Two warring Senate proposals on surveillance may have some common ground, one sponsor recently said, days before a hearing expected to touch on the overhauls. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., took a shot at the legislation of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., during this weekend’s C-SPAN Newsmakers. The Senate was also expected to have addressed a motion Monday after 5:30 p.m. to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to S-1197, the National Defense Authorization Act, which may be a vehicle for surveillance law updates. Senate leaders have said they want the defense reauthorization bill passed before Thanksgiving.

ORLANDO -- The prison calling order and the rural call completion order were FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn’s most valuable contributions to states as the acting chairwoman, she said during Monday’s NARUC general session moderated by Telecom Committee Chairman John Burke. In her five-month term as acting FCC chairwoman, Clyburn did more than a “few chairs did on a permanent appointment,” said Burke, a Vermont Public Service Board commissioner. Clyburn got her start as a commissioner with the South Carolina Public Service Commission, so it was “not long ago that she was one of us,” said Burke.

As the Commerce and State departments move forward with their effort to finalize changes and new rules to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), satellite companies must be properly prepared to understand the enforcement, compliance and implementation aspects of the rules, a government official and compliance experts said Monday at a Washington Space Business Roundtable event. By the end of the year, the agencies plan to complete a final draft of the new rules, which mainly focus on moving satellite components and technology that aren’t crucial to military operations and national security from the munitions list to the less restrictive Commerce Control List (CCL), said Kevin Wolf, assistant secretary of commerce for export administration.

ORLANDO -- The NARUC Telecom Committee approved resolutions on federalism and surveillance at its meeting Monday. The federalism resolution approved a yearlong effort to update a paper on federalism and how the states interact with the FCC and the industry. The surveillance resolution, introduced by Indiana Utility Regulatory Commissioner Larry Landis, was also passed by the committee with major changes to reflect concern that customer proprietary network information (CPNI) restrictions are being breached by telco cooperation with the National Security Agency. All NARUC commissioners will vote on the resolutions at the closing session Wednesday.

IPv6 is making “steady progress, nothing spectacular,” said Alain Fiocco, senior director of Cisco’s IPv6 program, in an interview. By October, 16 months after the June 2012 world IPv6 launch, the number of access networks that managed measurable IPv6 traffic toward the measurers at Google, Facebook and Yahoo had jumped from 69 to 197, Internet Society Chief Internet Technology Officer Leslie Daigle told us. That 1.5-2 percent of Internet users now use the technology is “significant growth in relative terms” over the past year, but “in absolute terms it’s still 1 in 50,” said Geoff Huston, chief scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Center. Whether the business case for IPv6 has finally been made remains to be seen, he said.

ORLANDO -- States need to remain at the forefront of the debate on cramming, slamming and porting regulations to protect consumers at the state and federal level, said panelists at the Sunday committee session at NARUC’s annual meeting. The industry needs incentives through laws and regulations to “get this right,” said Craig Graziano, NASUCA consumer protection committee chairman. “The industry needs to develop methods of authentication to actually authenticate and a cost-benefit analysis.” Comments were due to the FCC Monday to get an update on an NPRM issued in April 2012 on wireless and VoIP regulation (CD June 28/12 p9).

Though increasing competition and the scarcity of spectrum threaten the future of broadcasting, it’s likely to continue in some form, said panelists at a conference Friday at George Mason University. Preston Padden, former broadcast executive and director of the Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition, challenged the idea that broadcasting is in trouble. “Broadcast networks stay with their local TV station partners not out of sentiment, but because those stations … overwhelmingly dominate consumer viewership,” said Padden.

Radio interference is an issue that won’t go away and will only grow in significance, speakers said on a panel Thursday at the Silicon Flatirons Center. Speakers said the FCC has to balance the benefits with the risks of new technologies and devices, but that the argument can turn political.

The House Communications Subcommittee is inviting all five FCC members for a December hearing, said Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. He hasn’t met FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler or Republican Commissioner Mike O'Rielly, both confirmed earlier this month, he told reporters Thursday night. Walden emphasized the changes to the video market and an upcoming hearing on FirstNet, touching on a wide range of topics during the news briefing. Also of concern are the FCC’s spectrum auctions and the agency’s operations under Wheeler. The hearings on FCC oversight and FirstNet were expected (CD Oct 18 p3).

A broadcaster agreement to pay $110,000, train employees and take other compliance actions to settle an Enforcement Bureau indecency investigation is the first FCC action on such content in several years and a rare instance of the commission’s acting against non-English programming, said experts we interviewed Friday. The night before, the bureau released a consent decree where Liberman Broadcasting agreed to develop an indecency manual, name a compliance officer, train staff, report future noncompliance and file four reports over the three-year term of the settlement. Notably, said one of the indecency experts, broadcast lawyer John Crigler of Garvey Schubert, the licensee admitted it violated indecency rules for the now-discontinued talk show-type program that complaints said featured scantily-clad women with almost no obscurance of sexual parts and much unfiltered cursing in Spanish.