Technology companies and civil liberties and privacy advocates sent yet another letter to Congress, pressing legislators to bring two email privacy bills to the floor (S-607, HR-1852) (http://bit.ly/XprPEe). The letter -- with signers ranging from Adobe to search engine DuckDuckGo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- is the most recent letter urging congressional leaders to allow a vote on the bills, which would update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to require a warrant for law enforcement to access remotely stored data. “They would pass overwhelmingly, proving to Americans and the rest of the world that the U.S. legal system values privacy in the digital age,” the letter said.
Communities with widely available gigabit access have a per-capita gross domestic product 1.1 percent higher than communities with little to no gigabit availability, said a study released Thursday by Fiber to the Home Council Americas. The study examined 55 communities in nine states, a news release said (http://bit.ly/1wI8FJk). The 14 communities with gigabit “enjoyed approximately $1.4 billion in additional GDP when gigabit broadband became widely available,” said Council President Heather Gold.
Qualcomm’s Vuforia mobile vision platform will enable developers to build augmented-reality applications for a new generation of digital eyewear, Qualcomm said Thursday (http://bit.ly/1uLsmxv). Vuforia will provide “advanced computer vision functionality for recognizing images and objects in the user’s field of view,” Qualcomm said. It also uses Snapdragon processors to “minimize the motion-to-photon latency that is so essential” in delivering an “authentic” augmented-reality effect, it said. “The promise of digital eyewear is to create a heads-up display for our daily lives,” it said. “While the realization of this promise remains in the future, Vuforia is taking a big step in the right direction by enabling a first generation of applications for consumer and enterprise use."
Online identification security company Ping Identity raised /style5 million in a funding round, said a company news release Thursday (http://bit.ly/1s8ArgX). The financing was led by KKR & Co., and included Ten-Eleven Ventures, it said. The company’s PingFederate tool links a consumer’s online identity across a variety of identification management systems to protect against data breaches, it said.
Three Congressional Democrats back a petition to the FCC (http://bit.ly/UO5y1O) from Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause and the Sunlight Foundation, they told FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in a letter Thursday. “Adoption of this petition would enhance campaign disclosure by requiring cable, satellite, and broadcast radio stations to post existing political file documents to the FCC’s online database,” said the letter from Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., House Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif. (http://1.usa.gov/1p2Eg0g). “As of July 1, 2014, all broadcast television stations are already subject to this simple requirement which greatly improves the accessibility of the political advertising data disclosed in the political file.” The 2014 midterm elections are poised to be the “most expensive” in the history of the U.S., the Democratic lawmakers said. The FCC should “consider taking steps to enhance the accessibility of online political file documents,” they said.
T-Mobile unveiled its Personal CellSpot service and launched a free Gogo in-flight texting service. Personal CellSpot is “like a T-Mobile tower in your house,” T-Mobile said Wednesday in a news release (http://t-mo.co/1qZsb0r). It lets users get “full bars” experience “wherever you choose even beyond the reach of any cellular network,” it said. The in-flight service lets T-Mobile customers send and receive unlimited text and picture messages on any Gogo-equipped flight on U.S. airlines, it said.
Several minority-related organizations implored the Senate in a Wednesday letter (http://bit.ly/1BNgkpF) to pass the Internet Tax Freedom Act to extend the moratorium on Internet access taxes (WID Sept 9 p6). The U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the National Black Chamber of Commerce were among the letter’s signers. “As minority communities continue to struggle economically, it is critical that no new taxes be levied on Internet access,” it said. House Joint Resolution 124 (http://1.usa.gov/1qFpBNo), which would temporarily extend the ban on Internet access taxes through Dec. 11, was debated on the House floor Tuesday. Congress has four legislative days to pass any legislation before the moratorium expires Nov. 1.
Internet Security Alliance President Larry Clinton praised White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel Tuesday for saying the U.S. needs to take a more economics-based approach to cybersecurity, but added that there hasn’t been “adequate” follow-through on President Barack Obama’s 2013 cybersecurity executive order. Daniel had said during a Billington cybersecurity event Tuesday that improving cybersecurity is difficult in the U.S. because people still don’t fully understand the economics and psychology of cybersecurity. Daniel said the U.S. has improved its cybersecurity through its implementation of the executive order, particularly via the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework (WID Sept 17 p7). There’s “no evidence that using the Framework is cost effective and there has been no obvious work to develop the market incentives called for by the President,” Clinton said in a statement. “Without these critical pieces the simple existence of the Framework is unlikely to generate significantly improved cyber security.” A similar process to the one NIST used to develop the framework could be used to “address the economic issues surrounding use of the Framework, such as cost-effectiveness and incentives,” he said.
Unrestricted global data flows are critical to the health of e-commerce, said eBay Executive Director-Global Public Policy Lab Brian Bieron, testifying Wednesday before the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade (http://1.usa.gov/1qZmcZr). “Government restrictions on where companies can process data “would greatly limit the many benefits of the Internet,” Bieron said, in prepared remarks. “Imposing data localization requirements on Internet-enabled businesses is problematic from both an economic and security perspective.” Bieron said the problem is not remote. “Localization barriers are actually proliferating most among some of the larger and more developed countries,” he said. “G20 countries are responsible for 65 percent of the protectionist measures, and at the same time, they are also the countries which are the worst affected by protectionism.” Subcommittee Chairman Lee Terry, R-Neb., said in his opening statement “the European Commission, for example, has argued that localization of data could be a way to promote domestic industry and create jobs” (http://1.usa.gov/1uHO4T7). The hearing was to discuss the role of cross-border data flows in the ongoing negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trade in Services Agreement, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and U.S.-EU safe harbor agreement, said a background memo (http://1.usa.gov/1r1GJLJ). “I am hopeful that Congress can send a unified message to current and future trading partners that trade barriers will not be tolerated, and that we will protect our economic interest in data flows,” Terry said.
The FCC should craft net neutrality rules that “encourage investment in abundant bandwidth,” but allowing paid prioritization could “create incentives for providers to maintain scarcity and congestion on their networks, in order to sell services,” Google executives told Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel and aide David Goldman. Google Fiber’s deployment “suggests that it is both workable and economically desirable to manage a broadband network without prioritization and consistent with open Internet principles,” Google said at the meeting in Mountain View, California, where the company is based, recounted a filing posted Tuesday to docket 14-28 (http://bit.ly/1u1bHY4). Company attendees included Craig Barratt, senior vice president-access and energy. Communications Act Title II is a “flexible, light-touch approach for the preservation of open communications networks,” Free Press said in net neutrality reply comments (http://bit.ly/1ASdX2E). Common-carrier principles are “perfectly suited and absolutely necessary to maintaining nondiscrimination principles and nondiscriminatory outcomes” for all telecom services, “not just those delivered on copper telephone wires,” the group said. The FCC has “tremendous ability to tailor Title II,” and “extraordinary power to forbear not only from its own rules, but even from statutes and congressional acts themselves.” Section 706 “will not work for the protections contemplated,” Free Press said. Some want a Section 706 approach, as other replies to the net neutrality NPRM showed (WID Sept 17 p4).