The Communications Law blog reports about the Federal Communications Commission's plan for Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) linking transmissions on automobiles with highways. Those broadcasts on the the 5.850-5.925 GHz band are right next to the 5.725-5.85 GHz band used by Wi-Fi systems, and that industry keeps eyeing the DSRC bandwidth and saying, "Heh, since you aren't using those frequencies why don't we?" Most people have probably never heard of Dedicated Short Range Communications, as it is not in any cars now, though Cadillac plans to introduce it in the fall. The technology is for safety, with vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure transmissions, perhaps eventually helping to steer driverless cars. While there may be future uses for the frequencies, right now FCC commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel, Ajit Pai, and Michael O’Rielly have called for Wi-Fi sharing of the frequencies, and the commission is reportedly speaking with the Department of Transportation about how to manage the band. And the Commission has released a Public Notice seeking comments on two band-sharing proposals from the Wi-Fi industry. Cisco wants to allow unlicensed users to use the frequencies when DSRC is not in use. Qualcomm wants to “channelize” the band by moving “safety-related” DSRC to a segment at the top of the band (5.895-5.925 GHz), using the lower portion between non-public safety related DSRC and Wi-Fi via standard 802.11 protocols. The FCC accepts comments through July 7; enter Proceeding Number 13-49 to comment at fcc.gov.

The New York Times reports that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is asking for public comment through July 1 for the Ocean Noise Strategy Roadmap draft, a 10-year plan to quiet man-made noise in the oceans. Sonar, military tests, shipping, energy drilling all make the oceans a very noisy place, especially since sound travels so much better in water than through air. The barrage of sound underwater needs further studies, as anecdotal evidence is not good. Oceanic scientists have observed, off the coast of Massachusetts, that many whales no longer seem to hear the sounds of ships, and do not always move out of the way. Michael Jasny, from the Natural Resources Defense Council, said he is disappointed that the plan is vague and lacks a schedule. But the good news, he says, is unlike other forms of pollution, “Once you stop making noise, it goes away.”

Israel seems to be worried about activists of the "Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions" movement, who are trying to put economic pressure on Israel to end human rights violations against Palestinians. On June 5, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo created a blacklist for his state, boycotting anyone boycotting Israel. Melanie Trimble, the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union Capital Region chapter, said that government policy, “punishing New Yorkers for engaging in political speech degrades our state’s values and traditions and violates the Constitution.” Besides lobbying New York's leaders to create a blacklist, the Israeli government may also be behind a series of online attacks against the human rights activists. A report from eQualit.ie, an online security group, found that the botnets used to attack the bdsmovement.net website were also used against another organization supporting Palestinian rights. “These latest cyber-attacks against BDS seem to be part of a full-fledged Israeli war on the movement that includes McCarthyite legal repression, use of intelligence services and yet more funding for ‘brand Israel’ propaganda,” said Mahmoud Nawajaa, general coordinator of the Palestinian BDS National Committee.

Vice reports that combing through government records, it appears that Edward Snowden was telling the truth that he repeatedly raised concerns while at the National Security Agency, before leaking government documents to the media about the surveillance program of the United States. In his 2014 testimony to the European Parliament, Snowden was asked whether he, "exhausted all avenues before taking the decision to go public." "Yes," he said. "I had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than 10 distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them." Snowden was an employee of private contractor Booz Allen Hamilton when he leaked the documents, and, "I was not protected by U.S. whistleblower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for revealing classified information about law breaking in accordance with the recommended process." But four days later, Richard Ledgett, the deputy director of the NSA wrote, "Our findings are that we have found no evidence in the interviews, email, or chats reviewed that support his claims.... Some coworkers reported discussing the Constitution with Snowden, specifically his interpretation of the Constitution as black and white, and others reported discussing general privacy issues as it relates to the Internet." Actually, Snowden clearly was raising concerns that were not being listened to until they were leaks.

Techdirt reports that until May 31 the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals was the only appeals courts to rule warrantless access to cell site location data violated the Fourth Amendment. It was a limited decision, just concerning the collection of historical cell site data for extended periods of time as the court believed the records would give authorities considerable detail about a person's private movements. That changed with a May 31 ruling. "We now hold that the Government’s acquisition of historical [data] from Defendants’ cell phone provider did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Supreme Court precedent mandates this conclusion. For the Court has long held that an individual enjoys no Fourth Amendment protection “in information he voluntarily turns over to [a] third part[y].'," according to the court's opinion.

The Guardian reports that former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden performed a “public service” by leaking government surveillance documents. “We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,” Holder said on an audio program hosted by David Axelrod. “Now, I would say that doing what he did – and the way he did it – was inappropriate and illegal.” Snowden himself has said much the same thing, except for the inappropriate part. Snowden released one of the biggest leaks in American government history in 2013, revealing the extent of the indiscriminate bulk surveillance of U.S. citizens. “I think in deciding what an appropriate sentence should be, I think a judge could take into account the usefulness of having had that national debate,” Holder said.

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The "Frequency" movie from the year 2000 with Jim Caviezel as John Sullivan, who, because of a giant solar flare, can speak with his dead father, Dennis Quaid, on his dad's ham radio, is coming back from the dead itself, returning as a CW television series this fall. This time, it is a father Riley Smith speaking through radio from the dead to daughter Peyton List. When radio was first invented at the turn of the 20th Century, there was a common belief that one could speak to the dead through radio airwaves.

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The Amateur Radio Relay League reports that the ARRL reached an agreement with the Community Associations Institute — the national association of homeowners associations — to amend the language of the Amateur Radio Parity Act, allowing H.R. 1301 to proceed in Congress this year. The Act was meant to allow amateur radio enthusiasts living in deed-restricted communities to install an effective outdoor antenna. The homeowners lobby, though, does not want to lose the power to enforce deed restrictions across the country. “We express support for H.R. 1301, the Amateur Radio Parity Act, as proposed to be amended,” a statement from the homeowners' association said. Locally, a representative for Rep. Chris Gibson told WGXC that the previous version of the bill has his support.

Barre Phillips, "Mountainscape Ⅴ" from "Mountainscapes" (ECM)

The Guardian has found in an investigation that new electronic gizmos such as Amazon's Echo violate the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), set up to regulate the collection and use of personal information from anyone younger than 13. The story suggests companies such as Google, Apple, and others marketing artificial intelligence systems to young children could face multimillion-dollar fines. “This is part of the initial wave of marketing to children using the internet of things,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocacy group that helped write the law. “It is exactly why the law was enacted in the first place, to protect young people from pervasive data collection.” The story says Google’s standalone Home device, just announced but not yet on sale, and Apple’s Siri, use young children and Cookie Monster from Sesame Street in their ads. “When your advertising markets this product to children, and parents with children, that would absolutely trigger COPPA,” says Khaliah Barnes, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Recording children in the privacy of the home is genuinely creepy, and this warrants additional investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and the states.” Amazon and Google claim they comply with COPPA, while an Apple spokesperson told The Guardian that the company complied and doesn’t target kids. Read the full story in The Guardian.

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Net neutrality may be an issue that's never settled. Courts have struck versions down in the past, and they may again in the future. The U.S. House of Representatives just passed the "No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act," which would undermine the FCC's ability to enforce net neutrality rules, and is now in the U.S. Senate. The law is currently in effect, supposedly equalizing the internet for both home users and giant corporations, but the telecom companies have already found a way around it. Zero-rating is the latest loophole used by telecom companies to get around net neutrality rules with carriers exempting certain services, such as Spotify or Netflix, from a customer’s data plan. Net neutrality advocates say this gives certain types of data priority over others, when net neutrality is meant to create an even playing field for all. “Widely embraced, zero-rating threatens to rewrite the rules upon which the internet was built,” Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Corynne McSherry told Gizmodo. “Zero-rating helps transform the internet from a permission-less environment... into one in which developers effectively need to seek approval from ISPs before deploying their latest groundbreaking technology.” This week 58 tech companies, -- Reddit, Yelp, Kickstarter, among them -- sent a letter to the FCC asking for an open discussion about zero-rating, as the agency is looking at the practice, but not holding public hearings.

Science Daily reports that researchers from the University of Stuttgart and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF used radio transmission to send the contents of a conventional DVD in under ten seconds, setting a new world record in wireless data transmission. The transmission was clocked at 6 Gigabits per second over 37 kilometers between Cologne and the town of Wachtberg at 71-76 GHz in the so-called E band, regulated for terrestrial and satellite broadcasting. The researchers said they needed to use the millimeter waves of those frequencies to send the data so fast. The group used a highly directive parabolic antenna to send the signals, and say there are several applications for the technology. It could be used offload data from earth observation satellites down to earth, or the terrestrial radio transmissions in the E-band expand rural broadband, and has can be set up quickly for emergency broadcasts. Read the full story in Science Daily.

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Once upon a time, the few opponents in Congress to the low-power FM bill then pending in Washington D.C., made up a fake compact disc and distributed it to legislators, claiming it contained the sounds of interference that low-power stations would cause over the signals of much more powerful full-power stations. Of course, giant full-power FM stations would interfere with small low-power FM stations, if radio engineering was incorrect, not the other way around. Now that Congress has allowed two different low-power FM bills to pass, and thousands of stations to go on the air, Radio World reported May 12 that the Federal Communications Commission made their first ruling on this issue. A Birmingham, Ala. FM station, WDJC, raised repeated concerns about interference from three planned LPFMs stations, all with religious-based programming. Kimtron Inc., part of Crawford Broadcasting claimed their high-definition digital signals were endangered by the low-power stations, but the FCC did not buy that argument, and still, no one has proved that low-power FM stations interfere with full-power stations.

Pakistan on May 22 accused the United States of violating its sovereignty with a radio-controlled drone strike that reportedly killed the leader of the Afghan Taliban and a cab driver in a remote border area inside Pakistan. The president of Afghanistan announced the drone attack killed Mullah Akhtar Mansoor. U.S. officials said Barack Obama authorised the strike with multiple drones, and Pakistan said the U.S. government did not inform Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister, before the strike that U.S. drones were entering Pakistani airspace for the assault, and anonymous U.S. officials confirmed there was no warning. Meanwhile, U.S. Army chaplain Chris Antal has quit sending a May 6 letter of resignation to President Obama that said, "I refuse to support U.S. armed drone policy.... I refuse to support this policy of unaccountable killing." Antal says he saw drone aircraft lined to take off when he was at a military funeral service, and, he told Public Radio International, "My heart was opened to the pain of the loss of these American lives, but to hold that with the drones... to stand there wondering who we were killing, who their families were, and how they were grieving... it just created a break in my soul." The video above is Antal discussing how the military kicked him out of Afghanistan for his views on the radio-controlled drones.

Bobby Previte and the Visitors, "Live in Europe," live from Club Moods in Zurich, Switzerland, January 25, 2016. Michael Gamble, guitar, Michael Kammers, tenor saxophone, organ, piano, Kurt Kotheimer, bass, Bobby Previte, drums.

John Anderson in DIYMedia.net, after the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, looks at the big-picture with radio. While television broadcasters are about to make a bundle selling off spectrum, the radio industry is hearing lots of bad news recently. iHeartMedia is staving off angry bond-holders over its several billion dollars’ worth of its debt, while the next biggest radio company, Cumulus Media, is fighting off bankruptcy. Emmis may be delisting by NASDAQ in early June. And CBS is spinning off its entire radio division, and might sell. The collapse of the radio conglomerates may mean some major industry sea-change, Anderson posits. And future-thinkers are wondering if radio is keeping up with multi-platform interactivity, and, if cars become driverless, listeners will be even more distracted by thousands of other options. (Anderson is on Wave Farm's board.)

The Indiana University Libraries announced May 3 a $25,000 grant from the National Recording Preservation Foundation to preserve rare, original recordings of "The Orson Welles Show," the live radio series produced beginning Sept. 15, 1941. The university says that internet chatter seems to indicate only eight of the 19 shows in circulation, but Indiana U. says they will restore 14 original lacquer discs, and other supposedly lost recordings. The university will create a website for the recordings, where users will be able to stream audio, search Welles' scripts, and access expert commentary. Mike Casey, IU's director of technical operations for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, said they have 324 lacquer discs and about 100 accompanying paper scripts from old radio shows. "Most lacquer discs have an aluminum or glass base with a black lacquer coating," he said. "It contains the grooves that carry the sound. This is not a safe way to store a treasure -- lacquer discs are inherently chemically unstable and sometimes fail catastrophically."

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The Atlantic magazine reports that there are some days in Iraq when students have tests in school, and the country's entire Internet is shut down. For the second year in a row the government ordered Iraqi telecom companies to shut down to the Internet to prevent cheating, according to human-rights groups. An Internet analytics company called Dyn logged a pattern of three-hour long blackouts during the testing period there. Access Now, a digital rights advocacy group, reports that there have been 12 government-mandated Internet blackouts around the planet this year. Uzbekistan’s government also shut down the internet during school exams in 2014, and the same thing happened this year in Gujarat, a state in northwest India. But, usually, unrest or elections are the reasons behind Internet shutdowns.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was called out by HBO's John Oliver May 15, for diverting funds meant to maintain and improve the 911 emergency call system. On his "Last Week Tonight" television show, Oliver also mentioned that New York is one of the few states that do not coordinate their county 911 call centers statewide. And nationwide, Facebook or the Domino's pizza app can tell exactly where your cell phone is calling from, but 911 operators are not getting that information, and emergency victims are left waiting while responders spend time figuring out where victims are located.

David Oxenford in the Broadcast Law Blog reports the Federal Commuications Commission begins requiring commercial radio stations to upload documents and make their public files available online. The requirement begins June 24, but just in the Top 50 radio markets, and only for stations with five or more full-time employees. The station has their license, public comments, records of political ads, their EEO Public Inspection File Reports, and Quarterly Issues Programs Lists, and other documents for the public can evaluate in these files. Read the full story in the Broadcast Law Blog.