Washington Update

EDUCAUSE has chosen Greg Jackson, Vice President and CIO at the University of Chicago, as the association’s new vice president of policy and analysis.  Jackson, who will work primarily in the Washington, DC office, was a CIO for the past thirteen years at one of the nation’s leading research universities.  Prior to his service in Chicago, he was a director of academic computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  Jackson has served on the education faculties at Harvard and Stanford, including as a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government.  He holds a doctorate of education from Harvard, as well as a bachelor of science in engineering and history from MIT.

Last Friday, August 21, the Department of Education issued its long-awaited Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) related to Peer-to-Peer File Sharing on campus networks. The proposed regulations reflect the agreement reached by representatives of higher education and the entertainment industry during Negotiated Rulemaking sessions held earlier this year.

The proposed regulations create three primary requirements:

As required by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently issued a final rule pertaining to breach notification when health information is compromised by Web-based businesses. The rule requires “vendors of health records and related entities to notify consumers following a breach involving unsecured information.”  Additionally, it provides more information on the “timing, method, and content of [the] notification” and requires a notice to the media in breaches where 500 or more people are affected. 

The issue of releasing the spectrum known as “White Space” for unlicensed use has been under consideration at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for over five years and has come very close to being approved. EDUCAUSE has supported this effort because it would result in more and better spectrum becoming available for campus use. As our members attest, there is an ever-growing desire for advanced wireless devices and applications, and our campuses need spectrum to accommodate them. There have been statements made (by opponents of this effort) about how new devices, if allowed to use this spectrum on an unlicensed basis, would interfere with wireless microphones used in lecture halls, theatre productions, and sporting events. The FCC is aware of this problem, and they are also aware that most wireless microphones are currently used illegally, yet getting a license is not only difficult, but unnecessary.

“What we need to do is redouble our efforts to make sure that we have an infrastructure across the country that will allow us to take this nation into the 21^st century.”

-Vivek Kundra, Obama administration’s chief information officer

The FCC's national broadband plan got kicked off last week with addresses from the White House and FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski. The plan promises to be on the scale of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in size and scope, and is expected to shape telecommunications policy for decades to come. Blair Levin, who is tasked with coordinating the effort, joined Genachowski in asking for bold thinking and experimentation, even if it means regulators might “stumble along the way”.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently announced that it will be seeking nominations for members to serve on the Institute's federal advisory committees, including: the Technology Innovation Program Advisory Board, the Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, and the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology, among others. NIST says nominations will be accepted on an ongoing basis and will be considered as vacancies occur.

Higher education's cybersecurity community may be particularly interested in the Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board (ISPAB). More information on the ISPAB is found here.

On the eve of summer recess, Representatives Edward Markey, D-Mass. and Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., introduced the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009” which unabashedly reintroduces the term “net neutrality” into the public debate. But will this produce the fireworks that the term generated only a few short congressional sessions ago?

As the public comments have poured in, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is quickly discovering that creating a national broadband plan is no small task. 

Blair Levin, who was specifically recruited to help develop the plan, has said recently that the 8500 pages of public comments thus far collected have not been especially helpful.  Levin says that many people have focused on their own narrow interests, rather than taken a look at the broader issue.  With so many opposing voices on this topic, it has been difficult to determine the specific elements that will be needed to advance a broadband plan. 

Measuring broadband is really hard. That was the conclusion after a panel of noted authorities discussed George S. Ford’s presentation of the Phoenix Center’s new policy paper, “The Broadband Adoption Index” (BAI) on July 15. With a full house at the National Press Club, Dr. Ford, with the help of a lead-in by FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, made a convincing case for the inadequacy of the widely accepted means of measuring broadband deployment, by connections per capita. By comparing study after study he showed how the U.S. is ranked anywhere from second to twenty-sixth in the world, with the most common measure coming in around 15^th. But perhaps his most interesting point was, not that the studies were wrong, but that “even if we snapped our fingers and had fiber to the home tomorrow, the U.S.

Everyone's buzzing about a headline in Monday's Wired Campus blog from the Chronicle of Higher Education: "New Study Shows Decrease in Illegal Music Downloading". The survey of 1,000 music fans was carried out by a pair of British research organizations and initially described in The Guardian on Sunday. The Guardian headline: "Collapse in illegal sharing and boom in streaming brings music to executives' ears".

Since the broadband grant rules were published last week, lawmakers have begun to express concerns about requirements and definitions.  Yesterday, the House Subcommittee on Rural Development, Biotechnology, Specialty Crops, and Foreign Agriculture held a hearing to address the matter.  Some legislators made it clear that the broadband rules as currently written may pose problems for their communities, or potential service providers.

Last August, President Bush signed into law the 1,200-page Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008, termed by one Senator "a well-intentioned contraption of unnecessary rules and regulations that waste time and money that ought to be spent on students and improving quality." (For the source of that quote and additional HEOA background and references, see On Making Sausage in EDUCAUSE Review.)

Several sections of the HEOA deal with unauthorized file-sharing on campus networks, imposing 3 general requirements on all U.S. colleges and universities: