Expanding the amount of information on political ad sales TV stations are required to post online would needlessly burden broadcasters, said NAB, Raycom, LIN Media and others Monday in comments in docket 00-168 on possible changes to the online political file rule. “No additional burdens on broadcasters can be justified by the bare desire to amplify the political file’s ancillary benefits,” said NAB, responding to a proposal from the Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition(PIPAC), Sunlight Foundation and Center for Effective Government to have stations post political ad sales data using detailed, standardized forms of the type used for disclosures by the Federal Election Commission.

Seamless measurement methods of streaming TV need to catch up with new technology, said industry experts at a CableFax conference Tuesday in New York. Nielsen will expand its ratings system to smartphones and tablets in 2014, said Brian Fuhrer, senior vice president. The challenge with streaming across multiple platforms and TV Everywhere is monetizing the content, said cable executives. “Moving from live linear to online on-demand is a tremendous opportunity for a new layer of advertising and how we are going to track is going to be a big challenge that is going to require more collaboration,” said Fuhrer.

U.S. surveillance practices must be reconfigured in many ways to end a system gone wrong, said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Tuesday. “In my view, and I've discussed this with the White House, the [Patriot Act] Section 215 bulk collection of Americans’ phone records must end,” Leahy, an author of surveillance overhaul legislation, told a crowd at a Georgetown University Law School event. “It’s not making America safer.” He and former members of the Church Committee, which helped create the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the 1970s, advocated for major changes to the transparency and oversight tools the Church Committee created.

Proponents of LightSquared’s uplink operations for terrestrial handset use clashed with the GPS industry over the out-of-band-emissions (OOBE) limits necessary to protect the band used by GPS from interference. Reply comments in docket 12-340 were due Monday.

Verizon and AT&T will spread their wireless competition to LTE video services in 2014 using recently acquired spectrum, said their chief executives Tuesday at a Goldman Sachs investor conference in New York. The carriers are lining up content deals, and Verizon expects to deliver the Super Bowl to subscribers in February, CEO Lowell McAdam said. AT&T will begin deployments by mid-2014 and expects the service will “mature to scale” within three years, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told us.

The FTC should reject a company’s request for what would be the agency’s first approval under a new Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act rule, which became effective this summer (CD July 1 p1), for a way to verify that kids under 13 received parental permission to register for websites, said two privacy advocacy groups. The Center for Digital Democracy and Electronic Privacy Information Center opposed the June 28 COPPA request (http://1.usa.gov/19y5qE2) by AssertID, that the agency find its verifiable parental consent method is acceptable, on privacy and other grounds. CDD and EPIC said the company would make some parents achieve a so-called trust score before viewing disclosure and privacy policies of the websites the child wants to access.

A special committee of the FirstNet board took a long look at allegations of improper behavior by members of the board, raised by board member Paul Fitzgerald in April, and concluded there was nothing amiss. The report has been ready since at least Sept. 12 (CD Sept 13 p4), but was not released until Monday at a special telephone meeting of the board. Meanwhile, FirstNet is looking at communications problems at last week’s shootings at the Washington Navy Yard, General Manager Bill D'Agostino said Monday.

The FCC has a role to play in encouraging the development of mobile broadband standards and harmonization of spectrum usage, and in pushing for multistakeholder groups to investigate interference limits, members of the Technological Advisory Council said Monday. Small cell applications -- such as the ability to track user positioning by monitoring the location of his cellphone -- isn’t going to happen anytime soon, the “Spectrum Frontiers” Working Group found.

Deals with investment firms, or “spectrum speculators,” may be a viable option for some noncommercial TV station license holders that intend to sell their stations or participate in the upcoming broadcast incentive auctions, said some broadcast industry professionals and a media broker. Firms, including LocusPoint and NRJ TV, are eying some noncommercial TV stations as a means of benefiting from the auction, they said.

Several patent licensing firms plan to start an association to represent their interests in Washington, patent assertion entities (PAEs) and their allies said in recent interviews. The first-of-its-kind group, to be called the IP Rights Council, is soliciting membership from PAEs around the U.S., one PAE told us. A Washington lobbyist familiar with the nascent organization said the group isn’t ready to disclose its formation, and acknowledged that several patent licensing firms are interested in an organization that could help them tell their story as Congress and the administration examine patent assertion issues.