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Telecom
Firms Seek Shield As Wiretapping Deadline Arrives
by David Hatch
Providers of high-speed Internet access and Web-based telephone service must comply by Monday with federal wiretapping laws, the last major milestone toward implementing the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.
The requirements stem from a 2005 FCC order declaring that the services are subject to court-ordered surveillance. The rules were challenged before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 2006 and upheld. The law, known as CALEA, already permits the wiretapping of phone traffic carried over the public-switched telephone network.
The deadline arrived as major telecom firms are seeking legal protections on a separate but related item: cooperation with law enforcement on clandestine wiretaps aimed at uncovering terrorist activity.
According to the Web site for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which supports strong privacy rights, Senate lawmakers backed by the Bush administration may try to move legislation this week that would grant such liability safeguards.
John McHugh, technical director of the Organization for the Promotion and Advancement of Small Telecommunications Companies, better known as OPASTCO, expects the vast majority of the group's members to meet the CALEA requirements. "I don't know of any who have indicated that they're not going to be in compliance," he said.
For the 560 independently owned, rural carriers that belong to the association, the financial costs of CALEA have been steep, from $20,000 to $150,000 to add surveillance capabilities, mostly to broadband lines. In some cases, small providers have contracted with third-party vendors to conduct possible wiretaps.
McHugh said the carriers feel confident that customer privacy will not be violated. "The [criminal] target has to be identified," he said, adding that no action would be taken without a court order in hand. "I think that for the most part our folks understand this as an obligation."
But the Monday deadline has some critics worried about the law's larger implications. "We are incredibly concerned about the camel's nose under the tent," said John Morris, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
The watchdog group is worried that the FBI and federal regulators will insist that future Internet-based technologies comply with CALEA before being launched. Morris warned that such a hurdle could stifle innovation for creators who may not have deep pockets.
Jim Kohlenberger, executive director at the Voice on the Net Coalition, which represents several Internet phone services, said member companies are on track to satisfy CALEA. The regulations only affect Web-based phone players that interconnect with the larger telecom infrastructure. Compliance costs were in the $150,000 range per company, he said.
Morris noted that many phone- and cable-delivered broadband services already had satisfied CALEA well ahead of time.
The U.S. Telecom Association, which unsuccessfully sought to extend the May 14 deadline to give members more time to upgrade their networks, was not immediately available for comment.
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Intellectual Property
Gonzales Proposes Legislative Crackdown On Piracy
by Andrew Noyes
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday sent to Capitol Hill a legislative proposal aimed at curtailing intellectual property theft. He said the recommendations would increase the maximum punishment for pirates and set stronger penalties for repeat offenders.
Gonzales, who joined Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce briefing, said the proposal would "hit the criminals in their wallets" by ensuring that all illicit profits from IP theft would be forfeited.
A Justice Department official said the plan would bolster restitution for certain IP crimes that involve the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It also would outlaw exportation of copyright-infringing goods, just as exportation of counterfeit items is now criminal.
"I hope it's been demonstrated that this administration cares very much about protection of intellectual property," Gonzales said. "IP theft is not a technicality, and its victims are not just faceless corporations. It is stealing and it affects us all."
President Bush launched his multi-agency strategy for targeting online piracy in October 2004 and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft unveiled a related IP task force the same year. The efforts have improved IP protection and led to more federal investigations and prosecutions, Gonzales said.
There were about 57 percent more prosecutions of criminal copyright and trademark offenses in 2006 than in 2005, he said. Of those convictions, the number of defendants receiving prison terms of more than two years increased by 130 percent, he said.
"These are complicated cases, and we need a strong nationwide network to bring good cases and to win them," Gonzales said. Support from all levels of government and the private sector is needed now more than ever, he added.
Earlier in the day, Gonzales and Gutierrez met with the chamber's Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy to discuss IP enforcement. Both said intellectual property would be a topic at a meeting of the Group of Eight leading economies in Munich, Germany, next week.
Gonzales noted that pirates are getting more sophisticated and better organized. They "hide in the economic shadows to exploit any weaknesses in our enforcement efforts." Gutierrez said law enforcement is "making progress, but clearly it's an uphill battle."
Earlier this year, Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and George Voinovich, R-Ohio, introduced a measure that would establish a process for agencies to work together and consult with industry on IP issues. The bill, S. 522, also would create a way for other nations to track infringers.
"It's outrageous that American products are being pirated and counterfeited every day in countries like China, which then sells its knockoffs as 'made in the USA,'" Bayh said. "Intellectual property theft harms our national economy, bleeds American jobs and stifles innovation. We need a federal response commensurate with the gravity of the problem."
A staffer for Howard Berman, who chairs the House Judiciary Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee, said the California Democrat is reviewing Gonzales' proposal but expects to introduce his own IP bill later this year.
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Campaigns
Searchable Sites Pinpoint Candidates, Cash And Views
by Heather Greenfield
It's 8 o'clock. Do you know where your presidential candidate is? Maybe the Internet can help. New searchable sites are providing unprecedented information to help voters track candidate schedules, campaign contributions and every word uttered on the trail.
The Washington Post's Web site has a section to track each candidate's daily schedule, as well as a tally of how many visits have been made to each state.
When the presidential candidates released their quarterly campaign reports last month, furthermore, the details on the dollars and where they came from were put into a searchable database by the New York Times.
Plus interest groups like MoveOn, bloggers at the politics and technology forum techPresident, and content providers like Yahoo are hosting various online debates or town halls that allow people to submit questions for the candidates.
Candidates themselves are asking voters to communicate directly with them via video.
A new advertisement dubbed "job interview" by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a former U.N. ambassador, Energy secretary and U.S. House member, has been seen 124,938 times since it was posted on the YouTube video-sharing site last Tuesday.
An interviewer reviews Richardson's experience in between bites of his sandwich and then tells Richardson he might be a little overqualified. An announcer then asks viewers for video comments in response.
"This new, funny, irreverent stuff is the only stuff that looks right," said Carol Darr, who is director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. "All of a sudden the old stuff just looks so fake."
While candidates posted campaign ads on YouTube during the last election, this year has resulted in edgier ads created for an online audience and more use of video-sharing sites and campaign sites to take questions and comments by video.
Sen. John McCain was the first to seek voters' input via YouTube. McCain's video request had been seen more than 299,000 times as of mid-afternoon Monday.
After testifying at a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing Thursday, YouTube founder Chad Hurley told Chairman Edward Markey, D-Mass., in an interview posted on YouTube that "now everyone can be heard" and have messages reach them directly.
As for presidential candidates using the service to help get elected, Hurley said: "It's exciting -- unexpected. We would have never expected this two years ago when we started this site."
A 2006 study released this year by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that twice as many Americans used the Internet as their primary source of news about the 2006 campaign compared with 2002.
Some observers might argue that despite the growing trend, just a fraction of Americans are getting candidate information online -- visiting candidate sites and watching online debates and YouTube postings. But Darr said that small percentage is the "right" percent because those people are "influentials" who send the information to friends.
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Health
Firms Move To E-Health, But Will Workers Respond?
by Aliya Sternstein
Several major U.S. employers are offering employees Internet-based health records for storing their medical histories, in part to goad workers into helping cut costs. However, it is not clear whether employees will use them.
On Thursday, Verizon Communications announced that the company has begun giving some personnel access to a password-protected Web site containing individual health and prescription histories. The e-health records work independently of the employees' health plans, so individuals can maintain control of their records even if they retire or leave Verizon.
In December, Intel, Wal-Mart and a handful of other large employers reported that they are funding the development of a similar system dubbed Dossia.
Some critics argue that the general public is not technology-savvy enough or health-conscious enough to regularly update and share information with medical providers. The so-called personal health records, or PHRs, are different from e-health records maintained by healthcare providers.
Of the millions of employees and dependents granted access to the e-health records, not many will do anything with them, said Scot Silverstein, an assistant professor at Drexel University and director of its Institute for Healthcare Informatics.
As with other wellness and preventive programs, many employees will not participate. Also, some simply will not trust the employers, he said. "For example, unionized employees are going to resist these technologies due to privacy concerns."
On the other hand, Scott Wallace, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Health Information Technology, believes that Americans eventually will depend on personal health records, if for no other purpose than to save money.
"One of the biggest unspoken reasons employers are pushing personal health records is to change employee attitudes about health care," he said.
Reducing the cost of health care will require, among other things, that consumers take more responsibility for their own treatment. A personal record would make the employee aware of how many times tests are repeated, indicate the bloated costs of individual procedures, and alert the employee to overdue preventive care.
The technology must become more user-friendly for that to happen. David C. Kibbe, a former director of and now senior adviser to the Center for Health IT at the American Academy of Family Physicians, said PHRs need about five years to be ready for mass use.
"We may have a dozen Prodigy-like efforts before we get to one Netscape for personal health information," he said.
"It needs to be made easier to collect, organize and use your own health information," Kibbe added. "Whether employer-based PHRs will climb this curve faster than other kinds of PHRs, I don't know. They certainly have the motivation to make it work."
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Television
Court Backs Comcast In Its Dispute With The NFL
by Michael Martinez
The television network owned by the National Football League is moving to challenge a recent court ruling in New York that lets Comcast carry it on a special tier for sports programming.
In a decision made public late last week, the New York Supreme Court found that Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, should be allowed to offer the NFL Network in a niche package with fewer subscribers, potentially cutting off the NFL from millions in revenue. Comcast pays the league a fee for each subscriber with access to the channel.
The NFL Network sued Comcast last fall after the company decided to move the channel off of a digital packaging tier with about 7 million viewers onto the sports tier, which is only available to customers willing to pay more to receive the extra programming. According to Comcast, such a move is allowable under the terms of the company's agreement with the NFL Network.
Judge Bernard Fried agreed with Comcast in his decision. He did not find "any ambiguity" in previous agreements between the parties that would have prohibited Comcast from moving the NFL Network onto a niche tier.
Comcast "is entitled to distribute the NFL Network on a sports tier under the agreements between the parties," he said.
NFL spokesman Seth Palansky said in an e-mail that the network will challenge Fried's ruling. He did not elaborate.
The NFL launched the network four years ago, boasting 24 hours per day of original programming. It aired eight live games last fall.
The Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings last year examining the antitrust implications of exclusive sports programming packages, including those for professional football. Federal lawmakers also have expressed concerns about an exclusive deal between Major League Baseball and the satellite operator DirecTV that lets subscribers watch out-of-market games.
In a statement, Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen said his company "bargained explicitly" for the option to distribute the NFL Network on a sports tier because it was the "best and fairest solution" for its customers.
"This decision means that our customers who are NFL fans will be able to watch the NFL Network without burdening those who are not NFL fans with extra costs," he said.
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On The Download
Putting A Price Tag On Presidential Internet Sites
by Shira Toeplitz
What is a Web site worth in 2008? That question bears asking after a recent controversy over a MySpace volunteer sought payment from the presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama for his work on the social-networking site on Obama's behalf.
Direct-mail firms can prove how much money they generate for candidates. Field staffs can show off how many volunteers they recruit for campaign ground games. Communication shops have press clips to prove their worth. But other than online donations, how does an Internet department prove it?
It's certainly more difficult to put a price on MySpace Friends, unique hits or volunteer bloggers. An analysis of information from Federal Election Commission reports for the first quarter of 2007 (collected by PoliticalMoneyLine.com) and information from the presidential campaigns show the following:
-- Republican Mitt Romney and Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton paid the most for their actual Web sites -- about $412,000 and $202,000, respectively, in the first quarter.
-- Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich spent by far the largest percentage of his total expenditures on his Internet shop and Web site -- in large part because his total expenditures were low.
-- Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd and Obama won the value award for the quarter. Though both candidates could build off Senate campaign sites, presentation and features on their presidential sites certainly are above par for their price tags.
The campaign of Democrat John Edwards declined to provide The Hotline the names of all of its online firms, and the known entities were not found on PoliticalMoneyLine.com's version of Edwards' FEC report. Also, the campaign of Republican John McCain declined to provide a list in-house Internet staffers except for the online director, and Clinton's campaign did not return calls about the names of in-house Internet staffers.
With those caveats in mind, the following is a list of a how much each campaign spent on Web vendors in the first quarter, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.com.
-- Joe Biden ($39,000): NGP ($34,000), GetActive ($4,500), Articulated Man ($975). In-house Internet staff ($19,000): Eric Carbone, Timothy Westmyer.
-- Sen. Sam Brownback's listed firms ($61,000 total): Aristotle ($43,000), ElectionEdge.us ($18,000). In-house Internet staff: Leon Wolf ($1,500).
-- Clinton (at least $713,000): NGP ($511,000), Mayfield Strategies ($202,000). In-house Internet staff ($58,000): Jesse Berney, Peter Daou, Nancy Eiring, Crystal Patterson, Kevin Thurman.
-- Dodd ($36,000 total): Aristotle ($35,5000) and Wired for Change ($500). In-house Internet staff ($28,000): Tim Cullen, Brett Schenker, Tim Tagaris.
-- Mike Huckabee: GSL Solutions. ($11,000), LCM Strategies*. In-house Internet staff: Zach Taylor ($540).
-- Edwards (at least $36,000): Matthew Gross Communications ($20,000), NGP ($14,000), Advocacy Automated ($2,400), plus unlisted consultants. In-house Internet staff ($28,000): Ben Brandzel, Amanda Marcotte (no longer with campaign), Melissa McEwan (no longer with campaign), Aaron Myers, Tracy Russo*, George Stern, Joe Trippi*.
-- Rudy Giuliani (at least $299,000): Opera New Media ($268,000), Adfero Group ($24,000), Patrick Ruffini ($8,000). In-house Internet staff: Katie Harbath ($14,000).
-- Rep. Duncan Hunter ($55,000 total): Election Mall ($25,000), JCA Com ($17,000), Aristotle ($2,000), TCV Media ($12,000). In-house Internet staff: None.
-- Kucinich ($10,000 total): PayPal ($2,400), Akrobiz.com ($7,000). In-house Internet staff ($60,000 total): Michael Criscione, Chad Ely, Karen Kilroy.
-- McCain (at least$94,000 ): EDonation.com ($189,000), Campaign Solutions ($79,000), New Media Strategics ($15,000). In-house Internet staff: Christian Ferry ($20,000).
-- Obama ($247,000 total): NGP ($72,000), Auburn Quad ($62,000), Blue State Digital ($36,000), Pair.com ($5,000), Google Adwords ($72,000). In-house Internet staff ($31,000 total): Jim Brayton, Samuel Graham-Felson, Chris Hughes, Chris Northcross, Joe Rospars, Jessica Slider.
-- Rep. Ron Paul: Bill Dumas Productions ($14,000). In-house Internet staff: Justine Lam ($5,000).
-- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson ($62,000 total): Blue State Digital ($17,000), NGP ($11,000), Auburn Quad ($10,000), Care2 ($10,000), Rock Coast ($5,000), Articulated Man ($8,000). In-house Internet staff ($11,000 total): Joaquin Guerra, Andrea Johnson, Seth Tanner.
-- Romney ($584,000 total): Molecular ($412,000), Salesforce.com ($124,000), DigiNovations ($47,000). In-house Internet staff ($10,000): Abby Brack, Mindy Finn*, Larry Simmons, Stephen Smith.
-- Rep. Tom Tancredo: Aristotle ($10,500). In-house Internet staff: Mike Tate ($600).
-- Tommy Thompson ($8,000): Maelstorm Solutions ($6,600), Aristotle ($1,500). In-house Internet staff: none.
* -- Indicates staffers who came on staff after Q1.
Editor's Note: On The Download is Hotline's dispatch on politics, multimedia and the Internet.
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Today's Feature:
Issue of the Week
The House Administration Committee last week moved an e-voting bill that has been in the works for a while. During the past two Congresses, New Jersey Democrat Rush Holt pushed for mandatory paper receipts to confirm electronic votes, but those bills stalled.
Every Monday, read the Issue of the Week by the Technology Daily staff.
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E-briefs
Crime: The Justice Department on Monday announced the 50th felony conviction from Operation FastLink, a major initiative to combat online piracy. Christopher Eaves of Iowa Park, Texas, pleaded guilty before a Virginia federal judge to a single count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement for his involvement in the pre-release music group known as the Apocalypse Crew. Eaves, who faces up to five years in prison, is scheduled for sentencing Aug. 10. Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher called the conviction a milestone for the department and pledged to "continue to aggressively prosecute those criminals who seek to benefit unjustly from the hard work and creativity of others." Operation FastLink has led to more than 120 search warrants in 12 countries and the confiscation of hundreds of computers and illegal online distribution hubs.
Crime: The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday filed insider-trading charges against former Oracle Vice President Christopher Balkenhol for allegedly trading stocks he owned based on confidential information. The commission said Balkenhol received information on Oracle acquisition targets gleaned from his spouse, who also was employed by Oracle. "This case adds to a growing list of recent SEC enforcement actions against corporate employees and securities industry professionals for trading on information about upcoming corporate transactions that they knew to be confidential," agency Enforcement Director Linda Chatman Thomsen said. "Illegal insider trading undermines the level playing field that is the hallmark of our capital markets, and the SEC will continue to pursue these matters vigorously."
Intellectual Property: Universal Music Group has abandoned its attempt to silence syndicated conservative columnist Michelle Malkin for her online criticism of one of the label's controversial artists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Monday. Earlier this month, Universal filed a copyright notice regarding a recent episode of Malkin's online video in which she called hip-hop star Akon a "misogynist." She supported her claims with excerpts from his songs and video clips of him with a teenage girl at a Trinidad nightclub. EFF said Malkin's video, which was posted on YouTube, was legally protected "fair use" and fought a takedown notice from Universal on her behalf. The video has been put back online. EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl called the label's copyright claim "bogus" and said the company misused a 2001 copyright law. "Shame on any copyright holder who would attempt to use the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] to intimidate and silence critics," Malkin said in a statement.
E-Government: The massive collection of intelligence in today's world requires computer technology to help officials pinpoint the dots, Coleen Rowley, a former FBI agent and whistleblower, said during a press briefing Monday on congressional oversight of the FBI. "I don't think the FBI computer system has been fixed," she said, adding that the issue still remains a problem. A number of FBI technology projects have faltered, she said. Rowley, who spoke at an event that is part of "Whistleblower Week," further noted that millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted because of the flawed systems. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said whistleblowers like Rowley risk themselves for the good of citizens and should be recognized for their good deeds.
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