Happy Broadband NOFA Day

NTIA and RUS issued the Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA) for stimulus-related broadband grants.

• Broadband Initiatives Program and Broadband Technology Opportunities Program
• State Broadband Data and Development Grant Program

Analysis:

• Ars
• Fierce Wireless
• Harold Feld
• Public Knowledge
• Broadband Census
• Network World
• GigaOm

Radio Moon Bounce

Everybody loves a good moon bounce. Today's moon bounce didn't involve taking your shoes off and jumping, but it was every bit as fun (if you are a geek). Every so often, when the moon is in the right spot, amateur radio operators ("hams") organize a competition to see who can communicate with the most people across the world by bouncing signals off of the moon. Today was the "Echoes of Apollo Moon Bounce" event -- a global ham celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. The NY Times did a decent overview of the event.

I spent a good chunk of the day listening to these signals. Growing up, my dad was often in the basement with his radios or on the roof tweaking his antennas. I was always fascinated by his equipment and the people he talked to from all over the world, but by the time I got old enough to really get into it I had been bit by the computer bug. My dad sometimes compared what I was doing at age 12 with BBS'es and my 2400 baud modem with some of his ham radio passions. I still remember my first VoIP experience in the early 90's, talking to an Australian guy over dialup.

I never did get my ham radio license, in part because of the pull of computers and the burgeoning internet. Nevertheless, in the years since then I've gained a greater appreciation of the radio spectrum. Spectrum is a valuable shared resource that we have allocated to different users for communication. Sometimes we have tried to choose who is the most important, sometimes we have auctioned use of it off to the highest bidder, and other times we have allowed a "commons" oriented unlicensed use. New technologies shape the way we are able to use this common good, and we have plenty of active policy debate over these issues. Just yesterday I watched a New America Foundation event that was "optimistically" titled "The End of Spectrum ‘Scarcity': Opportunistic Access to the Airwaves."

Amateur radio operators have traditionally operated in via analog means as they communicate by voice or morse code. Over time, they incorporated packet radio, allowing computers to transmit over certain frequencies using special analog-to-digital hardware. In the time since my dad's basement tinkering and my first modem, the worlds of radio and computer -- analog and digital -- have converged. The latest example of this was of course the analog-to-digital transition for broadcast television in the United States, and the extent to which this opens up unused "white spaces" for broadband. The most important innovation in wireless digital communications has been the emergence of Software Defined Radio ("SDR") technology that allows tuning, transmitting, and receiving to be done in software instead of special hardware. This means that computing devices can become general purpose radios, and whereas my dad used to have to buy new transistors and diodes at the hamfest, I can just download and install a new radio image for my Android phone.

Receiving the Earth-Moon-Earth ("EME") transmissions requires a decent parabolic antenna, but I don't have one. So how did I spend the day listening to radio signals bouncing off of the moon? I tuned in via a Dutch dish that was streaming online. Now, it would be pretty cool if the operators of this dish were simply tuning around for signals and sending a single audio stream out to anyone who wished to listen. However, what they did was even cooler. They captured all of the data for a frequency band (1.24-1.3 GHz, what the hams call "23 cm" because of the wavelength) and then they published a web-based application for SDR decoding on that raw stream so that each person could tune to any transmission within that band! The interface includes a draggable tuner and live spectrum analyzer output of signals. You can actually see what location on the dial every other person is tuning to. This combination of SDR and internet-enabled interactivity just blew my mind. I chatted briefly with the folks in the Netherlands:

me: geek question: does websdr send all of the receiver data to the end-user and then the java app tunes locally, or is the java app instructing the server how to process before sending the stream?
them: The latter. The raw data stream would be about 3 Mbit/s, that would be too much for many home connections.
me: sdr is on the main cpu or other boards?
them: On the main CPU. The only external hardware is an analogue downconverter.

It really was fun to listen to the moon bounce, and the web-based experience just reinforced how much is possible in the radio spectrum when it is combined with computing. The traditional model of frequency allocation for a specific purpose needs to give way to more efficient spectrum-sharing techniques. The amateur radio operators have developed sophisticated social norms for sharing their radio waves, but they are highly inefficient when compared to something like WiFi, which is in turn highly inefficient compared to more modern approaches. As an example of what a bridging experience the moon bounce was for me, the signal was arriving in the 1.2 GHz band in the Netherlands, which then was piped over the internet to my house and then re-transmitted to my laptop over WiFi at 2.4 Ghz.

As a policy matter, digitization of the airwaves means that we need to re-think how we use them. Today, computers can directly connect and transmit more in a millisecond than an entire ham radio back-and-forth ("CQ, CQ, CQ..."). We need a map of the vast swaths of unused spectrum, and an automated digital means for sharing them. That's part of the upcoming National Broadband Plan being created by the FCC.

That's not to say that ham radio should go away. The thrill of finding a remote station in Russia, the Netherlands, London or Mexico and tuning it in for that brief moment is quite an experience. Everybody loves a moon bounce.

Here are a few excerpts I captured while I was listening (sorry about the lousy tuning in a couple places, it just makes it sound more like the Death Star attack from Star Wars):

Listen to the MP3

Petition: Improve PACER

We ask the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to improve PACER by enhancing the authenticity, usability and availability of the system.

We the undersigned, urge the Administrative Office of the US Courts (AO) to make the following changes to the PACER system:

• For verification and reliability, the AO should digitally sign every document put into PACER using readily available technology.
• PACER needs to be much more readily accessible if it is to be usable for research, education, and the practice of law. Improved accessibility includes both lowering the costs for using PACER and enhancing the web interfaces.
• Depository libraries should also have free access to PACER.

Sign now.

Sunlight on the Supreme Court

Wow, I'm not sure how I missed this earlier. The Supreme Court is looking to revamp its web site, and the Sunlight Foundation did an extensive proposal. It's got a lot of great suggestions, complete with mockups. Recently I've been using the existing SCOTUS site to pull docket information (which works reasonably well), but there is certainly room for improvement. In particular, it would be great if the Court implemented an e-filing system and then made those filings publicly accessible. You can see the possibilities in the difference between the current docket pages and the proposed format.

The NYT article mentions PACER, but if the Court went that route I hope they'd have the sense not to lock the documents behind a pay wall. This effort by Sunlight is a case study in why the government should open data up so that third parties can help make it useful -- whether that's by building their own sites on the data or helping the government improve its own web presence. I'm happy to see Sunlight engaging the Judicial Branch.

1st Circuit Rules Against Courtroom Webcasts in a Specific Case, but Throws Open Access Proponents a Bone

Lately I have been posting mostly about PACER, but today we had an interesting decision from the 1st Circuit that also addresses fundamental issues of public access to the courts. The back-story is complicated and interesting in its own right, but the relevant facts are:

• Generally, federal district courts do not allow proceedings to be video or audio recorded or broadcast
  
• Joel Tenenbaum, a defendant in the District Court of Massachusetts, requested that a hearing in his trial be webcast
  
• The judge, Nancy Gertner, granted his request
• The plaintiffs appealed (petitioned) the 1st Circuit, claiming that she did not have that authority under local rules (specifically 83.3). Plaintiffs also made some silly arguments about how people on the internet would make fun of them, which nobody took seriously.
• There are some additional complications due to non-binding policies of the Judicial Conference, and a previously obscure statement from the 1st Circuit Judicial Council. Ultimately these are not dispositive but (according to the 1st Circuit) lend credence to plaintiff/petitioners' claim

At oral argument, the debate focused on very specific details about how to read those local District of Massachusetts rules. Tenenbaum's lawyer, Charlie Nesson (who I know, and who is also at the Berkman Center), also made a high-level argument for why the ban on recording and broadcasting was bad policy (for more detail on the history of these policy issues, see this excellent CMLP blog post).

The court sided with petitioners, explaining that the Judge Gertner's decision "was based on a palpably incorrect interpretation" of the rule. In doing so, the court explicitly side-stepped the question of whether or not this was good policy -- its task was to decide whether the rule as written had been followed. The decision was a blow to the specific goal of webcasting the upcoming district court hearing, and unless the rules are changed it will be binding in other cases. This is where Judge Lipez, in his concurrence, throws open access proponents a bone or two:

Indeed, in my view, there are no sound policy reasons to prohibit the webcasting authorized by the district court. Therefore, this case calls into question the continued relevance and vitality of a rule that requires such a disagreeable outcome.

In short, the rules are dumb. Indeed, he noted the same irony that I had been pointing out to my colleagues in the weeks leading up to oral argument: the circuit courts themselves have implemented a program in which they record oral arguments and make them immediately available as MP3 podcasts on the internet. Lipez continues:

When the motions hearing at issue occurs, only those physically present in the courtroom will hear the parties debate the merits of the motions before the district court. Ironically, however, almost immediately after the oral argument in this First Circuit mandamus proceeding ended, anyone with an internet connection could access a recording of that argument from our website. There is no meaningful difference between the type of oral argument that we make available to the public as a matter of course and the type of argument that would have been broadly accessible under the district court's Order.

Judge Lipez thinks that the rules simply don't take into account the internet:

The Local Rule at the center of this controversy was adopted in 1990. Since its adoption, dramatic advances in communications technology have had a profound effect on our society. These new technological capabilities provide an unprecedented opportunity to increase public access to the judicial system in appropriate circumstances. They have also created expectations that judges will respond sensibly to these opportunities. With its sweeping prohibition on the broadcasting or recording of district court proceedings, Local Rule 83.3 prevents such responses in civil cases. So too do the Policy of the Judicial Conference and the Resolution of the Judicial Council of the First Circuit that underlie the Local Rule. As the outcome of this proceeding demonstrates, the Rule, the Policy, and the Resolution should all be reexamined promptly.

It seems like it's time to change the rules.


More coverage:

• Ars Technica
• Computerworld
  
• Boston Globe
• MediaPost
• Wired
• Recording Industry vs. the People
• AmLaw Litigation Daily
  

Ars: The case against PACER: tearing down the courts' paywall

I'm quoted in this new Ars Technica article by Tim Lee
The case against PACER: tearing down the courts' paywall

In this feature, Ars takes stock of online access to federal court records in the United States. We'll discuss how the system got where it is today, look at where there's room for improvement, and talk to two experts on open government about the prospects for reform. The bottom line is that the courts deserve credit for the progress they made in the 1990s, but a lot more work is needed to bring PACER into the 21st century.
[...]
Schultze and Grimmelmann agree that the solution to PACER's problems is for the courts to make court records available for free download. Schultze points to a recent paper from Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy arguing that governments should stick to releasing raw information and allow private parties to build organization and search tools. Schultze predicts that if private parties were given free access to the raw PACER documents, they would quickly build websites that surpass PACER in functionality and ease-of-use.

In the time since I was interviewed for this article, I had a conversation with one of the attorneys for the Administrative Office of the Courts. He was very friendly and candid, answering my questions to the best of his ability. I got the impression that the AO is passionate about access to court records, but struggles with the practicalities of no-fee access. This makes me hopeful that we can constructively work toward a solution.

Techliberation Podcast on PACER

In the latest episode of the Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front, I discuss the nature of public access to court records along with:

• Tim Lee, who’s written about the problems with PACER.
• James Grimmelmann of New York Law School, who has written a great essay on Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law.
• Berin Szoka, our gracious host.

Listen here.