The U.S. Trade Representative removed Israel from the Special 301 report watch list of countries that fail to sufficiently protect intellectual property rights, said USTR Michael Froman in a Friday news release (http://1.usa.gov/1hZTz7v). It said the Israeli passage of patent legislation fulfilled commitments the country made in a 2010 agreement with the U.S. pertaining to intellectual property.

President Barack Obama touted two big industry commitments to his ConnectED initiative Friday. Adobe contributed more than $300 million of free software, and Prezi is giving $100 million in its licensed software, and combined with $750 million in commitments previously announced, the ConnectED contributions now exceed $1 billion collected in the past month, the White House said. The initiative is also tied to a revamp of the E-rate program, which the FCC has considered changing to focus on faster broadband speeds. Obama spoke at the White House Student Film Festival Friday afternoon and emphasized the importance of “empowering our students with the best technology in the world,” focusing on ConnectED. Obama framed fast broadband as key to competing globally against countries like South Korea and warned of the consequences of not doing so. “That’s like waving the white flag when it comes to our global competition,” he said of such a possibility. If people demand free Wi-Fi in coffee shops, they should also demand it in schools and libraries, Obama said. He said he started “picking up the phone” to get business leaders involved, prompting the investment. A billion dollars “isn’t too shabby for one month,” Obama added.

Dell will provide up to $22 billion worth of information technology services to the Department of Homeland Security and the General Services Administration, the company said in a Wednesday news release (http://bit.ly/1ptYe6R).

The White House and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) said they plan to “announce progress” Thursday on the set of executive actions the White House issued in June aimed at combating abusive patent litigation. Those actions mainly involved changes at PTO (CD June 5 p12). The event will highlight the Obama administration’s “commitment to strengthening the patent system to ensure it encourages innovation and invention, inspires and rewards creativity, drives investment and spurs job creation,” the White House said Wednesday in an email to reporters.

AT&T received between 2,000 and 2,999 national security letters during 2013, affecting between 4,000 and 4,999 customer accounts, said the company’s first national security request transparency report (http://soc.att.com/1j8il6O). The company also received between zero and 999 content requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, affecting between 35,000 and 35,999 customer accounts, said the report. The company released its total criminal and civil litigation demand statistics, which revealed 248,343 subpoenas, mostly criminal, 36,788 court orders, and 16,685 search warrants. AT&T challenged or rejected 3,756 of the total 301,816 requests, the report said.

ConnectED is “a tipping point” that could “turn a negative cycle into a positive cycle” on education, said National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling Wednesday at an event co-sponsored by CEA and the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation. If broadband is expanded to 99 percent of schools within the next five years -- which the program seeks to do -- it allows cities and states to do bulk purchases for both electronic devices and educational content, Sperling said. “If an entire state was bidding for educational devices, you bet they would get lower prices,” Sperling said. Private companies “would start asking” how they can penetrate that market with lower-priced devices, he said.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., filed a class action lawsuit Wednesday seeking an end to the NSA’s phone surveillance practices. He filed his complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, on behalf of himself and FreedomWorks and naming President Barack Obama, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA Director Keith Alexander and FBI Director James Comey as defendants in the complaint (http://bit.ly/NCOOYF). He asked for “declaratory and injunctive relief” on the surveillance, asking the court to find the practices unconstitutional -- violating the Fourth Amendment search and seizure prohibitions -- and to prevent the government from continuing the practices. The complaint questions the effectiveness of the surveillance and judged the bulk collection of phone metadata to be revealing. The government would have to purge all its stored metadata, if Paul’s requests were granted. Paul’s lead counsel is Ken Cuccinelli, former Republican attorney general of Virginia. Paul held a courthouse press conference with Cuccinelli and FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe on Wednesday. “I expect this case to go all the way to the Supreme Court and I predict the American people will win,” Paul said in a statement (http://bit.ly/1kCutjz). The three wrote a joint op-ed for CNN this week (http://cnn.it/1ntUVsA). More than 5,500 people had signed on to an Internet petition supporting the lawsuit as of Wednesday afternoon, according to a FreedomWorks website (http://bit.ly/1dkIiiD).

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is glad the NSA head job is still combined with the head of the Cyber Command. That’s important from “an optic standpoint,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday. The reasons for keeping it together are “quite compelling” and “still germane,” Clapper said. President Barack Obama was under pressure to split the position last year to allow a civilian head of the NSA but ultimately chose to keep the position unified. “The president came to that conclusion on his own,” Clapper said.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will hold a March 12 meeting at the U.S. Department of Transportation in Washington to discuss upcoming guidelines on driver distraction from portable and aftermarket devices. The meeting will bring together “vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, portable and aftermarket device manufacturers, portable and aftermarket device operating system providers, cellular service providers, industry associations, ‘app’ developers, researchers, and consumer groups to discuss technical issues regarding the agency’s development of Phase 2 Driver Distraction Guidelines,” said NHTSA in a notice to appear in Wednesday’s Federal Register (http://1.usa.gov/1cq5MPd). Written comments are due May 12. NHTSA’s “Phase 1 Driver Distraction Guidelines,” released in April, applied to in-vehicle original equipment electronics. The Senate Commerce Committee held a daylong summit Thursday on distracted driving, where Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., challenged industry to resolve problems of distracted driving before the Senate takes a try at it (CD Feb 7 p5).

The FCC goes live in Maryland this week with a new database for Lifeline, intended to ease some concerns over waste and fraud. The database, which includes social services and LexisNexis records, will allow phone companies to check to make sure no others in a household are receiving Lifeline when someone applies for the discounted phone service, said Telecommunications Access Policy Division Chief Kim Scardino at the NARUC Winter Committee meeting Saturday. The database will be rolled out next week in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Washington states, with the rest of the nation to follow, she said. She said the program will also allow screeners to tell if someone signed up for the service through another carrier, or used up his or her minutes and is trying to sign up through a new carrier. She said that over the past 2-1/2 years, the FCC has manually scrubbed Lifeline’s rolls, saving $250 million. But Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable General Counsel Paul Abbott said 98 percent of those scrubbed in the state were removed because they didn’t respond to attempts to reach them to resolve questions. “I don’t know if there was waste or abuse involved,” he said on a panel about Lifeline data collection. Stephen Athanson, regulatory counsel for TracFone Wireless, expressed concern LexisNexis doesn’t include all people, which may lead to some people being disqualified without further verification of their address. Members of Congress have attacked Lifeline, citing the program’s rising cost due to wireless company participation and other alleged shortfalls.