Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Security, Telecom Top Tech Policy Agenda for 2003

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2003 13:28:17 -0500

Security, Telecom Top Tech Policy Agenda for 2003
Congress Will Oversee New Cybersecurity Bureaucracy, Revisit Broadband Rules
By TechNews.com Staff

Tuesday, December 31, 2002; 12:00 AM

Even before the 108th Congress convenes, lawmakers face an inbox full of tech policy items
left over from previous sessions and crowded with a growing list of emerging policy items
sure to draw attention on both sides of Capitol Hill.
Senators and representatives will return to Washington charged with overseeing a newly
created homeland security department -- an agency designed to protect the nation's
physical and digital resources. How to balance high-tech surveillance with privacy
protections for ordinary citizens likely will be the hot-button tech issue of 2003.

But it's the continued weakness in the technology sector that may draw the most visible
and contentious debates as lawmakers seek to reinvigorate the New Economy. Congress faces
a telecom sector still wracked with disagreement over the rules that govern broadband
Internet service. And then there are the perennial tech policy issues -- spam, copyright
protection, Internet taxes, gambling, military and business spectrum use, hacking and
network security. Congress tried hundreds of times to address these areas and is prepared
to try again in 2003.

Voters gave Republicans control of both the Senate and House of Representatives in the
November election, and the return to power in the Senate certainly heralds changes, but
tech policy battles don't always break down along partisan lines.
Here are some of the anticipated highlights for the upcoming two years of the 108th
Congress:
Homeland Security and Cybersecurity

• The Bush administration is expected to release the final version of its cybersecurity
plan in late January or early February. The
White House scrapped a planned September 2002 release of the strategy after the technology
community complained that the
administration failed to solicit or heed its input. Internet security experts also
complained, saying that the private sector wanted
to water down the document by making it a series of recommendations, not orders. Lawmakers
are expected to offer their own
takes on the plan, once it actually sees daylight.

• The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has hired retired Admiral John
Poindexter to run the Total Information Awareness System (TIAS). Replete with the Masonic
pyramid and omnipotent eye of the dollar bill as its logo,
TIAS is intended to gather as much information as it can from databases worldwide to track
down terrorists and other threats
to national security. Critics, including several key members of Congress, say it is a blow
against privacy rights, since the system
as designed will sort through information worldwide without regard to source or subject,
leaving open the possibility that personal information about ordinary citizens could wind
up archived in a Pentagon computer.

• The technology industry is expected to keep the pressure on Congress to devote more
dollars to information technology as a
way to fight terrorism, both at the federal and state level. President Bush signed a bill
in November that dedicates $900 million
over five years to cybersecurity research, but security-conscious lawmakers are likely to
devote more funds to that budget.

• With the adoption of a law that creates a new "homeland security" agency, there will be
a reshuffling of the federal
bureaucracy into a gargantuan office that will include several information technology
departments, including the FBI's National
Infrastructure Protection Center and the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office.
Congress will be charged with overseeing this
new bureaucracy and may revisit the legislation to "fix" anything it doesn't like about
how the White House organizes the new
agency.

Internet Piracy and Copyright

Digital piracy and intellectual property issues will be front and center in many
congressional committees next year, though it
remains to be seen whether they will match the bumper crop of anti-piracy legislation that
sprang up over the past two years.
• Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) likely will resurrect a bill he introduced in the 107th
Congress to allow the entertainment industry and other copyright owners to use
technological tools to pry into people's personal computers to stop them from illegally
swapping copyrighted music, movies and software online. The bill as written in the last
session says that copyright owners cannot cause more than minimal damage to a file
trader's software, but it already is being decried for legalizing techniques common among
hackers to uphold the law.

• House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman W. J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.) is expected to
reintroduce legislation to
speed the national transition to digital television and prevent unauthorized copying or
signal theft of digital TV programs. The bill
would require makers of digital televisions and DTV-ready equipment to include a digital
"watermark," or code, that would prohibit Internet transmission. In the Senate, Joseph
Biden (D-Del.) may reprise a bill to outlaw tampering with digital watermarks.

• Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Democrat Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-S.C) is expected
to reintroduce an anti-piracy bill that would mandate standards for personal computers and
other devices to prevent copyright theft. The legislation was strongly supported by Motion
Picture Association of America chief Jack Valenti, as well as other titans of the
entertainment industry, including the Walt Disney Co.

• The Supreme Court likely will decide whether Congress can repeatedly extend copyrights
on literature, art, music and film. At
issue is a challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, a 1998 law that
extended copyright protection by 20
years. Opponents of the law, led by Internet archivist Eric Eldred, say the law unfairly
burdens scholars and publishers, and
could leave creativity on the Internet in the hands of a few major entertainment and media
companies, many of which have been
slow to embrace the Web as a distribution medium.
Internet Taxation

Most online shoppers don't pay taxes on the goods they buy, thanks in part to a Supreme
Court ruling that says that Congress
can't force merchants to collect state sales taxes unless the merchants are located in the
state where the customer lives. The court also said that Congress can change that rule
when enough states simplify their disparate and often incompatible tax systems.

Now, 31 states and Washington, D.C., are one step closer to that goal. After passing other
procedural steps -- and after the
November 2003 expiration of a moratorium on Internet-specific taxes -- the states and D.C.
will ask Congress to approve a
mandatory, nationwide online sales tax. There is no guarantee that lawmakers will say yes,
in part because only 45 of the 50
states collect sales taxes. Given Congress's repeated passage of laws to ban Internet
sales taxes, members of Congress are
likely to get involved in the states' sales tax initiative, including Sen. George Allen
(R-Va.), a leading critic of imposing any taxes
on online commerce.
Spam and Identity Theft

• Lawmakers introduced more than two-dozen bills to thwart identity thieves and to assist
their victims, but none of them passed both chambers of Congress. Shortly after a
high-profile ID theft scam affecting an estimated 30,000 consumers
nationwide was reported in the fall, the Senate passed legislation to increase prison
terms for convicted identity thieves, but it
never received a hearing in the House. The Senate also passed legislation to help ID theft
victims repair their credit, but the House had little time before the end of the session
to review it. Several of the chief ID theft combatants are returning for the 108th
Congress, including Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and
Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.).

• Congress has again avoided passing legislation to combat the growing menace of junk
e-mail -- or "spam," encouraging states
to take the matters into their own hands. Roughly half of the states have passed anti-spam
laws. The Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) can prosecute spammers who send out misleading or illegal information --
including solicitations for drugs
without prescriptions, sex enhancement aids and free porn, for example -- but there is
still no federal law limiting unsolicited
commercial e-mail. Legislators such as Sens. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), Joseph Lieberman
(D-Conn.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)
and Reps. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.), Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Gene
Green (D-Texas) and Howard
Coble (R-N.C.) are expected to keep up the push for a federal law.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55618-2002Dec30?language=printer

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