Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., railed against government surveillance. The Supreme Court last looked at such issues of privacy back in the 1970s era of “dial-up phones,” he said Wednesday night during a Google Hangout hosted by Generation Opportunity, a libertarian-leaning organization focused on young voters. Paul lamented “generalized” warrants: “The warrant has to be specific to the person.” He said the issue must go to the Supreme Court, although it’s unclear whether privacy advocates would win. In Congress, the right and left have come together to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in significant ways, Paul said, saying “young people are more interested in this,” given how connected to technology they are. “Metadata is important,” he said, stressing a need to avoid metadata collection by the government. Paul doesn’t consider the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to be a “real” court given it’s not open: “You can’t have justice without a lawyer."

The House Intelligence Committee advanced the recently revised USA Freedom Act unanimously by voice vote, it said in a news release Thursday. That legislation would end the government’s bulk collection of metadata and make several changes to surveillance practice. Intelligence met in closed session Thursday to consider both the USA Freedom Act, HR-3361, and House Intelligence lawmakers’ own Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Transparency and Modernization Act (HR-4291). The House Judiciary Committee cleared the USA Freedom Act Wednesday (CD May 8 p9). The bill advances to the House floor. Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., plan on “working with the Judiciary Committee, House and Senate leadership, and the White House to address outstanding operational concerns and enact the USA Freedom Act into law this year,” they said in a joint statement. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., author of companion legislation in the Senate, praised the bill in a statement following its House Judiciary clearance Wednesday. But “I remain concerned that the legislation approved today does not include some of the important reforms related to national security letters, a strong special advocate at the FISA Court, and greater transparency,” Leahy said, saying Senate Judiciary will consider the bill this summer. In separate statements, Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., lamented that the revised USA Freedom Act is narrower than some proposals have been but largely praised its clearance as a key step forward in ending bulk collection, as they have backed.

The Senate Judiciary Committee again postponed its markup of the Patent Transparency and Improvements Act (S-1720) Thursday amid stakeholder perceptions that time is running out for the bill. Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., did not mention S-1720 during a committee meeting Thursday, but in a statement said he’s “continuing work with other members of the committee to address constructive comments from both sides” on a compromise manager’s amendment to the bill. Leahy had planned to release the manager’s amendment in late April after what had been viewed as significant progress in negotiations over the recess (CD April 29 p6). Negotiations have since been bogged down over several controversial provisions, an industry lobbyist said. The committee will need to act on S-1720 soon to get it through the full Senate, the lobbyist said, saying there’s a limited pre-summer window to get legislation through before the midterm election campaign slows further action. CEA criticized the committee’s latest delay Thursday, with Senior Vice President-Government Affairs Michael Petricone saying in a statement that “every week the committee waits to take action, patent trolls siphon off another $1.5 billion from the U.S. economy.”

Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., again slammed the FCC’s proposal on new net neutrality rules, this time in a video released Wednesday as part of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s NoSlowLane.com. He elaborated on the principle of net neutrality in the video, just under three minutes long. “Now net neutrality is under threat as it never has been,” Franken said. “We have to win this.” The FCC is taking up this net neutrality item at its May 15 meeting.

USTelecom responded favorably to lawmakers’ push this week (CD May 7 p2) for the FCC to expand USF support beyond the provision of voice. “Updating the Connect America Fund to encourage broadband investment by rate-of-return carriers will spur economic activity and benefit consumers,” said Vice President-Policy David Cohen in a written statement Wednesday. “A rational and predictable high-cost mechanism that includes support for broadband-only lines will enable carriers to continue to provide rural Americans with affordable high-quality communications services.” Two letters to the FCC urging an expansion were signed by 133 senators and congressmen.

Legislation released Wednesday would deny the right to retransmission consent to a TV station or AM/FM radio station unless it agrees to provide compensation for transmitting a sound recording, said a news release from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. (http://1.usa.gov/1o7N091). The bill, the Protecting the Rights of Musicians Act (HR-4588) (http://1.usa.gov/1isK0fG), is co-sponsored by Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Blackburn, vice chairwoman of the House Commerce Committee.

Some witnesses plan to air grievances about Comcast’s proposed buy of Time Warner Cable during Thursday’s House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee hearing. “ACA is most concerned about the competitive effects of the proposed Comcast-TWC transaction in two intertwined industries -- the (downstream) MVPD industry, which distributes video programming to consumers, and the (upstream) video programming industry, which provides this programming to these distributors,” American Cable Association President Matthew Polka will say, according to written testimony (http://1.usa.gov/1j3bCrL). “Comcast is a behemoth in both industries.” The hearing will be at 9:30 a.m. in 2141 Rayburn. The FCC and Justice Department must approve the cable company deal, and these regulators must not “ignore or treat lightly the potential harms or provide inadequate relief” of the deal, Polka will say. Cogent Communications CEO Dave Schaeffer will slam the deal quite strongly, arguing it will hurt consumers and stifle innovation and criticizing the paid peering deals Comcast is seeking: “Fundamentally, Comcast’s strategy is to get everyone to pay them, either through paid peering with content providers like Netflix, paid peering with backbone providers like Cogent, or both,” Schaeffer will say (http://1.usa.gov/1kMpKY3). Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen and Time Warner Cable CEO Robert Marcus will also testify, defending the deal, and will submit a joint written testimony spanning more than 100 pages. The deal would yield “better broadband, video, and voice services for millions of additional consumers, while enabling the combined company to upgrade its broadband network, expand last-mile services, and increase Wi-Fi availability,” they said (http://1.usa.gov/1fUMau8). “It will make Comcast a more viable competitor for advanced business services, especially for the underserved small and medium-sized business segments, but also for regional, super-regional, and national enterprise customers.”

Opening statements for House Commerce Committee markup of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act reauthorization draft and the Domain Openness Through Continued Oversight Matters (DOTCOM) Act begin Wednesday at 4 p.m. in 2123 Rayburn, said a committee news release Monday night (http://1.usa.gov/1lT8oww). The markup vote on the bills begins Thursday at 10 a.m. in the same room, it said. The STELA draft cleared the subcommittee with some tension remaining between Republicans and Democrats. They haven’t reached complete consensus on the STELA draft and are trying to hash out a compromise on the TV station joint sharing agreements provision this week, industry lobbyists told us. The DOTCOM Act (HR-4342) seeks to delay NTIA’s transition proposal of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority until a study is done by the GAO (CD April 11 p2). House Communications Subcommittee members John Shimkus, R-Ill., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., are co-sponsors of that bill, which passed the subcommittee in a markup vote along party lines last month.

Privacy advocates had mixed reactions to the House Judiciary Committee taking up the USA Freedom Act (HR-3361) for markup Wednesday at 1 p.m. as well as the substitute language key committee lawmakers plan to offer, as the committee announced earlier this week. “The mere fact that the Judiciary Committee is taking up this bill now is positive and encouraging,” the ACLU said (http://bit.ly/1kTXXHN). “The details still need to be hammered out, but the bill is certainly better than the one that the House Intelligence Committee will be considering this week, which is a non-starter.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the substitute a “potentially powerful approach to stopping the mass collection of phone records under the Patriot Act,” but said: “Nonetheless, we are deeply concerned about the number of ‘hops’ that the bill would permit, as well as the undefined phrase ’selection term,’ which may leave the door open to government attempts to take a nonintuitive interpretation of the language” (http://bit.ly/1if9Fg0). “We are also concerned that this bill [substitute language] omits important transparency provisions found in the USA FREEDOM Act, which are necessary to shed light on surveillance abuses.” The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute also said it was pleased the bill is being taken up but said it’s “dismayed to see that the strong transparency provisions in the original USA FREEDOM Act, which would have allowed Internet companies to engage in more reporting about the number and kind of government demands for information they receive and which were broadly supported by both industry and privacy advocates, have been removed” (http://bit.ly/1iZZFD7).

The House Communications Subcommittee received 58 responses to its Communications Act update white paper asking about spectrum policy, it said Tuesday, posting all of the comments in large batches on its website (http://1.usa.gov/1duRyNw). Comments were due late last month. Commenters included several stakeholders whose comments were already known, such as AT&T, CTIA, NCTA, NTCA, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. Other commenters included Comptel, Microsoft, Motorola Mobility, Public Knowledge, Qualcomm, the Satellite Industry Association and the Utilities Telecom Council, who weighed in on myriad spectrum policy issues, from FCC structure and spectrum management to unlicensed spectrum to how the agency handles spectrum auctions. “The priority of the auction must be to ensure an adequately competitive environment for consumer wireless access nationwide,” Public Knowledge told Congress of spectrum auctions generally. “Any additional consideration of revenue, such as deficit reduction, has too attenuated an effect on the public interest to be taken into account. Auction revenue should be irrelevant.” Recommended approaches differed notably depending on the commenter. Congress “should consider using spectrum auction revenue to create an ‘efficiency endowment fund’ to cover agency costs to experiment with new technologies or systems that would enable them to relinquish Federal spectrum,” Mobile Future said. “Without such funding and targeted budgets for these initiatives, agencies have little incentive to incur the costs and risks associated with such system and process upgrades.”