Broadband Nation?

Thomas Bleha on our lagging broadband capabilities. In essence, we’re falling further behind. Our “broadband” – DSL or cable modems are much slow than those available in Japan and Korea. Their services are priced similarily, yet 20X+ faster.

In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only “basic” broadband, among the slowest, most expensive, and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration’s failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband.

We Madisonians lag the rest of the country as well. We have very little public wifi. Our airport remains without wifi, years after others have implemented these inexpensive services.

Unauthorized Access to IRS Records

This problem will likely get worse, particularly with the recently passed gift to data thieves – the national ID act (Both Wisconsin Senators, Kohl & Feingold supported the National ID Act!). Caroline Drees has more:

The Internal Revenue Service is investigating whether unauthorized people gained access to sensitive taxpayer and bank account information but has not yet exposed any privacy breaches, an official said on Friday.

The U.S. tax agency — whose databases include suspicious activity reports from banks about possible terrorist or criminal transactions — launched the probe after the Government Accountability Office said in April that the IRS “routinely permitted excessive access” to the computer files.

The GAO team was able to tap into the data without authorization, and gleaned information such as bank account holders’ names, social security numbers, transaction values, and any suspected terrorist activity. It said the data was at serious risk of disclosure, modification or destruction.