Walden Lays Out Busy Subcommittee Agenda Before Election

The subcommittee’s first focus is to wrap up work on cybersecurity, Walden said. Then it will look at competition in the data, audio and video markets, he said. The subcommittee plans more oversight on broadband buildout under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he said. On spectrum, Walden plans to appoint a working group to look into government spectrum. And the subcommittee will have hearings on LightSquared, including one on receiver standards, he said.

Serious cyberattacks are happening without people knowing, Walden said. He compared the situation to the movie Men In Black, where there’s “a whole war going on that most of us never had to worry about.” The cybersecurity working group in Walden’s subcommittee has heard that “minimal intervention is best,” and government should provide “voluntary guidelines” for industry, he said. Every witness at the subcommittee’s hearings said to “do no harm,” he said. Walden said Wednesday the subcommittee will issue recommendations soon (CD March 29 p2).

Walden said he plans to conduct oversight of the public safety network as it’s rolled out nationwide. He said he was disappointed the House accepted the Senate’s governance language. “I'm concerned about how that’s going to work in the end,” he said. “We were really thinking you could leverage what the states and regions have already done to build networks as long as they were interoperable and worked on a national basis. That’s really been diminished, the way this came out.” Walden hopes states’ opt-out provisions are real and NTIA will recognize them, he said.

"My guess is in the three to five year range” for TV stations’ spectrum to sell under voluntary incentive auctions, and winners are likely to start building it out right away, Walden said. The public safety network can be built before auction revenue comes in, he said. Walden said he tried to maximize auction participation in the spectrum legislation. He didn’t think it would be right to allow the FCC to exclude Verizon and AT&T from the auctions, as the bill wouldn’t allow.

Political disclosures are the domain of the Federal Election Commission, Walden said of the FCC’s plan to require TV stations to make public files available online. “The notion that it’s actually going to save stations money tells you how bad the practice of economics is in this town,” he said. “I'd leave it the way it is."

Walden doesn’t believe Congress needs to make a law to stop employers from requiring employees to give them their Facebook passwords, he said. “I think we've got bigger fish to fry,” but it does seem “a little over the edge,” said Walden, comparing the practice to asking employees for all their mail and photos on their cameras: “Frankly, I wouldn’t want to work for a company that’s that interested."

Walden said piracy issues aren’t leaving Capitol Hill even after the strong Internet backlash to the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act. Even Internet companies realize there’s some need to address intellectual property theft, Walden said.

It’s “completely reprehensible” what Rush Limbaugh said on the radio about Georgetown law-school student Sandra Fluke, Walden said. “Let’s just point out though, that it’s happened on the left and the right” side of the political spectrum, he said. Government should not intervene to determine what’s appropriate and what’s not on the radio, he said.