White House

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.

Bearing the Republican banner in the party's response to Tuesday's State of the Union speech, Gov. Mitch Daniels, R-Indiana, used a tech titan to hit back at the president's jobs proposals.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died last year, did more to help the economy than government efforts, Daniels argued.

"Contrary to the President's constant disparagement of people in business, it's one of the noblest of human pursuits," Daniels said in his prepared remarks. "The late Steve Jobs - what a fitting name he had - created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew."

That may depend on how you count.

In October of 2009, the White House reported that 640,329 jobs had been created. But the method of counting those jobs came under fire and in 2010 the White House stopped providing a cumulative count of of all jobs. Now Recovery.gov, which tracks stimulus projects, reports the numbers by quarter.

Stimulus programs provided at least 400,000 jobs from July to September last year, according to data on Recovery.gov.

Jobs spent about two decades at Apple, which currently employs about 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 more overseas, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The New York Times reports that another 700,000 people work for contractors tasked with building the company's iconic electronic devices.

Mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, which Apple pioneered, also helped lead to an explosive growth in mobile application development.

People who viewed Tuesday's State of the Union on the White House website were treated to a multimedia presentation.

The site featured a live video feed of President Obama's speech to Congress, complemented by graphs, statistics, and photos displayed in a sidebar.

"As the President outlines his plans for 2012, you'll see key facts and figures," White House senior adviser David Plouffe said in an e-mail announcing the new features. "We'll present charts and infographics so that everyone can get a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges ahead of us."

The graphics corresponded to Obama's statements on such issues as jobs and immigration.

Obama used Tuesday's speech to outline proposals that he says will help the economy, including the tech industry, recover.

President Obama signed the America Invents Act into law on Friday, enacting the most expansive reforms to the U.S. patent system in almost 60 years.

Ahead of the ceremony at an Alexandria high school, White House officials played up Obama's role in breaking the logjam of disagreement that had scuttled earlier attempts at patent reform.

Jason Furman, deputy director of the National Economic Council, told reporters on Thursday that when companies admitted that they agreed on 80 percent of reform proposals, Obama encouraged them to resolve the remaining disagreement.

The bill, which passed Congress overwhelmingly, has been trumpeted as a key way to help businesses create more jobs.

"It's about turning American ingenuity into American jobs," said David Kappos, director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, on a conference call with reporters on Thursday. He said the bill would help his agency approve patent applications much faster.

Kappos said new funding could help him hire 1,500 to 2,000 more patent examiners, further helping the PTO keep up with the flow of patent applications.

Businesses remained somewhat divided over the final patent reform bill, but most agreed that it was a step in the right direction.

"The signing of the America Invents Acts into law today will help to rev up the engine of American innovation, improving the patent system and giving greater assurance to our nation's inventors," Christopher Padilla, IBM vice president of Governmental Programs, said in a statement.

Among other changes, the bill transitions the United States to a "first-to-file" system, under which the inventor who files an application first is awarded a patent.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse got a chance to pat himself on the back Monday on the White House blog - praising his company's efforts, with Dell and Sony, to cut what he calls E-waste. Hesse says only about 10 percent of cellphones are ever recycled.

"Sprint's Electronics Stewardship Policy sets aggressive e-waste goals, including the collection of nine phones for reuse or recycling for every 10 sold by 2017," Hesse writes on the blog.

"To date, Sprint has collected more than 25 million mobile phones-- keeping them out of landfills, helping to conserve resources, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and preventing air and water pollution."

President Barack Obama is no fan of lobbyists, priding himself on running an administration he says is unswayed by undue influence.

But he seems to have swallowed his distaste long enough to entertain one of Microsoft's top lobbyists Monday at the White House, where the tech giant announced a $15 million investment in immersive learning technologies like game-based instruction.

Microsoft SVP Fred Humphries sat in for CEO Steve Ballmer, who couldn't make the education roundtable that featured other high-powered current and former executives like United Way's Brian Gallagher and former Intel chief Craig Barrett, who were both registered to lobby until several years ago.

"At least Humphries is registered, unlike so many of his counterparts who lobby under the radar," complained one GOP tech lobbyist.

Humphries lobbies on copyright, immigration reform, broadband, taxes, free trade and, appropriately for today's White House meeting, "promoting excellence in technology, education, standards, and science," according to the company's latest lobbying disclosure.

"Microsoft is making a significant investment in education today announcing a new $15 million investment in research and development," said White House spokesman Eric Schultz. "They are committing over the next three years to train 150,000 educators and leaders and provide access to professional learning communities."

Still, the meeting left some on K Street grumbling about what they see as the president's double standard, regularly knocking lobbyists until they can help his administration.

The White House will host a meeting Thursday with public safety representatives and other federal officials on creating a national public safety broadband network.

Vice President Biden will deliver remarks at the event. Other Obama administration officials slated to attend include White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano as well as Gov. Martin O'Malley, D-Md., and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Public safety officials have been pushing policy makers to re-allocate a chunk of spectrum known as the D-block to them for the creation of a national broadband network, saying they do not have enough spectrum for such a network now. The network is aimed at ensuring that first responders can communicate with different agencies and utilize the latest technologies.

The Senate Commerce Committee approved legislation last week that would reallocate the D-block to public safety instead of auctioning it for commercial use as required by current law and establish a process for the creation of the network. President Obama came out in favor in February of reallocating the D-block to public safety officials and the White House will release a report at Thursday's meeting providing more details on its proposal to create and deploy a national public safety network.

At the end of last week's markup on his bill, Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., praised the help he had gotten from the White House on moving the bill along, noting in particular Biden's role.

The bill, however, still faces hurdles. Key Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have been resistant to reallocating the D-block to public safety officials.

Rockefeller is pushing to get his bill passed before the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which exposed deep problems with communications systems used by emergency first responders. He said Tuesday that he hopes the White House meeting will provide additional momentum to get his bill to the Senate floor.

"My hope is that this meeting and efforts by other leaders on this will help get the Public Safety Spectrum and Wireless Innovation Act to the Senate floor for a vote," Rockefeller said in a statement. "For the men and women who risk their lives running into burning buildings and chase down criminals each day without hesitation, we need to get this done."

Television broadcasters have a blunt message for the White House: don't tune out the tens of millions of hard-working Americans who rely on free, over-the-air reception. TV stations insist that the Federal Communications Commission is leaving average citizens out of the equation as it seeks to incentivize broadcasters to hand over some of their airwaves to wireless carriers.

A White House spectrum summit on Wednesday was stacked with economists from Google, the administration and academia, along with the FCC chairman, who are proponents of more frequencies for broadband.

But there were no participants voicing the opposing view: that spectrum auctions could jeopardize the delivery of free, high-definition television signals, including PBS programming, local news and weather and emergency alerts.

"The fact is that 43 million Americans are exclusive over-the-air viewers, and tens of millions more pay TV homeowners have second and third TV sets that are not hooked up to a pay TV service," National Association of Broadcasters spokesman Dennis Wharton told Tech Daily Dose.

(The 43 million estimate comes from the research firm Knowledge Networks; Nielsen estimates OTA viewership at 30 million.)

"One in three Spanish-speaking homes and one in three Asian-American homes are broadcast-only. Don't they matter to society, too?" Wharton asked.

The FCC, backed by the White House, is urging Congress to pass legislation that would allow broadcasters to voluntarily agree to have their spectrum auctioned. Stations would receive a cut of the revenue culled from selling their megahertz to wireless companies.

Advocates of more spectrum for broadband insist that broadcasters are inefficient users of their frequencies (an accusation stations largely deny) and that a looming broadband spectrum shortage must be addressed. For coverage of the White House spectrum event, visit National Journal's Technology site:

A Senate Democrat attacked the Obama administration for holding up passage of cybersecurity legislation that has been subjected to a more than yearlong interagency review process, Nextgov.com reported.

At a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., secured a commitment from the Homeland Security Department secretary, under oath, to provide him with a near-term deadline for finishing negotiations.

"We need input from the executive branch to sort out the differences between the different committees," he said at the Senate Judiciary Committee session. "There's no point in sorting it out if we don't know where the executive branch is going to stand. . . . We're kind of on hold now, waiting."

The chairmen of the multiple Senate committees with jurisdiction over computer security have signaled they want to pass a comprehensive bill that would address 10 elements of cyberspace, among them the security of government networks; private sector incentives to protect commercial networks; safeguards against online identity theft; and law enforcement authorities to investigate cyber crimes. To read more, click here.

President Obama will head for the West Coast on Thursday to meet with technology leaders and tour an Intel Corporation semiconductor manufacturing facility, National Journal reported.

The trip comes as the president is seeking to defend his 2012 budget proposal, which allocates funding to establish a nationwide broadband overhaul and to increase and better train the country's science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) teachers.

Obama will depart Washington on Thursday afternoon, and he'll meet with technology business leaders that night in San Francisco.

"The meeting is a part of our ongoing dialogue with the business community on how we can work together to win the future, strengthen our economy, support entrepreneurship, and get the American people back to work," said a White House official. To read more, click here.