TUESDAY BLOG ROUNDUP:
Want to know how meaningless the FCC's broadband plan is? - Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt
More agencies using cookies to track activity - Aliya Sternstein, Tech Daily Dose
The geek's guide to NCAA tournament pools - Mark McClusky, Wired
Online presence of hate, terror groups up 20 percent - Jacqui Cheng, ars technica
Meet POIA: 'Public means online' becomes a bill - Nancy Scola, techPresident
Google phone selling at slower pace than first iPhone - Brian Womack, Bloomberg
China readies Google pullout - John Pomfret, Post Tech
Feds consider going undercover on social networks - Declan McCullagh, CNet
Toward a bill of rights for online advertisers - Benjamin Edelman, HuffPo

OTHER STORIES FROM THE HILL:
Clyburn: Relocating broadcast airwaves could hurt local news - The Hill
Pelosi touts FCC broadband plan for job-creation prospects - The Hill
GAO: Fed spending portal rampant with inconsistencies - The Hill
Drum roll, please -- the National Broadband Plan, in digital form - The Hill

U.S. law enforcement agents are infiltrating social networks to gather information about suspects and track down criminals who prey on other Internet users or break common laws.

The AP reports that, according to internal Justice Department documents, the FBI and other law enforcement agents are logging on with fake identities to converse with suspects or suss out personal relationships or peruse photos and videos.

Investigators can even check suspects' alibis by comparing statements with Tweets and Facebook updates.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted the documents on its website today. One document detailed how IRS employees use social networking sites and other tools including Google Street View to investigate taxpayers. The IRS, however, prohibits employees from using fake accounts to gather the information.

Social networks are fertile ground for criminals. Sex offenders have flocked to sites such as Facebook and MySpace to find young users. Agents started monitoring AOL and MSN chat rooms a decade ago. But as more and more people join the social networking sites and maintain detailed profiles about their lives, it has become increasingly easy to track people--whether they are guilty of a crime or not.

A former U.S. cybersecurity prosecutor, Marc Zwillinger, said investigators should be able to go undercover in the online world the same way they do in the real world. But there should be limits, he told the AP.

Keeping up with requests for information from law enforcement officials has become a huge job for the likes of MySpace and Facebook. Those companies employ teams of people to keep up with such requests from authorities from around the world.

EFF says it will post more documents about how other agencies use social networking tools as they receive them.

Karl Rove was the only White House staffer with a BlackBerry on September 11, 2001.
 
Rove writes in his memoir, “Courage and Consequences,” that he had kept his BlackBerry “from the campaign in order to be able to send and receive messages without violating the Hatch Act. At the same time, the White House Communications Office had nixed BlackBerries for official business because they were still trying to figure out how to keep the White House’s e-mail traffic secure.”
 

It’s a marked change from this administration, when President Barack Obama famously fought to keep his hand-held device.
 
Rove notes that he was on Air Force One with several other staff members on the day of the attack and since the plane’s phones were tied up with official business, several of them borrowed his BlackBerry to type out emails to their families that would be sent when the plane passed over a cell phone tower.
 
Rove writes: “I’ve wondered since that day why the Federal Aviation Administration and airlines force passengers to turn off their wireless devices. My BlackBerry didn’t interfere with the operation of Air Force One on September 11.”

Dan Glickman, outgoing chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, gave his last major address today in Las Vegas, touting the movie industry's "power to change people's lives and, in doing so, to change the world."

Glickman said the era of 3-D movies is bringing people back to the theatres, as demonstrated by recent news that the 2009 box office saw a return to growth in U.S. admissions. But as always, there are challenges in racing to keep up with the latest digital techniques.

"Technology will help resolve these issues in a balanced and fair way, while opening new opportunities for creators to share their works with the world," he said at the ShoWest convention.

The protection of intellectual process must remain a priority for the movie inudstry that supports more than 2.4 million American jobs in every state of the country. The Pro-IP Act laid a strong foundation for IP protection, he said.

Glickman announced the relaunch of www.filmratings.com.

“We’re hoping this will provide some added transparency, shining a light on how the process works and promoting better understanding of the lesser-known, but equally important Advertising Administration, which strives to ensure every piece of movie advertising is appropriate for the audiences that see it,” he said.

Glickman is leaving the MPAA in April to become president of Refugees International. A search is still underway to fill the position, which is widely considered to be the most glamorous lobbying job in Washington.

“Movies will always be my first love,” he said. “But now I get to follow my heart back into public service.”

He concluded by saying, “I won’t say goodbye — just ‘see you at the movies.’ ”

A new report from the Government Accountability Office casts doubt on the effectiveness of the federal government's online spending portal, USAspending.gov.

The site -- commissioned in 2006 to track federal agencies' contracts, loans, grants and other financial awards -- remains hampered by reporting mistakes, data inconsistencies and a handful of other errors and missed benchmarks, the GAO found in its study, released on Friday.

Ultimately, investigators praised the project and signaled its administrators were working to address some of the GAO's criticisms, including the website's yet-unfinished section on federal subcontracts and still-unwritten procedures to handle agencies that fail to share their spending figures.

But the GAO still stressed the site's overall ability to promote transparency and openness "will be limited in providing the public with a view into the details of federal spending" for as long as the agency's concerns remain unaddressed.

Most notably, the GAO discovered a sizable collection of inconsistencies between the USAspending.gov's spending information and the annual reports the agencies themselves have on file.

Of the 100 awards GAO examined as part of its review, all of them contained at least one oversight -- from a missing value in a report's field, to a number that conflicted with an agency's self-reported spending total, to a confusing or otherwise inadequate spending data point.
Read more...

Some federal agencies will begin tracking visitors to their websites, perhaps signaling the end of a nearly 10-year ban on 'persistent cookies' that many have lambasted as outdated.

A handful of departments have recently sought waivers to begin using those online tools, which essentially allow webmasters to tune viewers' Web browsing experiences based on portions of the website they have previously visited.

Persistent cookies are nearly ubiquitous in the private sphere, as they allow web sites to remember user preferences without simultaneously capturing their sensitive, identifiable information. But the Office of Management and Budget issued a policy memorandum in 2000 that outlawed the practice, citing privacy as its chief concern.

However, agencies have routinely sought waivers to that policy, according to NextGov, which first discovered the practice was gaining more widespread federal acceptance. A handful of agencies already have them -- including NASA, which uses the cookies to shield users from constant prompts to grade the website.

The General Services Administration later granted a universal cookie waiver to agencies accepting input on their open government plans -- that's how users are able to log into one government website and share their opinions across agencies.

Still, those changes complement the White House's larger push to rewrite the persistent cookie policy altogether. Nextgov reports that the Obama administration has recently approached the OMB about revising its long-standing cookie rules, but it is still unclear when those changes might enter into effect.

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn is worried that the agency's proposals to relocate broadcasters' airwaves will impact the already ailing news industry.

In FCC's meeting today, where the National Broadband Plan was discussed, Clyburn said the recommendations come at a "crossroads in the nation's telecom policy."  She applauded many of the proposals, such as strengthening the nation's public safety networks.

But she also said she wants to "answer some essential questions that may shed light on contracting the broadcast spectrum."

"What will the effect of moving this spectrum from broadcast to mobile use be on the delivery of news and information to local communities?" she asked.  "I am very concerned about sacrificing an essential service to our communities in favor of new apps that have nothing to do with ensuring that we can have meaningful access to the news and information critical to our daily lives.  It is unclear at this point whether the Internet can currently replace these trusted sources."

All media outlets, from TV stations to daily newspapers, have struggled to adapt to the new revenue models of the Internet. Repurposing broadcast spectrum for mobile applications may further hinder the ability of local TV stations--the main source of news for most Americans--to flourish in the new media environment.

But if broadcasters are not using their airwaves in the most efficient way possible, it should be evaluated, she said.

"If broadcasters are not using the spectrum we have given them for free, then it should be put to different use," Clyburn said. "Broadcasters must be partners in this endeavor."

Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell thanked the agency's broadband task for that worked tirelessly to create the report, which will be handed to Congress tomorrow.

But in his statement at today's FCC meeting, he pointed out some ideas in the plan that "give me concern:"

---First, the Plan opens the door to classifying broadband services as old-fashioned monopoly era, circuit-switched, voice telephone services under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.  Broadband deployment and adoption have flourished in the absence of such regulations.  Not only do I doubt that such a reclassification would survive appeal, I don’t see how foisting a regulatory framework first devised in the 19th Century would help a competitive 21st Century marketplace continue to thrive.  But we will have plenty of time to engage in this debate.

---Second, the Plan implies that the Commission should mandate the unbundling of fiber and other network elements that have been deployed since the agency deregulated some of these components.  As a result of that deregulation, fiber deployment has spiked in recent years.  Rather than reverse course, the Commission should ensure that any future actions will not create regulatory uncertainty and litigation risk that could scare away capital investment.

Read more...

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell used his love of the NCAA tournament to show the already rapid growth of broadband. Blair Levin, head of the FCC's broadband task force, presented the plan to the commission this morning.

"We should be mindful that Blair and his team are presenting this plan to Congress during a tumultuous time. And I don't mean health care reform. I mean March Madness," he joked.

"It should be obvious to policy makers everywhere that March Madness...could be the killer app needed to accelerate broadband access to ubiquity by 2020."

After all, last year, 7.5 million unique visitors viewed March Madness on Demand, and 8.6 million hours of video and audio were consumed. He referenced the popular "boss button," that lets cubicle workers immediately hide the basketball footage on their computer screen if their supervisors approach their desk.

"This is the kind of market-driven solution to increased adoption," he said.