2016

Ex-NSA head asks court to toss out lawsuit

The former head of the National Security Agency asked a federal court to toss out a lawsuit accusing him of personally violating Americans’ constitutional rights. Keith Alexander filed a motion with the US District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of himself, President Barack Obama and other top administration officials, claiming he had never been properly served as part of a sweeping lawsuit over the NSA’s powers. The lawsuit, from conservative legal activist Larry Klayman, succeeded in a 2013 declaration that the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records was likely unconstitutional. The decision provided a major boost to the agency’s critics more than a year before they passed reform legislation on Capitol Hill that curtailed the program. The lawsuit also personally named Alexander, President Obama, former Attorney General Eric Holder and other officials in both their individual and official roles. But Klayman waited more than two years to serve those officials notice, Justice Department lawyers argued in the motion. Procedural rules require him to serve notice within 120 days. Klayman’s team has “never [emphasis in the original] personally served any of the individual federal defendants with the complaints in which those defendants were first named,” lawyers claimed.

Closed Captioning Second Report and Order

In this Second Report and Order, the Federal Communications Commission allocates the responsibilities of video programming distributors (VPDs) and video programmers with respect to the provision and quality of closed captions on television programming. These actions are intended to ensure that people who are deaf and hard of hearing have full access to such programming.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said, “Today’s Commission action on closed captioning is about responsibility. Those who produce and distribute video for television have a shared responsibility to ensure that closed captioning is both available and accurate. Likewise, this agency has a responsibility to seize on this moment in time which, for the first time in human history, offers us real opportunities to address the communications challenges faced by tens of millions of Americans with disabilities. We are making significant progress on this front and I thank my fellow Commissioners for joining me in this important work.”

Broadband hits roadblock in NY

Greene County (NY) continues to face obstacles in its fight to gain broadband and better Internet access for all residents, especially sparsely populated rural zones. Members of the Greene County Legislature heard an update on the county’s broadband project at its Economic Development and Tourism Committee meeting on Feb 16. Warren Hart, the county’s director of the Economic Development, Tourism and Planning Department, told lawmakers his presentation was based on 18 months of work. “Broadband throughout Greene County is a necessity now, not a luxury,” Hart said. “We have around 3,400 households that are unserved in the county, along with 13,800 households that are underserved.”

All of the numbers came from the state’s Broadband Program Office, Hart said. Getting county residents better broadband service has remained a top priority for the legislature and state-level officials for several years. Hart said the state’s new broadband program is accepting phase-one applications and this has presented significant challenges for rural counties. Hart said the consortium believes “The rules provide significant barriers for rural counties with small providers, and as a result, there may be limited or no submissions of applications in this first round.” In his opinion, he told county lawmakers, the guidelines listed in the state’s new program are geared more towards urbanized areas.

Washington wants your cable company to become a whole new privacy cop

As companies like Google become more interested in building their own cable box to compete with the one you rent from your TV provider, one big question is how they'll protect your privacy. Just like Netflix knows exactly when you tune in and tune out from a show, a set-top box made by a company outside of the cable industry would gain access to much of the same information. Basically, could this data be used for targeted advertising? Federal regulators say no.

Their recent proposal to "unlock the box" and let non-cable firms design alternatives to the traditional set-top box would require those companies to obey the same privacy rules that cable companies do. But what's interesting about this idea is how they propose to implement it: Give the cable companies responsibility for ensuring that cable boxes made by third parties don't abuse your personal data. The proposal effectively contemplates a world where Comcast could be overseeing Google, for example.

A modest plea for sanity in our election coverage

[Commentary] On Feb 20, Republicans vote in South Carolina and Democrats vote in Nevada. While we don’t know how those contests will turn out, we know that the results will be judged not so much on their own terms but on whether they conformed to “expectations.” Before we get sucked into that quicksand, we should stand up and say: This is madness. Why? Because expectations are meaningless.

To reiterate, when a candidate either exceeds or fails to meet expectations, all it means is that the ones doing the expecting — i.e. the press — were wrong. Expectations are a prediction about what’s going to happen. Sometimes those predictions are accurate and sometimes they aren’t. When we punish someone for failing to meet expectations or reward someone for exceeding them, we’re acting as though the expectations themselves represented an important objective reality. But they don’t.

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