Hill, The

The Chamber of Commerce is encouraging lawmakers to let the Commerce Department go forward with its controversial plans to relinquish its oversight role of technical Internet functions.

In a letter to lawmakers, Executive Vice President of Government Affairs Bruce Josten asked that the House not use the Commerce Department’s funding to constrain the administration’s Internet governance plans. The agency “should be allowed to take any needed steps to achieve the cautiousness and transparency that we agree is essential for a safe and smooth transition,” Josten wrote.

More than a dozen school and library groups want the Federal Communications Commission to update its program to hook public educational facilities up to the Internet.

In a letter, the groups pushed for changes to the FCC's E-Rate program, also called ConnectED, including more money.

"We cannot wait any longer to increase E-Rate support. The time is now to permanently raise the E-Rate’s annual funding cap," groups including the American Library Association, American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association wrote. According to the groups, demand to access the fund is often twice the current cap of $2.4 billion, yet it "has received no meaningful funding increase since 1998."

Additionally, most of the money is tied up for connecting schools and libraries to the Web, which makes it difficult to ensure that every classroom and computer within the building is connected. That is leading to "major roadblocks to students, educators and library patrons having enough bandwidth to perform online research, participate in digital professional learning classes and apply online for jobs or government services and benefits."

The president of Estonia thinks that his small northern European country is paving the way for keeping people’s information protected online. At a forum on international cybersecurity, Toomas Hendrik Ilves praised his country’s system of online digital signatures, which allow people to securely access a variety of financial, political and medical resources online.

“We have come to the solution that you cannot have any genuine security without a secure online identity,” he said. For instance, 90 percent of the country’s 1.3 million residents can file their taxes online in under three minutes, remotely access digital medical records and even vote over the Internet from the comfort of their couch, using the country’s digital national identification system.

“All these things are possible if and only if you have a secure online identity, because whoever has the data knows it’s you and not anyone else,” he said. Ilves said that the global public is misguided to fear that “big data” and the availability of everyone’s information online will expose their personal secrets. Instead, they should be focusing on how secure their data are from hackers and others who may be impersonating them online.

“You might be worried about someone knowing your blood type. I’m much more worried about someone changing the record of my blood type," Ilves said. “The real issue, and the real issue that I think instills fear in me, is maybe that it can be changed,” he added. “That will require a solution of the sort that we have.”

Estonia was the first real victim of an online attack, when attackers flooded the country with a stream of distributed denial-of-service attacks in 2007. Since then, it has rapidly increased security on national networks and developed a decentralized system to add new digital components onto the online infrastructure.

A Virginia communications firm won a $250,000 government contract to bring high-speed broadband Internet to the military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, via satellite.

According to a notice posted on a federal contracting website, E&E Enterprises Global will deliver “broadband satellite Internet equipment and subscription for Joint Task Forces Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”

Satellite Internet service is routinely used by the base’s 6,000 military and civilian residents to keep in touch with friends and family back home, as well as for official purposes. The military has tried to move off of the satellite hookups in recent years, which can be slow and expensive to maintain.

In 2013, the Pentagon announced plans to lay undersea fiber-optic cables to connect the military base to the mainland US, though that effort is not expected to be finished until 2015. After the military connects the fiber cables to its 45-square-mile base, those lines could then extend to the entire island, officials have said.

Privacy advocates are glad that the Federal Trade Commission outlined some potential problems with companies that collect and sell people’s data, but say it’s only a first step.

After the FTC released its call for new legislation on “data brokers”, Center for Digital Democracy executive director Jeffrey Chester called the effort “insufficient.” “The real problem is that data brokers -- including Google and Facebook -- have embraced a business model designed to collect and use everything about us and our friends -- 24/7,” he said. “Legislation is required to help stem the tide of business practices purposeful designed to make a mockery out of the idea of privacy for Americans.”

American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel Christopher Calabrese said that the FTC itself needed to be doing more with its current powers “to root out bad practices now.” That could include action under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, he said, which bans various forms of discrimination that the FTC alleged are made possible through data merchants’ repackaging of consumers' information.

“Strongly enforcing those laws is a first step toward curbing the harms that come from the buying and selling of detailed personal profiles of every nearly every American,” Calabrese said.

China is hitting back against the United States’ spying operations, days after the Obama Administration escalated bubbling cyber tensions with charges against a team of Chinese hackers. In a report issued by the China Academy of Cyber Space, Beijing accused the US of running “unscrupulous secret surveillance programs” that “flagrantly infringe international laws, seriously impinge on human rights and put global cyber security under threat.”

“America's spying operations have gone far beyond the legal rationale of ‘anti-terrorism’ and have exposed the ugly face of its pursuit of self-interest in complete disregard for moral integrity,” the agency said. “As such, they deserved to be rejected and condemned by the whole world.”

The Chinese organization specifically criticized a number of the programs revealed by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, including the government’s snooping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, plugging into fiber networks used by companies like Yahoo and Google and targeting Chinese firms like telecom giant Huawei. It also alleged that the US specifically targets “the Chinese government and Chinese leaders, Chinese companies, scientific research institutes, ordinary netizens, and a large number of cell phone users.”

“America must provide explanations for its surveillance activities, cease spying operations that seriously infringe upon human rights, and refrain from causing stress and antagonism in global cyber space,” the agency said in its report, called “America’s Global Surveillance Record.”

Republicans in the Senate aren’t thinking about using the appropriations process to block the Federal Communications Commission from issuing new regulations on Internet service providers.

The top GOP senators on the Appropriations Committee and the subcommittee overseeing the FCC both told The Hill that they don’t expect a rider preventing the commission from moving forward with the effort.

The world’s first investment fund that focuses solely on the virtual currency bitcoin is bringing some lobbying muscle to Washington.

Falcon Global Capital director Brett Stapper filed paperwork to lobby Congress and federal agencies, according to federal lobbying disclose forms. The company is the second to formally declare that it is lobbying on the virtual currency, after MasterCard had five lobbyists it hired focus on the cryptocurrency in April.

According to the paperwork, the San Diego-based investment fund will focus on “education and understanding of Bitcoin and other crypto-graphic based currencies.” Falcon markets itself as being able to give clients “an easy entry and exit point into the exciting and fast growing Bitcoin markets while having their investment secured in our Insured Bitcoin vault.” The company’s team sees “Bitcoin as a disruptive force in the way currency is stored, transferred, and regulated around the globe,” it adds on its website.

A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation to crack down on people and businesses that steal valuable economic secrets from American companies.

They say that the Deter Cyber Theft Act is necessary to protect US firms from foreign hackers who try to break in, steal their valuable secrets and strategies and then ship that information abroad.

The bill comes days after the Obama Administration filed landmark charges against a team of Chinese hackers for stealing trade secrets from American companies.

“It is time to fight back to protect American businesses and American innovation,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI), in a statement. “Battling the wave of computer espionage targeting the American economy requires law enforcement actions such as the indictment, and it requires action by Congress to hit those who profit from these crimes where they’ll feel it: in the wallet.”

Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sens John McCain (R-AZ) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) joined Sen Levin to introduce the bill. The Deter Cyber Theft Act would allow the Treasury Department to impose sanctions and freeze monetary assets of people behind the cyber snooping. Additionally, it would require the director of national intelligence to publish an annual report naming which countries target US company information through computer espionage, as well as a watch list of egregious offenders, how stolen information is being used and what the federal government is doing about it.

Sen Charles Schumer (D-NY) called on US Trade Representative Michael Froman to file a case against China over its cyber spying.

Sen Schumer urged Froman to file a case against Beijing at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in response to cyberattacks on US businesses.

"The sanctioning of these attacks, in which Chinese military officials have illegally gathered corporate information from members of the US solar, nuclear and metal industries is a threat not just to these specific companies, but to our entire economy," Sen Schumer wrote.

The Justice Department issued criminal indictments on five members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army for online theft of trade secrets from US firms.

Sen Schumer said that since China won't extradite those involved to go on trial here, US government officials have to seek damages through a WTO suit. "Cyber-attacks from China and other nations could prove crippling to American businesses in the years to come, so we need real teeth in our response,” Sen Schumer said. "DOJ did the right thing in filing these indictments, but the only way to really punish China for these outrageous attacks is through the WTO."