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Crime
MySpace, Prosecutors Draft Guide For Online Safety
by Andrew Noyes
The social-networking firm MySpace and attorneys general from 49 states and the District of Columbia on Monday issued guidelines for keeping kids safe on the Internet, with the aim of involving other high-tech and child-protection stakeholders.
The recommendations, released at a press conference in New York City, call on all online social networks to be able to scan images and video uploaded to their servers and to ensure that the profiles of young teenagers are not publicly available.
Site-design principles include steps that MySpace already has taken and ones the News Corp.-owned company soon will implement. MySpace makes profiles of 14- and 15-year-old users private and will up the age to 17, Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said.
MySpace will continue to delete registered sex offenders from its virtual community and will strengthen the technology that enforces the site's minimum age of 14. This is "a landmark step forward in providing new protections for teenage members of social-networking sites," he said.
At the event, a handful of attorneys general announced the formation of a MySpace-led task force that will explore "all new technologies that can help make users more safe and secure." Existing age- and identity-verification products are inadequate for the burgeoning industry, officials noted.
The task force will include Internet businesses, ID-authentication experts, nonprofits, academics and technology firms. "We have always believed that it takes a partnership of law enforcement, parents and educators" to address critical Web safety issues, Nigam said. "Only by working together can we fully succeed."
The Center for Democracy and Technology, which routinely has expressed concerns about age-verification proposals, was asked to join. CDT President Leslie Harris said her group would take part in a task force "that has no preconceived notions of the wisdom, efficacy or legal implications of age verification and authentication technologies."
Progress and Freedom Foundation Senior Fellow Adam Thierer, who also will contribute to the effort, called the partnership "a giant step forward in the right direction" and said the outlined principles "represent a model code of conduct for the entire industry."
MySpace plans to unveil an online safety public-service announcement targeting parents and hopes to make available free parental software in the future, Nigam told reporters. The company also will explore the creation of a children's e-mail registry that would let parents block kids' access to MySpace or any other social-networking site.
Law enforcement leaders at the event lauded the announcement and pressed other online communities to get involved. The Facebook networking site "has always created an inhospitable environment for predators" and will continue working with attorneys general, a company spokeswoman said.
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said discussions with MySpace and other sites had been ongoing for more than a year and "during that time we've agreed we want to keep children safe, but we sometimes disagree on the best way to do that."
Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's attorney general, added: "We are not papering over or concealing our continued differences. We're going to work to bridge them." The process will be "difficult and daunting but also extraordinarily educational," he said.
Texas was the only state that did not sign onto the initiative. Inquiries to Attorney General Greg Abbott's press office were not returned by deadline.
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Lobbying
Welcome Back, Now Get To Work On Trade Policy
by Heather Greenfield
When Congress returns from the holiday break Tuesday, there will be 3,000 e-mails from people who attended the annual Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas last week. They want lawmakers to support pending free trade agreements.
The letters note that the electronics industry depends on access to global markets. They are part of a big push by the Consumer Electronics Association to educate both lawmakers and the public about the connection between trade and American jobs.
But Sage Chandler, who handles trade issues for CEA, admits the industry might need to use some new high-tech speakers to get heard above anti-global elements in both the Democratic and Republican parties this Congress.
In an election year, Chandler said a story of someone losing a job is compelling. But no one typically writes a lawmaker when they make an international sale and says thanks for keeping markets open.
"It is politics of fear," said Ralph Hellman, a lobbyist for the Information Technology Industry Council. "There are elements of both parties that want to be able to point to someone hurting America's prosperity."
The concern is that those fears could result in trade barriers or immigration protections that ultimately lead to more jobs -- especially innovation ones -- moving overseas. Hellman said there are plenty of examples of companies like Microsoft opening facilities in Canada or Europe because of the highly skilled workers available there.
Five years ago, the limit on H-1B visas for high-skilled workers was twice the 65,000 a year now allotted, and tech industry associations have been fighting to boost the visa cap ever since. But recent attempts to get more H-1B visas into immigration reforms have failed because overall immigration measures are so controversial.
Congress recently approved a trade agreement with Peru, but others with Colombia, Panama and South Korea are pending. President Bush indicated he wants them passed in the order they were negotiated so no one feels slighted.
While the tech industry has the most to gain from the South Korea agreement, they are pressing for all of the deals as a top priority this year. "Trade agreements actually open other markets to us more than the other way around," Chandler said.
Hellman said lawmakers and the public don't realize that if the United States is not selling products in this day and age, someone else will. He is concerned that if the trade agreement with South Korea stalls, the European Union could negotiate a deal with that nation.
The long-term effect, he said, is that Malaysia, Thailand and other nations are watching and concluding that the United States is in protectionist mode and may not be worth the effort.
"American politicians still think we live in a bipolar world, but that's just not the case," Hellman said. "We can't say we're going to shrink and retreat from trade and immigration and we're going to do it on our own. It's just not that simple."
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Spectrum
AT&T, Verizon In Good Position To Get Airwaves
by David Hatch
AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless stand to benefit from a major upcoming auction of wireless spectrum because of the collapse of Frontline Wireless, which abruptly announced last week that it has "closed for business."
With the removal of Frontline, the dominant mobile firms no longer have to contend with a serious competitor that had qualified for a 25-percent bidding credit and was backed by heavy-hitters, including former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and venture capitalists James Barksdale and John Doerr.
The news has shaken up plans for the auction of the coveted 700-megahertz band, to begin Jan. 24. The frequencies, to be relinquished by analog television stations as they shift to digital signals, are desirable for offering wireless, high-speed Internet access and conducive to applications such as mobile video. The FCC will issue a final list of bidders soon.
While dozens of companies may participate, only a handful appear to have the financial muscle to bid on spectrum with nationwide footprints in the so-called "C" and "D" blocks. In an advisory, the investment firm Stifel Nicolaus said Frontline's demise reduces prospects for a "competitive market structure" and makes it easier for an already-dominant firm to secure the "D" block, which Frontline was targeting.
In exchange for securing commercial airwaves in the "D" block, the license holder must construct a nationwide network for adjacent spectrum so emergency responders can communicate across jurisdictions. With Frontline gone, the victor would have "more leverage" with public-safety officials to negotiate the emergency network's final terms, Stifel Nicolaus said.
"It puts the entire 'D' block in doubt as to who will be the bidder," said Jessica Zufolo, a senior telecom analyst at the investment firm Medley Investment Group. "We are still hopeful that there will be someone who will emerge as being willing to take on this challenge," the FCC said in a statement.
AT&T and Verizon have endorsed opening their networks to unaffiliated devices and applications after earlier resistance, suggesting they might be preparing to vie for the "C" block, which the FCC conditioned last year with open-access restrictions.
In a blog posting, Save The Internet, a coalition of mostly academics and watchdogs, wasn't convinced by the incumbents' about-face. "AT&T and Verizon hope to horde this spectrum and stifle competition and cheaper alternatives to their closed networks," the group asserted.
Also eying the "C" block is Google, though analysts are uncertain about its strategy. There is speculation that Google would offer the "reserve price" for the frequencies -- the minimum bid required -- to ensure that the open-access conditions remain. If the reserve price is not met, the spectrum would be re-auctioned without the conditions, with the largest portion of the "C" block possibly divided into smaller chunks.
Under that strategy, Google would let a major carrier such as AT&T or Verizon win the "C" block, knowing that open access would assure Google's presence on the future network.
But Zufolo said it's too early to gauge Google's approach. "They may well end up seeing how the bidding goes" before deciding how to proceed, she said. The auction is expected to dominate the FCC's agenda through February.
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Health
ACLU Wants Changed Focus In Pandemic Planning
by Chris Strohm
Government planning for a disease outbreak is too focused on treating health emergencies as a law enforcement or national security problem rather than treating victims as patients and engaging the public, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
The group on Monday released a report that asserts that plans made by the Bush administration since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to protect the nation against a possible influenza epidemic put the civil liberties of U.S. residents at risk.
"Rather than focusing on well-established measures for protecting the lives and health of Americans, policymakers have recently embraced an approach that views public health policy through the prism of national security and law enforcement," the report states. "As a result ... today's pandemic prevention focuses on taking aggressive, coercive actions against those who are sick. People, rather than the disease, become the enemy."
The report, for example, cites part of a plan from the Health and Human Services Department that calls for forced containment in the event of an influenza outbreak that could include banning public gatherings, restricting the movement of individuals and mass quarantines.
Health and Human Services Department spokesman Bill Hall acknowledged that the plan includes a containment strategy but said the ACLU report mischaracterizes it. He said the strategy calls for containment at the initial stage of an outbreak for a limited population. If that failed to control the outbreak, containment would not be used on a mass scale, he said.
"First and foremost, respecting civil liberties has been an important component ... of our planning efforts," Hall said.
The report cites an incident last year in which an Atlanta lawyer, Andrew Speaker, was diagnosed with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. The report says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, part of HHS, treated Speaker "like a dangerous public enemy" rather than a patient. The agency told him to stay in Italy and asked the Homeland Security Department to put him on a no-fly list, essentially lumping him in with suspected criminals and terrorists, the report states.
Speaker did not follow the orders and made it back into the United States to seek treatment.
"In the case of an epidemic, the same evasive behavior seen here in one man would likely be replicated on a mass scale that would undermine the goal of stopping the disease, if the authorities pursue this kind of coercive, law enforcement approach to the crisis," the report states.
The report adds that courts are likely to be closed if a mass pandemic erupts, meaning that judicial review of quarantines and forced treatment might not be available.
The report makes a series of recommendations to improve emergency response in the areas of public health, civil liberties, protecting privacy and government accountability. Hall said HHS agrees with many of the recommendations.
"As far as the specific recommendations, the majority of them make sense and in fact we've actually implemented a number of them for some time," he said. "We're already well down the road on some of those."
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Today's Feature:
Issue of the Week
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Friday announced regulations to require states to issue new driver's licenses and identification cards, declaring that "this is a great teaching moment on the challenges of really reconfiguring a society."
Every Monday, read the Issue of the Week by the Technology Daily staff.
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E-briefs
Antitrust: The European Commission will initiate a pair of formal antitrust investigations against Microsoft concerning two separate categories of alleged abuses of a dominant market position, officials said Monday. The first case involves the ability of Microsoft products to work with those of competitors in relation to a complaint by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems. ECIS alleges that Microsoft illegally refused to disclose interoperability information across a broad range of products, including information related to its Office suite, a number of its server products and its so-called .NET Framework. The second complaint, filed by the Opera Internet browser, claims that Microsoft engaged in an unlawful tying of its Internet Explorer product to its Windows computer-operating system. The complaint alleges "ongoing competitive harm from Microsoft's practices, in particular in view of new proprietary technologies that Microsoft has allegedly introduced in its browser that would reduce compatibility with open Internet standards, and therefore hinder competition."
Labor: A federal judge on Friday blocked the government from conducting background checks of low-risk employees at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after an appeals court said the investigations threaten the constitutional rights of workers. AP reports that U.S. District Judge Otis Wright issued the injunction after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed his earlier ruling. The higher court said the 28 scientists and engineers who refused to submit to the background checks faced "a stark choice -- either violation of their constitutional rights or loss of their jobs." The workers claimed that NASA was invading their privacy. If they didn't agree to the checks, they were to be barred from the lab campus and fired. NASA has argued that requiring employees to submit to the investigations was not intrusive and that the directive followed a Bush administration policy ordering agencies to boost security via new identification badges.
Intellectual Property: The federal panel that sets music-licensing fees last week denied a request by digital-royalty collector SoundExchange for a rehearing of certain aspects of a recent decision that set the payment scheme for satellite radio services Sirius and XM. Under the December rulemaking by the Copyright Royalty Board, the companies would pay a performance rate of 6 percent of gross revenue for 2007 and 2008, with the amount increasing to 8 percent through 2012. SoundExchange had proposed royalties ranging from 8 percent to 23 percent. In rejecting the request, the board found that advertising and other monies directly linked to channels with no music -- or where music was incidental to the service provided -- could be excluded. The panel said that SoundExchange presented "no credible evidence" that the excluded types of revenue would significantly impact the calculation for how much satellite radio owes the music industry.
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