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FCC: Internet Speeds Much Slower than Claimed

Pulkit Chandna — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:34:58 -0500

You can now curse your ISP with even more conviction. A task force set up by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has revealed that actual broadband speeds are slower than promised speeds by as much as 50% to 80%.

Although the task force didn’t name any decent ways to express dissent, it is suggested that indignant consumers learn the art of protesting from the true masters of the art: the Palestinians, who have pioneered some of the most effective and economical techniques, including stone pelting and the fabled catch-and-hurl-back-teargas-grenade technique.

Coming back to the subject of broadband access, the task force is busy preparing a report on ways to enhance broadband penetration in rural and urban areas. The panel will submit its final report to Congress in February. It said in an interim report that anywhere between $20 and $350 billion might be needed for installing necessary wireless and landline infrastructure. Its estimate depends on the internet speed.

“This speaks to consumer empowerment. And if you are advertising one speed but delivering another, that takes power away. Consumers can't make accurate decisions based on quality of service from one provider off another,” Joel Kelsey, an analyst at Consumers Union, told the Washington Post.

The panel said in its report that while nearly 2/3 of Americans are wallowing in broadband bliss and 1/3 have access but haven’t subscribed, 4% have no access whatsoever. The panel also expects smartphones to march ahead of blander phones by 2011.

Image Credit: RTE

Congress Says P2P is Dangerous to National Security, Singles Out LimeWire

Paul Lilly — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:15:30 -0500

The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is taking a hard stance against peer-to-peer file sharing, claiming the practice is "jeopardizing" national security.

"At any time your computer is connected to the Internet, other computer users with similar software could simply search your hard drive and copy unprotected files. Unfortunately, that is the sad reality for many unsuspecting computer users," said Chairman Edophus Towns.

Towns went on to single out LimeWire, a popular P2P file sharing program, noting a startling amount of sensitive data made freely available by using the app. In addition to music and movies, Committee staff also unearthed federal tax returns, the Social Security numbers and family information for every master sergeant in the Army, medical records of about 24,000 patients of a Texas hospital, FBI files, and the safe house location for the First Family.

Naturally, Mark Gorton of the Lime Group saw things differently.

"I am confident that with LimeWire 5.2.8 any sharing is intentional sharing. LimeWire does not share any Documents by default," Gorton explained.

Murphy's Law: Building an Open Source America with Open Source Data

David Murphy — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:00:00 -0500

A coalition of some of the biggest names in the OSS world have banded together to create Open Source for America, a brand-new advocacy group that's going to try and highlight the advantages of open-source software to help achieve the goals set out in President Barack Obama's push for an open-data government. But as we pause to "ooh" and "ahh" at the list of companies and open-source celebrities contributing to the new group--Novell, the Mozilla Foundation, the EFF, Tim O'Reilly, and Mark Shuttleworth, amongst many others--let us not forget the uphill battle that the concept of "openness" tends to face in the government sector.

I'm not suggesting that the OSA's cause is anything but noble: Instead of pitching open-source as a replacement to proprietary code, the group wants to level the playing field and allow both to equally compete for governmental contracts. That does have practical implications for the common person. Increased savings and reliability will allow resources spent for upkeep to be shifted to additional needy sources, and open-source software should--in theory--be easier and quicker to deploy than proprietary code given the larger user base that could feasibly assess and contribute to such a project. When it comes to efforts like standardizing a way to share a patient's health records across a wide swath of federal, state, local, and private organizations, multi-tiered cooperation and speedy results are a good thing.

Nevertheless, I just can't find myself getting that excited over open-source software when we still have fundamental issues of transparency and openness in governmental data. There's a wealth of information out there that's free and easily accessible to the public. But that doesn't mean that legislators, agencies, and departments are going out of their way to make this information as useful as it could be. In fact, it was only as recently as two months ago that the U.S. Senate opened up its own voting records for third-party applications and mashups.

Open Data's in the House

The House of Representatives and Senate have both used XML to exchange legislative documents since 2000. It's pretty easy to find XML feeds for the bills passing between the two legislatures via The Library of Congress's THOMAS database--the central information repository for all legislative activity in Congress. Pulling up an XML listing of how the votes fell out in the House is also simple, although you'll have to jump to the Office of the Clerk for that information. The Senate, not-so-much. Up until May, when a formal request by South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint was finally accepted by the Senate Rules Committee, this information was restricted to straight-up HTML feeds.

Why is any of this important? Because third parties wishing the use the data to track things like voting records and attendance, filibustering, and comparisons between legislators would have to input this information manually in order to get an accurate database for external applications or data mashups. These amalgams, in turn, offer increased access to the legislative record for your average, everyday American who has no time to scan over arcane THOMAS listings to discern the status of a piece of legislation or, come election time, a Congressperson's legislative activity.

Representative Melissa Bean, Democrat of Illinois, put it best in an interview with Politico. “Coming out of the business world, I think results matter. How can people really track results if they don’t even know how their representatives are voting?” she said. Bean, in turn, has introduced legislation that would compel the Office of the Clerk to create an electronic list of all votes taken in the house organized by member. This feature, currently lacking in the XML feeds for roll call votes, would allow visitors to quickly and easily discern exactly how and when a particular member has voted throughout the congressperson's tenure.

Free Data Federalism

And this is just the situation in the U.S. Congress. Check out Data.gov, the brainchild of the Obama administration's first-ever CTO, Vivek Kundra. Specifically, head on over to the "state/local" portion of the site to see just how many states in the union have begun to offer up official archives with machine-readable datasets (like XML) for public consumption. I'll spoil the answer for you. Not counting the District of Columbia, there are two: California and Utah. To be fair, there's a varying degree of open information accessibility in the individual state legislatures--New York, for example, has pushed past RSS-feed-like XML feeds and offers full APIs for data access. It's a move that many wish to see enacted at the federal level.

In a perfect world, the results of our representative democracy would be available for perusal by any member of the public. But when I say available, I don't just mean locked away in some complicated, searchable database. Let the third-party world of application developers, information enthusiasts, and political junkies sift through the deliverables and create their own compelling derivatives for public consumption. Based on the impressive results that have come from the laborious combination of automatic and manual data entry, I can only imagine the kinds of benefits that an average citizen could acquire as a result of a truly "open" government. Open-source software is a great discussion point. Let's throw a bigger bone to open-source data, too.

A few data-crunching sites worth surveying:

Govtrack.us

Fillibusted

e-PaperTrail

OpenCongress

Maplight

Congress Expresses Concern Over E-Mail Surveillance

Justn Kerr — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 01:28:24 -0500

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over its domestic surveillance program, and Congress is now claiming that their powers may go too far. A review of recent telephone and email intercepts seems to suggest that the agency may be monitoring the conversations of everyday Americans far more than they let on. Longstanding legal issues aside, the N.S.A, as of last year, is expected to only monitor the private communications of US citizens if it can be demonstrated that it was done so as an incidental byproduct of investigating individuals abroad.

Even more troubling, in April, it was disclosed that intercepts of private American communications were far beyond the legal limits for both late 2008 and early 2009, and the extent of the problem is still being investigated. Further supporting evidence was provided by a former N.S.A analyst who claims he was trained in 2005 to use specialized email monitoring software, an application which intelligence officials confirms is still in operation. New Jersey Democratic representative Rush Holt admitted that “Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental”, but still admits, few lawmakers can deal with the issues because of the technical complexities of the operation. “The people making the policy,” he said, “don’t understand the technicalities.”

It’s easy to see that trying to distinguish between domestic and foreign email correspondence can be difficult, but is the privacy trade off worth the added security benefit? Let us know what you think.

Proposed Bill Would Have Fiber Conduit Built Into Every New Road

Justin Kerr — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:05:53 -0500

Depending on where you check your stats, the US ranks anywhere from 15th to 22nd in broadband speeds, falling way behind other countries such as Iceland, Denmark, and even Canada. The broadband problem in the US gets even worse as you move out further into the rural areas where some communities have the choice of dial up, or if they have a ton of money to burn, super high latency satellite. This is a problem that won’t be solved overnight, but a new bill proposed in Congress last week by Democratic Representative Anna Eshoo, might just be the long term solution everyone is looking for.

The new bill would force governments to build fiber conduit into the sides of all new road projects allowing high-speed connections to flow naturally throughout the country. The costs are expected to be relatively low, since the bulk of the cost associated with laying new fiber is digging up and burying the cables.

Eshoo is the representative pushing the proposal forward in Congress, but doesn’t deserve full credit for the idea. The concept was initially proposed last year in the New America Foundation’s playbook, a guide published by Ben Lennett and Sascha Meinrath who were advisors to the Obama campaign on tech issues. The cost of the fiber optic cables will still be paid by private companies, but it will make for a much more compelling return on investment for fiber deployments in the future.

With all the new roads the Obama administration is proposing to stimulate the economy, this certainly seems like an idea they should implement sooner, rather than later. What do you think?

Congressman Tries to Slap Health Warning on Games

Nathan Grayson — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:36:59 -0600

“WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior.”

WARNING: The above label could soon take top billing on all of your favorite game packages – that is, if Congressman Joe Baca has his way. Last week, he introduced the “Video Game Health Labeling Act of 2009.” His reasoning? A masterpiece of misinformation.

“The videogame industry has a responsibility to parents, families and to consumers – to inform them of the potentially damaging content that is often found in their products,” Baca said in a statement.

“They have repeatedly failed to live up to this responsibility. Meanwhile research continues to show a proven link between playing violent games and increased aggression in young people. American families deserve to know the truth about these potentially dangerous products.”

Of course, Baca fails to mention the other, equally valid studies that kind of, you know, “prove” that gamers are, by and large, normal people. We think one of them might’ve been titled “Real Life.”

So yeah, odds are, this bill won’t be sitting on Capitol Hill for long. Sorry, Baca. Same time next week?

Immunity for Telecom Compliance in Warrantless Spying ?

Erin Simon — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:04:54 -0600

The Senate Judiciary Committee was supposed to vote today on a bill to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but the vote has been pushed back to next week to give lawmakers more time to consider proposed amendments. One of the key disputes is whether to grant immunity to the telephone and internet service providers who are accused of illegally participating in the NSA's warrantless surveillance programs. Immunity would end lawsuits by state public utility commissions and civil liberties groups (among them my former employer the Electronic Frontier Foundation) which charge the telecoms with turning over massive amounts of user data to the government in violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), among other laws. The government and the telecoms in those cases have thus far been unsuccessful in trying to get the cases thrown out on the grounds that the possible surveillance is a state secret, so now it appears the telecom lobbyists are trying to win in Washington instead.

I won't pretend to be neutral on this issue; I went to law school because I believe, in a fundamental and probably naïve way, in the rule of law. If you go to court and you lose, you shouldn't be able to buy yourself a get out of jail free card by donating to congressional reelection funds.

Mark Klein, the AT&T technician who blew the whistle on that company turning over millions of email and phone communications to the NSA, went to DC this week to make the same point directly to Congress. He told the Washington Post, "If they've done something massively illegal and unconstitutional -- well, they should suffer the consequences. It's not my place to feel bad for them. They made their bed, they have to lie in it. The ones who did [anything wrong], you can be sure, are high up in the company. Not the average Joes, who I enjoyed working with."

Instead of blanket immunity, some lawmakers are tossing around the idea of indemnification – the telecoms would still litigate the cases against them, but the government would pay any damages. Another compromise proposal would have the government substitute for the telecoms, stepping into their place in the lawsuits. Either of these proposals would permit the cases to continue, which would allow us the public to find out just how extensive the alleged surveillance was.

FISA Taken Out Behind Shed, Shot

Erin Simon — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:04:15 -0500

The unbelievably-named Protect America Act, which was rammed through both houses of Congress in the last hours of this year's legislative session, amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to give the government the legal ability to do just about everything it has so far been doing illegally.

The Act permits warrantless surveillance targeted at persons (even US citizens) reasonably believed to be located outside the US, which sounds like it legitimates what the government has been calling the Terrorist Surveillance Program. It also authorizes the government to secretly order communications service providers – phone companies, ISPs, email providers – to create back doors in their services to facilitate eavesdropping. Providers can appeal the orders to the secret FISA Court, but are immune from suit for participating. Those who refuse to comply can be held in contempt.

The Act also grandfathers in whatever current surveillance programs have received FISA Court approval. It's set to expire in six months, but programs authorized under the Act can last up to a year before needing re-authorization.

Plus, the person responsible for submitting a twice-yearly report on surveillance abuses is the Attorney General, the same Alberto Gonzales who has already lied under oath to Congress about the existence of surveillance abuses.

Democrats had prepared their own bill, featuring oversight and limits on domestic spying. President “30% Approval” Bush threatened to veto it and then blame Democrats for the lack of a bill. Facing Republican accusations that without this bill, Washington D.C. would be hit by a terrorist attack in August, the Democratically-controlled congress passed the bill.

Thumbnail photo courtesy nolifebeforecoffee.