California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed AB-856 Tuesday. The bill, which closes a loophole in existing law by clarifying paparazzi are trespassing when flying a drone over private property, was authored by Democratic Assembly member Ian Calderon. “Paparazzi have used drones for years to invade the privacy and capture pictures of public persons in their most private of activities -- despite existing law,” Calderon said in a news release Tuesday. AB-856 prohibits drones from being used to fly over fences, bypass gates and travel into private sanctuaries to peer into windows, capture goings on and otherwise spy on the private lives of public persons, Calderon said.
NTIA plans a daylong regional broadband workshop in California to help communities expand their broadband capacity and utilization, it said in a notice in Wednesday's Federal Register. The workshop will be Nov. 17 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. PST in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, NTIA said.
The Broadband Tech Summit will be Oct. 14 at the Utah Valley Convention Center in Provo, said the event website. The Utah Broadband Outreach Center is hosting the event to outline changes in the telecom industry, it said. Among the speakers will be state Rep. Stephen Handy (R); John Windhausen, Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition-executive director; Brian Gibbons, NTIA-senior communications policy specialist; and Andy Spurgeon, Broadband USA-director of operations.
State commissions should require incumbent carriers to file their VoIP interconnection agreements for review, make them public and make them available for opt-in by competitors, said a white paper released by Gillan Associates and written by economist Joseph Gillan. The paper cites several instances where Verizon failed to disclose VoIP interconnection agreements with state commissions as required under Section 252 of the Telecom Act. Verizon in California revealed it has at least 11 unfiled IP agreements for the exchange of voice traffic with other competitors and wireless carriers, the paper said. The paper raises no new arguments and gets the law wrong, said a Verizon spokesman. The FCC ordered earlier this year that interconnection obligations for VoIP providers are unsettled and the commission has declined to mandate IP VoIP interconnection arrangements, the spokesman said. Gillan said the paper is a synthesis of his work from a variety of state proceedings for his clients.
The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) is supporting Charter Communications buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable. Bringing higher-speed Internet at no additional cost to subscribers "is squarely in the public interest," NCSL said in an FCC filing posted Monday in docket 15-149. Citing Charter's "faster internet speeds, and their commitment to expanding Wi-Fi in public places," NCSL said the cable company "has been recognized ... as being the best provider in the nation. Expanding the Charter umbrella only further expands their capability to offer a superior product and experience to more Americans." It also doesn't "present any significant antitrust concerns," NCSL said. Other groups of many sorts have recently been backing the deal (see 1509250040).
The Washington, D.C., City Council’s proposal to heavily regulate Airbnb is an “atrocious public policy” that will stifle innovation and prevent necessary competition in the hospitality industry, said CEA President Gary Shapiro in a news release Thursday. "Airbnb helps D.C. visitors find affordable accommodations, while allowing D.C. citizens to earn supplemental income while sharing their love of this city,” Shapiro said. “Legislating higher prices and fewer choices” will harm D.C.’s reputation as a tech-friendly, pro-business city, he said.
More work lies ahead "to ensure that no one is left behind in this digital revolution" and "the need for speed" will continue to increase, said NTIA Tuesday after a broadband summit it helped organize the previous day (see 1509280060). "When we started the Recovery Act grants program in 2009, the FCC still defined broadband at a speed less than 1 Mbps. Today the FCC recommends download speeds of 25 Mbps. At that rate, nearly 51 million Americans still do not have access to a wired broadband connection." About 250 broadband experts attended Next Century Cities and NTIA's Digital New England Summit in Maine Monday, the agency said in a blog post Tuesday. The event was the third in a series of regional workshops that NTIA is hosting across the country as part of its BroadbandUSA program, it said. The effort builds on NTIA’s broadband grant programs, which were funded by money from the 2009 Recovery Act, it said. NTIA invested more than $4 billion in about 230 projects across the country that have built critical network infrastructure, opened or upgraded public computer centers, and established broadband adoption and digital inclusion programs. The State Broadband Initiative Program invested $300 million to help states collect broadband data for the National Broadband Map and expand broadband capacity, the agency said. The grantees deployed more than 114,000 miles of network miles, connected nearly 26,000 community anchor institutions such as schools and hospitals, and installed or upgraded more than 47,000 computers in public access centers, the agency said. Grantees also enrolled hundreds of thousands of people in broadband services, it said.
Indiana Fiber Network (IFN) interconnected with Iowa Network Services through Indatel in Chicago, said IFN in a Tuesday news release. Indatel is a group of rural LECs nationwide that helps get people connected in rural areas.
The Massachusetts Constitution requires a warrant for tracking a person’s location using cell site location information (CSLI), unless law enforcement is searching a time period of six hours or less, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in an opinion in Commonwealth v. Estabrook Monday. Attorneys for Adam Bradley and Jason Estabrook argued that law enforcement shouldn't have been able to search or seize their phone records without first obtaining a warrant (see 1505070048). Arguing on behalf of the commonwealth, Jamie Michael Charles said because law enforcement knew the time of the murder they believed Bradley and Estabrook committed, they collected two weeks' worth of cellphone information but searched only a six-hour time frame around the time of the murder, so a warrant wasn’t needed. The American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation have written amicus briefs asking the court to close the six-hours-or-less loophole in the state’s warrant requirements for cellphones as authorized under Commonwealth v. Augustine (see 1504270048). The court partially agreed with the ACLU and EFF, saying the commonwealth’s request of two weeks of CSLI violates the state constitution, even if just six hours' worth of CSLI is used during a trial. In a blog post Monday, EFF Staff Attorney Andrew Crocker applauded that part of the court’s opinion, saying, “Too often law enforcement and intelligence agencies successfully argue that they should be able to access large amounts of private information as long as they only use a smaller amount.” However, Crocker expressed concern with the court’s decision not to end the six-hour loophole authorized in Augustine as well as the court’s decision to add a footnote in its opinion saying the exception to the warrant requirement for CSLI applies only to phone call CSLI and not registration CSLI. “Why should you have more protection when you walk around playing Words with Friends than when you actually exchange some words with a friend over the phone,” Crocker said.
The Oklahoma Corporation Commission Public Utility Department is seeking comment on how to resolve problems with special universal services funding from the state USF, the department said in a notice of inquiry earlier this month. The commission is looking for recommendations on payments from the fund that affect telemedicine and Internet access to public schools and public libraries, the NOI said. Some questions ask commenters to address how the school funding should be based, what the target bandwidth for libraries in the state should be, and whether the state should adopt FCC telemedicine values. The commission also is reviewing how to define "public interest," as it can reject a request if there is a lack of it. A hearing is set for Dec. 1.