Lifting NDA curbs on downloadable security would ensure that ‘an ...

won’t remove the restrictions on its own, the FCC should do it, Shapiro said. Senate Commerce Committee Chmn. Stevens (R-Alaska), House Commerce Committee Chmn. Barton (R-Tex.) and House Telecom Subcommittee Chmn. Upton (R-Mich.) wrote FCC Chmn. Martin Tues. to decry forcing costly deployment of “outdated” CableCARDs, with superior downloadable security technology impending. They urged “timely” deployment of downloadable security. Shapiro said cable’s downloadable security spec “is fatally lacking in transparency and interoperability, ensuring no progress toward actual deployment of this technology can be made. The secret environment under which downloadable security exists makes future support for it even more speculative and uncertain than for the CableCARD.” But NCTA thinks NDA restrictions “protect the valuable content that cable operators provide consumers,” a spokesman said. Removing them “would violate the specific direction that Congress provided to the FCC to not ‘jeopardize security of multichannel video programming,'” he said. “Almost every consumer electronics product is developed using a non- disclosure environment, including devices that format security for the same high-end content.” Waiving such protections for downloadable conditional access would “compromise the security elements” used by other commercially successful pay-TV security systems that have been deployed, he said.