The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board sought comment by June 16 on PCLOB’s examination of counterterrorism activities conducted under President Ronald Reagan's national security executive order 12333 and the implications for privacy and civil liberties, it said Monday.

The Defense Information Systems Agency gave Harris Corp. a contract with a potential value of $450 million to provide systems engineering and program management services for the agency’s crisis management system, said a company news release Thursday. Harris has supported the system since 2004 and will continue to provide 'round the clock on-call, on-site corrective maintenance for all related hardware and software components.

Cisco took the lead in Q4 over Microsoft in enterprise unified communications collaboration, said a news release from Synergy Research Group Tuesday. While Microsoft briefly matched Cisco for market leadership in the first half of 2014, Cisco regained its lead in the final quarter of the year with a 9 percent sequential increase in revenue, said the release.

The FTC will host a Nov. 16 workshop on privacy issues for “cross-device tracking” for advertising and marketing purposes, the agency said Tuesday in a news release. Questions the commission hopes to answer include: What are the different types of cross-device tracking, how do they work, and what are they used for; What types of information and benefits do companies gain from using these technologies; What benefits do consumers derive from the use of these technologies; What are the privacy and security risks associated with the use of these technologies; How can companies make their tracking more transparent and give consumers greater control over it; and Do current industry self-regulatory programs apply to different cross-device tracking techniques, the agency said. “More consumers are connecting with the internet in different ways, and industry has responded by coming up with additional tools to track their behavior,” said Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Jessica Rich. "It’s important to ensure that consumers’ privacy remains protected as businesses seek to target them across multiple devices.”

Apple and Samsung’s combined dominant share of the tablet market could plummet to 38 percent by 2019 in a “tectonic shift” to lower-priced tablets, a Juniper report said. Evolving form factors and emerging players such as Lenovo with low-cost alternatives are a threat to today’s dominant tablet vendors, said the industry researcher Monday. It expects Lenovo to lead the movement and increase its shipments by 30 million units per year by 2019. Lenovo announced several Android- and Windows-based models at Mobile World Congress, Juniper noted. Android will remain the dominant tablet platform over the forecast period, with Windows-based devices expected to be close to 10 percent of the market by 2019, Juniper said. Hybrid devices such as two-in-ones will find a place in office environments, but tablets will struggle “due to peripheral compatibility requirements,” it said. Phablets also will have a growing impact on tablet sales, Juniper said. More than 400 million phablets will ship globally in 2019, up from 138 million forecast for this year, it said. The iPhone 6 has been a catalyst for bringing the phablet category “further into the limelight,” but budget-priced devices are the key to driving phablets into the mainstream globally, it said. The phablet emerged out of the transition of the smartphone away from communications and toward multimedia use, Juniper said, although in terms of device hardware, a phablet is “virtually identical” to a smartphone except in screen and battery size. A smartphone can perform most computing tasks, which would suggest that other mobile devices can become increasingly like smartphones, Juniper said. At the hardware level, that would involve integrating modem and cellular functionality within the chipset “rather than as add-ons,” it said. The platform-centric approach would require systems on a chip to be scalable for different products and hardware possibilities, it said.

Vonage agreed to buy privately held SimpleSignal for $25.25 million, said a Vonage news release Monday. SimpleSignal provides unified communications as a service and collaboration solutions to small- and medium-sized businesses. The purchase price is about 1.5 times the estimated 2015 SimpleSignal revenue, said Vonage.

The Department of Justice advocated for the passage of an amendment proposed by the Obama administration that would “add activities like the operation of a botnet to the list of offenses eligible for injunctive relief,” in a blog post Wednesday by DOJ Assistant Attorney General-Criminal Division Leslie Caldwell. Criminals use botnets to steal usernames, passwords and other personal and financial information, or to infect computers with criminal malware to hold computers and computer systems ransom, Caldwell said. The DOJ has used the civil injunction process to thwart these attacks successfully in the past, she said. “If we want security to keep pace with technological innovations by criminals, we need to ensure that we have a variety of effective tools to combat evolving cyber threats,” Caldwell said. Enacting the Obama administration’s proposed amendment, which would add to list of offenses eligible for injunctive relief activities that may not be technically considered fraud or illegal wiretapping -- such as stealing sensitive corporate information, harvesting email account addresses, hacking computers, or executing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks -- would “provide the government with an effective tool to shut down illegal botnets or certain widespread malicious software to better match the ways that criminals are using these technologies,” Caldwell said. Under the administration's proposed update to the criminal code, the legal safeguards that currently apply to civil injunctions such as civilly suing the defendant, the defendants' right to notice and ability to have a hearing before a permanent injunction is issued, and the defendants' ability to move to “quash or modify any injunctions,” would still apply, Caldwell said.

A lawsuit challenging the NSA mass surveillance program’s large-scale search and seizure of Internet communications, known as “upstream” surveillance, was filed against that agency and the Department of Justice Tuesday by the Wikipedia creator, the Wikimedia Foundation, the group said in a news release. Upstream surveillance “taps the Internet’s ‘backbone’ to capture communications with ‘non-U.S. persons,’” under the authority of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (FAA), the release said. “By tapping the backbone of the Internet, the NSA is straining the backbone of democracy,” said Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Lila Tretikov. The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Rutherford Institute are among the nine co-plaintiffs in the Wikimedia Foundation’s lawsuit, which aims to end the mass surveillance program to “protect the rights of our users around the world,” the release said. “Surveillance erodes the original promise of the Internet: an open space for collaboration and experimentation, and a place free from fear,” said Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales. “Privacy is an essential right,” Wales and Tretikov wrote in a New York Times op-ed Tuesday, explaining the suit. “It is a universal right that sustains the freedoms of expression and association,” the Wikimedia Foundation release said. DOJ is reviewing the complaint, a spokeswoman told us. The NSA had no immediate comment.

AT&T will hold its annual stockholder meeting April 24 in Spokane, Washington, the carrier said in an SEC filing Tuesday. The meeting starts at 9 a.m. PDT in the DoubleTree by Hilton Spokane City Center Grand Ballroom.

Gogo urged the FCC to hold an auction for air-to-ground mobile broadband service (AGMBS) spectrum, since the in-flight Wi-Fi provider needs additional spectrum capacity, said an ex parte notice posted Tuesday in docket 13-114. Gogo representatives met with Public Safety Bureau officials March 4 to discuss the proposed 14 GHz AGMBS, it said. Bureau and Gogo officials also discussed the company's efforts to accommodate flight safety, national security and law enforcement concerns that executive branch agencies had with its existing ATG service (see 1502120054). Gogo is willing to satisfy the conditions that the FBI requested be imposed for any AGMBS licensees, it said. In-flight broadband increases flight safety for passengers and crew members, Gogo said. Almost 50 airlines worldwide have introduced or will begin offering in-flight service with terrestrial or satellite systems, it said. A draft FCC order on ATG was taken off circulation, agency officials have said.