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The Senate's top two Democrats are sending early warning signs that a push by Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) to link a fight over control of the Internet to a short-term government funding bill is a non-starter. Asked if Democratic Sens are opposed to Sen Cruz's push to include a rider to block the Obama Administration from relinquishing the oversight role the United States has had over the Internet, Sen Dick Durbin (D-IL) said "of course." "If he's going to be allowed to dream up an issue and produce it and say we're going to stop the government, which he has quite a good reputation of doing... where in the heck are the Senate Republicans?" Sen Durbin added.

Sen Cruz's push comes as lawmakers are facing a looming Oct 1 deadline to get a deal on government funding to avoid a shutdown. Under Senate rules, any member of the chamber could force the Senate to go through lengthy procedural hurdles before it can take a final vote on a short-term spending bill. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) also pointed to Sen Cruz's Internet fight as one of myriad policy issues that still needs to be worked out as part of the spending discussions, arguing it's an "attempt to slow down the [continuing resolution]." "Unfortunately this is what we've come to expect from my friend, the junior senator from Texas. When the Senate has a deadline, he tries to obstruct government funding bills," he added. "So we have our work cut out for us." Sen Cruz is expected to hold a hearing Sept 14 about the transition. If Congress fails to act by the end of Sept, the transfer will take place, giving Sen Cruz leverage to get the issue included in the CR.

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that hacking someone’s computer counts as a “search,” meaning police must get a warrant to hack into someone’s computer. Senior US District Judge David Alan Ezra of the San Antonio division of the Western District of Texas court ruled that the FBI needed a proper warrant when it hacked Jeffrey Jerry Torres’s computer.

Torres is facing charges of receiving and possessing child pornography. Torres and others were allegedly caught by the FBI for using the dark web child pornography site, Playpen. “[The contention that] Mr. Torres did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his IP address is of no import. This was unquestionably a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes,” Ezra wrote. In February 2015, the FBI seized and then ran Playpen, for two weeks. In that time they installed malware on users computers to identify suspects. In a previous case, a judge had ruled that because when users accessed Playpen, via the dark web browser Tor, they made their IP address known to another computer to access Tor, thus giving up any reasonable expectation of their privacy of their IP address. Ezra disagreed with this, supporting the idea that Tor users had a reasonable expectation of privacy on the platform. The warrant that the FBI used in the Torres case also came under question because it was used to obtain information beyond the district that it was issued in.

Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) hammered on the Senate floor the Obama Administration's deal to relinquish supervision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Sen Cruz said President Obama’s decision “poses a significant threat to our freedom,” and that “it will empower countries like Russia, China and Iran to be able to censor speech on the internet.” Sen Cruz said that he isn’t convinced that an international regulatory body would be free from influences that could lead to internet censorship. The senator also highlighted national security concerns. “Congress has received no insurance from the government to keep dot-gov or dot-mil” domain names, he said, which could facilitate “foreign phishing scams.”

A national security expert refuted this, saying that the transition wouldn’t affect .mil or .gov names. According to the expert, these are already under the jurisdiction of the federal government and would remain there regardless of who controlled IANA. That expert also argued that US supervision of ICANN and IANA would give some countries a political excuse to attempt to intervene in the affairs of the organizations, but that they would have no such leverage in the hands of an international body.

[Commentary] America is under cyberattack; this is the harsh reality. Over the past few years, we’ve seen numerous high-profile hacks on government systems that have directly impacted government organizations, citizens, and in some cases even the presidential candidates themselves. The Office of Personnel Management breach exposed the addresses, health and financial history, and other private details of over 21 million people, including every person that was given a government background check for the last 15 years. Cyberwarfare is the attack vector of the future; it’s cheaper and less risky than physical warfare and has no geographical borders. Every new device connected to the Internet – from fridges to thermostats to cars to airplanes – becomes a potential target for cyberattack.

Earlier in 2016, President Barack Obama unveiled the Cybersecurity National Action Plan, reinforcing the White House’s role in partnering with private industry to improve cybersecurity and allocating $19 billion for cybersecurity in the 2017 Budget, a 35 percent increase over 2016. The upcoming Presidential Debates represent a fantastic opportunity for both candidates to discuss cybersecurity, clarify their policies and comment on the plan and whether they would continue to support it. More importantly, the debates represent an opportunity for voters like you to engage the candidates on cybersecurity, ask the tough questions and seek specific answers. Because while Donald Trump and Secretary Hillary Clinton may want to avoid addressing the elephant in the room, President Trump or President Clinton will not have that same luxury.

[Alex Manea is director of BlackBerry Security]

House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) tore into government surveillance methods, saying his committee will investigate one in particular — Stingray scanners. Stingrays are cellphone trackers that can be used to gain location data from phone users. The trackers have recently come under scrutiny from civil rights groups. "You will be shocked at what the federal government is doing to collect your personal information," Chairman Chaffetz said. "And they can't keep it secure, that's the point."

Chairman Chaffetz last November introduced the Stingray Privacy Act, a bill aimed at curtailing the implementation of the cell tracking technology. “The abuse of Stingrays and other cell-site simulators by individuals, including law enforcement, could enable gross violations of privacy,” he said at the time. Chairman Chaffetz’s comments come after the House Oversight Committee’s release of a scathing 241-page report on the Office of Personnel Management data breach.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler’s disastrous set-top box proposal to force companies to “share” their set-top box content with other businesses has faced almost unanimous opposition. As opposition mounts from creators, civil rights groups, Silicon Valley innovators, organized labor, almost 200 Members of Congress, and many others, the arguments of proponents of Chairman Wheeler’s set-top box regulation keep shifting. We’ve noticed that they seem to follow the famous five stages of grief.

1. Denial -- Almost immediately after Chairman Wheeler released his proposal, people began to point out that it was premised on allowing commercial use of copyrighted works without any provisions to ensure proper respect for those rights or existing copyright licenses.
2. Anger -- Perhaps sensing the weakness of their denial, in a fit of pique, proponents of the Wheeler regulations lashed out at the Copyright Office. Worse, a handful of academics went so far as to try to censor the Copyright Office’s analysis before it was written.
3. Bargaining -- When name-calling didn’t work, the trade association for Silicon Valley behemoths that want to use regulation to over-ride the free market (and call it “competition”) tried to offer a revised version of the Wheeler proposal.
4. Depression -- Having realized that Chairman Wheeler’s windfall is doomed, proponents have switched to a scorched-earth policy. T
5. Acceptance -- Don’t hold your breath. These guys are famous for never admitting they’re wrong. So expect to keep hearing attacks on the Copyright Office and empty claims about competition when what they really mean is government regulation.

[Dan Schneider is the executive director of the American Conservative Union. Larry Hart is a Senior Fellow for Government Reform with the American Conservative Union Foundation.]

39 consumer advocate groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Free Press, said that placing an exemption in looming federal privacy rules for broadband providers that covers data divorced from an individual customer would be ill-advised and illegal. The Federal Communications Commission is in the process of crafting rules that, under a proposal from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, would make it harder for Internet providers to use their customers' data for most purposes. Privacy and consumer groups said in a Sept 7 letter to Chairman Wheeler that the commission shouldn’t make an exception for data that has been stripped of information that could identify the customer to whom it belongs.

“We urge the Commission to resist some parties’ request for the creation of a special carve-out for ‘de-identified’ customer information,” the groups said. “There is no room in the statute to accommodate that request.” “Even if there were, it would be harmful to consumers to allow ISPs to make an end-run around privacy rules simply by removing certain identifiers from data, while leaving vast swaths of customer details largely intact,” they added. The groups argued that it would be easy to re-connect the data with a user. “It is often trivial to re-identify data that has supposedly been de-identified," they said in the latest salvo in the battle over the rules.

[Commentary] Ever since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, deployment of advanced telecommunications infrastructure has been a national priority. In fact, Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 specifically directs the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and each state commission with regulatory jurisdiction over telecommunications services to "encourage the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans." However, broadband deployment is not as easy a task as it seems — network construction is enormously expensive and there are a variety of practical factors, like various government permissions, a provider must address. One of these factors is the little-known, but highly important, issue of how broadband providers may attach their wires to utility poles, which are mostly owned by private companies. To provide guidance, Congress set forth a detailed framework to govern this process in Section 224 of the Communications Act.

Like it or not, broadband is a difficult and, more to the point, an expensive business, so identifying and removing policy-relevant barriers to entry remains a constant challenge. Nonetheless, there are detailed laws which govern our conduct which must be respected, not just for economic reasons, but to protect our health and safety. Having municipalities pass ordinances which are nakedly intended to circumvent those laws and abridge private property rights in the name of promoting "competition" achieves none of these goals.

[Spiwak is the president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies.]

Policy battles that have been mounting for months are poised to engulf the Federal Communications Commission in the final months of the Obama Administration. Sept 8 marks the deadline for FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to say whether he will bring any of three major policy proposals to a vote at the commission’s meeting in September.

Major corporate players have a stake in all three debates. One proposal could give Americans more ways to watch television and, possibly, replace their living room set-top box. A second would crack down on how internet providers use customers’ personal data. And a third has the potential to bring changes to an obscure but valuable market for broadband connections that are used by big business.

[Commentary] Secretary Hillary Clinton published a plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure earlier this year, and is now making infrastructure investments a key part of her economic pitch to the American people. Her plan focuses on key needs like road and bridge repair, investing in public transit, increasing freight rail capacity, renovating airports and the air traffic control system, increasing broadband access, upgrading water and sewer systems, and modernizing the nation’s antiquated power grid.

Her proposal costs $275 billion and is a good start, but a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers says that the country actually needs $1.6 trillion in infrastructure spending at all levels by 2020 to bring us up to date and to make America competitive with the rest of the world. Years ago, the Chicago architect Daniel Burnham wisely said “make no small plans, for they do not have the power to stir men’s souls.” The country’s needs are indeed great, and Secretary Clinton, as president, can address those needs, and make a transformational decisions, by following Daniel Burnham’s wisdom.

[Glickman is a former Congressman and Secretary of Agriculture and currently is a Senior Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center]