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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]

[Commentary] Imagine a world where politicians have substantive debates at any time of the day; you don’t need a cable subscription to watch, and you are the one directly asking the questions of them. Is this a reality in 2016? No. But thanks to Donald Trump and other contributing factors, we are closer than ever.

With shifting demographics and a new way of consuming media, political discourse is being teed up for a golden era. And it starts with millennials, who will continue to become a larger share of active voters. Many millennials don't watch political debates on live TV. In fact, a major proportion don’t even subscribe to cable service. Yet, they are politically active, and do watch the debates online. So where does much of this political activity take place? On social media. This is where Facebook’s new Live feature comes in. Facebook has announced that it will soon allow for a two-way broadcast on Facebook Live. In other words, it will become a video chat that is public and easily sharable. So the question is, in future election cycles, what would stop an impromptu debate between candidates on Facebook Live?

[Adam Chiara is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Hartford]

Bidding concluded late in the day on Aug 30 in the first round of a historic spectrum sale to wireless providers and other buyers without regulators reaching their target for the sale. The first stage of the Federal Communications Commission’s sale ended without buyers bidding the $88.3 billion needed to hit the price target. The agency will hold another stage of the auction with a lower spectrum clearing target. A bidding pool that includes major wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon as well as other companies, like Comcast, and individuals bid roughly $22.4 billion in the first round. The high price target points to the auction’s first-of-a-kind design.

The FCC spent part of 2016 buying wireless spectrum, the invisible frequencies that carry signals to mobile devices, from broadcast stations. Now they’re attempting to resell it to wireless carriers and other bidders. The broadcasters were active participants, leading to the high cost bar that the commission needs to clear. The $88.3 billion number also includes some costs associated with the auction. The commission also set the highest possible target before the auction began for the amount of spectrum it would attempt to sell. The trade group representing broadcast stations on Aug 31 hinted that the showing in the first stage of the auction was evidence that the wireless industry's pleas for more spectrum were misleading.

A federal court ruled against a challenge to part of the Federal Communications Commission’s ongoing process of reassigning valuable wireless spectrum to mobile providers. FCC officials are currently running an auction to buy spectrum from broadcasters and sell it wireless providers and other buyers — and repackage the assignment of radio frequencies in the process.

Low-power television (LPTV) services, small regional stations that have a secondary position to full-power broadcasters, were not protected from potential difficulties during that repacking process by the commission. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied a challenge from Mako Communications, an LPTV operator, to the FCC’s decision not to extend those protections to its operations, citing a prohibition on altering their spectrum rights in the law authorizing the repacking. The court said that the FCC’s decision not to offer the protections did not change the rights of LPTV broadcasters, since full-power stations already have priority when it comes to using wireless spectrum. “As a general matter, LPTV stations’ secondary status renders them subject to displacement insofar as they cause interference to primary services,” Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote in the ruling. "Today's court ruling validates the Commission's Incentive Auction design in light of the Spectrum Act’s goals," said an FCC spokesperson. "The Commission values the important role that low-power TV and TV translator stations play in the communities they serve. With that in mind, we have taken — and continue to consider — steps to assist any displaced low power stations to find feasible channels after the close of the auction."

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy filed a federal complaint over WhatsApp’s decision to share consumer data with parent company Facebook. WhatsApp announced recently that it was planning to provide information about its users for Facebook's targeted advertising unless users choose to opt out. EPIC and the Center for Digital Democracy say that the change betrays previous promises Facebook has made on privacy. “When Facebook acquired WhatsApp, WhatsApp made a commitment to its users, to the Federal Trade Commission, and to privacy authorities around the world not to disclose user data to Facebook,” said EPIC President Marc Rotenberg. “Now they have broken that commitment.”

Specifically, the complaint invokes the FTC’s jurisdiction to police unfair and deceptive practices, as well as a 2012 agreement between Facebook and the agency that the company would take certain steps to protect user privacy. Central to their case is a long history of WhatsApp making privacy a core part of its brand. The company now makes end-to-end encryption the default setting for its users, for example, and over the years has said that it is not interested in leveraging its customers’ info.