Privacy advocates and the government faced off in oral argument Wednesday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. The case, Under Seal v. Eric Holder, Jr., was on the National Security Letter authority that the FBI uses in the course of government surveillance. Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl argued to limit the authority -- he “will urge a federal appeals court today to uphold a groundbreaking ruling that the National Security Letter (NSL) provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional,” an EFF media advisory said (http://bit.ly/1rXAxFb). EFF initially predicted that audio from the oral argument would be streamed live, but it was not. EFF was told audio would be available later, it said. The judges were Sandra Ikuta, Mary Murguia and N.R. Smith.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study lends credence to the view that Netflix “allowed congestion to increase until it affected its performance” in order to “gain bargaining leverage” with Comcast, wrote Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology Executive Director Fred Campbell in an op-ed (http://bit.ly/1scg0xN) in the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman Wednesday. Campbell cited an MIT and Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis study (http://bit.ly/1oGQoJG) that said Netflix forced its traffic “through clogged delivery routes, when less congested channels were available.” Netflix was not immediately available for comment.
The NSA listed several safeguards to prevent improper surveillance of individuals, in an NSA Director of Civil Liberties and Privacy Office report released Tuesday (http://1.usa.gov/1oO6I6v). NSA employees whose training is incomplete or outdated aren’t allowed to use targeted surveillance systems and such surveillance must fall under the requirements in the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, it said. An NSA senior analyst or supervisor must review all targeting requests before they take place, it said. Senior officers must review data recovered by such targeting to verify that the data contains “foreign intelligence on foreign targets,” said the report. If an individual is mistakenly targeted, those involved in the surveillance must end operations; if the mistaken individual is a U.S. citizen, all collected data must be removed from NSA systems, it said. Initial collection and related decisions are “auditable,” it said.
NTIA will seek comment on the current and potential availability of communications services in the Arctic region, in a notice scheduled for Friday’s Federal Register (http://bit.ly/1xFRTeo). Comments are due 30 days after the publication. The NTIA efforts follow a January implementation plan from the White House seeking an assessment of “current and potential availability of telecommunications services in the Arctic region, including local and long-distance terrestrial, commercial mobile cellular, public safety services, emergency services, navigational safety and satellite voice, and broadband channel availability by the end of 2014.” NTIA also seeks comment on investment in the region and management of Arctic spectrum.
The FCC has been using “sandbox thinking,” used in the technology sector to test out ideas in practice, but the agency needs to do more, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel told the Democracy Symposium Tuesday, according to prepared remarks posted by the agency (http://bit.ly/1mMLv0X). Citing broadcast channel-sharing in Los Angeles and AT&T’s IP trials, she said that “this sandbox thinking is yielding dividends -- at the FCC and in the communications sector. But we need to expand it.” Rosenworcel said that “if we need our regulatory state to be more agile and more innovative, why not take a page from technology itself?"
Wearables, as the “advanced consumer face” of the Internet of Things, will rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.56 percent and “cross” $11.6 billion in global sales in 2020, MarketsandMarkets said Friday in a report (http://bit.ly/1u3gc3e). The U.S. is more than 72 percent of the market, making it the “single largest revenue base” for global wearables, it said. The U.S. also “is expected to maintain its dominance” through 2020, but Asia-Pacific, “with China leading the way, is likely to grow at the highest CAGR during the next six years,” it said.
New Media Rights, a nonprofit at the California Western School of Law, told the White House that broadband should be reclassified as a Communications Act Title II telecom service, in comments on the Obama administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council’s request for information on U.S. innovation strategy. It attached the comments it made to the FCC on the issue. Reclassification “is necessary because internet access is a distinctly different service from other ‘information services,'” the group said. “Broadband internet access has been wrongly grouped together with services that like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and others and have thus been able to maintain enormous market power while being subject to very little oversight.” Several university groups focused on the importance of a strong patent system. “Unfortunately, in recent years, legitimate patent holders across the spectrum, including universities and their licensees, have been victimized by abusive practices that impair the ability of the U.S. patent system to foster innovation and economic competitiveness,” they told the White House (http://bit.ly/1t2Uk3I). “Any proposals targeting abusive practices must be structured so that they curb abuses without undermining the ability of legitimate patent holders to enforce their patents and, by extension, diminishing the value of patents.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation took aim at “low-quality patents” and focused on open access. “EFF urges the Administration to support needed legislative reform to improve patent quality and reduce abusive litigation,” it said (http://bit.ly/1vmfoov).
The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) structure, policies and procedures are consistent with standards in the Inspector General Act of 1978, but there are areas for improvement, said the GAO Wednesday. It recommended that the DHS OIG establish additional automated and supervisory controls to protect the identities of DHS employees who file complaints, having found that existing procedures involve manual recording and are thus subject to “human error.” GAO recommended the OIG develop a policy for obtaining legal advice from counsel, having found that OIG doesn’t have such a policy in place. Twenty-eight reports dealt with IT management, while two dealt with infrastructure protection, GAO said (http://1.usa.gov/1ruR8RV). OIG told GAO it’s revising its online complaint forms to protect employee confidentiality.
The Telecommunications Industry Association praised the Senate Commerce Committee for its unanimous clearance of the E-Label Act (S-2583) Wednesday (CD Sept 18 p8). “The bill will enhance the ability of ICT [information and communications technology] manufacturers to innovate and compete while increasing access to device information for consumers,” TIA President Grant Seiffert said in a statement Thursday (http://bit.ly/ZsgDbH). “The current FCC requirement for manufacturers to either etch or print mandatory regulatory markings on the exterior of devices unnecessarily increases costs, limits design options and ineffectively conveys important information to consumers.” The House passed companion legislation earlier this year.
Sony Electronics in Park Ridge, New Jersey, and its Tokyo parent are jointly patenting technology for a TV, set-top box or DVR that suppresses broadcast or recorded TV commercials and claims to do so much more effectively than current systems. Sony’s system, described in U.S. application 2014/0064705 filed in November 2013, names Brant Candelore of San Diego as the inventor. “Most every business entity advertises to promote products or services, and often pays significant sums of money on such activities to broadcasters and service providers,” said the patent. But consumers “are generally less entertained by advertising,” it said. “To most, an advertisement is an unwanted pause in a program with generally increased volume, and therefore, a significant inconvenience.” Current ad suppression systems, which mute the sound, change the channel or turn the TV off during a commercial are “laborious and prone to error given that a user must guess as to when the commercial break will end,” said Sony. “Despite the ability to fast-forward through commercials, users must still deal with undershoot and overshoot problems.” Thus, despite the advantages of time-shifting over viewing in real-time, “commercial suppression in recorded content is still a manual and laborious task that is prone to error, thereby exacerbating the annoyance and inconvenience brought by commercials in the first place,” it said. Instead, the patented system relies on downloading and storing a library of templates of known commercials, the Sony document said. Downloading is automatic and ongoing, by Internet connection, and the templates contain both audio and video information on the ad’s content and duration, it said. The program being watched is continually compared with the stored templates, and when a match is found, the sound is automatically muted or playback fast-forwarded and the screen blanked until the template signals the end of the ad and switches the set back to normal viewing mode. Attempts to reach inventor Candelore were unsuccessful. Sony representatives didn’t immediately comment.