FCC reform advances in the House. Greg Walden’s FCC Process Reform Act is a needed bill, so I’m glad that it went from committee to the floor, and took minimal modification in passing. I like that it got an extra poke at FCC being more closed on FOIA requests than even CIA.
Locking in the reforms is important, and CTIA is right in saying we need a “more transparent, predictable regulatory process.”
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Previously on Tech at Night I linked to a story that suggested there was a split between Darrell Issa and Chuck Grassley on FCC transparency. It turns out the story I relied on, had it wrong. Oversight wasn’t grading transparency itself; the committee was grading the management of FOIA requests, and FCC did relatively well by having established processes for dealing with FOIA. and tracking the requests in a systematic way.
The Oversight committee was not saying that the FCC is open. Because, in fact as pointed out by Mario Diaz-Balart, FCC rejects more FOIA requests than CIA, amazingly enough. That’s a serious transparency problem.
Speaking of transparency, Eric Cantor is soliciting citizen co-sponsorship of the DATA Act which would try to get more data about government out into the open, where the public can apply oversight.
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The big stories this week continue to be LightSquared and cybersecurity. Even as House Democrats complain about government doing too much, incredibly, we see that Senate Democrats are so inflexible that John McCain is in a gang of Republicans to fight the Democrats on the cybersecurity bill. Consider that. That’s how extreme Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, Jay Rockefeller, and Susan Collins are on this. John McCain is putting together a team to make a Republican bill with Kay Bailey Hutchison and others, rather than sign on with a Democrat on a bill. Danger, Will Robinson! Harry Reid is that much of an extremist!
Reid is rushing to pass it, but details come out anyway, such as an attack on FOIA. Transparency! Not.
Speaking of transparency, the firm that the Barack Obama FCC has remained oddly silent on, and that insists the FCC should remain silent on, is ready to go on the offensive. It almost seems like LightSquared bet the company on this, and will go down swinging. They may end up making a spectrum trade though, which if workable would be interesting.
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Welcome to the fourth and final part of the series (See I, II, and III to get up to speed with what’s going on here).
Brief summary: Andrew McLaughlin is Deputy White House CTO, and has been reprimanded by the White House for inappropriate relations with his former employer, Google. Due to a Google Buzz security hole, wide-eyed observers at Big Government noticed that McLaughlin was still very cozy with Google through his Gmail account. This led to a FOIA request for those emails, and now I’m reading them from an InsideGoogle.com release.
On to Part III of that release.
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Via InsideGoogle.com I’ve come across the Andrew McLaughlin emails released via FOIA requests (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). I’d meant to make a 5 part series of my reading through them for signs that McLaughlin was inappropriately acting as an agent of Google from his job as White House CTO (which is an accusation that Darrell Issa is not letting drop quietly, internal slap on the write to McLaughlin or not, and is in fact expanding beyond McLaughlin). This will be a four part series this week though. We’re starting on Tuesday instead of Monday because life got in the way. Unlike some of my opposition, my advocacy on technical matters is not funded.
Anyway, let’s begin.
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