Today, Public Knowledge, joined by a wide variety of consumer, civil rights, and civil liberties groups, urged the FCC to immediately pass rules that would prevent local authorities from ordering a shutdown of wireless services the way that BART did earlier this month. As Harold’s earlier blog post points out, we don’t even need to get to the (extremely pressing and important) First Amendment issues to find that BART’s actions violated the law—the Communications Act, to be precise.

The announcement by the White House that it would support reallocating the D Block – the 10 MHz of spectrum left over from big broadcast band auction of 2008 (the 700 MHz Auction) – to public safety use rather than auction it for commercial use defies conventional wisdom on two fronts.

<

p class="MsoNormal">The blogging service Blogetery was recently cut off from the Internet by its web hosting service.  As a result, blog creators and readers lost access to an estimated 73,000 blogs.  Why Blogetery was cut off from the Internet is not clear.  The New York Times' Bits Blog originally reported that the cut off resulted from an FBI request, made after the FBI discovered links to Al Qaeda bomb-making instructions on one of the blogs on the Blogetery service.  The web host

Today, on behalf of the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition, Public Knowledge filed comments with the FCC about the plans to build wireless chipsets for the 700 MHz band, the band that is going to be important to the deployment of 4G service.  While that might sound as boring and technical as boring and technical can be, it actually has some very important and straightforward real world ramifications.

The Communications bar was buzzing today because the FCC released the Executive Summary of its National Broadband Plan. Tomorrow at its monthly meeting, the agency will release the entire plan, all 360 pages of it.

But along with the Commissioners, staff and scores of onlookers, there will be an elephant in the meeting room that will not get nearly as much attention – that is, whether the FCC actually has the power under the Communications Act to enact major parts of the plan. Without a “cop on the beat,” the fate of broadband consumer protection regulations such as privacy, transparency and emergency communications will be at risk, as will other initiatives to ensure great access to broadband and greater adoption of broadband by the disadvantaged.

As I've blogged over at Tales of the Sausage Factory, my even snarkier and wonkier blog, a company called CellAntenna continues to try to leverage the problem of cell phone smuggling into prisons t expand its product line. Sadly, they keep gaining momentum, as lots of people (particularly prison wardens) would like to believe that a new tech gadget can solve their problems.

A day in advance of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on legislation (S. 251) to allow interference with cellular phones in prisons, nine public interest groups and consumer organizations told the Committee in a July 14 letter that the legislation would cause more serious problems than it would solve.