The Hill reports that another net neutrality critic has been added to the Federal Communications Commission landing team for the president-elect, with Roslyn Layton joining Jeffrey Eisenach and Mark Jamison. All three work for the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank. All three are against the net neutrality rules, which require internet service providers to treat all web traffic the same. “The FCC's recent actions and the White House's intervention is inconsistent with a stable, evidence-based regulatory approach,” Layton wrote about net neutrality in a 2015 op-ed co-written with Jamison. “The situation distracts the FCC from its mission-critical responsibilities, such as the upcoming incentive auction to get more spectrum in the marketplace and meet consumers’ increasing demand for wireless technologies.” Earlier this month, Layton wrote a Tech Policy Daily op-ed urging the Trump administration to promote international broadband and take on Chinese apps. “As my forthcoming research on the mobile app economy shows, the Chinese succeed in making significant mobile app innovation without having explicit open internet rules,” Layton wrote. “This contradicts the regulatory dogma and suggests that policymakers should rethink their assumptions about how internet innovation works.”

Those annoying sounds that interrupt television and radio programming for "a test of the emergency broadcasting network" may be a thing of the past. If there had been an actual emergency, the Emergency Alert System, or EAS, might not be there to go off in a Donald Trump administration. Mark Jamison, part of Trump's telecom transition team, has written that, "Most of the original motivations for having an FCC have gone away," Jamison, who leads the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida, has argued that the FCC could be replaced by a much smaller agency that just hands out licenses for the airwaves for cellphone calls, mobile data, and TV signals. That would mean no more Emergency Alert System, when the government takes over all the airwaves, interrupting programs to tell viewers and listeners about its views on said emergency. Recently the Federal Communications Commission has been upgrading the system, with another nationwide test of the improvements last month. The Dec. 15 FCC Open Meeting includes a vote on a Proposed Rulemaking to enhance the Emergency Alert System, "as a tool for community emergency preparedness. The Report and Order improves alerting organization at the state and local levels, builds stronger community-based alerting exercise programs, and protects the EAS against accidental misuse and malicious intrusion. The Further Notice seeks comment on proposals to leverage technological advances to improve alerting and additional measures to preserve EAS security.

Chal Ravens reports in Fact Magazine that Hudson Valley-based composer Pauline Oliveros, who pioneered the concept of “deep listening,” has died at age 84. Flutist Claire Chase first reported the news Nov. 25 on Instagram and it was confirmed by many posts on Facebook and Twitter. Oliveros was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, and collaborated with Terry Riley and modular synthesist Morton Subotnick. On Nov. 21 she read from John Cage's letters at an event in Manhattan broadcast on WGXC. In 2003 she explained her "deep listening" concept: “In hearing, the ears take in all the sound waves and particles and deliver them to the audio cortex where the listening takes place. We cannot turn off our ears–the ears are always taking in sound information–but we can turn off our listening. I feel that listening is the basis of creativity and culture. How you’re listening, is how you develop a culture and how a community of people listens, is what creates their culture.” Oliveros taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy and Mills College in California, and lived in Kingston, New York.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation announced decimating cuts to programming last week, and more than 60 staffers reacted by unanimously passing a motion of no confidence. The radio staff cited "systemic failure" in senior radio management and, "the erosion of the editorial and managerial responsibilities of executive producers." The motion also said, "The continuing erosion of specialist programming in music, features and religion is a serious breach of the ABC Charter and a disservice to the Australian audiences that the ABC is funded to serve." Eight staffers lost jobs in the announced cuts, which included the experimental "Soundproof" show.

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Rich people have waged war on the media before -- Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel recently succeeded in shutting down the news website Gawker -- but the war wagers have never been president of the country before. So far Donald Trump has engaged in three Twitter wars since being elected, against The New York Times, "Saturday Night Live," and "Hamilton." He has assembled officials and journalists from all the news networks -- NBC, CBS, CNN, ABC, and Fox -- not to set ground-rules and a tone as previous president-elects have, but to, according to various reports, berate and bully the reporters. A source told The New York Post, “Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said, ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed.’ ” CNN is owned by Time-Warner, which is part of a proposed $85 billion merger with AT&T that needs government approval. During the presidential campaign, Trump railed against the merger, but so far has appointed lobbyists to his telecom transition team that favor such corporate unions. Hamilton Nolan, a former Gawker scribe now at Deadspin, wrote, "The single biggest barrier to the completion of this $85 billion media merger may be Donald Trump’s childish personal dislike of CNN’s news coverage of him." Back at the meeting with various TV networks, a source told The New Yorker, “He truly doesn’t seem to understand the First Amendment... He thinks we are supposed to say what he says and that’s it.” During the campaign, the press largely did, giving the Trump campaign nearly $3 billion in free airtime during the primary campaign, far more then any other candidate.

Jeffrey Eisenach, the head of the President-elect's telecom transition team, has now been named to the Federal Communications Commission transition team for Donald Trump, further leading speculation that he will be nominated for FCC chairman. Eisenach, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an elite Republican think tank, would certainly end net neutrality, and, previously worked for Verizon, he has supported other mergers. So his views on the AT&T merger with Time-Warner might be different than his boss, who has spoken against the merger. Eisenach, “has been supportive of all the deals in the last few years, including the AT&T/[T-Mobile] and Comcast/Time Warner Cable deals,” according to a recent investor note from the analyst firm New Street Research. “Either there's going to be mass tension within his team, or he's going to sit back and let the [establishment conservatives] have their way — in which case, all of his campaign rhetoric on blowing up Comcast and AT&T was just cheap talk,” Hal Singer, an economist and senior fellow at the George Washington Institute for Public Policy, told the Washington Post. Beyond the chair, the FCC shakeup is unknown -- Republicans have blocked Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel's renomination for the commission, and if she does not get a full senate vote, she will leave when the new Congress is seated in January. Traditionally, the leader of the opposition party -- in this case New York Senator Chuck Schumer -- would nominate another Democrat to fill the seat on the FCC, with the president's nomination of a new chairperson flipping the vote 3-2 to the Republicans. But Trump has said he will not follow convention in every case, so it is hard to tell if Schumer will get to nominate a Democrat, or not.

Politico reports that Republican President-Elect Donald Trump picked Jeffrey Eisenach, "a crusader against regulation," and consistent critic of current Federal Communications Commission chief Tom Wheeler, to lead his telecom transition team. Eisenach is a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and critic of the Obama administration's net neutrality, and broadband investment policies, and also the leading name among Washington insiders to run the FCC. Robert Atkinson, president of the non-partisan think tank Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, told Scientific American what to expect if Eisenach is named FCC chairman.

"If it is Jeff, then broadband access will no longer be classified as a Title II service that’s subject to a wider range of rules and is much easier to regulate. Instead, it will once again be considered a Title I service, making it harder for the government to get legal approval to do price or privacy regulations. With Jeff, you’d also see a push for ending what we might call government overbuilding, such as federal grants for local communities that have access to commercial broadband but decide it’s not fast enough and want to build another network on top of or alongside it. And you’d see a big push for freeing up space on the radio spectrum to pave the way for a transition to 5G next-generation networks."

Broadcasting and Cable reports that the Prometheus Radio Project is challenging parts of the FCC's Aug. 25 quadrennial ownership review, and the legal battle between the non-profit group and the radio regulators continues now for more than a decade in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Prometheus and the Media Mobilizing Project said in their filing that the FCC again failed to satisfy directives from the court by reinstating an earlier definition of eligible entity the court had vacated and remanded, "while citing no additional evidence to show that this definition will promote ownership opportunities [for] minorities and women." Prometheus is challenging the FCC on several issues, including the decision to modify some broadcast ownership rules, "so as to permit increased concentration," as well as its "failure" to treat shared services agreements as attributable ownership interests subject to local market duopoly rules. "While we generally support the decision to retain the ownership rules and reinstate JSA [joint sales agreement] attribution, the Commission's intransigence with respect to getting reliable data to make meaningful efforts to diversify ownership is a serious legal and policy error," said Andrew Schwartzman, one of the attorneys for Prometheus, a Philadelphia-based non-profit group that sprung out of a pirate radio station there.

David Oxenford in the Broadcast Law Blog writes that the Federal Communications Commission will hold a hearing about the license renewal of the Entercom Sacramento radio station KDND that held a broadcast contest that led to the death of a participant. The radio station held a water-drinking contest listening to which contestant could go the longest without vomiting or using the restroom while consuming eight ounces of water every 10 minutes. The winner got a Nintendo Wii game console in the “Hold Your Wee For Wii” contest. A contest runner-up complained of light-headedness and a headache, then slipped into a coma and died of hyponatremia, a brain function disturbance caused by consuming too much water. An FCC Judge will conduct a trial to determine if the company gets to keep its license to use the public airwaves. Oxenford writes, "This appears to be a unique case where the FCC has turned a case of negligence – usually resolved through a lawsuit in civil courts – into a violation of the general obligation of a station to operate in the public interest."

David Oxenford reports in the Broadcast Law Blog that as of Sept. 9 there are 60 days until election day, and commercial broadcasters must now charge the “lowest unit rate” for political advertising. Any candidate for any office anywhere buying late-night ads, gets charged the lowest rate for those ads, and candidates buying time during NFL football games are charged the lowest rates for those events. If Coca Cola buys 50,000 ads in bulk and gets a cheap rate, political candidates only have to pay that same rate without buying ads in the same volume. State and local candidates have no right per se for stations to air any ads, as they can refuse, Oxenford writes. Rarely, though, do broadcasters turn down advertising, and they do have a bonanza coming, monetary incentive to keep contests considered close so more money is spent. Only candidates get the discount rates, as political action committees and issue-oriented advertisers pay in full. So count the dollars local TV stations and national news networks are making each time you see or hear a political advertisement this fall.

In a largely issue-free presidential election, attempts to parse policy positions can be difficult. Here is what Republican Donald Trump said Sept. 6 at an event with former General Michael Flynn:

"Well, that's it. And you know cyber is becoming so big today. It's becoming something that a number of years ago, short number of years ago, wasn't even a word. And now the cyber is so big. And you know you look at what they're doing with the Internet, how they're taking and recruiting people through the Internet. And part of it is the psychology because so many people think they're winning. Any you know, there's a whole big thing. Even today's psychology — where CNN came out with a big poll. Their big poll came out today that Trump is winning. It's good psychology, you know. It's good psychology. I know that for a fact because people they didn't call me yesterday, they're calling me today. So that's the way life works, right? But I think we're doing very well and I really thank the state of Virginia, so many different places have been so incredible. So I thank you very much. But cyber has been very, very important and it's becoming more and more important as you look and a lot of it does have to do with ideology and psychology and lots of other things."

There seems to be only one factual statement that could be fact-checked in that monologue. Trump claims "cyber" was not a word a few years ago. In 2013, the blog Gizmodo traced the history of the word to the 1940 book "Cybernetics." Other than that, Trump seems to be saying he will stop the online tactics of ISIL because of his large poll numbers.

The New York Times reports that the Air Force has a shortage of pilots for its radio-controlled drone fleet, and now the Pentagon will rely more on private contractors for reconnaissance missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The private contractors are not allowed to be "trigger pullers" shooting targets, but can fly reconnaissance, sending video feeds of operations. Over the past ten months, "the Pentagon has added four drones flown by contractors to the roughly 60 that are typically flown every day by uniformed Air Force personnel," the Times reports. “This is opening up a whole new can of worms — we have seen problems with security contractors on the battlefield since 9/11, and there’s been an improvement in oversight in that area, but that came after a decade of problems,” said Laura A. Dickinson, a law professor at George Washington University, who studies military contractors. “With drones, this is a new area where we already do not have a lot of transparency, and with contractors operating drones there’s no clearly defined regime of oversight and accountability.” Read the full story in The New York Times.

Scientific American was quick to jump into the discussion last week about the sounds Russian scientists supposedly heard, saying the discovery of a possible radio signal from outer space is, "this week’s biggest non-story in science." Science journalist Paul Gilster wrote last week about a message he had received from some Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence researchers reporting a powerful three-second burst of radio waves from less than 100 light-years away, and claiming they could not rule out the possibility that the signal was artificial. In reality, in May of 2015, the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia detected the signal from about 94 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, claims that, "a radio blast sent out in all directions by a hypothetical alien civilization would take hundreds of times more power than that of all the sunlight bathing the Earth, based on how bright the signal appeared in the Russian telescope.... If it were instead a beam focused solely on the Earth, the signal would still require twice the electricity used by the United States in an entire year. Eric Korpela, an astronomer at the University of California in Berkeley said, "SETI@home has seen millions of potential signals with similar characteristics, but it takes more than that to make a good candidate.... Multiple detections are a minimum criterion.” But this radio signal everyone is talking about this week was only heard once and Korpela said the signal could have been, "due to flares from the target star, the burp of a supermassive black hole in a background galaxy, or even the chance magnification of ordinary, all-natural stellar radio emissions by a passing foreground star or a transient ripple of interstellar plasma."

David Oxenford at the Broadcast Law Blog reports that the Federal Communications Commission is currently going through one of its every-few-years efforts to make it seem like it is cracking down on pirate radio. After many New York and New Jersey politicians have repeatedly complained to the FCC about competing transmissions from unlicensed broadcasters, the regulators have taken several public actions. There's a new FCC website, where one can track enforcement actions by location (see map above). The FCC has also issued several large fines to individual pirates and a railroad company that had been illegally operating hundreds of stations. Oxenford notes that the FCC also, "sent a warning letter to a property owner for a home from which a pirate radio station operated, warning that the operation was illegal – perhaps setting the stage for more aggressive actions against those who enable pirate radio operators."

If a group set up "more than a hundred wireless radio facilities" without any licenses, that might be a big deal? Turns out the Canadian Pacific Railway Company is the biggest pirate radio operator in the U.S., with the Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau announcing a $1,210,000 fine against the railroad company. Canadian Pacific got in trouble for setting up all those pirate studios, and for failing to obtain FCC authorizations for the transfer of control of thirty wireless radio licenses. “Wireless facilities are critical to the safe and efficient operation of our nation’s railways,” said Travis LeBlanc, Chief of the Enforcement Bureau. “We take seriously our responsibility to ensure that the ownership and operation of all such facilities comply with the FCC’s licensing processes.” Canadian Pacific, which used to be called the Soo Line Corporation, found during an internal audit in 2015 the non-compliance with FCC licensing regulations, and they told the FCC. The railroad industry widely uses radio transmitting devices for voice and data transmissions, and the Soo Line Corporation had been constructing, relocating, modifying, and operating various unlicensed transmitters since 1979.

The Air Force Times reported last week that the service is increasing retention bonuses to $35,000 per year for radio-controlled drone operators. With the Obama administration expanding the drone program over the years and both major presidential candidates in favor of keeping it, the Air Force needs more pilots. Now officer drone pilots re-upping get $175,000 for five more years beginning Oct. 1. In July, Barack Obama claimed that drone and other airstrikes have killed between 64 and 116 civilians during his administration. The administration claimed that it launched 473 strikes that killed between 2,372 and 2,581 terrorist “combatants.” Activists claim those reported numbers are lower than reality.

Legislators in the United States are on a long vacation, so there has not been much to report lately on the Amateur Radio Parity Act, H.R. 1301. Just before the break, on July 13, the bill, which would make it easier for amateur radio users to raise antennae around the country, received a unanimous favorable report from members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, the ARRL reports. The bill was amended before the vote, making it more palatable to the homeowners association that was opposing the measure. “The amendment guarantees that even in deed-restricted communities, Amateur Radio operators are able to use an effective outdoor antenna,” Rep Greg Walden, an amateur radio operator licensced W7EQI (R-OR), said. “Without an effective antenna Amateur Radio operators are severely limited, so this amendment ensures that amateurs are free to pursue their passion wherever they live.” The bill failed in the last Congressional session, but has proceeded farther this time. Lawmakers will be back in Washington D.C. in September.

Techdirt reports that French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced Aug. 11 a "global initiative" to "fight" messaging encryption. Ahead of an Aug. 23 meeting with German counterpart Thomas de Maiziere, the French want to limit terrorists use of messaging encryption, but that means limiting everyone's access to secure messages. Techdirt does not believe that is a smart plan. "First of all, encryption is still difficult to use and easy to mess up. In fact, most reports suggest that ISIS is pretty bad about its opsec when it comes to encryption. And, even if they are successfully using encryption, they still leave plenty of other breadcrumbs for law enforcement and the intelligence community to track," the website says. France has been hit with several terrorism-related crimes recently, and wants to do something.

The Washington Post reported last week that court-ordered declassified administration guidelines say that President Barack Obama approves radio-controlled drone operations, but does not sign off on every single strike. The 18-page top-secret document was signed by Obama in May 2013, when the administration released a “fact sheet” briefly outlining the secret procedures. The rules say the military must have, “near certainty” that the target is correct and that no civilians will also be hit, and that the target poses a “continuing and imminent” threat to Americans, and capture is not feasible, while the U.S. obeys all relevant domestic and international laws. Last month, the U.S. published aggregate numbers on how many civilians have been killed by CIA and military strikes in countries including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and Libya, with 64 to 116 civilians and 2,372 to 2,581 “combatants” in 473 strikes in countries where the United States is not at war. Many nongovernment groups claimed the numbers should be much higher, and all agreed they do not include actions in the war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. An American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit before Judge Colleen McMahon, in the Southern District of New York, forced the release of the rules. “The [Presidential Policy Guidance] PPG should have been released three years ago, but its release now will inform an ongoing debate about the lawfulness and wisdom of the government’s counterterrorism policies,” said ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer. “The release of the PPG and related documents is also a timely reminder of the breadth of the powers that will soon be in the hands of another president.”

The Commission considered items on Relay Services for Deaf-Blind Individuals; Improvements to Benchmarks and Related Requirements Governing Hearing Aid-Compatible Mobile Handsets; and Rates for Interstate Inmate Calling Services. Held on August 4, 2016 at FCC Headquarters in Washington, DC.