The USA Freedom Act (HR-3361) picked up four House co-sponsors Tuesday, bringing the surveillance legislation authored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., up to 121 backers. The bill would end the government’s bulk collection of phone metadata, create an advocate for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and make other changes. New co-sponsors are Reps. Paul Broun, R-Ga., vice chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence and chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight; Doris Matsui, D-Calif.; William Keating, D-Mass., a member of the House Homeland Security Cybersecurity Subcommittee and Counterterrorism and Intelligence Subcommittee; and Randy Weber, R-Texas.

The House Commerce Committee’s “aggressive agenda advances” in 2014 will include work in updating the Communications Act, said Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., in a written statement Monday. He flagged the coming work, which the committee has said (CD Dec 4 p1) is expected to include hearings and white papers, in a news release touting a report about the committee’s work in 2013 (http://1.usa.gov/1ht2bH3). “We had a strong record of accomplishment in 2013, and we look forward to building upon our record of bipartisan success,” Upton said. “The committee will remain focused on promoting job creation and economic growth, transforming Washington to create a smaller, modernized government for the innovation era, and protecting families, communities, and civic initiatives.” House Commerce clocked 112 days of hearings, 29 days of markups, 22 bills and resolutions reported to the House and 13 legislative initiatives enacted into nine laws, it said. The report included a section on the Communications Subcommittee and the bills it has considered and hearings it has held. “We will keep our foot on the gas both legislatively, evidenced by the House voting on several of our measures this first week of the second session, and in our oversight work,” Upton said.

Congress should do a fuller investigation, beyond any one existing committee, into National Security Agency surveillance, said the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a blog post Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1aFbuMj). EFF’s Mark Jaycox and Lee Tien lament the lack of information members of Congress seem to have, and the limits of what members have managed to learn from intelligence officials in hearings throughout the past half-year. “But any investigation into the NSA’s activities must include a review of the current Congressional oversight regime,” they wrote. “Since the creation of the intelligence committees in 1978, there has been no external audit or examination of how the system has performed.” They back the creation of a special congressional committee to investigate.

The House Communications Subcommittee will host former FCC chairmen at a Jan. 15 hearing, it said (http://bit.ly/1acG57b). The focus will be on updating the Communications Act, as top committee Republicans announced in December they intended to do. A spokesman for the committee declined to provide additional information, including which former chairmen had been asked to testify.

Members of Congress and policymakers worry about how the licenses awarded in the spectrum auction will be structured and whether that structure will allow for competition and new entrants in the mobile market, wrote Linda Moore, a specialist in telecom policy, in a Dec. 23 Congressional Research Service paper posted recently. “Many policy makers and Members of Congress are concerned, for example, that the current structure of auctions to assign spectrum licenses does not provide enough opportunities for competition or new entrants into mobile communications markets,” she said (http://bit.ly/1a1gcUy). “These concerns include the availability of spectrum for uses such as telemedicine or driverless vehicles.” She said implementing the 2012 Spectrum Act raises questions about how stakeholders structure the incentive auction and how to use spectrum controlled by the government. “Without abandoning competitive auctions, spectrum policy may benefit from including additional ways to assign or manage spectrum that might better serve the deployment of a broader range of wireless technology and the implementation of national policies,” Moore said. “Congress may consider these and other policy options as it evaluates how to meet future spectrum needs."

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn’t intend to lie to Congress, his office’s General Counsel Robert Litt said Friday evening. Litt wrote a letter to The New York Times, also posted to ODNI’s Tumblr page (http://bit.ly/1a1tIHA), responding to the paper’s recent editorial on ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Clapper had told Congress earlier this year that the U.S. government didn’t collect content on Americans at large, which many have said was a lie, given revelations since then about the government’s bulk metadata collection program. During a hearing, Clapper “was surprised by the question and focused his mind on the collection of the content of Americans’ communications,” Litt said. “In that context, his answer was and is accurate. When we pointed out Mr. Clapper’s mistake to him, he was surprised and distressed.” The record could not be corrected due to how classified the program was, Litt said. “This incident shows the difficulty of discussing classified information in an unclassified setting and the danger of inferring a person’s state of mind from extemporaneous answers given under pressure.”

The yet-to-be-introduced Cybersecurity Recruitment and Retention Act “aims to give [the Department of Homeland Security] hiring and retention authorities for cybersecurity professionals that are comparable to the ones allowed to the Department of Defense so that DHS can strengthen its workforce and more effectively carry out its cybersecurity mission,” a Senate Homeland Security Committee aide told us. The committee postponed a planned Dec. 18 markup of the bill and has not set a new timeline for action on the measure (CD Jan 6 p2). Committee Chairman Tom Carper, D-Del., and ranking member Tom Coburn, R-Okla., “hope to move a bipartisan measure, including legislation to enhance the ability of DHS to recruit and retain the cyber workforce it needs to protect the department and our nation, in the new year,” the committee aide said.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will host all five members of President Barack Obama’s surveillance review group for a hearing Jan. 14 at 2:30 p.m. in 226 Dirksen, the committee said in a notice Friday (http://1.usa.gov/1cqV1ya). Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., had previously said he would hold such a hearing that day but had not provided details. The five members of the group are Richard Clarke, Michael Morell, Geoffrey Stone, Cass Sunstein and Peter Swire. The White House released the group’s surveillance recommendations, amounting to more than 300 pages and widely perceived as more aggressive than expected, in mid-December. Obama has said he will publicly weigh in on these recommendations in January.

One lawmaker wants to know if the National Security Agency is spying on Congress. “Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other elected officials?” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked NSA Director Keith Alexander in a letter Friday (http://1.usa.gov/1kh3NFR). He specified that spying includes metadata collected from official or personal phone calls, and content pulled from emails and websites visited. The recent revelations about NSA surveillance have uncovered “clearly unconstitutional” actions, Sanders said, saying he was disturbed to learn details of the practices and of the U.S. government’s surveillance of foreign leaders.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., demanded an end to sports blackouts, pointing to three games that recently faced the threat of blackout. “As a result of the NFL’s arcane blackout rules, thousands of Colts, Packers, and Bengals fans had no idea whether they would be able to see their home team play just hours before the playoffs kicked off,” Blumenthal said Friday in a statement, calling the uncertainty unacceptable and unfair. “The threat of a blackout is itself both injury and insult. The NFL and other sports leagues that enforce blackout policies should not be rewarded with special regulatory status, antitrust exemptions, and taxpayer subsidies.” Congress should back the Fans Act, which he introduced with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Blumenthal said. Rep. Brian Higgins, D-N.Y., who introduced companion legislation in the House, also on Friday slammed sports blackouts. He asked colleagues to co-sponsor the bill earlier this week. “Recently the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to repeal federal policies that support sports blackouts calling the rules ‘Obsolete’ and ‘No Longer Necessary,'” Higgins said (http://1.usa.gov/1bE6hni). “With the clock ticking, it is apparent now more than ever that it is the time for an NFL to follow suit and once-and-for all turnover forced blackouts on fans."