In case you missed it, Friday’s Tech at night featured Q&A with Rep. Steve Scalise. Don’t miss is now.
Team Soros, assemble! Remember when it was “wrong” for AT&T to get spectrum by buying T-Mobile? Remember when I said it should be allowed because the Obama administration and the radicals were making it too hard to get spectrum any other way? Vindication, baby: The left unites to fight Verizon buying spectrum another way. Before the excuse was to prevent industry consolidation. Well, Verizon is buying from cable companies, not wireless phone providers.
Note that Verizon has strongly refuted their claims, including the dangerous, crypto-socialist idea that the FCC should be allowed to dictate to Verizon and Comcast an alternate transaction. Such as one to benefit T-Mobile.
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FCC reform advances in the House. Greg Walden’s FCC Process Reform Act is a needed bill, so I’m glad that it went from committee to the floor, and took minimal modification in passing. I like that it got an extra poke at FCC being more closed on FOIA requests than even CIA.
Locking in the reforms is important, and CTIA is right in saying we need a “more transparent, predictable regulatory process.”
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So we already had the coming FCC battle over Verizon’s attempts to acquire the spectrum it needs, the Senate fight over ‘cybersecurity,’ and a possible Congressional fight over Internet sales taxation. But now there’s a new issue to keep track of: the FTC is taking it upon itself to regulate the Internet on the grounds of protecting privacy. Jim Harper seems thinks it’s nothing new, but under the Obama administration, I’m more concerned. Still Adam Thierer also says it could have been worse, though, but also mentions those dirty words ‘personal responsibility.’ Can’t have that.
Democrats are eager to empower the Obama administration, of course. That’s why we need a Republican Senate to go with a Republican House.
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Previously on Tech at Night I linked to a story that suggested there was a split between Darrell Issa and Chuck Grassley on FCC transparency. It turns out the story I relied on, had it wrong. Oversight wasn’t grading transparency itself; the committee was grading the management of FOIA requests, and FCC did relatively well by having established processes for dealing with FOIA. and tracking the requests in a systematic way.
The Oversight committee was not saying that the FCC is open. Because, in fact as pointed out by Mario Diaz-Balart, FCC rejects more FOIA requests than CIA, amazingly enough. That’s a serious transparency problem.
Speaking of transparency, Eric Cantor is soliciting citizen co-sponsorship of the DATA Act which would try to get more data about government out into the open, where the public can apply oversight.
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Remember the SECURE IT bill, backed in the House by Marsha Blackburn and Mary Bono Mack, and in the Senate by John McCain and the gang? One of the key reasons I like the idea is that it enhances our options for prosecuting online crime. And contrary to ACLU hysteria, it’s not the Republican bill that is a threat to our liberties. Sharing reasonable, relevant information is not a problem. Guess what: information is the life blood of Internet defense. The Lieberman-Collins threat of an effective government take over of the Internet: that’s the problem.
Also a problem though are the attackers themselves: whether far away or based in an allied nation, information sharing is vital to defense. And when they’re domestic, criminal prosecution hurts them.
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ACTA. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is Darrell Issa’s next project, as he’s not happy about the treaty. So, he’s put the treaty online for all to see.
I still don’t know of any specific reason to oppose the treaty. My understanding is that it basically brings the west in on the DMCA. There may be details I’ve missed though. The best argument against the treaty is a process argument: it’s a bad precedent to pass a treaty kept from the public the way ACTA has been.
In much more amusing news, Anonymous and affiliated online terror cells continue to get rolled up, in some cases with the help of members and leaders already caught.
They’re not anonymous. They have names. They’re not legion. They are limited in number. They’re not an unstoppable idea. They’re specific people who can be jailed. And we’re doing it.
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Great news! Tech at Night’s favorite Representative Marsha Blackburn, along with TaN’s own home representative Mary Bono Mack are bringing a version of Secure IT to the House. The bill has been introduced in the Senate as an alternative to the power grab known as Lieberman-Collins. The great thing about the bill? It toughens criminal penalties for online lawbreaking even as it makes it easier for the private sector to share information about attacks.
The bad guys share information, and they think they won’t go to jail. If we let the good guys share information without getting sued for it, and if we throw the bad guys in jail, we win. And you can tell that the bad guys really hate it when we send them to jail; just witness how Anonymous has been hitting law enforcement more and more in the last year or so, most recently targeting Interpol’s website, and previously publishing names and addresses of police officers in the US. These online terrorists don’t like that they can be held accountable for their actions. It’s their weakness, the fact that they are named individuals who are finite in numbers, and we need to exploit it.
I know we had to push hard against some good members of Congress in order to send a message on SOPA, but it had to be done. The RIAA is not giving up on SOPA, so it was important that we let good members of Congress know what the problem was. And we did, so now it’s time to move on to passing good bills like SECURE IT.
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