The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board plans a closed meeting Monday in Washington starting at 9:30 a.m. to continue PCLOB's in-depth and ongoing examination (see 1504080024) of specific counterterrorism activities related to executive order 12333, it said Thursday. President Ronald Reagan issued the EO in 1981 to authorize foreign intelligence investigations. EO 12333 essentially establishes the overall framework for U.S. intelligence activities, including when and how agencies can spy on people within the U.S., and provides policies on what data can be collected, kept and shared. PCLOB began the examination in April and a report may be released by the end of 2015.

The Visiting Nurse Service of New York signed a five-year agreement with Verizon Enterprise Solutions, the telco said in a news release Wednesday. The healthcare provider will outsource its IT network and wireless infrastructure to enable its point-of-care communications, said the company. Verizon said its services will give the Visiting Nurse Service a "more efficient way to manage communications between clinicians, employees and patients especially in the patient-care setting."

Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig, a strong net neutrality advocate and observer of Internet policy, on Monday ended his ambitions to compete against other Democratic contenders for the 2016 presidential nomination. He blamed Democrats for changing the rules and instituting provisions that wouldn't allow him any chance to compete in the second Democratic primary debate against such candidates as Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. “I must today end my campaign for the Democratic nomination and turn to the question of how best to continue to press for this reform now,” Lessig said in a video, referring to his focus on campaign finance overhaul. Lessig announced his interest in the nomination in August (see 1508110050). He didn't rule out the possibility of running as an independent.

The FCC proposed to change hearing aid compatibility (HAC) rules for both wireline and wireless handsets. The commission in an NPRM released Friday proposed in the wireline arena to: (1) adopt an industry standard developed by the Telecommunications Industry Association that "appears likely" to help people with hearing loss select phones “with sufficient volume control to meet their communication needs and provide greater regulatory certainty for the industry”; and (2) apply the agency’s phone volume control and other HAC requirements “to handsets used for VoIP services, pursuant to the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA).” For wireless, the FCC sought comment on a proposal to set a standard for handset volume control “to ensure more effective acoustic coupling between handsets and hearing aids or cochlear implants.” The commission also proposed to require manufacturers to use exclusively a 2011 wireless standard developed by an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) committee “to certify future handsets as hearing aid compatible; and eliminate the power-down exception if manufacturers are required to test and rate handsets exclusively" under that standard. Finally, to implement a CVAA provision and simplify the process for achieving handset compliance with HAC requirements, the FCC sought comment “on a process for enabling industry to use new or revised technical standards for assessing hearing aid compatibility compliance, prior to Commission approval of such standards.” Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said he supported most of the notice but partially dissented due to concerns that FCC proposals to implement CVAA Section 701(c) on standard setting and HAC compliance “may lead to an overly expansive interpretation of the statute,” permit “inappropriate Commission intervention in the standards process” and allow “excessive delegation to Commission staff.”

AT&T asked the FCC for an extra three months to file a rural call completion report for the third quarter. In a petition filed on Monday in docket 13-39, AT&T asked for a three-month waiver from a November 2013 rural call completion rule requiring "covered providers" to file quarterly reports on their compliance with duties to "record and retain specified information" on every long-distance toll-call attempt. Noting the commission allowed for a conduct "safe harbor" and waiver process to guard against undue regulatory burdens, AT&T said it was granted a previous six-month waiver Feb. 2 so it could implement a plan to "retain and report data based on a statistically valid sample of inter- and intrastate calls to rural and nonrural areas," which required "extensive system changes." But AT&T said "due to unexpected difficulties, that timeframe has proved to be insufficient to test and validate" its rural call completion data, so it needed another three months to complete its implementation work and file a quarterly report.

While the American Civil Liberties Union disagrees with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision to deny a motion for a preliminary injunction (see 1510290070), the group said all Americans should celebrate that bulk collection of call records ends in a few weeks. The injunction would have barred the government from collecting call records under the phone metadata program, required it to quarantine call records already collected under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and prohibited it from querying metadata obtained through the program using any phone number or other identifier associated with them. It’s now “up to the district court to address to what extent the government must purge the call records it collected unlawfully,” ACLU attorney Alex Abdo, who argued the case, said in an emailed statement to us. “In the meantime, the government still needs to rein in other overreaching NSA spying programs," he said.

An FCC order giving VoIP providers direct access to phone numbers was published in the Federal Register Thursday, triggering a Nov. 30 effective date. The order, which was approved by a 5-0 vote June 18, allows interconnected VoIP providers to obtain phone numbers directly from numbering administrators, rather than going through telco intermediaries (see 1506180060 and 1506220032).

GOP presidential contender Carly Fiorina slammed the FCC’s net neutrality order Wednesday during a debate among Republican candidates. “Government causes a problem, and then government steps in to solve the problem,” said Fiorina, former CEO at Hewlett-Packard and a former AT&T executive. “This is why, fundamentally, we have to take our government back. … Government trying to level the playing field between Internet and brick-and-mortar creates a problem. The FCC jumping in now and saying ‘we’re going to put 400 pages of regulation over the Internet’ is going to create massive problems. But guess who pushed for that regulation? The big Internet companies. This is what’s going on. Big and powerful use big and powerful government to their advantage.”

The FCC and the University of Colorado-Boulder Interdisciplinary Telecom Program will co-sponsor a summit on cybersecurity issues in the communications and public safety sectors Dec. 7, the agency said Tuesday. “The event will feature industry, public safety, academic and government thought leaders in the field of cybersecurity in a series of moderated panels, considering technical, practical, and policy issues related to the cybersecurity threats facing our commercial and public safety networks,” said a notice from the commission. The event will be in Boulder. More details are to follow.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other privacy advocates opposed to encryption back doors reached their goal Tuesday of receiving more than 100,000 signatures needed on their White House petition (see 1510260029). The groups will now receive an official White House response on their petition, which demands secret doors not be incorporated into technology.