July 2016

Over the next two years, the City of Madison (WI) will invest $500,000 in general obligation capital funds to experiment with a creative public private partnership to bring fiber-to-the-building services to more than 1,000 underserved families. Madison has been attacking the community’s digital divide from an anchor institution angle for years and using public-private partnerships to get there.

"[Broadband Technology Opportunities Program] layed the framework,” said Richard Beadles, Technical Services Manager for the city. Mayor Paul Soglin made digital equity a priority five years ago, and the City won a $10 million BTOP grant to build a fiber middle mile network to connect its municipal buildings and libraries, higher education, schools and other municipalities in the area. The new Metropolitan Unified Fiber Network (MUFN) was born. In exchange for using part of the network for commercial services, a company called Wisconsin Independent Network (WIN) connected all the schools and the 14 community centers to fiber and gave them free 100 Mbps symmetrical service. A non-profit called DANEnet managed the network and data communications for those community centers. Then two years ago, the City budgeted and fiber connected another 10 cultural centers. WIN was required to provide free Internet service to the centers by contract and worked with ResTech Services to provide 100 Mbps service at no cost.

What are the best practices for isolating an interfering signal and tracking it to its origin, and what should the consequences be for the offending transmitter to prevent future interference? Such legal and regulatory issues will be explored at 2016’s International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies (ISART), on Aug. 1-3 in Westminster (CO).

ISART is sponsored by the Center for Advanced Communications, a joint effort between National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). ISART – now in its 15th year – will once again bring together the world's experts on advanced radio systems development. The theme of ISART 2016 is Spectrum Forensics, defined as the spectrum measurements that support interference monitoring, investigation, and enforcement. ISART 2016 will be particularly appealing to engineers, mathematicians, and others who are interested in understanding the application of specific measurement and monitoring techniques to spectrum sharing analyses. During the three-day conference, participants will hear presentations that explore the implications of technological advancements on policies related to the forensic analysis of radio interference; hear about the results of spectrum monitoring efforts in Europe, the United States, and Canada; discuss research in spectrum monitoring using unmanned aircraft systems; hear a report on the state-of-the-art in the technologies and standards that make spectrum forensics possible; and identify gaps where future development and standardization are needed.

The Federal Communications Commission announced that Sinclair Broadcast Group will pay $9,495,000 to resolve a number of Media Bureau investigations, including the Bureau’s investigation of allegations that Sinclair violated its obligation to negotiate for retransmission consent in good faith. The Commission’s retransmission consent rules, as mandated by Congress, forbid a broadcaster to negotiate jointly for one of its stations and for another station in the same market that it does not control.

In its investigation, the Media Bureau found that, over the course of seven months, Sinclair negotiated retransmission consent on behalf of dozens stations that it did not control at the same time that it was negotiating for its own stations in the same markets. In addition to agreeing to pay $9,495,000, Sinclair has agreed to implement a compliance plan aimed at ensuring no similar violations in the future. This action is the first of its kind to enforce the Commission’s long-standing retransmission consent rules. The settlement also resolves a number of other issues that had been pending for Sinclair-owned stations, and the Bureau has agreed to grant all pending Sinclair renewal applications as part of the settlement terms.

They may both support the dissemination of government secrets, but Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks seem to disagree on how best to do it. On July 28, Snowden, the former government contractor who released a trove of National Security Agency documents and now lives in exile in Russia, credited WikiLeaks, a clearinghouse for similar disclosures, with furthering the cause of transparency but also criticized its unfiltered approach. "Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped. But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake," he tweeted. His words prompted a swift and cutting reply from WikiLeaks, which had once come to his aid.

Snowden, it suggested, was trying to ingratiate himself with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, just days after WikiLeaks had released embarrassing emails showing that Democratic Party officials had derided the campaign of her main rival in the primary, Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT). "Opportunism won't earn you a pardon from Clinton & curation is not censorship of ruling party cash flows," replied Wikileaks on twitter. WikiLeaks is often criticized for releasing documents without editing or regard for the sensitive information they may contain. Snowden, on the other hand, has said that he chose to work with journalists in 2013 to selectively release the NSA documents in order to limit the harmful consequences of exposing what he called the abuses of government surveillance. The exchange was all the more striking in light of the past collaboration between Snowden and the group, which helped him as he sought to find a place to settle into exile.