February 2012

The Huffington Post explains what Google's controversial privacy changes set to go into effect Thursday mean for users. Meanwhile CNET provides tips on how to manage your Google data before the changes are launched.

Reuters reports that LightSquared may hire former Nextel CEO Timothy Donahue as its new chief.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates complained about the lack of investment in clean technologies, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Microsoft has released Windows 8, the latest version of its popular computer operating system, USA Today reports.

Read all of today's e-Reads on ourTech Page.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday said it will begin seeking comments on what issues should be addressed in the development of voluntary industry codes of conduct aimed at improving consumer privacy.

It's the first step in implementing proposals the Obama administration outlined last week for enhancing consumer privacy online. The administration's plan calls for creating a "privacy bill of rights" for consumers that it would like to see enshrined in legislation. But in the meantime, it also is calling for the creation of voluntary industry codes of conduct based on the principles in its proposed privacy bill of rights.

In a Federal Register notice,Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration suggested that the first round of discussions on the industry codes of conduct could focus on giving people more information about what data mobile application makers and providers are collecting. It's a hot issue right now given reports that some iPhone applications can access users' address books and even their photos.

"A common set of practices that implement the Transparency principle in the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights could provide guidance to mobile apps developers, operating systems, and apps stores, as well as better inform consumers about how mobile apps use personal data," the department said in the notice.

The notice also listed other potential topics for stakeholder discussions including location-based services for mobile applications, accountability, and online services targeted at children and teens.

The department also wants input on how the discussions should be structured to "ensure openness, transparency, and consensus-building." Privacy groups say they want to have a key role in the process.

Six Republican senators plan to unveil a cybersecurity bill on Thursday to compete with legislation backed by Senate Democratic leaders and the White House.

The Strengthening and Enhancing Cybersecurity by Using Research, Education, Information, and Technology (SECURE IT) Act would use more incentives, rather than regulation, to spur companies to adopt cybersecurity measures.

Two weeks ago at a hearing on the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which is being championed by Senate Homeland Security Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., aired a laundry list of concerns about that bill.

"If the legislation before us today were enacted into law, unelected bureaucrats at the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) could promulgate prescriptive regulations on American businesses - which own roughly 90 percent of critical cyber infrastructure," McCain said of Lieberman's bill. "The fundamental difference in our alternative approach is that we aim to enter into a cooperative relationship with the entire private sector through information sharing, rather than an adversarial one with prescriptive regulations."

Lieberman said on Tuesday that he is "open to negotiating" with McCain and other Republicans on the issue. While Republicans have also complained about the process for debating the Cybersecurity Act, "hopefully we can come together and agree on a way to go forward because nobody disagrees with the argument that our country is vulnerable to cyberattacks today," Lieberman said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to bring the Cybersecurity Act to the Senate floor without an official markup by committee, and Lieberman said he hopes the bill will come up after the debate on postal reform.

McCain, who is the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, will be joined by Commerce Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas; Judiciary Ranking Member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa; Intelligence Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.; Energy and Natural Resources Ranking Member Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; and Sen. Dan Coats, R-Indiana.

It's been a year since Comcast got the green light to merge with NBC Universal and the company says it has gone "above and beyond" to meet the commitments it agreed to in order to win regulatory approval of the deal.

In its first compliance report filed with the Federal Communications Commission Tuesday, Comcast detailed its efforts to comply with the conditions it agreed to when it gained approval of its merger with NBCU. The conditions it says it has been working to meet include a pledge to help spur broadband adoption by offering lower-cost broadband connections to 41,000 homes, to increase the number of independent cable networks it carries, and expand its commitment to local news by investing "millions" in the 10 local news stations NBC owns.

The report "shows the extensive measures we've taken to comply with and in many cases go above and beyond our commitments and the FCC's conditions in connection with the NBC Universal transaction," Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen wrote in a blog post Tuesday on its report to the FCC. "As the report shows, our commitments and the conditions, though extensive, have been incorporated into our business activities and become part of the company's 'DNA.'"

But some of the company's critics beg to differ. They include financial news and data provider Bloomberg, which argues that Comcast-NBCU has refused to abide by its pledge to ensure Bloomberg's financial news network is grouped with other news channels including NBCU's CNBC financial news channel on Comcast cable systems.

"Comcast's report to the FCC includes revisionist language that deliberately misstates its own legally binding commitments to [FCC] Chairman [Julius] Genachowski and the American people on the news neighborhooding condition in the Order on Comcast-NBC-Universal," Greg Babyak, who heads government affairs for Bloomberg, said in a statement. "Comcast has refused to implement this time-limited condition for more than a year. Now means now, and news does not -- as Comcast claims -- mean infomercials. It's now time for the FCC to move swiftly to force the company to live up to its commitments."

Bloomberg filed a complaint with the FCC last summer claiming that Comcast-NBCU had failed to abide by this condition. It is waiting for the commission to rule on the matter. In its report Tuesday, Comcast argued that it has not "rearranged any news channels into a neighborhood since the close of transaction and, as a result, has not incurred any obligation to neighborhood news channels."

While Comcast touted deals it has made with online video distributors to gain access to NBC programming, Free Press, which joined other public interest groups in opposing the merger, said it doubted Comcast-NBCU's willingness to promote competition in the online video market.

"These core conditions are the only things preventing Comcast from using its market dominance to disadvantage its rivals and limit consumer choice in programming and video services," Free Press Senior Policy Counsel Corie Wright said. "We urge the FCC to ensure that these conditions are being enforced and that competition and consumer choice is protected."

Federal regulators plan to require all passenger cars to have rear-view cameras by 2014, The New York Times reports.

Several lobbyist firms have dropped Facebook after concerns over conflicting contracts, Politico reports.

An Apple media event scheduled for March 7 may feature the latest iPad, The Washington Post reports.

Scientists aren't too happy about proposed cuts to NASA's Mars budget, the Associated Pres reports.

More of today's e-Reads can be found on our Tech page.

GOP leaders on the House Energy and Commerce Committee asked the Federal Communications Commission and other agencies on Tuesday for correspondence between them and the wireless company LightSquared.

The FCC says it will block LightSquared's plans because they could interfere with global positioning systems. But Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., say the prolonged controversy over LightSquared's plans call the federal process into question.

In a letter to the FCC, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the interagency National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing, and the Defense Department, the three lawmakers ask for documentation of any communication with LightSquared, its corporate predecessors and financial backers, and GPS manufacturers.

"As the committee with jurisdiction over federal communications policy, committee members have been monitoring the progress of the proposed deployment of the broadband network," the committee said in a statement. "However, with the recent tentative decision to limit LightSquared's license to satellite-based service, there remain many unanswered questions, particularly whether the processes used by the FCC, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the interagency National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing were appropriate."

In the Senate, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has blocked votes on two nominees to the FCC because he says the agency and LightSquared have not provided the information he want. Staffers for Grassley and the Senate Commerce Committee met on Monday to discuss the standoff, but no agreement was reached, according to Senate aides.

"The FCC said it wouldn't give internal documents about LightSquared to any members of Congress except the chairmen of the two committees that oversee the FCC," Grassley said in a statement. "Now one of those two committee chairmen is asking for internal documents. It will be hard for the agency to ignore this request."

On Tuesday the fallout from the FCC's decision continued as LightSquared CEO Sanjiv Ahuja announced his resignation. LightSquared says it will still try to overcome the interference problem.

After coming under fire from U.S. privacy advocates and some lawmakers, Google has been told by European Union officials that the changes it plans to make to its privacy practices may violate EU rules.

EU data privacy commissioners also urged Google to delay its changes, which are set to go into effect Thursday, until an investigation being conducted on their behalf by France's data protection authority has concluded.

"Our preliminary analysis shows that Google's new policy does not meet the requirements of the European Directive on Data Protection, especially regarding the information provided to data subjects," Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who heads France's data protection authority, wrote in a letter to Google CEO Larry Page.

Google announced last month that it would consolidate more than 60 privacy policies and begin tracking consumers as they move from one Google service to another. U.S. privacy advocates and some lawmakers have criticized the changes, particularly the fact that Google does not offer consumers a choice to opt out.

Some privacy groups have complained to the Federal Trade Commission that the changes violate the privacy settlement the commission reached last year with Google. While the commission has not commented on these claims, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said Sunday that Google was giving consumers a "binary and somewhat brutal choice."

The EU officials particularly pointed to Google's plans to combine data it collects as users move from one Google service such as Gmail to another such as Google calendar.

"The EU data protection authorities are deeply concerned about the combination of personal data across services: They have strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing and about its compliance with European Data protection legislation," the letter added.

Falque-Pierrotin did praise Google for launching a high-profile campaign to inform users about its changes but complained that Google did not adequately inform all the EU data commissioners first.

Google said it has asked to meet with the French data protection authority so it can answer any questions officials may have about the company's privacy changes.

"We believe we've found a reasonable balance between the [data commissioners'] recommendations: to 'streamline and simplify' our policies while providing 'comprehensive information' to users," a Google spokeswoman said. "We are committed to providing our users with a seamless experience across Google's services, and to making our privacy commitments to them easy to understand."

The hacker group Anonymous has released a list of politicians it wants defeated in November over their stance on a variety of issues, CNET reports.

Facebook offered to cooperate with wireless carriers in making money off mobile content, Reuters reports.

Competing phone manufacturers are on Apple's heels as the mobile phones get cheaper, according to The New York Times.

AT&T is preparing a program to allow app makers help shoulder the cost of using data, The Wall Street Journal reports.

More of Today's e-Reads are available on our Tech page.

The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission said on Sunday that Google was giving consumers a "binary and somewhat brutal" choice on whether they want to go along with the changes to the company's privacy policies set to go into effect next week.

Jon Leibowitz was asked by Tech Daily Dose during an appearance on C-Span's Newsmakers show whether he is personally concerned about the changes Google is making to its privacy policies. The company announced last month that it was consolidating more than 60 privacy policies and that it would begin tracking consumers as they move from one Google service to another.

"Other than saying that they have been clear, and that it's a fairly binary and somewhat brutal choice that they are giving consumers, I think I can't say much more," Leibowitz said. "But we're aware."

Leibowitz urged companies to provide more understandable and clear privacy policies that would allow consumers to make a choice on whether they want to continue to visit a website or use an online service offered by those companies.

"If companies gave clearer disclosures and, again some companies do give pretty clear disclosures, and Google in what it is doing is giving clear disclosure, I think consumers will be able to make a choice," he said. "And maybe, by the way, you have competition over privacy policies, which would be a good thing."

Privacy advocates, lawmakers and a group of state attorneys general, however, have criticized Google for not offering consumers a clear way to "opt out" of being tracked as they move from one Google service to another.

Google has defended its privacy changes by saying it is not collecting any new information and that it offers consumers many tools to control the level of privacy they want.

The FTC reached a privacy settlement with Google last year over allegations the company deceived consumers by automatically signing up its Gmail users for its now-defunct social networking service Buzz. Privacy groups have argued that Google's changes to its privacy practices, which are set to go into effect on Thursday, violate that FTC settlement.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a lawsuit against the FTC earlier this month to require the commission to enforce its settlement with Google. A judge dismissed the lawsuit on Friday but EPIC said it plans to appeal the decision.

A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit on Friday that was brought by a privacy group against the Federal Trade Commission over Google's new privacy policies.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center says the search giant's new privacy policy violates a Consent Order with the FTC. The group asked a court to force the FTC to enforce the agreement and block Google from consolidating its data and privacy policies across its various websites and services.

The FTC countered that courts have no authority to tell an agency when or how to enforce such agreements, and a judge with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed.

The "decision to enforce the Consent Order is committed to agency discretion and is not subject to judicial review," Judge Amy Jackson concluded. Jackson did not rule on whether Google's policy violates the agreement, and said the FTC could still choose to make that determination.

EPIC says it will appeal the ruling. Google will brief congressional staff about the changes to its policies on Monday.

As the White House seeks to hand consumers more control over their information online, a Pew report released on Friday shows a majority of people on social networking sites use existing controls to protect their privacy.

Fifty-eight percent of social network users say they set their online profiles so only friends can see it, while another 19 percent allow friends of their friends to view their profile, according to the survey conducted on behalf of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Twenty percent of users said they left their profiles fully public.

And people aren't afraid to go further to protect their information and online reputation, the survey found. Nearly two-thirds of respondents have unfriended someone, 44 percent have deleted comments, and 37 percent have untagged photos. All of those practices, often called "pruning," have increased by nearly 10 percent since 2009, the report said.

On Thursday the White House released an online privacy "bill of rights" that calls for laws and voluntary actions to help consumers know privacy policies and control their personal data and how it is used.

The poll surveyed 2,277 adults last year and has a margin of error of +/- 2.4 percentage points.

From the Influence Alley blog.

With the hiring of former Republican Rep. Susan Molinari to head its lobbying shop, Google has fully embraced the Washington culture it once found beneath contempt. When company officials first came to town, the brash, young tech company made clear that it didn't need an army of well-connected lobbyists to carry its message for them. They were already hard at work making the lives of staffers and lawmakers easier with better online searches and tools -- and they were beloved for it.

Former CEO Eric Schmidt underscored the point a couple of years ago when he told The Washington Post, "The part of politics in Washington that's 'who you know' and all that kind of stuff, it's just not very interesting."

My, how times have changed. Molinari is the very definition of an inside player. As a representative from New York, Molinari was elected to House Republican leadership making her the highest ranking woman in Congress. After her political career ended, she founded her own firm, served in a senior role at the lobbying shop Bracewell & Giuliani and was the CEO of The Washington Group. And she's married to former Republican Rep. Bill Paxton, a lobbyist with Akin Gump.

She replaces Alan Davidson, who founded Google's Washington office, at a time when the search giant is under intense anti-trust and privacy scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers alike.

Google's lobbying operation is no longer playing on its own terms, but on Washington's.

UPDATE: Here's a more recent quote from Schmidt when asked by the Post last fall how his thinking on lobbying has evolved:

There are two kinds of lobbying. And this, I think, is grossly unfair but kind of true. There's the kind of lobbying where you pay an ex-senator to get the current senator to write a sentence into a bill, and there's no confusion as to what this is about. You are representing your corporate interest. It's specific to your company. In Washington, for example, you can pay an ex-person $50,000 to arrange a meeting to get that process, to get those five sentences written in this bill, and so forth and so on.

The punch line is, we concluded that we didn't want to do that as industry, and certainly not at Sun. We wanted to lobby based on ideas. And as far as I know, every company that I've worked with--and I was part of the Business Software Alliance and all these other groups--we all sort of agree with this. There's a line that we're not willing to cross. So what we do from a leadership perspective, at least in terms of political leadership, is we talk about ideas. ...

The staffers--and the staffers are young--the staffers get it. They're 25, 30 years old and they all get it. So that's what we depend on. And of course we've hired ex-staffers as well. They all know each other. So that's how it really works. And I believe what we're doing is extremely defensible if it's around ideas. I would have a lot of trouble if we in our industry started following the other kind of lobbying.

ABC went into Apple's now-notorious FoxConn supplier in southern China. And New York Times blogger David Pogue ruminates on what it means,

After failing to win regulatory approval for its acquisition by AT&T, T-Mobile USA says it will spend $4 billion on a high-speed broadband 4G network, the Wall Street Journal reports.

CNET examines the challenges T-Mobile faces in its efforts to turn the company around.

Apple's board has given in to pressure from some investors and says it will begin electing future board members by a majority vote instead of only requiring a plurality, Bloomberg reports.

The New York Times details a new program the Dutch airline KLM is testing to allow passengers to use information from social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to help select their seatmates.

British singer Adele is the first artist ever to go double platinum on Apple's iTunes store, selling more than 2 million digital copies of her hit record "21," the Huffington Post reports.

Read all of today's e-Reads on our Tech page.

Privacy advocates indicated Thursday that they expect to have a key role in helping to implement the Obama administration's "privacy bill of rights" released on Thursday.

The administration's privacy policy, included in a Commerce Department report, calls on Congress to pass legislation that details how personal data should be handled and protected. The report also calls on Congress to give the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general specific authority to enforce the privacy bill of rights.

With Congress unlikely to pass privacy legislation this year, the administration also is pushing an effort to develop voluntary industry codes of conduct. Companies that sign on will be subject to FTC enforcement.

"What we like about this approach is it gives us more speed and flexibility than traditional regulatory processes," Commerce Secretary John Bryson said Thursday at the White House release of the privacy report.

While praising the initiatives in the report as a good step forward, privacy advocates released their own set of principles on Thursday that they say should guide the development of the industry codes of conduct. They include ensuring that consumer groups play a role in developing the codes, that the process be open and transparent, and that all stakeholders have an opportunity to offer ideas.

The document was signed by nearly a dozen consumer groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Consumers Union, Consumer Watchdog, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the World Privacy Forum.

"The real question is how much influence companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook will have in their inevitable attempt to water down the rules that are implemented and render them essentially meaningless. I am skeptical about the 'multi-stakeholder process', but am willing to make a good faith effort to try," John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog said in a statement.

Ellen Bloom, senior director of federal policy for Consumers Union, is more optimistic. She said at the White House event that the country is "on the right track" in improving privacy protections for its citizens with the proposals offered by the administration.

The United States currently lacks a broad consumer privacy law, instead relying on a mix of industry self-regulation and sector-specific privacy laws related to health and finance.

"If people don't trust that their personal information will be handled with care and respect, they will be reluctant to sign up for new services," Bloom said.

Intel is among the few tech firms to endorse privacy legislation. "It is necessary individuals have trust in being able to create, process, and share all types of data, including data that may be quite sensitive, such as health and financial information," David Hoffman, Intel's director of security policy and global privacy officer, said in a blog post Thursday.

"The Administration's paper rightly recognizes that this innovation will only be possible if policymakers create a legislative framework to ensure this trust."

Meanwhile, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade is expected to hold a hearing on the privacy report next month. "While I look forward to working with President Obama and Secretary Bryson on this critically important issue, any rush to judgment could have a chilling effect on our economy and potentially damage, if not cripple, online innovation," subcommittee Chairwoman Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., said in a statement.

The ink is barely dry on the spectrum legislation signed into law Wednesday by President Obama and experts already are saying more work is needed to ensure a steady stream of spectrum is available in the future.

Legislation included in the payroll tax cut package would free up more spectrum for wireless broadband by enticing broadcasters to give up some of their airwaves.

The legislation authorizes the Federal Communications Commission to conduct reverse auctions to see how much it would take to get broadcasters to give up some of their spectrum. Then it allows auctions of the airwaves broadcasters give up. The FCC has said it hopes to free up 120 megahertz from this process, an amount some say is overly optimistic.

Former Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., praised the passage of the legislation as an important step in providing more spectrum to meet the growing demand for wireless technologies such as smart phones and tablets. But he added that policymakers need to move quickly to free up spectrum now being used by federal agencies.

Wireless carriers failed to persuade Congress to include language in the spectrum legislation to re-purpose a chunk of spectrum now being used by the Defense Department. The administration last year committed to finding 500 megahertz of new spectrum for wireless broadband uses over the next decade, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which manages the nation's spectrum holdings, is in the process of trying to meet that goal.

"This is a continual process," said Boucher, who headed the House Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee before losing re-election in 2010. He spoke during a spectrum event sponsored by TechAmerica. "Next on the block for auction to the wireless carriers will probably be re-purposed government spectrum. Don't know how quickly that will come but to meet the kinds of demands that we see with these predictions from the FCC for mobile data use, we're clearly going to need more spectrum."

Boucher echoed a call Wednesday by the former chief economist for the FCC, George Mason University law and economics professor Thomas Hazlett, for policymakers to give broadcasters and other spectrum holders flexibility in how they use their spectrum. Hazlett noted at a Hudson Institute event that while broadcasters do not have as much spectrum as they had in the 1950s, they are still required to stick by the over-the-air broadcasting business model set up during that time.

"I think it's more efficient to say 'here's spectrum for a period of time, use it for whatever is most economically efficient. If you would rather offer mobile phone service than broadcast, fine,'" Boucher said.

Three dozen state attorneys general are demanding that Google CEO Larry Page meet with them to find a way to allay their concerns over the company's proposed privacy changes, which also have prompted scrutiny from Congress.

Google said last month that it would be consolidating many of its privacy policies and would track and gather data about users when they move from one Google service to another.

"Given all of our serious concerns, and given our obligation to protect consumers within our states, we request to meet with you as soon as possible to work toward a solution that will best protect the privacy needs of those who use Google's products," the 36 states attorneys general wrote in a letter sent to Page on Wednesday. The top prosecutors, led by Douglas Gansler of Maryland and Robert McKenna of Washington state, demanded a reply by Feb. 29.

The attorneys general outlined several concerns with Google's changes, set to go into effect March 1. They worry that users will not be able to effectively opt out of being tracked by Google and having that data combined with other information the company gathers from users of its products. While some users can choose to stop using Google products, changing services could be costly for businesses and other users who rely on Google for e-mail and other products, or use mobile phones with the Google Android operating system.

"On a fundamental level, the policy appears to invade consumer privacy by automatically sharing personal information consumers input into one Google product with all Google products," the letter added. "Consumers have diverse interests and concerns, and may want the information in their Web History to be kept separate from the information they exchange via Gmail."

Google has argued that it is not collecting any new data and that it offers users many tools to control the level of privacy they want.

"Our updated Privacy Policy will make our privacy practices easier to understand, and it reflects our desire to create a seamless experience for our signed-in users," Google said in a statement Wednesday. "Of course we are happy to discuss this approach with regulators globally."

Meanwhile, the Center for Digital Democracy filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission Wednesday against Google's privacy changes, saying they violate the privacy agreement the company reached last year with the commission. Other groups have made similar claims. The Electronic Privacy Information Center has called on a federal court to order the FTC to enforce its settlement against Google.

Members of Congress are pointing to duplicative investments in federal information technology as an area where the government can cut wasteful spending.

"Federal IT programs have been plagued with cost overruns, program failures, and duplication. Taxpayers should not have to pay for federal IT projects twice," Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Ranking Member Susan Collins, R- Maine, said in a statement on Wednesday.

She pointed to a Government Accountability Office report released on Friday that described $1.2 billion in duplicative spending on IT systems at the departments of Energy and Defense. That amount was found in the watchdog's review of only 11 percent of all federal IT investments.

Collins and Homeland Security and Government Affairs Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., and Sens. Tom Carper, D-Del., and Scott Brown, R-Mass., have introduced a bill to increase transparency and accountability in the federal IT projects.

"The administration has made significant progress in recent years in shutting down failed projects and forcing agencies to consider more cost-effective technology solution," Carper said. "We must continue to transform the government's use of information technology by identifying and eliminating duplication as well."

While many developed countries have adjusted their laws and regulations to address cloud computing, the wide differences in those rules make it difficult for companies to invest in the technology, according to a new study by the Business Software Alliance.

Cloud computing provides resources, software and data over networks. Such systems may feature servers in one country and customers in another, making it difficult to regulate and protect them.

The 24 countries surveyed in the report account for about 80 percent of the world's information and communications technology, but some countries have done better than others.

Japan, Australia, the United States, and some European countries top the rankings, while some otherwise tech-savvy countries like India, China and Brazil are near the bottom, the group found.

In the United States, for example, there are many up-to-date laws covering issues like cybercrime. Inconsistencies in state laws and court rulings on privacy, data breaches, and copyright issues still need to be remedied, the report concluded.

More regulation is not needed to help the world take advantage of a global technology like cloud computing, said BSA President Robert Holleyman. Rather, the patchwork of laws needs to be "harmonized" so that companies can develop cloud computing.

"My biggest concern is that if we don't watch out, governments will chop the global cloud into pieces and wall in their separate markets," he said in a statement.

One surprising finding: some countries are closing themselves off with laws and regulations that conflict with other countries. The report said the European Union's proposed Data Protection Regulation could undermine the potential scale and economic impact of the cloud. "To have a global cloud market, we don't need every country's laws to be identical. But we do need them to be compatible," said Holleyman

A few days after lawmakers passed spectrum legislation, the White House issued a report that says freeing up more spectrum for wireless technologies will spur economic investment and job creation.

The report's timely release comes as President Obama waits for Congress to send him the spectrum legislation, included in the payroll tax cut package passed Friday, that would free up more spectrum for wireless broadband technologies and help build a national network for emergency first responders. The legislation calls for generating more spectrum by offering broadcasters money to give up some of their spectrum, which will be auctioned to wireless providers.

"Like other information and communication technologies that have transformed the economy in the past, the spread of wireless broadband is likely to increase the rate of growth in per capita income; spur economic activity through new business investment; and support many new high-quality jobs," the report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers said.

The report also echoes arguments from wireless carriers that they are facing a "spectrum crunch" given the public's growing demand for smart phones, tablets, laptops and other wireless devices. To meet this shortage, the White House pledged last year to find 500 megahertz of additional spectrum over the next decade. A big part of that is expected to come from the airwaves broadcasters may give up as part of the incentive auctions authorized by the spectrum legislation.

The new report alsopromotes the benefits of building a national broadband network for public safety. The spectrum legislation authorizes spectrum and $7 billion in funding to build the network. Public safety officials have long argued that it would greatly improve their ability to respond to emergencies and eventually allow them to better communicate with other first responders during emergencies.

"The measure that Congress just passed picks up on many aspects of the President's Wireless Innovation Initiative and will enable new spectrum to be used for innovation, to speed wireless communication, and to fulfill a promise made to first responders after 9/11 that they would have the technology they need to stay safe and do their jobs," Vice President Joe Biden said in a statement.

Biden was active in pushing for the creation of the public safety network, which the report noted would enhance "the ability of emergency personnel to communicate efficiently and to obtain necessary information quickly, including real-time videos, images, and other data."

Silicon Valley's crop of young CEOs have challenges of their own, Reuters reports.

Barnes & Noble goes head to head with Amazon with a $199 tablet, The Washington Post reports.

Mini cameras and cloud computing may help Taser overcome concerns about deadly incidents, according to The New York Times.

More of Today's e-Reads can be found on our Tech page.

The Commerce Department appears close to finally releasing its long-awaited final report outlining the Obama administration's position on consumer privacy online.

The report is likely to be released as soon as Thursday. While the report apparently has been completed for weeks, the agency has been trying to line up some big-name support to help release it, possibly Vice President Joe Biden.

The report is not expected to include any major differences from the draft report the department released in December 2010. It is, however, likely to include the administration's previous calls for Congress to pass legislation calling for a "privacy bill of rights" that would establish basic privacy protections for consumers.

While Commerce's draft privacy report did not call for broad privacy legislation, the administration came out in support of congressional action during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last March.

In its final report, Commerce may provide more details on its calls for industry sectors to create their own codes of conduct on the commercial use of personal information. Commerce's draft privacy report said companies working with privacy advocates and others should help craft voluntary codes of conduct, which would be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.

While both industry representatives and some privacy advocates say it is unlikely that Congress will pass broad privacy legislation this year, the report may spur the private sector to do more on its own to protect consumer privacy.

"The [White House] privacy report sets the stage for important advances to be made to protect consumers online," Jeff Chester with the Center for Digital Democracy said. "This new initiative will generate greater public awareness on the need to protect privacy. It will also help support the development of new safeguards for consumers."

After criticism over working conditions, Apple's supplier, Taiwan-based Foxconn, says it has raised its workers' wages, Reuters reports.

Amazon is buying office space in Washington state, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The online game site Zynga is trying to reduce its dependency on Facebook, according to Bloomberg.

The group Anonymous says it has hacked U.S. government agency websites to protest a global copyright treaty, the AP reports.

More of Today's e-Reads can be found on our Tech page.

Add whiplash to the pain Google's Washington team may be feeling after the search giant's privacy policies came under fire again on Friday.

Two weeks after she summoned them to the Hill to explain Google's new privacy policy, Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., wants representatives to brief her on reports that the company bypassed privacy controls in order to track people online.

"Even if unintentional, as the company claims, these types of incidents continue to create consumer concerns about how their personal information is used and shared," Bono Mack said in a statement. "Companies need to be open about what they're collecting, and how that information is used. Just as importantly, this needs to be clearly communicated to consumers."

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Google and some other advertising companies used tracking cookies that circumvented privacy controls on Apple's Web browser.

Google has disabled the feature but says it was simply designed to allow Google users who signed-in to see personalized content.

That hasn't stopped a storm of criticism even as the company continues to face concerns over its new, streamlined privacy policies.

A spokesman for the Center for Democracy and Technology said such a misstep is unacceptable.

"While we take Google's assertion at face value that it was not their intent to track users in this way, we are perplexed how this decision evaded Google's internal design and review process," Brock Meeks said in a statement. "After a several recent missteps--and two new reboots on privacy-by-design--this should never have happened."

And others in the tech industry fear the repeated controversies could lead to increased congressional scrutiny and regulation of all tech companies.

"Given that Google has a track record of violating user privacy, from its wi-fi surveillance to the Buzz Settlement to the controversy over its recent privacy policy changes, the search giant's latest transgression could have profound implications for everyone in the industry," said Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology.

The House is set to take up a payroll tax cut package Friday that includes legislation that would provide more spectrum, both to fill the insatiable demand for wireless technologies and to help firefighters, police and other first responders build a broadband public safety network that's been promised since 9/11.

The deal has bipartisan support among the top leaders on the House Energy and Commerce Committee - a big change from the divisions seen when the Communications and Technology first marked up its version of the spectrum legislation in December.

"I cannot tell you how happy I am about this," said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., who championed the bill's provisions to help create the public safety network.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, whose agency will play a pivotal role, signaled that he is not entirely satisfied with modified language affecting auctions to be arranged to reallocate the frequencies and raise cash.

"I'm pleased that Congress has recognized the vital importance of freeing up more spectrum for mobile broadband, both licensed and unlicensed, although the legislation could limit the FCC's ability to maximize the amount and benefits of recovered spectrum," Genachowski said in a statement.

A wide range of industry and public interest groups applauded the spectrum legislation including the wireless industry association CTIA, the Public Safety Alliance and Free Press.

Shares in pay-as-you-go wireless provider Leap jumped on news that AT&T is considering buying it, Bloomberg reports.

The Transportation Department has asked car makers to include technology that would bar people from accessing social networks like Facebook and engaging in other online activities while a car is moving, according to Bloomberg.

The New York Times says Apple appears to be trying to tie its new Mac operating system to the operating system it uses for its iPhone and iPad.

Apple's iPads are getting harder to find in China, USA Today reports.

All of today's e-Reads can be found here.

Language that would have barred the Federal Communications Commission from extending all its network neutrality rules to wireless providers was deleted on Thursday from compromise spectrum legislation to be attached to a payroll tax cut package.

The net neutrality provision was adopted as an amendment during the House Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee's December markup of spectrum legislation crafted by the panel's GOP leaders.

The subcommittee's spectrum legislation was included in the payroll-tax cut bill the House passed late last year. The amendment, offered by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., would have barred the FCC from imposing any net neutrality requirements when issuing licenses to wireless carriers as a result of the incentive auctions authorized by the spectrum bill.

Republicans strongly opposed the net neutrality rules approved by the FCC in December 2010 even though they did not go as far as proponents wanted. The rules exempted wireless carriers from a provision barring broadband providers from discriminating against content. Despite this, congressional Republicans have repeatedly tried without success to block the rules from going into place.

While critics' latest bid to attach anti-net neutrality language to the spectrum bill may have failed, Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., indicated Thursday that he is not likely to let the issue die.

Groups that supported the FCC's network neutrality rules cheered the removal of the anti-net neutrality language from the spectrum bill. "We are also pleased that the conferees deleted language preventing the FCC from implementing even the modest open Internet rules for wireless services," Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld said in a statement Thursday.

A day after regulators said they wouldn't allow its plans for a wireless broadband network to go forward, LightSquared is looking to swap the problematic airwaves it currently holds for spectrum used by the Defense Department, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Cisco says it will challenge Microsoft's bid to buy Skype in the European Union's highest court, according to the Associated Press.

Deutsche Telekom is considering selling a joint U.K. wireless phone venture to help raise money after its bid to sell its T-Mobile USA subsidiary to AT&T fell through in December, Bloomberg reports.

Syrian opposition activists are trying to strip President Bashar al-Assad's name off of Google's maps, The Washington Post reports.

Read all of today's e-Reads here.

Updated 8:30 pm

House and Senate negotiators on Wednesday were finalizing the details of spectrum legislation that is now expected to be part of a payroll tax cut package.

"We're just about there," House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., told reporters. Upton, along with Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., are members of the House-Senate payroll tax conference committee and are working on the spectrum provisions.

Negotiators were trying to finish their work Wednesday night so they could hold a vote in the House as early as Friday on the payroll tax cut package.

The negotiators want to use the spectrum legislation to help pay for the payroll tax cut package. The spectrum legislation would authorize incentive auctions, from which the Federal Communications Commission to could give broadcasters and other spectrum holders a share of the revenues from the spectrum they relinquish. Auctions could raise billions for the Treasury depending on how the legislation is structured. The Congressional Budget Office projected that spectrum legislation approved late last year by Walden's subcommittee and included in the House's version of the payroll tax package would generate $16.7 billion for the Treasury.

"It's all about the money," Communications and Technology Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., said.

Walden's bill, along with spectrum legislation passed last summer by the Senate Commerce Committee, also authorized funding and frequency for the creation of a national broadband network for public safety officials. How that network should be governed was among several policy issues that divided House and Senate lawmakers and House Republicans and Democrats. The negotiators may decide to leave some of the details of the public safety network to the FCC and the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration to tackle.

"We've made great progress and are very close to a historic milestone--creation of a new nationwide communications network for our first responders," Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said in a statement. "My expectation is that we will be able to include this legislative language in the compromise payroll deal that is close to being finalized. Although we continue to hash out some of the finer points of the legislation, the end result should be the same: a new communications network that will save lives and generate economic growth."

Other thorny issues include whether the FCC should be restricted from freeing up more spectrum for unlicensed uses such as Wi-Fi.

Tech firms, wireless carriers and public safety officials have been keen for Congress to move forward on spectrum legislation. "Congress needs to take action before the looming spectrum crisis throws a cold blanket on one of the bright spots in the U.S. economy right now - mobile broadband," Qualcomm Vice President of Government Affairs Alice Tornquist said in a blog post on the issue Wednesday.

The Federal Communications Commission may be looking to block LightSquared's proposed network, but Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, isn't backing down from his investigation into the agency's handling of the case.

"Now that the interference issue is settled, we need to find out more than ever why the FCC did what it did," Grassley said in a statement on Wednesday. "If we don't find out how and why the FCC failed to avoid this controversy, then it will keep operating as a closed shop instead of the open, publicly accountable agency it should be."

The FCC proposed Tuesday night to prohibit LightSquared from launching its nationwide wireless network because it interferes with global positioning systems.

Since last year Grassley has been pressuring the FCC and LightSquared to provide documents from the company's application. The senator has been blocking Senate votes on two nominees to the FCC until the agency provides the information and a spokeswoman for Grassley confirmed that the hold remains in effect.

The FCC has said Grassley does not have oversight authority and at a news conference on Wednesday FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski refused to comment on the spat.

Grassley called on other senators, and specifically Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefellerr, D-W.Va., who oversees the FCC, to join him in pressuring the agency.

"The FCC's action seems to acknowledge the point I've been making since April," he said in his statement. "Now that the FCC has backtracked on LightSquared, I'd like to see my Senate colleagues join my document request, especially the chairman of the only Senate committee that the FCC is willing to answer."

More coverage of LightSquared can be found on our Tech page.

If executives of the social media application maker Path thought that lawmakers were going to ignore reports that their service secretly downloaded the address books of Apple iPhone users, they were surely mistaken. However, it isn't Path that's drawn the attention of two senior Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It's iPhone maker Apple.

Energy and Commerce ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee ranking member G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., say Path may not be alone, according to news reports, and that other iPhone apps may be collecting similar information without user knowledge. The lawmakers want to know whether Apple privately condones such conduct, and if not, what steps the company is taking to ensure app makers are respecting their users' privacy.

"This incident raises questions about whether Apple's iOS app developer policies and practices may fall short when it comes to protecting the information of iPhone users and their contacts," Waxman and Butterfield wrote in a letter Wednesday to Apple CEO Tim Cook, which also was sent to Path CEO Dave Morin.

The lawmakers have requested information from Apple by the end of the month about what information app makers can access from users without their permission, criteria Apple uses to approve apps, how many apps makers transmit data about users, whether it considers an address book to be data about a user that requires permission before it is accessed, and how many apps makers access users' address books.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment .

It was a nice thought.

That was the reaction to news that federal regulators had concluded Tuesday night that LightSquared's proposed nationwide wireless network could not proceed.

"While I'm disappointed that the interference testing has shown LightSquared will not be able to move forward, we still have to continue to look for new and creative ways to drive competition and expand wireless broadband deployment across the country," said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., the ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee.

LightSquared originally sparked excitement over its innovative plan to offer a wholesale wireless service but its transmissions interfered with global positioning systems.
Enthusiasm faded as the fight between LightSquared and GPS manufacturers and users dragged on.

"It is very unfortunate that the engineering studies did not find a clear way forward to bring much needed spectrum to the public on a wholesale basis," said Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge. "While it is possible that a way forward may emerge from the comments in response to the FCC's public notice, it would appear that LightSquared will not fill this need for wholesale access any time soon."

Congress played a major role in pulling the controversy into the spotlight, but even opponents of LightSquared's plans said it would have been nice had the company found a way to solve the problems.

"Our position has always been that Lightsquared's plans should not be approved unless tests proved no interference for GPS devices," said House Small Business Committee Chairman Sam Graves, R-Mo. "I hope that technology continues to be developed in a way that addresses the GPS interference concern on behalf of the many small businesses that rely on them, and that we can find a way to have a win-win on this issue."

TechNet has flown in executives from several tech companies to lobby Congress on Wednesday to act on the group's top priorities, most of which are focused on boosting U.S innovation and competitiveness.

Among those in town for TechNet's 10th annual Washington visit include Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers, Sybase Chairman and CEO John Chen, and eHealth Chairman and CEO Gary Lauer.

More than 40 TechNet executives will be meeting with lawmakers from both parties to push for action on investment in research and development; clean energy technologies; tax and immigration reform; expanding free trade; and extending the research and development tax credit, which expired at the end of 2011.

The group also will be pushing lawmakers to pass legislation to free up more spectrum for wireless broadband technologies and to continue to oppose anti-piracy legislation that critics say could harm the integrity of the Internet and innovation.

TechNet has joined several leading tech groups and companies in opposing the two controversial bills, the Senate's Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, aimed at curbing piracy and counterfeiting on foreign websites. The group is scheduled to meet with two of the leading congressional opponents of those bills, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., to discuss the issue.

Among the many other lawmakers the executives are scheduled to meet with Wednesday include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. The group also has plans to meet with Treasury Department officials and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

The TechNet executives also have meetings scheduled with representatives from President Obama's re-election campaign and the campaigns of GOP presidential contenders Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum.

Could an iPad 3 be coming in March? The Washington Post rounds up the latest Apple rumors.

PC World reports that Reddit has moved to ban forums that focus on sexual content related to children.

UnitedHealth Group has launched a cloud computing platform to help doctors manage medical information, the AP reports.

Yahoo's attempts to sell some of its holdings in Asia have faltered, The New York Times reports.

After winning approval of its bid to buy handset maker Motorola Mobility, Google needs to focusing on taking on Apple in the tablet market, two CNET columnists write.

More of Today's e-Reads can be found on our Tech page.

Top members of the Senate Commerce, Intelligence, and Homeland Security committees introduced a long-awaited bill on Tuesday to address a wide range of cybersecurity issues in government and private industry.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 (S. 2105) would direct the Department of Homeland Security to assess and determine what industries to classify as "critical infrastructure." If selected, industries like electric grids or financial services would be required to meet a minimum level of cybersecurity.

Under the bill, all of DHS's cybersecurity efforts would be consolidated in a new National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications. The legislation would also seek to increase information sharing between the government and private businesses; provide a new program for research and development; and increase standards for federal networks.

"This bill would begin to arm us for battle in a war against the cyber mayhem that is being waged against us by our nation's enemies, organized criminal gangs, and terrorists who would use the Internet against us as surely as they turned airliners into guided missiles," one of the bill's sponsors, Senate Homeland Security Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said in a statement.

Other sponsors include Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

On Monday Feinstein rolled out her proposals for increasing file sharing in a bill she plans to incorporate into the larger legislation.

The group that runs the Internet's address system is revealing a few details about the program it launched in January allowing for the introduction of an unlimited number of new Internet addresses.

So far, 100 groups or companies have submitted applications to run their own domain names to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the group said Tuesday. Each applicant is allowed to apply for up to 50 names. However, applicants must pay a $185,000 evaluation fee for each name they apply for, an ICANN spokesman said. ICANN has so far refused to say now many names each applicant has applied for or give any details about the applicants.

In the unlikely event that every applicant applied for the maximum number of names, it means there could be as many as 5,000 possible new domain names to compete with the 22 existing top-level domain names. But it could take up to a year before any of the proposed names, whether it be .car or .anything, become available. ICANN has established a lengthy evaluation process to ensure applicants have the financial and technical means to run a new domain name.

ICANN began accepting applications for its controversial new domain name program on Jan. 12 and the window for applications closes April 12.

The program has been criticized by trademark holders and others who worry that they will be forced to apply for domain names for strategic and competitive reasons and say it will pose unnecessary costs on trademark holders. ICANN has promised to closely evaluate the process after the first round is completed and before moving forward with a second round.

Despite this, ICANN's board approved a resolution last week committing to opening a second round for the introduction of new domain names. It has not set a date for when that will begin. "The important thing here is that the board has erased any doubt that there will be a second application window for new generic top-level domains," ICANN Chairman Steve Crocker said in a statement Friday.

Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced legislation on Monday designed to help businesses and government communicate about cyberthreats.

A comprehensive Senate cybersecurity bill has been in the works for months and is expected to be introduced before a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday. Feinstein say she plans to incorporate her proposals into that broader bill.

Feinstein's proposal would require the government to designate an agency as a "cybersecurity exchange" to coordinate information sharing; allow the government to share classified cybersecurity information with certain private-sector organizations; and provide liability protection for companies that share information.

"Alongside terrorism, cybersecurity is perhaps the number one threat facing our nation today, but many obstacles exist that prevent the cooperation and coordination needed to deter this growing threat," Feinstein said in a statement.

A House and Senate conference committee is coming under increased pressure from a wide range of stakeholders to ensure the Federal Communications Commission has the flexibility it needs to free up more spectrum for unlicensed uses such as Wi-Fi.

As it weighs whether to include spectrum legislation in a payroll tax cut package, the conference committee must settle several policy issues. They include calls from a broad coalition of tech companies and public interest groups and some lawmakers to delete language in the House's version of the spectrum legislation that would restrict the FCC from providing additional spectrum for unlicensed uses such as Wi-Fi .They are particularly worried that the House language could keep the FCC from using some of the spectrum that broadcasters are expected to voluntarily give up for unlicensed uses.

"It is particularly critical that some of the 'the beachfront' spectrum located in the television bands remain available for unlicensed services, which are driving innovation, promoting rural broadband deployment, and creating new services in the wireless ecosystem," Google, Microsoft, Public Knowledge and several other tech firms and public interest groups wrote in a letter to the conference committee.

A group of 42 House members led by Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Darrell Issa, R-Calif. sent a similar missive last week in which they argued the importance of freeing up more unlicensed spectrum.

While wireless companies also rely on unlicensed spectrum at times to help alleviate congestion on their networks, they want to ensure that they have first dibs on any of the spectrum broadcasters give up.

Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., who authored the House spectrum legislation and is also on the payroll tax conference committee, said he agrees on the importance of providing both unlicensed and licensed spectrum but said licensed spectrum should be the top priority.

"There is currently more unlicensed spectrum than there is licensed spectrum for wireless broadband use. The JOBS Act not only preserves unlicensed spectrum, it creates more for future innovation," Walden said in a statement last week. "The JOBS Act simply says that the FCC cannot spend taxpayer funds to clear additional spectrum and then give away that billions of dollars worth of spectrum. Taxpayers deserve a return on their investment."

Meanwhile, the conference committee has come under pressure from smaller wireless firms including Sprint and T-Mobile to also delete language in the House spectrum bill that would restrict the FCC from barring the two biggest wireless firms, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, from participating in future auctions of the broadcast spectrum.

Buried on page 1120 of President Obama's budget, the wireless startup LightSquared gets an indirect shout out. And not in a good way.

The appendix of the massive budget document released on Monday includes this provision:

"SEC. [628]618. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Federal Communications Commission to remove the conditions imposed on commercial terrestrial operations in the Order and Authorization adopted by the Commission on January 26, 2011 (DA 11-133), or otherwise permit such operations, until the Commission has resolved concerns of potential widespread harmful interference by such commercial terrestrial operations to commercially available Global Positioning System devices."

That language is aimed squarely at LightSquared's proposed nationwide wireless network, which has been shown to interfere with GPS devices. The FCC has long said it won't give LightSquared the green light until the problem is solved, but that hasn't stopped Congress, and now apparently, the White House, from seeking to make sure agency doesn't move ahead with anything.

In the Defense Authorization Act signed by Obama last year, Congress prohibited the FCC from approving LightSquared's plans until the interference issue is addressed.

A LightSquared spokesman said the language represents an existing provision that the company has already agreed to.

Apple says the independent Fair Labor Association has started checking out working conditions in the Chinese factories where its iPads and iPhones are assembled, starting at gan the inspections Monday morning at Foxconn City in Shenzhen, the AP reports.

The company's shares broke $500 on Monday -- a 25 percent rise since July, the Washington Post reports.

The European Commission has approved Google's bid to buy Motorola Mobility even as it waits for the Justice Department's word on the deal, CNET reports.

Job-seekers with good analytical skills have a future, the New York Times reports.

See more of today's e-Reads on our Tech page.

He may have come close to matching last year's approved budget for NASA, but President Obama's expected budget proposals for the space agency are already eliciting criticism from Congress.

When the White House unveils its budget on Monday it is expected to ask for $17.7 billion for NASA with a slight drop from the $17.8 billion budget Congress approved last year, but it's a 5 percent cut compared to the $18.7 billion that Obama envisioned when he submitted his budget last year, according to Space.com.

Some departments would suffer more cutbacks than others. The budget for NASA's planetary science division, which studies other planets and moons, would be reduced by 20 percent from $1.5 billion to $1.2 billion. The cuts would end a joint NASA program with the European Space Agency to send probes to Mars.

Last year the House Appropriations Committee proposed up to $578 million in cuts from NASA, but members of Congress from states with NASA facilities had already voiced their opposition to Obama's plans.

RESTON, Va.--Appearing at home in front of an audience of technology executives and workers, Mitt Romney on Friday extolled the virtues of innovation, limited regulation, and low taxes to spur the U.S. economy.

"You have to have regulators in government who see their job as encouraging innovation in the private sector, as opposed to killing all potential risk," he told about 900 people at the Northern Virginia Technology Council. The crowd, often polite and quiet, interrupted the speech to clap at that line. They also applauded his calls to "staple a green card" to the Ph.D.'s that foreign students earn in the United States, or even abroad at top universities.

Romney's speech sketched the broad outline of the business climate he sees as necessary for the U.S. to prosper, including the importance of allowing people the freedom to take risks, with few proposals specific to the technology industry.

A file released by the FBI on Steve Jobs, who was being considered in the late 1980s for a seat on a presidential council, reveals that friends and acquaintances of the late Apple co-founder discussed his past drug use and at least one claimed he had a "tendency to distort reality," according to the Huffington Post.

The Internet community's success in shelving controversial anti-piracy legislation is complicating efforts to pass unrelated cybersecurity legislation because some lawmakers fear doing anything that might anger Internet activists, The New York Times reports. Read National Journal's latest coverage of the cybersecurity legislation here.

As it works to exit from bankruptcy, Kodak plans to phase out its digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frame division and focus on digital printing, Bloomberg reports.

AT&T says mobile customers should not be too worried that they could be snagged by the wireless firm's policy of slowing down its biggest data users, The New York Times reports.

Oracle announced plans to buy Dublin-based cloud provider Taleo for $1.9 billion, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

Read all of today's e-Reads on our Tech Page.

A Senate committee on Thursday debated a controversial Justice Department opinion that some legal experts and gambling supporters say has opened the door for states to begin offering online gambling within their borders and could harm Indian gambling operations.

The Senate Indian Affairs Committee examined how any potential expansion of Internet gambling within states could affect Indian tribes that also offer gambling on their reservations.

The issue has come under more scrutiny in recent months following the release in December of a Justice Department opinion that reversed the department's opinion on the scope of the Wire Act, a federal law prohibiting some gambling activities. The department now says that the Wire Act only applies to sports betting. Some states are moving quickly to take advantage of the department's opinion and begin offering some online gaming within their states.

"The short answer to the DoJ opinion is that states are now free to do whatever they wish with respect to Internet gambling, except for, of course, sports betting," Patrick Fleming with the Poker Players Alliance told the committee. "This opens up an entire Pandora's box of possibilities."

Congress enacted legislation in 2006 aimed at barring online gambling in the United States by prohibiting financial institutions from processing payments for online bets. Critics of the law say it has not stopped Americans from gambling online using offshore sites. They argue that these players lack consumer protections and that the United States is losing out on potential tax revenues.

Witnesses told the committee Thursday that the Justice Department opinion puts more pressure on Congress to act on an issue that had already gained some steam in the last year. Bipartisan legislation was introduced in the House last summer that would legalize online poker. And in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., are working on Internet gambling legislation that may involve legalizing online poker. Kyl authored the Senate version of the 2006 anti-gambling law. Kyl recently told National Journal that the Justice Department opinion may force Congress to clarify the law.

"Quite possibly something will be done. As a result of that, there is probably a need to tighten up the law to address all forms of Internet gambling and in that context things like Internet poker, so I am involved in it because I am the author of the original legislation," Kyl said. He added that "Reid has supporters in Nevada" who want to deal with online poker. "And obviously the two of us therefore are talking."

Legal experts and the head of a New York tribe said that without intervention by Congress, Indian tribes, particularly smaller tribes with little political influence, could be harmed by the spread of online gambling at the state level. They urged lawmakers to ensure tribes will have equal access to licenses that might be given out by state or federal regulators to offer online gambling.

If you thought the sparring between AT&T and Sprint ended with the demise late last year of AT&T's bid to buy T-Mobile, think again.

AT&T is once again on opposite sides of a major telecom issue with Sprint, a fierce critic of the AT&T-T-Mobile merger, and several other smaller rivals. The issue this time is over legislation aimed at freeing up more spectrum to meet the public's growing demand for wireless technologies.

Sprint, along with T-Mobile, C-Spire Wireless, Cricket and other smaller wireless operators want members of Congress to give the Federal Communications Commission discretion to design future spectrum auctions as it sees fit. They called on lawmakers Wednesday to strip a provision from House spectrum legislation that would bar the FCC from imposing restrictions on who can bid for spectrum given up for auction by broadcasters.

"The proposed provision would substantially limit the FCC's ability to promote competition and a competitive wireless marketplace for consumers throughout America. It would facilitate spectrum warehousing, inefficient use of scarce spectrum resources, and reduce spectrum auction revenues to the U.S. Treasury," they wrote in a letter to the House and Senate payroll tax conference committee.

The payroll tax cut package could include the spectrum legislation.

The provision in the House spectrum bill is aimed at ensuring the FCC can't keep the nation's two biggest wireless providers ,Verizon Wireless and AT&T, from participating in future spectrum auctions. Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., who drafted the House spectrum legislation, said last month that he doesn't think it's good public policy to exclude any market players from participating in spectrum auctions.

AT&T has echoed Walden's view on the issue. "Auctions should be open, not closed. Any qualified carrier, including those on today's letter, should have a chance to bid on any spectrum available in an auction," AT&T Senior Executive Vice President Jim Cicconi said in a statement. "This group, however, wants the FCC to stack the deck in its favor. Congress is right to resist this notion."

The spectrum language is just one of many thorny issues lawmakers are trying to resolve as part of the negotiations over the payroll tax deal. One of the biggest issues is how to pay for the cost of the payroll tax package.

A hacker who demanded $50,000 from Symantec to not release stolen computer code from the computer security firm says the company was tricked into offering the bribe and has since released some of the stolen code, The Washington Post reports.

The New York Times says one of the reasons why the two sides in the debate over online piracy legislation are having trouble finding a compromise is that they have yet to agree on the scope of the problem.

Sprint says it is close to shutting down parts of the Nextel network that have proved to be a costly distraction since the two companies merged seven years ago, CNET reports.

The wireless industry group CTIA in a blog post examines whether it's legal for political campaigns to call voters on their cell phones.

Fox News details why wireless carriers really don't like the iPhone.

In its first earnings report since going public, the online deal provider Groupon says it lost money in the last quarter of 2011, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Read all of today's e-Reads on our Tech page.

Activists will be using an old-fashioned tactic Thursday to try to force change at one of the nation's most cutting-edge tech firms. Two groups are dropping more than 250,000 petitions at Apple stores in New York, London, Washington and other locations around the world calling on the tech giant to improve working conditions at its Chinese factories before the release of the iPhone 5.

The two groups behind the petition drive, Change.org and SumOfUs, allow Internet users to organize and collect online petitions calling for companies to change practices they don't like. Change.org has scored some big victories, including helping to persuade Bank of America to drop a $5 debit card fee and student-loan provider Sallie Mae to back off a $50 fee imposed on unemployed borrowers who want to temporarily stop re-paying their loans.

The petitions against Apple were prompted by reports of abuses in factories run by Foxconn, one of Apple's main suppliers in China. A recent New York Times story detailed explosions at one of Foxconn's factories and an apparent spate of suicides by allegedly overworked employees.

"Apple's attention to detail is famous, and the only way they could fail to be aware of dozens of worker deaths, of child labor, of exposure to neurotoxins, is through willful ignorance," SumOfUs Executive Director Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman said in a statement. "That's why our members are asking Apple to clean up its supply chains in time to make the iPhone 5 its first ethically produced product."

The controversy has brought some unwanted attention to a company that has a cult-like following by its customers and keeps a low profile in Washington.

Apple, however, says it is taking concerns about its suppliers seriously and is working to address any abuses at factories that make its products. Apple has published reports in recent years about working conditions at its overseas suppliers.

The 2012 report detailed its response to two explosions at plants run by its Chinese suppliers. Apple also recently became the first tech firm to join the Fair Labor Association, a nonprofit that works to improve working conditions at factories around the world. Apple said the group will have access to its overseas factors and conduct independent audits.

"We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. We insist that our suppliers provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes wherever Apple products are made," Apple said in a statement Wednesday. "Our suppliers must live up to these requirements if they want to keep doing business with Apple."

Representatives of the aviation and global positioning systems industries couldn't speak about how to protect GPS as a transportation resource without blasting LightSquared's proposed wireless network during a House subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.

House Transportation Aviation Subcommittee Chairman Tom Petri, R-Wisc., asked the witnesses to focus on the broad issues "out of fairness" to LightSquared and the Federal Communications Commission, which were not invited to testify.

But that didn't stop the witnesses, or members of the subcommittee, from making LightSquared and the FCC a focal point of the hearing.

"Despite repeated requests, we were told there was no need to testify because LightSquared was not the subject of the hearing," LightSquared spokesman Chris Stern said. "It's outrageous that a congressional hearing set up to examine factual issues was only focused on one side of the story -- a side of the story supported by commercial GPS makers who designed faulty devices that depend on using spectrum licensed to LightSquared.''

A spokeswoman for Petri confirmed that LightSquared had asked to be included, but was not invited "because this hearing was not about LightSquared--it was about the broad issue of GPS' place in our aviation infrastructure. I believe they and others not testifying are welcome to submit testimony for the record."

LightSquared's proposals for a nationwide wireless network have been shown to interfere with GPS devices that operate on neighboring spectrum. The company says the fault lies with GPS companies for manufacturing faulty devices, but others, including Petri, blame LightSquared for the problem.

As Google continues to struggle to defend its changes to its privacy policies, the company could see the whole controversy shift to a federal court.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center said Wednesday that it planned to ask a federal court to order the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the privacy settlement the agency reached last year with Google. EPIC says Google's privacy changes violate that settlement.

"We haven't yet seen the filing so [we] can't comment on the specifics," Google said in a statement in response to EPIC's court filing. "Protecting people's privacy is something we think about all day across the company, and we welcome discussions about our approach."

Google says the changes will make it easier for users to understand its privacy policies. It also denied a claim EPIC made in its court filing that the company did not obtain users consent before sharing data with third parties. Google maintains that it does not share user data with third parties and that will continue to be the case even after the privacy changes go into effect on March 1.

Want to help decide which names should get a chance to become a new Internet address? The group that runs the Internet's address system has an opportunity for you.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers says it's looking for volunteers to help evaluate which groups should get a big discount on the $185,000 fee to apply to run a new top-level domain name. Deserving applicants could pay a quarter of that cost - $47,000 - if they can show they need the financial help, that their proposed new domain name provides "a public interest benefit," and that they have the financial and technical means to run a new domain name. The support program appears to be aimed in particular at applicants from developing countries.

"These volunteers will be key to ICANN's effort to assure that the less-developed parts of the world are able to participate in the new domain name program," ICANN Senior Vice President Kurt Pritz said in a statement. "The panel members will make a real impact in ensuring that the opportunities for innovation and economic development created by the Internet are open to everyone."

ICANN's Support Application Review Panel, however, isn't open to just anyone. The group will be looking for volunteers who have experience running a small business, operating in developing countries, analyzing business plans, and have a knowledge of the domain name system. Potential volunteers will have until March 31 to submit an application to serve on the panel.

ICANN began accepting applications last month for its new domain name program, which calls for the introduction of an unlimited number of domain names. The application period for the program's first round ends in April.

The embattled wireless company LightSquared formally asked the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday to develop standards that would require global positioning system manufacturers to ensure their devices are compatible with transmissions from other networks.

LightSquared's bid to build a nationwide wireless network with spectrum near that used by GPS has been on hold after tests indicated its transmissions could interfere with the navigation systems. The company says the problem lies with GPS devices that should have been designed to filter out neighboring signals.

"It has become apparent that the commercial [GPS] industry has failed to design receivers that communicate with the U.S. GPS system in a manner that is compatible with the authorized use of adjacent spectrum bands," LightSquared wrote in documents filed with the FCC on Tuesday. "This failure has inhibited the deployment of licensed services in adjacent bands that would provide significant public interest benefits, such as increased competition."

While the FCC has traditionally relied on market forces to keep competing spectrum users from overlapping, LightSquared says this method has failed.

GPS manufacturers say it should be up to LightSquared to fix the problem because GPS devices were built with the expectation that the adjacent bandwidth wouldn't be used for a land-based network like LightSquared has planned.

"This latest filing yet again proceeds from the same false premises and claims that LightSquared has repeated ad nauseum in its ongoing effort to deny its obligation to avoid harmful interference to millions of government and private GPS users," Jim Kirkland, vice president at the GPS manufacturer Trimble, said in a statement. "LightSquared's continuing efforts to move the goal posts are too little, too late."

On Wednesday the House Transportation Subcommittee on Aviation plans to hold a hearing which could include the potential impact of LightSquared's plans on aviation navigation systems.

The District of Columbia's city council voted Tuesday to repeal legislation that authorized Internet gambling in the nation's capital, according to The Washington Post.

Google has launched a new initiative aimed at bringing together the brightest minds and experts to help solve the world's greatest problems, CNET reports.

A new report says that love is going digital with most romantic connections being made online, Fox News reports.

Led by a surging tech industry, Silicon Valley is recovering from the economic downturn faster than the rest of the country, according to the Wall Street Journal.

All of today's e-Reads can be found on our Tech page.

Two key lawmakers said Tuesday that despite some differences between the House and Senate approaches to the issue, they are still hopeful spectrum legislation will be included in a package to extend a payroll tax cut.

House and Senate lawmakers on the payroll tax cut conference committee met again Tuesday to try and hammer out differences between the two chambers' versions of the legislation but did not discuss spectrum.

Still, House Energy and Commerce ranking member Henry Waxman of California, one of the House Democratic conferees, told Tech Daily Dose that staffers are meeting and making slow progress on ways to narrow differences between the House-GOP passed spectrum legislation, which was included in a one-year extension of the payroll tax bill, and a stand-alone bipartisan spectrum bill approved last summer by the Senate Commerce Committee.

Both bills focus on freeing up more spectrum to meet the nation's growing demand for wireless technologies and providing public safety officials with spectrum and funding to help build a national wireless broadband network. They also would authorize the Federal Communications Commission to conduct incentive auctions of spectrum voluntarily relinquished by broadcasters.

The major sticking points continue to be over how much flexibility the FCC should be given to set aside spectrum for unlicensed uses such as Wi-Fi, who should be allowed to participate in the incentive auctions, and the governance structure of the public safety network, Waxman said.

"If we can work out the policy, we want to move it ... The differences on this bill have never been so great that we couldn't resolve it in the House," Waxman said. He and most of the other Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee did not support the House GOP spectrum measure when it was approved by the Communications and Technology Subcommittee late last year because of their concerns over the restrictions on unlicensed spectrum and the public safety governance structure.

House Republicans may have the upper hand in the negotiations given that their spectrum legislation is in the House payroll measure and the Senate Commerce bill is not. In addition, the authors of the House spectrum bill, Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., are among the House payroll-tax negotiators, while no one from the Senate Commerce Committee is on the conference committee.

"We have to work to accommodate the positions of both the House and the Senate," Waxman said. "The House bill was only a partisan bill -- never voted on in full committee, went right to the floor and the Senate's not going to take it as is."

Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Tuesday he believes differences over how to structure the public safety network, which is his top priority, could be resolved by having the National Telecommunications and Information Administration oversee its development. "I'm hopeful," Rockefeller said about finally getting spectrum legislation enacted. "The problem is always on the House side."

Supporters of increased anti-piracy efforts, including the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, are the "greatest threat" to Internet freedom in the United States, a former Federal Trade Commission official said on Tuesday.

Two years after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laid out U.S. support for global Internet freedom, efforts to crack down on online theft, increase surveillance, or block protests have proved those words to be empty promises, said Christopher Soghoian, a research fellow at George Soros' Open Society Foundations and a former technologist at the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection.

"It's really time to stop quoting Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet freedom," he said at a Media Access Project forum on Internet freedom. "The last two years have shown those were hollow, shallow words."

While the copyright lobby is pushing for stricter Internet piracy laws, thousands of Internet companies have mobilized to protest proposed anti-piracy bills, which were eventually abandoned.

Soghoian called such proposals "truly heinous" and said they undermine the free flow of information online. "There are many bad things on the horizon and Hollywood is pushing them," he said. "In an attempt to protect their own failing and sinking business model, they are willing to take the Internet down with them."

Supporters of the House's Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate's Protect IP Act said online theft of intellectual property is out of control and is hurting the economy as a whole. Fears of censorship and control are overblown by Internet companies that profit off the flow of illegal content, supporters like the Motion Picture Association of America have said.

But not all threats to global Internet freedom are homegrown.

While the gap between countries with relatively free Internet access and those that censor and control the Web has increased in recent years, Google's Bob Boorstin said he will be watching countries that haven't fully gone one way or another. "Are they going to go the right way? Or the wrong way and try to clamp down on information," he said.

Where do you get your news and do minorities have enough access to the public airwaves? The Federal Communications Commission wants to know.

First off, the FCC wants to review any studies on media access and ownership, the agency says.

"Section 257 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, mandates that the Commission review and report to Congress on (1) efforts to identify and eliminate regulatory barriers to market entry in the provision and ownership of telecommunications services and information services, or in the provision of parts or services to providers of telecommunications services and information services by entrepreneurs and other small businesses and (2) proposals to eliminate statutory barriers to market entry by those entities, consistent with the public interest, convenience, and necessity," it says.

Verizon and Redbox are launching an online movie streaming service, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Don't look for the FCC to do anything about the Super Bowl "fleeting finger," Ad Week reports.

Did the Opie & Anthony Show incite a wave of cyberbullying on Twitter?

Wired breaks down the privacy policies at top Internet companies into 100 words.

More of Today's e-Reads can be found on our Tech page.

A partner at a law firm that represented AT&T in its blockbuster merger case has been nominated by President Obama to head the Justice Department office that moved to block the merger.

William Baer, a partner at Arnold & Porter, has been nominated to replace Sharis Pozen as an assistant attorney general over the DOJ's antitrust division, the White House officially announced on Monday. Last week Obama indicated he planned to nominate Baer.

Baer currently heads the antitrust office at Arnold & Porter, whose lawyers staffed top positions in AT&T's failed bid to buy T-Mobile last year. According to a confidentiality statement filed in May with the Federal Communications Commission, which also reviewed the merger, AT&T hired at least 32 lawyers from Arnold & Porter. Baer was not listed.

Pozen's antitrust division at DOJ spearheaded a court battle that ultimately led to AT&T's decision to abandon the deal. Pozen was serving as acting head of the division after Christine Varney left in August.

According to a profile on the Arnold & Porter website, Baer has represented clients like General Electric, Intel, Cisco, and Visa. He previously worked at the Federal Trade Commission when it blocked a1997 merger between Staples and Office Depot.

Opponents of the House's Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act in the Senate want Congress to hit pause on efforts to forge new anti-piracy legislation.

In a letter sent to Capitol Hill on Monday, about 70 advocacy groups, Internet companies, and venture capitalists urged Congress to stop pushing new legislation until all concerns have been addressed.

"Now is the time for Congress to take a breath, step back, and approach the issues from a fresh perspective," the groups wrote. "The concerns are too fundamental and too numerous to be fully addressed through hasty revisions to these bills. Nor can they be addressed by closed-door negotiations among a small set of inside-the-beltway stakeholders."

Amnesty International, Consumers Union, Public Knowledge, and Mozilla were among the organizations that signed the letter.

Besides addressing the criticism that led to last month's unprecedented online protest by thousands of Internet companies, including Google and Wikipedia, Congress should work to determine the full extent and impact of online piracy, the letter said.

On Wednesday Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., unveiled crowd-sourced portions of his Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, which he claims would take a more targeted approach to online piracy. Issa established a website to solicit crowd-sourced recommendations from Internet users, but it may not be enough to spark enthusiasm for the measure.

Industry groups and entertainment companies have said they do not support Issa's bill.

The FBI confirmed that the hacker group Anonymous listened in on a telephone conference between the agency and foreign police organizations, The New York Times reports.

The CEO of microchip manufacturer Micron Technologies died in an airplane crash, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Nokia published a policy against using minerals mined in war zones, The New York Times reports.

More of Today's e-Reads can be found on our Tech page.

Too many tax-payer funded technologies are being taken by China or other countries, Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., says, and on Friday he reintroduced a bill to stop the flow.

In order to operate in China, for example, American companies are often forced to hand over their intellectual property and proprietary. Many of those technologies are developed using taxpayer money through grant, loans, or other incentives, Webb said in a statement.

"If taxpayers supported the development of the technology, they own a piece of it and it can't just be given away," Webb said. "Federal dollars that go toward R&D funding, loan guarantees, and public-private partnerships in order to help develop the next generation of technologies here are supposed to be making American businesses competitive and generate American jobs -- not to help develop other industries, such as those in China."

Webb's bill would prohibit companies from transferring technology to countries that require such transfers as a cost of doing business.

"The transfer of publicly supported proprietary technologies by American firms to China -- and potentially other countries -- clearly and unequivocally places the competitive advantage of the American economy at risk," Webb said.

A Commerce Department agency has been hacked, The Washington Post reports.

Internet security provider VeriSign has acknowledged that it was attacked multiple times in 2010 by hackers, according to PCWorld.

Facebook's move to file documents for an initial public offering helped lift the stocks of other Internet firms that recently went public including game maker Zynga and online coupon provider Groupon, the Associated Press reports.

Federal authorities announced a new crackdown on illegal sports streaming websites, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Read all of today's e-Reads on our Tech page.

No matter how hard it tries, it appears Google has yet to convince members of Congress that its proposed privacy changes are not as troubling as they appear to some on the surface.

Google Deputy General Counsel Mike Yang and Public Policy Director Pablo Chavez met Thursday with about 10 members of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, which has jurisdiction over consumer privacy, to address concerns over the changes the company plans to make to its privacy policies on March 1.

Last week, the company said it plans to consolidate its numerous privacy policies but also will track users and collect data about them as they move from one Google product to another. In addition to the briefing, Google issued yet another blog post Wednesday about the privacy changes in which it tried to debunk what it described as myths about its approach to privacy.

Subcommittee Chairwoman Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., who organized the closed-door briefing, told reporters that while Google did a thorough job of explaining the changes and the tools available to consumers to control the level of privacy they want, she and other members were not satisfied with everything they heard.

"At the end of the day, ultimately, I don't think that their answers to us were very forthcoming necessarily in what this really means for the safety of our families and our children and ourselves," she said. "At the same time, they did a thorough walk through of the technology that exists and explained how they feel they can still protect privacy to whatever level the consumer wants. I think the concern in Congress is how much active participation does a user have to do to protect their privacy."

She said that when members asked about why Google wasn't offering consumers a clear opt-out of having data collected about them, the Google officials pointed to the various privacy control tools such as Google Dashboard. Bono Mack said she and other committee members continue to worry that these tools are "too complicated to find, too complicated to do."

Despite such concerns, Bono Mack gave little indication that the committee plans to do much more at this point other than hold more hearings this year on consumer privacy and continue to press Google for better answers.

A Bono Mack aide noted that Google officials have said they do not think the privacy changes violate the privacy settlement it reached last year with the Federal Trade Commission over the roll out of its now-defunct social networking service Buzz. He noted that panel, however, plans to reach out to the FTC itself for clarification on the issue. So far, the FTC has declined to comment on the issue.

The controversial advocacy group Demand Progress can't get enough of Lamar Smith.

After working to torpedo the Texas Republican's Stop Online Piracy Act, Demand Progress is taking aim at another of Smith's bills.

The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act (HR 1981), which cleared Smith's House Judiciary Committee 19-10 last year after a hotly contested markup, would require Internet service providers to keep some user information on file to help track pedophiles and child pornographers. The bill's supporters say it does not require the collection of content and most ISPs already retain the data.

Still, the measure drew attention from critics who see a potential to undermine privacy and civil liberties.

House aides say the bill is effectively dead for now, but that hasn't stopped opponents from reigniting the debate after SOPA and its Senate companion bill were shelved. The issue also resurfaced on the link-sharing website Reddit, where users organized opposition to SOPA.

Demand Progress, which claims a following of more than one million, is asking supporters to send letters to Congress opposing the bill.

"We taught Congress a lesson last month: We need to do to HR 1981 what we did to SOPA, and make it clear to Lamar Smith and the rest of Congress that they can't run roughshod over Internet freedom," the group's executive director, David Segal, said in a statement.

Smith's spokeswoman, Kim Hicks, said child pornography is one of the fastest growing crimes in the U.S. "The Internet can be a force for good or bad," she said. "But it should not be used to facilitate crimes against our children."

During the fight over anti-piracy legislation the U.S. Chamber of Commerce accused Demand Progress of using scare tactics to distort the issue.

A top consumer protection official at the Federal Communications Commission is stepping down, the agency said on Thursday.

Joel Gurin, chief of the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, oversaw efforts to crack down on abusive robocalls; companies that sneak unauthorized charges onto customers' bills, also know as "cramming;" and unclear billing practices known as "bill shock." He also worked on programs to help people with disabilities take advantage of modern communications.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Gurin helped use technology to empower consumers as the communications market rapidly evolved. "We'll miss Joel's dedication as a stalwart advocate for consumers, working to solve real problems in smart ways," Genachowski said in a statement.

Kris Monteith, currently a deputy chief in the FCC's Media Bureau, will serve as acting bureau chief.

Gurin, a former science and medical journalist, joined the commission in 2009 after serving as acting president of NARSAD, a non-profit charity now known as the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. He also spent almost a decade as vice president of Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports.

Three days before the 2012 Super Bowl, federal officials said they have seized more than 300 websites accused of selling fake merchandise or illegally streaming sports games.

Recent anti-piracy bills in Congress crashed and burned after critics said they could limit free speech and undermine due process. While the entertainment industry took a leading role in the debate over the legislation, Thursday's announcement highlights the less-publicized counterfeit goods side of online piracy.

As part of an ongoing "Operation Fake Sweep," U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shut down 307 websites, including 16 used to stream live sports events, and 291 allegedly selling counterfeit goods.

A Michigan man was arrested on Wednesday and charged with operating nine of the 16 sites accused of streaming copyrighted content.

"In sports, players must abide by rules of the game, and in life, individuals must follow the laws of the land," ICE Director John Morton said at a news conference with National Football League officials on Thursday. "Our message is simple: abiding by intellectual property rights laws is not optional; it's the law."

The "record-breaking" operation netted $4.8 million worth of fake Super Bowl-related items from a range of stores, flea markets, street vendors, and other places, according to ICE. Officials also seized $6.4 million in fake memorabilia from other sports.

A House subcommittee kicked off this year's cybersecurity agenda by approving a bill designed to protect "critical infrastructure" from cyberattacks, even as a Senate bill waits in the wings.

Leaders in both the Senate and the House, as well as President Obama, have said they want to pass broad cybersecurity legislation this year. Senate leaders had been expected to introduce their version as soon as this week, but a Senate aide now say that's unlikely.

Senate staffers are working to forge agreement on a comprehensive bill, while the House is pursuing, smaller, separate pieces of legislation.

On Wednesday the House Homeland Security Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies Subcommittee approved H.R. 3674, the Promoting and Enhancing Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Effectiveness Act of 2011 (The PrECISE Act), with a voice vote.

The bill would task the Homeland Security Department with determining what "critical infrastructure" like the power grid or financial systems, need federal oversight from existing agencies. The bill would also would establish a National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center to coordinate federal cybersecurity efforts.

"Government should enable and facilitate the private sector in this effort by providing threat information, standards and best practices," said the bill's sponsor, subcommittee chairman Dan Lungren, R-Calif. "In this way, we ensure that owners and operators are in the strongest position to protect their critical infrastructure."

More on the House bill can be found on our Tech page.

As the tech world anxiously awaits Facebook's expected initial public offering, a Forbes columnist questioned the value of owning stock in the social networking service.

The daily online deals site LivingSocial lost $558 million last year, the Washington Post reports.

Microsoft is looking to take advantage of the public uproar over Google's proposed changes to its privacy policies, Information Week reports.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is appealing a British court's order that he be extradited to Sweden to face sexual misconduct allegations, according to The New York Times.

All of today's e-Reads can be found on our Tech Page.

The Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee announced Wednesday that it will hold a hearing to examine the impact on competition from the deal struck between Verizon and some of the nation's biggest cable firms to buy some of their spectrum and cross-promote their services.

Subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl, D-Wis., said in a statement he planned to examine the potential competitive effects the deals will have in markets where both Verizon and the cable firms offer both video and Internet services.

Kohn has "not reached any conclusions on this deal yet - just beginning an inquiry which this hearing will be a part of," Kohl's spokeswoman said. The committee has not set a firm date but is aiming to hold the hearing sometime after the President's Day break.

Verizon announced late last year that it had struck deals with Bright House Networks, Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner to buy some spectrum from them and also to cross-promote their services.

Public interest groups welcomed Kohl's interest. They say the deals raise serious competitive issues given that in most markets there are only two major broadband, phone and television providers.

"If, as these companies claim, they cannot compete against one another, Congress and the FCC need to consider whether we will need to return to the world of regulated natural monopolies," Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld said in a statement. "While Public Knowledge believes that competition is better, there are serious questions to be answered whether true broadband competition can ever emerge if one provider in a two-company broadband market starts selling the products of the other company."

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., says he's working with other supporters to attract more Republican co-sponsors for legislation that would require online retailers to collect sales taxes in states where they have no store or other facility.

Durbin told Tech Daily Dose Wednesday that he would like to see more GOP backers for the bill to help attract the 60 votes needed on the Senate floor to overcome a likely filibuster of the legislation. Durbin is the lead Democratic co-sponsor of the legislation offered with Sens. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

The bill aims to close a loophole left by a 1992 Supreme Court decision that found states cannot require retailers to collect sales taxes from customers in states where the companies do not have a physical presence. At the time, the case applied to catalog retailers but has since been exploited by Internet retailers.

"We're trying to get some more Republican cosponsors and when we reach the critical number that I think gives us assurance of passage, we'll bring this up in the Senate," Durbin said. When asked what that critical number is, he said he would like to have "perhaps" 10 Republicans sign on in support of the bill. So far, the bill has five Republican and seven Democratic co-sponsors.

The Enzi-Durbin-Alexander bill would authorize states to require Internet retailers to collect out-of--state sales taxes as long as the states either sign on to a tax-simplification project or comply with tax-simplification principles in the bill. Supporters note that the legislation does not introduce a new tax but instead makes it easier for states to collect sales taxes that are already owed.

Still, the bill will likely require consumers to pay more for some products or services they buy online. When asked if this is a difficult sell in an election year, Durbin said the bill "does make it clear that it's no new tax obligation."

The measure is supported by a growing list of companies that sell goods and services, including Amazon, which came out in support of the measure late last year despite fighting individual state efforts to address the issue.

Perhaps in an effort to help Durbin and other congressional supporters attract more backing for the bill, a large coalition of companies and groups wrote Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., on Tuesday to urge his support. The bill has been referred to his committee.

The bill "would level the playing field between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce retail businesses while assisting the states in collecting approximately $23 billion in uncollected state sales taxes that are currently due on Internet and other remote sales," according to the letter signed by such groups as the National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association and companies such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart.

A similar bill has been introduced in the House. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the issue last year but it is unclear if any additional action is planned.