Victory! Political Files Go Online

Free Press
Molly Buckley

It’s here! It’s finally here!

Today’s the day we get our first glimpse into the deep, dark pockets of major network TV broadcasters all across the nation. The FCC’s online political files database launches today — and not a minute too soon.

In the post-Citizens United era, manipulative and misleading political ads are bombarding our public airwaves. Super PACs are throwing money at broadcasters at head-spinning rates. And with the 2012 presidential election looming, these rates are predicted to soar.

For decades, every broadcast TV station has been required to keep a “political file”: records detailing who has purchased political ad time from the station and how much they paid for airtime. Unfortunately, anyone wanting to see this information had to schlep down to their local stations to inspect it. And trust me, that’s no easy feat — some stations require advance appointments, some charge exorbitant fees for making copies and some keep their files so poorly organized that an outside set of eyes would have no idea which direction is up.

So how do we fix this problem and allow for more transparency and more convenience? Simple: Put the files online!

And the Federal Communications Commission agrees. This April, in response to the efforts of Free Press and other public interest groups, the agency voted to get the political files out of the filing cabinets and onto the Internet.

The FCC’s rule requires stations affiliated with the four major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox) in the nation’s top 50 markets to post political ad records online starting today. The remaining stations can delay posting until 2014.

This decision is a huge step in the right direction — but the broadcasters fought it every step of the way, claiming the rule was too expensive and cumbersome to implement. In fact, the National Association of Broadcasters is currently in court challenging the rules — but Free Press has intervened in the case to help protect the FCC order.

While the ruling is a crucial win for media transparency, let’s be real here: It’s still the very first step in a long and extensive process. There are over 2,200 broadcast TV stations in the country. This rule requires only 200 of them to put their political files online as of Aug. 2. And the rule doesn’t require stations to upload all of their old files retroactively — it applies only to ads purchased from today forward.

Furthermore, an awful lot of political ad money will be spent in markets that are exempt from today’s deadline. Stations in small media markets that are big electoral battlegrounds (like parts of Ohio and Virginia)  have until 2014 to post their files online. Telemundo and Univision affiliates serving Spanish-speaking voters — a key electoral demographic — also have until 2014 to put their files online. This means that the millions of Americans who are about to get hit with political ads the most are left with no easy way to access information about local political ad spending.

To help fill those gaps in time for this election, Free Press has partnered with the Sunlight Foundation and the New America Foundation to recruit volunteers to collect files from the exempted stations in their own local TV markets. With the help of our activists all over the country, we’ve already started sorting and uploading these files to our user-friendly and accessible online database. Take a look and see if you can find out who’s been buying the rights to your eyes and ears. Or sign up here to find out how you can inspect the political files at your local stations.

Broadcasters have held the keys to our elections for too long; it’s about time we take them back. Maybe we can’t keep Super PACs from using their money to manipulate us, but with the help of the FCC, we can at least find out who’s trying to tell us what — and that’s a great first step.

Obama Seizes Control of All Communications Systems With Executive Order

Occupy Corporatism 
Suzanne Posnell

President Obama has usurped all available forms of communication for use and discretion of the US government. Under executive order (EO) , Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions, Obama has enabled the executive branch to control communications under all “possible under all circumstances to ensure national security, effectively manage emergencies, and improve national resilience.”

Radio and wired communications systems “of all levels of government, the private and nonprofit sectors, and the public must inform the development of national security and emergency preparedness (NS/EP) communications policies, programs, and capabilities.”

Cellular phone corporations like Sprint owned Boost Mobile have released messages to their customers concerning the US government’s allocation of their phone communications at the whim of the President. In a text message to customers, Boost Mobile said that: “. . . you can receive national and local emergency alerts directly on your phone.”

Back in 2011, Hillary Clinton admitted that the US government, via the mainstream media, is losing their “information war” with the American public. As alternative media becomes more prevalent, the propaganda must be taken up a notch in order to keep the masses onboard with the agendas of the US government.

Danny Schechter, filmmaker and investigative journalist, explains that MSM cannot compete with the alternative media. Schechter says that “America feels on the defensive because it can no longer” monopolize the thoughts of citizens domestically and abroad. Since the US government thinks “its point of view is the only point of view” these new news outlets are “extremely damaging” to the US continual purveyance of propaganda.




The Presidential Alert was announced in August of 2011, wherein the Commissioners for the FCC required that television, radio stations and cable systems (including satellites) will redirect broadcasting if the President wants to “alert Americans of impending danger”.

This EO explains that the establishment of a NS/EP Communications Executive Committee (CEC) will “serve as a forum to address NS/EP communications matters”. The CEC will answer to the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and advise Obama on the “prioritization of radio spectrum and wired communications that support NS/EP functions”.

Looming Health Crisis: Wireless Technology and the Toxification of America

Global Research
James F. Tracy

As a multitude of hazardous wireless technologies are deployed in homes, schools and workplaces, government officials and industry representatives continue to insist on their safety despite growing evidence to the contrary. A major health crisis looms that is only hastened through the extensive deployment of “smart grid” technology.

In October 2009 at Florida Power and Light’s (FPL) solar energy station President Barack Obama announced that $3.4 billion of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act would be devoted to the country’s “smart energy grid” transition. Matching funds from the energy industry brought the total national Smart Grid investment to $8 billion. FPL was given $200 million of federal money to install 2.5 million “smart meters” on homes and businesses throughout the state.[1]

By now many residents in the United States and Canada have the smart meters installed on their dwellings. Each of these meters is equipped with an electronic cellular transmitter that uses powerful bursts of electromagnetic radiofrequency (RF) radiation to communicate with nearby meters that together form an interlocking network transferring detailed information on residents’ electrical usage back to the utility every few minutes or less. Such information can easily be used to determine individual patterns of behavior based on power consumption.

The smart grid technology is being sold to the public as a way to “empower” individual energy consumers by allowing them to access information on their energy usage so that they may eventually save money by programming “smart” (i.e, wireless enabled) home appliances and equipment that will coordinate their operability with the smart meter to run when electrical rates are lowest. In other words, a broader plan behind smart grid technology involves a tiered rate system for electricity consumption that will be set by the utility to which customers will have no choice but to conform.

Because of power companies’ stealth rollout of smart meters a large majority of the public still remains unaware of the dangers they pose to human health. This remains the case even though states such as Maine have adopted an "opt out" provision for their citizens. The devices have not been safety-tested by Underwriters Laboratory and thus lack the UL approval customary for most electronics.[2] Further, power customers are typically told by their utilities that the smart meter only communicates with the power company “a few times per day” to transmit information on individual household energy usage. However, when individuals obtained the necessary equipment to do their own testing they found the meters were emitting bursts of RF radiation throughout the home far more intense than a cell phone call every minute or less.[3]

America's Telecom-friendly Policy for RF Exposure

A growing body of medical studies is now linking cumulative RF exposure to DNA disruption, cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and autoimmune diseases. Smart meters significantly contribute to an environment already polluted by RF radiation through the pervasive stationing of cellular telephone towers in or around public spaces and consumers’ habitual use of wireless technologies. In the 2000 Salzburg Resolution European scientists recommended the maximum RF exposure for humans to be no more than one tenth of a microwatt per square centimeter. In the United States RF exposure limits are 1,000 microwatts per centimeter, with no limits for long term exposure.[4] Such lax standards have been determined by outdated science and the legal and regulatory maneuvering of the powerful telecommunications and wireless industries.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ceased studying the health effects of radiofrequency radiation when the Senate Appropriations Committee cut the department's funding and forbade it from further research into the area.[5] Thereafter RF limits were codified as mere “guidelines” based on the EPA’s tentative findings and are to this day administered by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites - now

CNET
Declan McCullagh


CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.

The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance.
In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned.
The FBI general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.

"If you create a service, product, or app that allows a user to communicate, you get the privilege of adding that extra coding," an industry representative who has reviewed the FBI's draft legislation told CNET. The requirements apply only if a threshold of a certain number of users is exceeded, according to a second industry representative briefed on it.

The FBI's proposal would amend a 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, that currently applies only to telecommunications providers, not Web companies. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband networks.

FBI Director Robert Mueller is not asking companies to support the bureau's CALEA expansion, but instead is "asking what can go in it to minimize impacts," one participant in the discussions says. That included a scheduled trip this month to the West Coast -- which was subsequently postponed -- to meet with Internet companies' CEOs and top lawyers.

Data Harvesting at Google Not a Rogue Act, Report Finds

New York Times
Dave Streitfield

SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.

The report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission after a 17-month investigation of Google’s Street View project, was released, heavily redacted, two weeks ago. Although it found that Google had not violated any laws, the agency said Google had obstructed the inquiry and fined the company $25,000. 

On Saturday, Google released a version of the report with only employees’ names redacted.

The full version draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off. 

The so-called payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of Street View, a project to photograph streetscapes over much of the civilized world. When the program was being designed, the report says, it included the following “to do” item: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel.” 

“That never occurred,” the report says. 

Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material. 

A Google spokeswoman said Saturday that the company had much stricter privacy controls than it used to, in part because of the Street View controversy. She expressed the hope that with the release of the full report, “we can now put this matter behind us.” 

Ever since information about the secret data collection first began to emerge two years ago, Google has portrayed it as the mistakes of an unauthorized engineer operating on his own and stressed that the data was never used in any Google product. 

Moyers: Media Giants Fight Proposal That Could Shed Light on Who's Buying Our Elections

Alternet
Bill Moyers

The new rule would require the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates in the top 50 markets to make their files on political advertising available on line immediately. 

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how the media giants who own your local commercial television and radio stations have been striking like startled rattlesnakes at an FCC proposal that would shed a light on who’s buying our elections. The proposed new rule would make it easier to find out who’s bankrolling political attack ads by posting the information online.

The stations already have the data and are required by law to make it public to anyone who asks. But you can get only it by going to the station and asking for the actual paper documents – what’s known as “the public file.” Stations don’t want to put it online because — you guessed it — that would make it too easy for you to find out who’s putting up the cash for all those ads polluting your hometown airwaves.

If approved, the new rule would require the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates in the top 50 markets to make their files on political advertising available on line immediately. Other stations would have a two-year grace period.

In the meantime, the mighty giants of broadcasting have been fighting back. A number of senators serving the industry have spoken up against the proposal and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) — led by their top lobbyist and president, the frozen food millionaire and former Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith – have been meeting with commissioners urging them to scuttle its proposal or at least water it down until it means nothing.

As Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic magazine wrote:

“The arguments against transparency offered by the networks show that, having experienced the windfall of advertising dollars that Citizens United unleashed, they have little interest in meeting their legal and ethical responsibility to serve the public interest.”

Jamming signals to stop hackers from lethal pacemaker attacks

ComputerWorld
Darlene Storm

While there have been no publicly known murder by hacking insulin pumps or pacemakers cases, the lethal hack and wireless attack has been demonstrated by researchers. Most folks do not want to have surgery to replace a functioning medical implant with a replacement device even if it might be less vulnerable to "passive eavesdropping" and to attackers sending unauthorized radio commands which could reprogram the implantable medical device . . . or as in a DDoS attack to drain the pacemaker battery so boom, victim falls over dead via untraceable assassination.

MIT and University of Massachusetts researchers have developed an anti-hacking jamming device that addresses communication security to protect implantable medical devices. The wearable "shield" device can emit a jamming signal when an active attacker establishes an unauthorized wireless link between a pacemaker and a remote terminal.


Researchers presented "They Can Hear Your Heartbeats: Non-Invasive Security for Implantable Medical Devices" [PDF] at the SIGCOMM communications conference. If all broadcasting radio "noise" on the implant frequency is blocked by a jamming device, it prevents the doctor as well as an attacker from receiving the data signals. The researchers created "the shield" prototype so doctors could still access the data but passive eavesdroppers and active attackers sending radio commands could not.

The innovation radio design device does not jam all signals, but the paper states that a "sophisticated adversary" could "transmit at 100 times the shield's power" and the shield's jamming broadcast would still block communications until the attacker was within five meters of the victim's implant.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has also taken an interest in protecting wireless enabled medical devices. The committee sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office, asking GAO to "conduct a review of the FCC's actions in regard to wireless medical devices."

Another electronic medical technology leap forward came when University of Illinois researchers presented Electronic Skin which could replace bulky electrodes. It was described on New Idea as:

It is hair-thin, constructed with sensors, antenna, LED and other parts and powered by built-in solar batteries to monitor a person's heartbeat, brain activity, muscle contractions and so on. If you put it besides your throat, the device can even "hear" your words so as to accomplish certain tasks. It can be easily applied to anything, without need for glue. When such amazing things used in the medical field, we bet we humans can benefit more from the advanced technology.

People who find this mixture of medical communication and technology somewhat more creepy than cool may wish to invest in Faraday Cage apparel?

People who find it fascinating may like Ohio State University researchers' idea to embed high-powered antennas into clothing in order to create the next generation of communication systems. Research Associate Professor Chi-Chih Chen said, "Our primary goal is to improve communications reliability and the mobility of the soldiers, but the same technology could work for police officers, fire fighters, astronauts - anybody who needs to keep their hands free for important work." It is believed that such an antenna communication system sewn into a shirt or vest could also aid the elderly or disabled who might need help in case of an emergency.

Rising water, falling journalism

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
DAWN STOVER

Every evening, my father climbs the levee along the Missouri River in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and peers down into the black water that swallows the road. The water is rising, and the Army Corps of Engineers says the levee has never faced such a test. Dad, a retired professor, is packing his books and papers. If the levee doesn't hold, his one-story house could be underwater for months.

A little farther up the Missouri, at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Station near Blair, Nebraska, the river is already lapping at the Aqua Dams -- giant plastic tubes filled with water -- that form a stockade around the plant's buildings. The plant has become an island.

In Blair, in Council Bluffs, and in my hometown of Omaha -- which are all less than 20 miles from the Fort Calhoun Station -- some people haven't forgotten that flooding is what caused the power loss at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the disastrous partial meltdowns that followed. They're wondering what the floodwaters might do if they were to reach Fort Calhoun's electrical systems.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a "yellow finding PDF" (indicating a safety significance somewhere between moderate and high) for the plant last October, after determining that the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) "did not adequately prescribe steps to mitigate external flood conditions in the auxiliary building and intake structure" in the event of a worst-case Missouri River flood. The auxiliary building -- which surrounds the reactor building like a horseshoe flung around a stake -- is where the plant's spent-fuel pool and emergency generators are located.

OPPD has since taken corrective measures, including sealing potential floodwater-penetration points, installing emergency flood panels, and revising sandbagging procedures. It's extremely unlikely that this year's flood, no matter how historic, will turn into a worst-case scenario: That would happen only if an upstream dam were to instantaneously disintegrate. Nevertheless, in March of this year the NRC identified Fort Calhoun as one of three nuclear plants requiring the agency's highest level of oversight. In the meantime, the water continues to rise.

No guarantees. On June 7, there was a fire -- apparently unrelated to the flooding -- in an electrical switchgear room at Fort Calhoun. For about 90 minutes, the pool where spent fuel is stored had no power for cooling. OPPD reported that "offsite power remained available, as well as the emergency diesel generators if needed." But the incident was yet another reminder of the plant's potential vulnerability.

And so, Fort Calhoun remains on emergency alert because of the flood -- which is expected to worsen by early next week. On June 9, the Army Corps of Engineers announced PDF that the Missouri River would crest at least two feet higher in Blair than previously anticipated.

The Fort Calhoun plant has never experienced a flood like this before. The plant began commercial operation in 1973, long after the construction of six huge dams -- from Fort Peck in Montana to Gavins Point in South Dakota -- that control the Missouri River flows and normally prevent major floods. But, this spring, heavy rains and high snowpack levels in Montana, northern Wyoming, and the western Dakotas have filled reservoirs to capacity, and unprecedented releases from the dams are now reaching Omaha and other cities in the Missouri River valley. Floodgates that haven't been opened in 50 years are spilling 150,000 cubic feet per second -- enough water to fill more than a hundred Olympic-size swimming pools in one minute. And Fort Calhoun isn't the only power plant affected by flooding on the Missouri: The much larger Cooper Nuclear Station in Brownville, Nebraska, sits below the Missouri's confluence with the Platte River -- which is also flooding. Workers at Cooper have constructed barriers and stockpiled fuel for the plant's three diesel generators while, like their colleagues at Fort Calhoun, they wait for the inevitable.

To be sure, there are coal-fired power plants on the river in Sioux City and Council Bluffs, Iowa -- north and south of Fort Calhoun, respectively -- that presumably could provide backup power if the nuclear plant were to lose power. Operators at the coal plants are protecting critical structures with berms and sandbags, but they can't guarantee that a levee break won't take the plants offline.

Failure of the fourth estate. Newspapers and websites all over the country have reported on the flooding and fire at Fort Calhoun, but most articles simply paraphrase and regurgitate information from the NRC and OPPD press releases, which aggregators and bloggers then, in turn, simply cut and paste. Even the Omaha World-Herald didn't send local reporters to cover the story; instead, the newspaper published an article on the recent fire written by Associated Press reporters -- based in Atlanta and Washington.

Unsurprisingly, much of the information in recent press reports has lacked context. For example:

Virtually every article about the flooding mentions that the Fort Calhoun plant was shut down on April 9. On May 27, the Omaha World-Herald reported, "The Omaha Public Power District said its nuclear plant at Fort Calhoun, which is shut down for maintenance, is safe from flooding." The implication is that being shut down makes a plant safe. But as the ongoing crisis in Fukushima demonstrates, nuclear fuel remains hot long after a reactor is shut down. When Fort Calhoun is shut down for maintenance and refueling, only one-third of the fuel in the reactor core is removed. Besides the hot fuel remaining in the core, there is even more fuel stored in the spent-fuel pool, which is not shut down. According to a May 2011 report PDF by Robert Alvarez at the Institute for Policy Studies, there are an estimated 1,054 assemblies of spent fuel, weighing 379 tons, at Fort Calhoun. The oldest of these assemblies are in dry-cask storage, which does not require any water or electricity for cooling. Like the dry casks at Fukushima, which survived the tsunami unscathed, the Fort Calhoun casks do not appear to be in any danger from flooding.

Many news outlets copied this sentence from a June 6 OPPD press release announcing a low-level emergency: "According to projections from the US Army Corps of Engineers, the river level at the plant site is expected to reach 1,004 feet above mean sea level later this week, and is expected to remain above that level for more than one month." Though hardly reassuring news so far, missing from these reports (and from the original release) was the elevation of the plant itself, which turns out to be -- surprise! -- 1,004 feet. According to NRC Senior Public Affairs Officer Victor Dricks, the river yesterday was at 1,005.7 feet and is expected to crest at 1,006.4 feet. By then, the plant will be standing in more than two feet of water; luckily, the eight-foot-tall Aqua Dams should keep the water at bay.

And the river is still well below the worst-imaginable scenario that OPPD is required to prepare for: a flood reaching 1,014 feet above sea level. Nevertheless, in the absence of any context, the press-release language is meaningless to any reader in the neighboring communities.

Almost every article about the fire and power loss at Fort Calhoun has quoted an OPPD spokesman who said that a diesel-powered backup pump was "available" but not needed. None of these articles, however, told readers how much diesel fuel is stored at the plant, how many generators and batteries are on site, and how long they could keep coolant circulating through both the reactor and spent-fuel pool. For the record, there are two emergency diesel generators at Fort Calhoun. According to Dricks, there is usually enough fuel on site to provide cooling for two weeks, but currently the plant has sufficient fuel for four weeks. Of course, the average newspaper reader would never know any of that or be privy to the timeline of potential events.

Finally, many articles have reported that the temperature in the spent-fuel pools rose 2 degrees during the recent power outage. That may not sound like much, but only a few articles told readers the actual temperature of the pool. And a 2 degree rise from, say, 210 degrees Fahrenheit to 212 degrees Fahrenheit (the boiling point for water) would be catastrophic. The pool is normally kept at about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. OPPD estimated that, in the absence of any power to circulate coolant, it would take about 88 hours before water in the pool would begin boiling.

Admittedly, it's not easy finding information about Fort Calhoun, even if you're a local reporter without a tight deadline. OPPD press releases and the company's online newsroom do not provide details about the plant's layout and components. Some of that information was available before 9/11 but was removed because of concerns about terrorism. In protecting ourselves from enemies, we have also hidden vital information from ourselves. So finding the relevant facts takes some digging and dialing, and most newsrooms today don't have that kind of manpower. That's especially true at newspapers scrambling to cover a multitude of flood impacts across the region.

A June 9 report delivered by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), "Information Needs of Communities," states that the number of full-time journalists at daily newspapers has fallen from a peak of about 56,900 in 1989 to 41,600 in 2010 -- fewer than before Watergate. As the FCC report observes:

An abundance of media outlets does not translate into an abundance of reporting. In many communities, there are now more outlets, but less local accountability reporting.

While digital technology has empowered people in many ways, the concurrent decline in local reporting has, in other cases, shifted power away from citizens to government and other powerful institutions, which can more often set the news agenda.

In the absence of in-depth professional reporting on the situation at Fort Calhoun, OPPD created a web page to respond to the flurry of rumors flying around the Internet. One rumor concerns the no-fly zone ordered by the FAA on June 6, which extends two miles around, and 3,500 feet above, the nuclear plant. Contrary to rumor, the no-fly zone has nothing to do with a radioactivity release. But OPPD's rumor-control page neglects to mention that the utility requested the zone, ostensibly because of work being done on overhead power lines but also because of undisclosed "security reasons." An OPPD spokesperson said that the utility is worried about news helicopters flying low over the plant.

Greater government and industry transparency can give citizens and reporters a better understanding of what's happening at the nation's nuclear power plants, and help prevent rumors from dominating the airwaves. Nonprofit organizations such as the Bulletin can help fill today's information gap. But local reporting ultimately relies on readers and advertisers who are willing to support it. Meanwhile, in the absence of reliable information, my dad continues his evening walks to the levee and peers into the rising water to judge for himself.

House GOP votes to overturn net neutrality

12160

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives voted on Friday to reject Internet "neutrality" rules that were adopted last year to keep big Internet service providers from blocking certain traffic

House Republicans, in a 240-179 vote, pushed through a measure disapproving the Federal Communications Commission's rules. Tech and telecom giants such as Verizon Communications Inc and Microsoft Corp could be affected.

The outlook for further progress by the Republicans in rolling back the FCC's actions was uncertain, however.

While a similar measure has been offered in the Senate and has 39 co-sponsors, the White House said on Monday that President Barack Obama's advisers would recommend that he veto any such resolution.

The FCC's rules, approved in late December, banned Internet service providers from blocking traffic on their networks, while allowing providers -- such as Verizon, Comcast Corp and AT&T Inc -- to "reasonably" manage their networks and charge consumers based on usage.

Republicans argued in House debate that the FCC's rules needlessly impose government regulation on the Internet.

"The FCC has never had the authority to regulate the Internet," said Republican Representative Cliff Stearns.

House Republican Leader Eric Cantor called the House's vote "an important step to bring down the FCC's harmful and partisan plan to regulate the Internet."

Democrats argue that the FCC rules are needed to curb the growing market power of large service providers.

Disapproving the FCC rules "would give big phone and cable companies control over what websites Americans can visit, what applications they can run, and what devices they can use," said Democratic Representative Henry Waxman.

Democratic Representative Anna Eshoo called the Republican push against the FCC's rules "an ideological assault on a federal agency and its ability to provide basic consumer protections."

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Monday dismissed challenges to the FCC rules that had been filed by Verizon and MetroPCS Communications Inc, ruling that the challenges were premature.

"In most parts of the country, companies like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast have a virtual monopoly over access to the Internet," Waxman said. "Without regulation, they can choke off innovation by charging for the right to communicate with their customers."

FCC creates a monster, gives it control of the Internet

PCWorld, Dec. 21, 2010

This morning the Federal Communications Commission turned the open Internet into the Grimm's fairy tale of pyramid schemes. One in which nothing changes, nothing new is created, but those with more power on the 'net get to feed on those with less.

Carriers -- who virtually wrote the FCC's policy and have defended it behind closed doors ever since, except when they ventured out to set up straw-man proposals that were even more outrageously unfair than the rules they were really promoting -- sit at the top of the pyramid.

Below them are content providers such as Time Warner and Netflix, and SAAS, cloud-computing and other online services companies whose traffic amounts to something slightly richer and more useful than bandwidth-saving ASCII text.

At the bottom of the pyramid are end users -- consumers and businesses who use the Internet in legitimate ways, who pay exorbitant fees to do so and whose interests the FCC was created to protect.

Full story
See also FCC Net neutrality rules: What the future might look like

Supreme Court Takes Cases on Corporate Rights

New York Times

WASHINGTON — Continuing to explore the limits of corporations’ constitutional rights, the Supreme Court on Tuesday added cases to its docket that will test the scope of companies’ rights to due process and privacy.

The new cases follow the court’s decision in January in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that corporations and unions have a First Amendment right to spend money in candidate elections.

In two of the cases, the justices will consider how the state secrets privilege, which can allow the government to shut down litigation by invoking national security, applies in a contract dispute between the Navy and military contractors hired to create a stealth aircraft.

In the third case, the justices agreed to decide whether corporations have privacy rights for the purposes of the Freedom of Information Act.

The cases were among 14 the court added to its docket.

The court’s newest member, Justice Elena Kagan, disqualified herself from four of the new cases, including the one concerning corporate privacy, because she participated in them as United States solicitor general before joining the court in August. She has also recused herself from about half of the roughly 40 cases that had already been on the court’s docket for the new term, which starts Monday, and so will be absent from the bench much of the time in the coming months.

The state secrets case arises in a surprising context. The court has turned back appeals from people who say they were sent abroad to be tortured but whose lawsuits were dismissed after the government invoked the privilege.

This month, a sharply divided 11-member panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, dismissed a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary accused of arranging flights for the Central Intelligence Agency to transfer prisoners to other countries for imprisonment and interrogation, on state secrets grounds.

Boeing, as successor to the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, is one of the parties to the state secrets cases the court agreed to hear on Tuesday, Boeing Company v. United States, No. 09-1302, but now it objects to the government’s invocation of the privilege. Its case has been consolidated with the second one, General Dynamics Corp. v. United States, No. 09-1298.

Both arose from a 1988 contract to develop the A-12 Avenger aircraft. Dissatisfied with the contractors’ progress, the Navy terminated the contract three years later and demanded the return of $1.35 billion.

The contractors refused to return the money and sued, saying among other things that their work had been frustrated by the government’s failure to share classified technology. The government disputed that assertion but would not explain why, invoking the state secrets privilege. An appeals court repeatedly ruled against the contractors, saying at one point that the Constitution’s due-process clause does not require that they be able to present “a defense that would threaten national security.”

The leading Supreme Court case on state secrets, from 1953, also concerned an aircraft. In that case, United States v. Reynolds, the widows of men who died when a B-29 bomber crashed in Waycross, Ga., during a secret mission, sued the government for negligence.

The Supreme Court ruled against the widows on state secrets grounds. But the court said things might be different if the government were pressing a claim rather than defending against one.

It would be unconscionable to allow the government to pursue a criminal prosecution, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson wrote for the majority, “and then invoke its governmental privileges to deprive the accused of anything which might be material to his defense.”

“Such rationale,” Chief Justice Vinson went on, “has no application in a civil forum where the government is not the moving party.”

The new cases are civil rather than criminal, and the parties disagree about which of them is the plaintiff and which the defendant. With interest, the government now seeks about $3 billion.

The privacy case, Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T Inc., No. 09-1279, will consider whether a provision of the Freedom of Information Act concerning “personal privacy” applies to corporations.

Full Story