Brian Fung

A University of Ottawa law professor got a set of documents from the Canadian government showing that law enforcement agencies are asking the country's telecom operators for subscriber information every 27 seconds.

That's a staggering amount, but how does it compare to the United States, where authorities are willing to record all of the calls that take place in a foreign country?

To get a sense, I decided to take a look back at the transparency reports from major US phone companies. In 2013, AT&T and Verizon together received more than one request every 60 seconds. Is that a lot? Depends. It's not as high as the rate cited in Canada. But we're also dealing with an incomplete data set here.

In its first-ever transparency report, AT&T reported receiving 301,816 requests for user data from state, local and federal authorities. Verizon's inaugural transparency report, meanwhile, shows it got 321,545. That's the equivalent of 1.2 requests every minute.

The Department of Homeland Security says an AT&T plan to test new network technology would degrade a special telephone service reserved for national emergencies and presidential communications.

If implemented, the plan would hamper the ability of first responders and public officials to respond to a crisis of the magnitude of Hurricane Sandy or even 9/11, according to DHS.

The special service, known as the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS), allows the president or any high-level official with a secret PIN to dial a unique phone number and demand priority access to the nation's telephone network. GETS calls automatically take precedence over all other phone traffic, and can even overcome busy tones that an ordinary caller might face during periods of congestion.

About one-tenth of one percent of people in the United States have access to this system -- and AT&T is proposing to strip that priority status from a key stage of the calls.

"If you're not applying priority to the end-to-end call, then it's a straightforward position to say you're putting GETS at risk," said Jason Healey, a security expert at the Washington-based Atlantic Council and a former George W. Bush administration official who oversaw the GETS program.

AT&T may be getting more involved in the pay-TV business with a bid for DirecTV. If that's true, it could have major implications for the US TV market.

Merging with one of the nation's biggest satellite TV providers would put AT&T on strong footing to compete against an expanded Comcast (if the cable company successfully buys Time Warner Cable).

AT&T has about 5.7 million TV customers on its U-verse service, while DirecTV boasts about 20 million subscribers. A combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable would control about 30 million customers. The mergers would create two big giants, each controlling around one-third of the US pay-TV market.

One big question is whether AT&T could get a merger past federal regulators, who are already looking closely at the proposed Comcast deal.

A serious move by AT&T to pursue DirecTV (more on that in a bit) would trigger a pretty complicated game of regulatory chess: The Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department would probably need to determine whether or how an AT&T-DirecTV merger would affect a Comcast-TWC merger.

[Commentary] We heard a lot about Aereo, the startup that could upend the television business if it survives a Supreme Court battle with television broadcasters. But even if it squeaks past the court's technologically challenged justices, it might not matter -- the company is still likely doomed. Here's why.

At heart, Aereo is an Internet company that operates on Internet pipes and serves Internet customers. Yes, the company's main business involves pulling broadcast TV signals out of the air. Critics say that practice violates copyright laws.

But technologically, Aereo stores its customers' TV shows in an online, cloud-based locker. Then it sends those shows, on-demand, over the Internet to its subscribers' waiting PCs, tablets and mobile phones. Incidentally, that makes Aereo subject to the Federal Communications Commission's new rules on network neutrality.

If Aereo loses its Supreme Court bid, the show's over and the question becomes irrelevant. But if Aereo survives, then it would be living in a world filled with Internet fast lanes and paid prioritization.

Find Me 911, a coalition of first-responders, issued a new report on wireless 911 calls.

The group, which includes the US First Responders Association and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, surveyed some 1,000 public safety answering points (PSAPS) nationwide -- amounting to roughly 15 percent of all 911 call centers, according to spokesman Andrew Weinstein.

"It just hit a nerve," said Weinstein. "Across the board, they're saying they have regular problems getting data, and strongly, almost to a PSAP, they say that they are regularly getting calls from callers who cannot give locations for one reason or another."

Of the 1,000 respondents, only 187 call centers reported "a great deal" of confidence in the location data they receive from wireless carriers. The Federal Communications Commission estimates that upwards of 70 percent of all emergency calls take place from a cell phone. Of those, 64 percent come from indoors, the report finds.

That's problematic because many phones today are impossible to find with the pinpoint accuracy that first-responders need to locate someone in a crisis. Assisted GPS -- the technology that helps Google Maps tell you where you are -- requires a cellular connection and good line of sight to multiple satellites. But if you're indoors and have poor reception, you'll likely be out of luck. T

here are obvious privacy concerns that come along with using geolocation data to find cell phone users. In a life-threatening emergency, though, most people would probably consider setting those aside.

The last time the world got together to talk about how the Internet should work, China and Russia proposed making it easier for individual governments to control what their citizens can see on the Web.

Now they're at it again, this time at a major international conference in Brazil. The conference, known as NETMundial, is expected to produce a set of nonbinding, international principles that countries can use in their management of the Internet.

The issue has grown more prominent lately as the United States signaled its intent to relinquish its largely symbolic role in overseeing the Web's global name and numbering system. Unlike many of the other 180-odd proposals submitted by other countries and organizations, China and Russia are plainly preoccupied by how Internet governance could affect state authority.

[Commentary] In the end, the Supreme Court's ideal frame of reference was the phonograph. The fact that their first instinct was to turn to an invention created 137 years ago speaks gigabytes for how well the Justices approach the day's most important technology cases.

It's easy to poke fun at the bench. Justice Sonia Sotomayor kept referring to cloud services alternately as "the Dropbox," "the iDrop," and "the iCloud." Chief Justice John Roberts apparently struggled to understand that Aereo keeps separate, individual copies of TV shows that its customers record themselves, not one master copy that all of its subscribers have access to.

Justice Stephen Breyer said he was concerned about a cloud company storing "vast amounts of music" online that then gets streamed to a million people at a time -- seemingly unaware of the existence of services like Spotify or Google Play. And Justice Antonin Scalia momentarily forgot that HBO doesn't travel over the airwaves like broadcast TV.

Yes, it's fun to mock Justices who seem clueless about technology. But the truth is that the laws themselves are often far behind technology. When a justice asks about a phonograph, it's because he is trying to go back to the most basic examples that support the current legal framework. And if a Justice truly doesn't understand the basics of some technology, you wouldn't want them not to ask these questions out of fear of ridicule.

[Commentary] Depending on the outcome of the Aereo case, the battle could either solidify TV networks' grip over their content or throw the doors open to a future where consumers will be able to get traditional, over-the-air programming over the Internet instead.

Either way, the case promises to have huge implications for the way we watch TV. So here's a quick primer to get up to speed.

• What is Aereo? Based in New York City, Aereo uses tiny antennas to grab TV signals out of the air. Those antennas feed the broadcast programming to a DVR, which then plays the programming back to you on your PC, tablet or phone on demand. The technology is cloud-based, meaning it works a lot like Dropbox or Google Drive: The TV shows are stored online, then served to you over the Internet.
• Why is it so controversial? At issue is whether Aereo should have to pay money to TV broadcasters for their content. Right now, Aereo pays nothing -- it gets the TV signals for free just as you or I might with our own televisions. But unlike us, Aereo gets to make money off of relaying those transmissions over the Web. Broadcasters have challenged Aereo on that around the country, accusing it in court of stealing their work and infringing their copyright. They'd much prefer Aereo do what cable companies do, which is to pay "retransmission" fees for the right to carry broadcast content on cable.
• What's really at stake here? If Aereo is allowed to avoid paying retransmission fees, and more people start watching TV on Aereo instead of their cable subscriptions, that's money the broadcasters are losing out on.
• Suppose Aereo wins at the Supreme Court. Then what? Aereo would still need to prove that it's a viable business. With more and more people turning to Internet video, the commercial odds appear to be in its favor. That could change, however, if the broadcasters themselves start getting into Internet-enabled, or "over-the-top" TV.

[Commentary] Tens of thousands of software engineers are currently suing Apple, Google and a host of other companies for a shot at reclaiming wages they say the tech firms stole from them.

How? The engineers say Apple's Steve Jobs, Google's Eric Schmidt and other top Silicon Valley executives secretly agreed not to hire away valuable employees from each other. The resulting industry-wide moratorium on talent poaching allegedly resulted in suppressed wages as people who would've been offered higher salaries to work elsewhere never got the opportunity.

The particulars of the case are rather well-trodden at this point, but a settlement is said to be near; going to trial would mean the tech companies could face as much as a $9 billion penalty.

It's interesting to think about Apple and its rivals secretly colluding to keep the price of labor down. But the case is also taking place against the backdrop of several other economic trends. And in some respects, this class-action suit over wage theft actually cuts against the grain.

• Inequality. Silicon Valley is beset by a reputation -- earned or otherwise -- for egotism, a growing wealth gap and a lack of self-awareness that the rest of the country mistrusts. Software engineers tend to be extremely well-compensated -- particularly the highest performers -- compared to the rest of us. Driving their wages up even higher would likely have made places such as San Francisco even less livable.
• Youth. Silicon Valley has an obsession with youthfulness. The fascination with youth is also somewhat cultural. Thanks to Facebook and Google -- two of what might be dozens of tech companies with compelling coming-of-age stories -- we now find it normal, if not desirable, that college kids build the next great economic empire with a few lines of code.
• Immigration. The informal agreement not to poach each other's workers artificially restricts the labor pool and "forces" companies to look elsewhere for talent.

Ever since the DC Circuit court ruled that the government can't ban Internet providers from blocking or prioritizing Web traffic, the Federal Communications Commission has been looking for a way to get around the ruling.

For network neutrality advocates, the few proposals that have emerged so far aren't satisfying; they're all a little risky, and they aren't guaranteed to produce the results that the FCC wants. Now a new recommendation has federal regulators sitting up. Under the proposal, regulators would surgically apply new rules on Internet providers that otherwise could only be imposed on phone companies. And with that, the FCC could solve some of the thorniest issues surrounding net neutrality, according to a paper co-written by Columbia Law scholars Tim Wu (who coined the term "net neutrality") and Tejas Narechania.

They argue that the FCC should selectively be able to apply more stringent, telecommunications-type regulations to certain aspects of an industry that tends to escape easy definition. From Wu and Narechania's perspective, this describes exactly what phone companies do: Establish the connection between a caller and a responder for the purposes of a transaction. And this telecommunications function is increasingly what we pay Internet providers to do -- unlike before, when they offered telecommunications as one of a bundle of features that together added up to an "information service."

Under these conditions, the authors say, the FCC would be completely justified in applying Title II of the Communications Act -- the part of the FCC's congressional charter that lets it apply blanket restrictions on phone companies -- to broadband companies, which are currently regulated lightly as Title I businesses.