U.S. surveillance and transparency practices faced fierce new debate this week as intelligence officials released another order reiterating the legality of government surveillance and saying telcos did not challenge the process. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted the Aug. 29 opinion (http://1.usa.gov/1guBs7I) of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Claire Eagan on its Tumblr page Tuesday. Government surveillance faced challenges on multiple fronts, meanwhile, as LinkedIn announced legal action with the hopes of disclosing more data about how many government requests it receives.

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers played down the significance of a judge’s summary judgment in favor of Pandora in a rate dispute. Pandora earlier Wednesday claimed a partial victory in the dispute after Judge Denise Cote of U.S. District Court in New York granted summary judgment Tuesday. The decision upheld Pandora’s right to perform all compositions in the ASCAP repertory, said Pandora.

LAS VEGAS -- T-Mobile has to focus on sub-1 GHz spectrum if it wants to compete with Verizon Wireless and AT&T, and T-Mobile Vice President Kathleen Ham offered a concrete reason why during a panel discussion at the Competitive Carriers Association annual meeting Tuesday. T-Mobile has only a single license below 1 GHz, a 700 MHz A-block license in Boston, acquired as part of T-Mobile’s acquisition of MetroPCS.

ORLANDO, FLA. -- Gridlock in Congress over the sequester will make it impossible for any telecom laws to pass this year, said Carolyn Coleman, National League of Cities (NLC) director-federal advocacy, at the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors/NATOA conference Wednesday. Republicans want to defund or delay the Affordable Care Act in exchange for lifting of the sequester, said Coleman. “We hope that there is some bargain to keep the government functioning, but none of us would be surprised by a government shutdown,” she said. “It works the same way for the debt ceiling, which will reach its limit in the middle of October, where if the administration would delay Obamacare, the Republicans would increase the debt ceiling."

Many corporations unfamiliar with the process at Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers/ICANN weighed in on proposed risk mitigation for name collision issues, during the public comment period which closed Tuesday. USTelecom, General Electric and several electric utilities, as well as regular ICANN participants like Microsoft, Yahoo and Verisign, asked the organization to delay its new generic top-level domains program to allow additional study of the name collision issue. New gTLD applicants issued similarly broad comments taking issue with the risk mitigation proposal and urging ICANN to move forward more quickly with the delegation process.

"Governments and industry can do more” to tackle cyberattacks, European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) Executive Director Udo Helmbrecht said in an interview Wednesday. ENISA’s interim threat landscape review for mid-year 2013, an analysis of 50 reports covering the first half of this year, to be published Thursday, will show significant changes since its last full report in 2012, it said. Among those are the growing shift from botnets to malicious URLs, and the use of peer-to-peer and TOR-based botnets, it said. This first “taste” of current developments is intended to warn stakeholders as early as possible so they can take countermeasures, Helmbrecht said in a press release. In addition, he told us, a bit more regulation is needed because industry self-regulation isn’t working.

ORLANDO -- Social media played an active role in keeping citizens informed during the Boston bombings and Superstorm Sandy over the past year, said speakers at the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors/NATOA conference Tuesday. Social media awareness has picked up in a way that few people aren’t signed up for Facebook and Twitter in New Jersey, said Richard Desimone, board member of community media distribution network Jersey Access Group. “Facebook became the primary communications source” during Sandy “because it was a major source of updating,” he said. “When you run a community, it’s important that you know what is happening with its citizens."

Industry efforts won’t be enough to solve the problems of patent assertion entities (PAEs), said developers and others at an Application Developers Alliance event Tuesday. Industry efforts to police the problem or eliminate overly vague patents might not be equally supported by companies with a proportionately larger share of the patents, said Van Lindberg, Rackspace vice president-intellectual property. “It has to be government,” he said. “It has to be all of us agreeing that we're going to act in accord."

The FCC’s rural call completion order has been circulated, agency officials said Tuesday. The order will “enhance the FCC’s ability to investigate and crack down” on the problem of calls that don’t reach their rural destinations, said Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn in a written statement (http://bit.ly/17HI1li). A safe harbor would exempt carriers from reporting requirements if they use no more than two intermediate providers, an agency official told us.

Don’t expect the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act to be the vessel for all communications law changes, said House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., Tuesday. Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell had asked Walden at an American Enterprise Institute event whether telecom law would be best served by a comprehensive rewrite or in piecemeal legislation. McDowell congratulated Walden on the recent unanimous House vote approving the FCC Consolidated Reporting Act (CD Sept 11 p18). “These rewrites can take years,” McDowell noted, asking which path is better.