A top Senate Democrat defended the government’s phone surveillance program Friday, while expressing possible receptiveness to its change. “I continue to believe the phone records program authorized by Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act plays an important role in detecting and preventing terrorist attacks against the United States,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in a statement of the much-debated bulk metadata collection program. “Again, this program collects only phone numbers and the duration and times that calls are made -- it does not collect the content, names or locational information of calls.” But Feinstein is “certainly open to changes” if there are alternatives that keep the effectiveness of the current program, she said, saying “the president is looking at alternatives and modifications to the current program” and she awaits recommendations from Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will be before Congress twice this week to discuss the White House’s proposed 2015 budget. Also testifying alongside Wheeler will be Commissioner Ajit Pai, the agency’s senior Republican. The first hearing will be Tuesday at 2 p.m. in B-308 Rayburn before the House Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee. Both commissioners will then appear before the Senate Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee Thursday at 10 a.m. in SD-138 Dirksen. The White House unveiled its proposed 2015 budget in early March and recommended $375.38 million for the FCC (http://fcc.us/1hNuRs2). Congress must approve any budget.

One top Democratic office is signaling optimism for compromise going into the House Communications Subcommittee’s markup of draft Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act legislation, scheduled for early this week. The subcommittee will meet for opening statements Monday at 5:30 p.m. in 2123 Rayburn and then meet there Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. to vote on the bill (http://1.usa.gov/1jhR7Kg). “The draft legislation, which addresses a number of discrete issues raised over the course of the subcommittee’s year-long review, strikes the appropriate balance to improve the law without offering any fundamental changes to the marketplace, which are best left to our work toward a Communications Act update,” said draft author and subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., in a statement. Subcommittee Democrats expressed reservations about the bill at a recent STELA hearing, focusing on provisions on CableCARDs and language prohibiting FCC action on sharing agreements until the agency completes its media ownership quadrennial review (CD March 13 p1). “We are negotiating in good faith with our Republican colleagues,” a spokeswoman for Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., told us Friday. “We are hoping to come to an agreement, and look forward to working toward a bipartisan solution.” The markup’s background memo describes the draft’s STELA add-ons as “targeted, pro-consumer changes to government involvement in retransmission consent discussions and includes language to relieve cable operators of the obligation to include CableCARDs in operator-deployed set-top boxes” (http://1.usa.gov/1nKCVzM). STELA must be reauthorized by the end of the year or it will expire, and Judiciary and Commerce committees in both chambers have jurisdiction. The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a STELA hearing Wednesday at 10 a.m. in 226 Dirksen.

Witnesses for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act reauthorization hearing are Dish Network General Counsel Stanton Dodge, Schurz Communications Senior Vice President-Broadcasting Marci Burdick, Writers Guild of America-West Director-Research and Public Policy Ellen Stutzman and Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer, said the committee website. The hearing will be Wednesday at 10 a.m. in 226 Dirksen.

The current retransmission consent regime is broken and in need of congressional fixing, USTelecom told Senate Commerce Committee Democratic and Republican leaders in comments submitted about the reauthorization of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act. STELA reauthorization “presents a unique opportunity for Congress to address acute problems in the legal framework governing the retransmission consent process,” USTelecom said (http://bit.ly/1l7SCiB). It criticized broadcasters for their negotiating strategy and urged Congress to “eliminate broadcaster preferences and take government’s thumbs off the scale in the retransmission consent process by moving instead to true and free negotiations between broadcasters and” multichannel video programming distributors, and also criticized the rules surrounding must-buy and basic tier placement, suggesting they bring “imbalance” to retrans negotiations. It urged Congress to forbid joint broadcaster negotiation, to allow distant-signal importation and to adjust or kill the sweeps week rule. NAB has defended its retrans negotiations and in its own comments backed clean reauthorization of STELA that doesn’t include provisions on retrans. Coalitions of broadcast and pay-TV stakeholders, meanwhile, continued to pummel each other in blog posts about what provisions should or shouldn’t go into STELA. “If pay-TV is granted its ‘wish-list’ of regulatory add-ons as part of the STELA reauthorization process, it would ultimately tilt the regulatory playing field in their favor over TV broadcasters in retransmission consent negotiations,” a spokesman for TVFreedom, a coalition of broadcast interests, wrote in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1duhnNT) Thursday, calling for a clean STELA reauthorization. “What will the excuse be to consumers if pay-TV operators get the legislative add-ons and lopsided policy changes they are seeking on retransmission consent and no longer have the luxury of blaming broadcast TV for rising monthly bills?” The American Television Alliance, which represents many pay-TV industry interests, is planning to post another blog post soon, its spokesman told us. That post attacks broadcaster claims about the basic tier, bundling and sidecar agreements as illustrative of what ATVA calls dishonesty. “Broadcasters are lobbying to keep negotiations heavily in their favor,” the ATVA post will say. “When they lobby to keep ‘basic tier’ mandates, protect bundling, and prevent any rules that would prohibit ’sidecar’ ownership arrangements, their hypocrisy is exposed. They don’t want a free market; their business depends on decades-old government regulations in their favor.” Both NAB and NCTA have endorsed the one STELA draft bill that has been introduced so far in the House.

The controversy about government surveillance programs means “there almost certainly will be legislation,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said Wednesday. “Certain key elements” of the Patriot Act will expire in June 2015, “and we have an opportunity and an obligation to address these issues.” Blumenthal spoke in Philadelphia at an event hosted by the National Constitution Center and The Constitution Project, which posted video of the event online (http://bit.ly/1gD4jWs). Blumenthal slammed the secrecy of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and cited a need to change it, as he has proposed in legislation calling for what some call a “constitutional advocate” for the court. “How much unchecked and unmonitored intelligence activity can be consistent with the rule of law?” Blumenthal asked. “The advocate can be made more effective if we give it a certain form,” he said, saying it should be able to proactively engage the court. The court should not be the body choosing when to invite this permanent, staffed advocate, he added. All government branches are now reexamining how these programs should operate.

The Food and Drug Administration should clarify its policy on medical mobile apps, said six senators in a Wednesday letter to the FDA (http://1.usa.gov/OAUDGe). “It is important for the FDA to be well-equipped with the proper tools to be able to advance public health while taking care that innovation is not stifled through uncertainty or over-regulation,” said Sens. Michael Bennet, D-Colo.; Orrin Hatch, R-Utah; Tom Harkin, D-Iowa; Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.; Mark Warner, D-Va.; and Richard Burr, R-N.C. The FDA uses a “risk-based approach” to define medical mobile devices, they said. “Given that a large number of medical mobile applications could be actively regulated under the statute using this definition, we appreciate the FDA’s decision to use a risk-based approach to regulation.” Despite “clarity on the agency’s approach to regulation of mobile medical applications, we believe more transparency is needed to avoid stakeholder confusion over how a wider range of medical software might be appropriately regulated,” wrote the senators. Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) Executive Director Morgan Reed said transparency will aid industry. “It is important that government and industry become better informed about health apps that are improving patient outcomes,” Reed said in a statement. ACT works with small- and medium-size app developers to help them comply with government regulation. “We are already seeing remarkable results in chronic disease care through the use of smartphones and tablets,” said Reed. “The regulatory environment will be a critical factor in determining how patients may best use mobile devices to monitor their health and communicate with healthcare providers.” The FDA and FTC share jurisdiction over healthcare data security, which some believe creates industry-stifling uncertainty. Consumer advocates have proposed granting the FTC sole jurisdiction in this area because of what they call the commission’s superior technical expertise, while other industry officials have pushed for the FDA to receive sole oversight due to its sector-specific expertise. FDA had no comment.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., will push for creation of a select congressional committee to investigate government surveillance programs, he said. He lambasted what he called “an intelligence community drunk with power,” speaking Wednesday at the Berkeley Forum in California. “If you own a cellphone, you're under surveillance. I'm here to tell you that the NSA believes that equal protection means that Americans should be spied upon equally, including Congress,” Paul said, according to video the event organizers posted (http://bit.ly/NxckFl): “What you do on your cellphone is none of their damn business.” Paul said surveillance is one area where he can agree with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who worried in recent months about the government surveilling members of Congress. Surveillance goes “beyond party politics,” relevant whether the president is a Democrat or Republican, said Paul. “When I return to Washington I will push for a select committee styled after the Church Committee that investigated the abuses of power by the intelligence community in the ‘70s,” Paul said. “It should be bipartisan, it should be independent and wide-reaching.” The committee “should watch the watchers,” he said. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., introduced a resolution last month calling for such a committee, as have former Church Committee staffers and privacy advocates. Paul warned that U.S. citizens’ right to privacy was under assault and cited the importance of the Fourth Amendment in the digital age. He questioned a “generalized” warrant applied to countless phone customers as well as the secrecy of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “I look into the eyes of senators, and I think I see real fear,” Paul said. The government has agreed there are changes that should be made to its surveillance programs and is expected to announce details of potential changes, exploring ways to shift collection of phone metadata away from government hands, next week (CD Jan 21 p1).

Spectrum policy may need to be more “inclusive,” said a Congressional Research Service report (http://bit.ly/1a1gcUy). “Many policy makers and Members of Congress are concerned, for example, that the current structure of auctions to assign spectrum licenses does not provide enough opportunities for competition or new entrants into mobile communications markets,” said the report, by telecom policy specialist Linda Moore. She also wrote a CRS report on FirstNet and the relevant issues it poses for Congress. “In addition to monitoring progress in building the new broadband network for public safety, Congress may want to consider reviewing the role of commercial networks in emergency response and recovery,” CRS said (http://bit.ly/1hCsUxc). “Once commercial communications lines are compromised because of infrastructure failures, interdependent public safety networks are threatened and the ability to communicate vital information to the public is diminished. New policy initiatives may be needed to identify critical gaps in communications infrastructure and the means to fund the investments needed to close these gaps.” CRS questioned the governance of FirstNet and the manner in which it’s housed within NTIA. Both reports, which CRS doesn’t publicly release, are dated March 12.

Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., blasted Comcast’s planned buy of Time Warner Cable, citing net neutrality fears, in a letter to the Justice Department Wednesday. The approximately $45 billion deal requires the approval of U.S. antitrust authorities and the FCC. “I am very concerned that Comcast could use its clout in the broadband market to dictate the content consumers receive and the prices they pay, and these concerns are only intensified by Comcast’s proposal to acquire Time Warner Cable,” Franken wrote. “With more than 20 million customers, Comcast already is the nation’s dominant Internet service provider, controlling about a quarter of the national broadband market and a much higher percentage of the market in many of the local areas in which it operates. By acquiring Time Warner Cable, Comcast would extend its reach substantially, covering millions of additional customers. This would give Comcast even more leverage to manipulate Internet traffic to serve its own corporate interests.” Franken emphasized the importance of net neutrality and that the acquisition “could disrupt this balance of power, resulting in higher costs and fewer choices for consumers” when it comes to the open Internet. Franken is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which plans a hearing on the proposed deal April 2 at 10 a.m. in 226 Dirksen. Comcast has said the transaction would be good for consumers and merits approval. The deal “will bring millions more Americans under the Open Internet rules as soon as our deal closes,” a Comcast spokeswoman said. “We fully expect that the FCC will have in place Open Internet rules that will apply to all companies by the time our current condition from the NBCUniversal deal expires in 2018. That condition was always meant as a bridge to enforceable rules that would be applicable to all companies in the industry.” Comcast always backed the net neutrality rules since they were proposed, the spokeswoman added.