When Privacy Shield comes up for its first review in September, EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourová said, one of the "crucial" questions that her side will ask companies is how many times U.S. authorities asked them to provide Europeans' private data. She said during a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event Friday she has been trying to convince representatives of companies that have self-certified under trans-Atlantic data transfer framework to provide such information upon EU request and has gotten "positive" responses. When the framework was being negotiated, she said the U.S. wouldn't agree to companies providing that information.
A federal appeals court ruled that Tennessee 911 programs have the right to sue AT&T over 911 fee remittance. The 911 programs (the Districts) alleged AT&T (BellSouth) covertly omitted fees mandated by Tennessee law to reduce costs, offer lower prices and get more customers. In an opinion Friday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s decision to dismiss the local 911 programs’ lawsuit and judge in AT&T’s favor on whether the company violated the Tennessee False Claims Act (TFCA). U.S. District Court in Chattanooga said the 911 programs lacked private right of action under the state law, but the appeals court disagreed. The programs’ “funding is entirely dependent on the service suppliers’ proper billing, collecting, and remitting of the 911 charges; hence, the Districts’ continued viability -- indeed, their very existence -- necessarily depends on BellSouth’s proper compliance with the 911 Law,” wrote Judge Alice Batchelder for the 6th Circuit. “It is therefore fully consistent with the underlying purpose that the Districts have a means of compelling BellSouth to properly bill, collect, and remit the 911 charges in accordance with the 911 Law. Moreover, because the 911 Law contains no other regulatory system, governmental overseer, criminal or administrative enforcement provisions, or express penalties for violation, the Districts’ most expedient and effective means of compelling the phone companies is a private right of action.” The 6th Circuit said the programs supported their claim that AT&T made misrepresentations, and disagreed with the lower court that they also had to prove those falsehoods were made in bad faith. Because it said the lower court asked the wrong question, the 6th Circuit remanded the matter for further proceedings. Judge Karen Moore concurred that the 911 programs had a private right of action, but said she would have also reversed the lower court’s opinion dismissing the 911 programs’ claim that AT&T owes them a fiduciary duty. The district court found no fiduciary relationship between the programs and company, but Moore disagreed. “Although the 911 Law does not expressly state that telecommunications providers like BellSouth are agents or fiduciaries of the Districts, agency can be implied under Tennessee law,” she said. The programs presented evidence “from which a reasonable juror could conclude” that the telco didn’t make full disclosure of facts that would benefit the programs, she said. Judge Deborah Cook joined the majority opinion. The company didn’t comment.
Looser regulation of industry is one of the keys to the Republican plan to get the country out of "stagnation," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told the NAB State Leadership Conference Tuesday. Getting rid of "the regulatory monster" is a key goal, McConnell said in a speech that included praise for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. "We hope he'll soon be followed up by a majority" that will take the FCC in a "less heavy-handed and regulatory direction," McConnell said of Pai. NAB President Gordon Smith and Sen Dick Durbin, D-Ill., also spoke at the event about the importance of broadcast journalism.
The Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability’s draft recommendations for improving the organization’s transparency drew early praise Wednesday in interviews. The draft recommendations, released Tuesday, are part of CCWG-Accountability’s work on a second set of recommended changes to the organization's accountability mechanisms (see 1610030042). CCWG-Accountability’s transparency work had already been seen as progressing smoothly, even as the working group’s exploration of how to address ICANN's post-Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition jurisdiction was raising U.S. stakeholders' eyebrows (see 1701030021). Comments on the draft transparency recommendations are due April 10, ICANN said.
The Trump administration hasn't contacted FCC Inspector General David Hunt and Commerce Department IG Peggy Gustafson about the possibility of removing them from their positions, they told Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Bill Nelson, D-Fla., in letters dated from this week and provided to us Wednesday by a Nelson spokesman. But the administration told some IGs they would be held over only temporarily, some IGs told Nelson. Senate Commerce held a hearing focused on IGs Wednesday, with testimony from Gustafson, confirmed to the position in December, as well as Homeland Security Department IG John Roth, Transportation Department IG Calvin Scovel and National Science Foundation IG Allison Lerner.
Ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden "was not a whistleblower" but a "disgruntled employee" who lied often and did "tremendous damage" to national security through his document leaks, concluded the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in a declassified bipartisan report released Thursday. After a two-year investigation, committee members released the 38-page redacted report along with a document with report highlights and a news release. Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said "it will take a long time to mitigate the damage" Snowden caused, and ranking member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said the former contractor wasn't a whistleblower. "Most of the material he stole had nothing to do with Americans’ privacy, and its compromise has been of great value to America's adversaries and those who mean to do America harm," said Schiff. Among the findings, the report said Snowden cheated on an NSA test to obtain a position and had numerous run-ins with supervisors at the CIA and NSA. The report also said "the vast majority of documents" Snowden took were unrelated to electronic surveillance, privacy and civil liberties, but he did infringe on the privacy of NSA personnel by searching their drives without permission. The committee also said it's still concerned the NSA and intelligence community hasn't done enough to lessen the risk of another unauthorized disclosure. In a series of tweets, Snowden countered several report assertions, including one tweet that said: "Bottom line: this report's core claims are made without evidence, are often contrary to both common sense and the public record." Another Snowden tweet said: "It is an endless parade of falsity so unbelievable it comes across as parody. Yet unintentionally exonerating:" Former Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, who wrote about government surveillance based on Snowden's leaks, also wrote a scathing commentary, calling the committee's report "trifling." Gellman is a senior fellow for The Century Foundation, which published his commentary.
The FCC has overcompensated the largest video relay service (VRS) provider by about $1 billion since 2008, says a former commission investigator who wrote a 2010 internal report that was disputed and shelved. Sorenson Communications collected upward of $500 million more than it would have from 2008 to 2010 if the FCC had adopted staff proposals in 2007 to enforce its own compensation standard establishing allowable costs and profits, according to the report, provided us by Stanley Scheiner, who authored it for the Office of Inspector General. Although the FCC has cut rates closer to costs since then, Sorenson collected another $500 million in estimated excess profit from 2010 to 2016, Scheiner told us.
Neustar moved to update a court on events the company said backed its challenge to a March 2015 FCC order that conditionally selected Telcordia (iconectiv) to replace Neustar as the local number portability administrator. Neustar cited the controversy over Telcordia's initial use of foreign nationals on number portability system software coding, documents the FCC released in response to a Communications Daily Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and the commission's July order approving Telcordia's contract terms as administrator, which the LNPA incumbent last week also challenged.
Verizon Wireless allegedly took millions of dollars from the Defense Department through fraudulently inflated billings, said a whistleblower complaint (in Pacer) unsealed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. OnTheGo Wireless, filing the complaint as a relator on behalf of the United States, said Verizon violated the False Claims Act by not honoring a promise to provide prices to DOD that are as good or better than those charged other customers. “Verizon routinely and knowingly overcharged the DOD for wireless communication services,” the complaint said. “The margin of overcharge was immense, amounting to millions of dollars each year.” Verizon senior executives knew about the overcharging, it said. OnTheGo said it knew about the scheme because Verizon retained a related entity to analyze pricing plans, including nonpublic pricing data, for many of Verizon’s customers. The relator said it was “present at meetings where Verizon acknowledged its failure to comply with the best pricing obligations it owed the government.” The complaint seeks damages and civil penalties on behalf of the U.S. Verizon didn’t comment Thursday.
Newseum President Jeffrey Herbst wants an "all-out war" against online anonymity. "We should be sending as a signal to everyone -- and especially young people -- that it doesn't count unless you put your name on it. And you should not pay attention to it unless you know that someone else's name is credibly on it," said Herbst at a Hudson Institute event Wednesday. Herbst, who was Colgate University's president until last year, said he wasn't pushing for speech codes or government regulations, but social mores should make it "unacceptable" to post derogatory or similar comments without attribution on sites like Facebook and Yik Yak, which allows anonymous discussion threads. Herbst said he still supports anonymity for whistleblowers and dissidents in authoritarian countries. He cited studies saying most Americans had at least some issue with incivility on social media sites. A Newseum and Knight Foundation survey of college students, he said, found that "41 percent" said conversation on social media wasn't civil and 74 percent found it too easy to say something anonymously in that space. Herbst said there has been some movement on news websites against anonymous comments and several reporters have made it a point to do more sourced reporting. He said pressure can also be put on venture capital firms not to invest in anonymous social sites like Yik Yak. That company didn't comment right away. The Newseum and Knight Foundation are working to find examples where communities are addressing such issues without curtailing free speech and he plans to write a best practices guide in the fall, he said. "I reject the idea that it's just going to be this way and we can't do anything about it." Herbst said this effort will "take a long time and move slowly."