Day: July 27, 2018

Comcast recently installed Wi-Fi equipment in public rights of way without permits in the city of Corvallis, Oregon. But instead of settling the matter locally, a cable lobby group that represents Comcast told the Federal Communications Commission that it should override municipal permitting processes such as the one in Corvallis. In doing so, the cable lobby group made “misleading and inaccurate” allegations about what actually happened in the Comcast/Corvallis dispute, according to city officials.

NCTA—The Internet & Television Association, the cable industry’s chief lobby group, told the FCC last month that it “should declare that local governments may not abuse routine permitting processes for construction activity as a backdoor way of extracting unwarranted authorizations and fees from cable operators and otherwise delaying the deployment of new facilities.”

NCTA’s filing provided several examples allegedly demonstrating that cities and towns are unreasonably holding up network construction. These examples prove that “cable operators are facing unwarranted impediments in their efforts to deploy state-of-the-art broadband networks as a result of abusive permitting requirements,” the NCTA claimed.

Of Corvallis and Comcast, NCTA wrote:

A community in Oregon has refused to issue permits allowing installation of Wi-Fi equipment on cable facilities, on the grounds that the equipment does not support cable service, even though the equipment is used in part to allow cable subscribers to watch subscription video programming on their mobile devices.

City: Comcast needs permit for Wi-Fi service

But that isn’t what happened at all, Corvallis City Manager Mark Shepard told the FCC in a letter yesterday:

NCTA’s letter references a ‘community in Oregon’ that ‘has refused to issue permits allowing installation of Wi-Fi equipment….’ NCTA does not name the community that it is accusing in this statement. Corvallis has been addressing Comcast’s unauthorized placement of Wi-Fi equipment in the rights of way (‘ROW’), without either applying for the necessary permits or consulting with the City prior to installing its Wi-Fi equipment, so to the extent this allegation is referring to Corvallis it is misleading and inaccurate. Corvallis strongly objects to NCTA’s characterization of its actions as ‘abuses’ when it is Comcast that has failed to follow generally applicable City codes and the terms and conditions of its negotiated franchise agreement.

Here’s what really happened, Shepard told the FCC:

There are two issues regarding Comcast’s installation of Wi-Fi equipment in the City’s ROW. Initially, Comcast installed Wi-Fi units in the City’s ROW without application for construction permits. These installations would require a construction permit per Comcast’s franchise agreement. When the City inquired about the units, the installation and their function, Comcast stated that in addition to allowing wireless access to video services, the units also provided non-cable service to non-cable customers, even though Comcast’s franchise does not authorize use of the ROW to provide non-cable services to the general public. The City encouraged Comcast to apply for a telecom franchise to remedy the situation, just as the City would require a franchised telecommunications provider to obtain a cable franchise prior to using the ROW to provide cable services.

The construction is apparently for Comcast’s network of public Wi-Fi hotspots, which can be used by cable subscribers or by non-cable subscribers for a fee. Corvallis has more than 54,000 residents.

The NCTA’s “blatant misconstrual of facts casts a cloud” over the lobby group’s assertions, Shepard wrote. Given that, Shepard told the FCC that it should “not rely on NCTA’s vague accusations against Corvallis or any other unnamed jurisdiction” in its decision-making.

“Further, the City objects to NCTA’s proposals as stated in the letter, which would require Corvallis to ignore the terms of its negotiated franchise with Comcast and create disparities in the City’s application of its otherwise generally applicable rights of way use requirements,” Shepard wrote.

The FCC next month will vote on a related proposal, which it says will “preempt, on an expedited case-by-case basis, state and local laws that inhibit the rebuilding or restoration of broadband infrastructure after a disaster.” The proposal would also preempt “state and local moratoria on telecommunications services and facilities deployment.” But it’s not clear whether the FCC will act on the NCTA proposal that led to the conflict with Corvallis.

We contacted Comcast and the NCTA today and will update this story if we get any response.

Facial recognition software sold by Amazon mistakenly identified 28 members of Congress as people who had been arrested for crimes, the American Civil Liberties Union announced on Thursday.

Amazon Rekognition has been marketed as tool that provides extremely accurate facial analysis through photos and video.

The ACLU tested that assertion by using the software to scan photos of every current member of the House and Senate in a database that the watchdog built from thousands of publicly available arrest photos.

“The members of Congress who were falsely matched with the mugshot database we used in the test include Republicans and Democrats, men and women, and legislators of all ages, from all across the country,” the ACLU stated.

The test misidentified people of color at a high rate — 39 percent — even though they made up only 20 percent of Congress. One member falsely cited as a crime suspect was Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who first came to prominence as a civil rights leader.

As part of the test, the ACLU said it used Amazon’s default match settings.

But a spokeswoman for Amazon Web Services said in an emailed statement that the ACLU should have changed those settings — and used a higher “threshold,” or percentage that measures how confident Rekognition is in finding a match.

“While 80% confidence is an acceptable threshold for photos of hot dogs, chairs, animals, or other social media use cases, it wouldn’t be appropriate for identifying individuals with a reasonable level of certainty,” she said. For law enforcement, Amazon “guides customers” to set the threshold at 95 percent or higher.

ACLU of Northern California attorney Jacob Snow responded to that comment in an emailed statement: “We know from our test that Amazon makes no effort to ask users what they are using Rekognition for,” he said.

Snow doesn’t think that changing the threshold changes the danger: “Face surveillance technology in the hands of government is primed for abuse and raises grave civil rights concerns.”

Outcry from privacy and civil rights groups has not stopped law enforcement from pursuing the technology. The Orlando, Fla., police force tested Rekognition’s real-time surveillance. The Washington County Sheriff’s Office, near Portland, Ore., has used it to search faces from photos of suspects taken by deputies.

“This is partly a result of vendors pushing facial recognition technology because it becomes another avenue of revenue,” Jeramie Scott, national security counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., told NPR. He compared facial recognition software to body cameras worn by law enforcement, which can be used for police accountability or, increasingly, public surveillance.

He stressed the need for debate so that the technology doesn’t become a poor solution for bad policy. “Because of the disproportionate error rate, and because of the real risk of depriving civil liberties posed by facial recognition technology, we need to have a conversation about how and when and under what circumstances this technology should be used by law enforcement, if at all.”