F.C.C. to Weigh Allowing Cellphone Use on Flights

Any change, which was placed on the agenda for the commission’s Dec. 12 meeting, is still months away, requiring a public comment period of weeks and a final draft of the rules. But it would constitute a major shift for airline passengers.

The use of cellphones during flights has been vigorously opposed by many passengers and by flight attendants, although some airlines in Asia and Europe already offer cell service. In the United States, the flight attendants union immediately urged the F.C.C. not to proceed with the proposal.

An F.C.C. official said airlines in the United States would be given the option of outfitting their planes with equipment that would allow the use of cellphones once a plane climbed above 10,000 feet, but the airlines would not be required to provide the service.

Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, said the new rules, if adopted, would “expand consumer access and choice for in-flight mobile broadband,” meaning the commission thinks both Wi-Fi and wireless cellphone data plans could be used.

“Modern technologies can deliver mobile services in the air safely and reliably, and the time is right to review our outdated and restrictive rules,” Mr. Wheeler said in a statement. “I look forward to working closely with my colleagues, the F.A.A. and the airline industry on this review of new mobile opportunities for consumers.”

A swift negative reaction came from the Association of Flight Attendants, a union representing airline workers.

“Flight attendants, as first responders and the last line of defense in our nation’s aviation system, understand the importance of maintaining a calm cabin environment,” the union said in a statement. “Any situation that is loud, divisive and possibly disruptive is not only unwelcome but also unsafe.”

The union said polls and surveys conducted over many years found that “a vast majority of the traveling public wants to keep the ban on voice calls in the aircraft cabin.”

“In far too many operational scenarios, passengers making phone calls could extend beyond a mere nuisance, creating negative effects on aviation safety and security that are great and far too risky,” the union said.

Several airlines already provide in-flight Wi-Fi service, enabling passengers to use the Internet, email and text messaging. The F.C.C. measure would allow voice calls through the use of what is called a picocell, a small cellular base station that would be installed on a plane, collect all cellphone activity during the flight and send it down to the ground.

Airlines in the United States already have the technical ability to allow in-flight phone calls using voice connections over an onboard Wi-Fi network, but so far none have done so.

It is all but certain that vast waves of airline passengers in the United States will tell the F.C.C. their feelings about the proposal. Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration changed the rules to permit airlines to allow the use of electronics during takeoff and landing, and passengers generally rejoiced at the ability to be able to read an e-book or play a game on their tablet or smartphone.

But sitting next to someone who is chatting away for hours could quickly outweigh the common complaint of sitting next to a crying baby for the duration of a flight.

“I don’t want to have to sit next to someone who is talking on their phone the entire flight,” said Greg Pritikin, a screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles. “That would be a nightmare.”

On Twitter, people also complained about the potential new rule.

“Really bummed to hear that news,” wrote Randi Zuckerberg, author of the book “Dot Complicated” (and sister of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook). “Airplanes were the last socially acceptable place to require people to unplug.”

The F.C.C. proposal would permit calls and data connections, which would allow people to surf the web on their smartphones and other devices. Airlines and a number of companies, including Gogo, have spent millions of dollars outfitting planes with Wi-Fi connections, and that business could suffer with the allowance of cellphone traffic.

But Steve Nolan, a spokesman for Gogo, said the company’s business would not be affected by the change. It already has the ability to provide in-flight phone service through its Wi-Fi connections, he said, but the commercial airlines have not permitted it so far. Gogo provides the service on some private jets.

If the F.C.C. approved the use of the cellphone equipment on airlines, the F.A.A. would still have to permit the equipment installation to ensure it did not affect passenger safety, officials said.

If the F.C.C. goes ahead with its plan on Dec. 12, it will solicit public suggestions on the proposed new rule.

After reviewing the comments, the commissioners will decide whether to approve the new regulations, either as proposed or with revisions.

The initiative comes less than three weeks after Mr. Wheeler took over as chairman of the F.C.C., but it has been in the works for months, agency officials said.

A Bill Allowing More Foreign Workers Stirs a Tech Debate

Mr. Doernberg worked in chip design, before that industry shrank, and then for a solar energy company, before that industry shrank, and has been unemployed since the middle of last year. By his own account, his skills are not ideal for the current job market. Nor does it help, he says, that at 53, he looks older than he is; youth is at a premium in his industry. So, too, is optimism.

“It’s a question of convincing someone that with these skills, I can do this job, even though I haven’t done it before,” he said. “I’m very optimistic. I know I will find a job.”

The questions of skills, jobs and nationality are a combustible mix these days.

Silicon Valley companies, warning of an acute labor shortage, say it is too costly to retrain older workers like Mr. Doernberg, and that the country is not producing enough younger Americans with the precise skills the industry needs. Their arguments have persuaded a majority of senators to give them what they want: a provision in the immigration bill to let in many more foreign professionals.

But Americans like Mr. Doernberg and the powerful labor lobby say that what the tech industry really wants is to depress wages and bring in more pliant, less costly temporary workers from overseas. If there is such a talent shortage, they ask, why are wages for most engineers not rising faster? Labor groups have pushed for a requirement to offer jobs to equally qualified Americans before hiring foreigners, a provision that the industry has fiercely resisted.

The pitched arguments of both sides, which are likely to resurface in the House when it takes up its version of an immigration overhaul, cloud a complicated reality. There is little empirical evidence to suggest that foreign engineers displace American engineers as a whole. If anything, one recent study suggests, the growth of immigrant workers in American companies helps younger American technical workers — more of them are hired and at higher-paying jobs — but has no noticeable consequences, good or bad, on older workers.

“In the short run, we don’t find really any adverse or superpositive effect on the employment of Americans,” said William R. Kerr, a Harvard business professor who conducted the study on the work force of 300 American companies. “People take an extremely one-sided view of this stuff and dismiss any evidence to the contrary.”

A recent analysis by the Brookings Institution reached a similar conclusion. It found that in the top 10 cities that bring in the largest number of high-skilled guest workers on H-1B visas, college-educated Americans — those who could compete for jobs with high-skilled guest workers — are not more likely to be unemployed.

At the same time, though, the industry’s claims of a labor shortage may be somewhat overblown. Most H-1B workers hold entry-level positions. Economists say that bringing in more of these workers would serve to keep wages down. It also saves employers the trouble of having to retrain workers.

There is a difference between what companies say they need and want, said Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Saying we need people with these skills is like me saying I need a four-wheel drive,” he said. “They could retrain people.”

It is true that for certain categories of engineers, wages are not going up as sharply as one would expect if good engineering talent were indeed hard to find. But it is also true that engineers with certain specialties, like software development, are hard to find.

Intel, for instance, which has more than 50,000 employees in the United States, said it has 1,000 openings. Motorola Solutions said it was scrambling for software engineers. And unemployment among technology professionals is generally about half the national average, buttressing the industry’s claims.

Economists say there may be other reasons for opening the door to high-skilled immigrants. In cities where there are large concentrations of such immigrants in science and engineering, overall wages tend to go up, especially among college-educated American residents, and eventually, so do housing prices, according to a study by Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis.

The Congressional Budget Office weighed in this week too, concluding that the growth in high-skilled immigration would lead to “slightly higher” productivity and in turn higher wages overall.

Already, the fight over high-skilled immigration has led to arguments and counterarguments on the Senate floor, with one side warning that jobs will go to workers from overseas and the other rallying for Americans first.

But Ardine Williams, the vice president for human resources at Intel, said that hiring Americans is not always practical. Asked about hiring unemployed engineers in this country, she said, “I encounter those folks as well. They are skilled and have expertise outside of an area where we need engineers. In some cases they haven’t kept their skills current.”

The debate over the effect of foreign engineers on American ones has obscured the critical issue of why more Americans are not going into the thriving technology sector. Students in the United States consistently rank low on global math and science tests, suggesting that relatively few are prepared to go into rigorous science and engineering programs.

In engineering programs at American universities, a little more than 40 percent of all graduate students were from abroad, according to data from the National Science Foundation. Even among Americans who do graduate with computer science or engineering degrees, a third pursue careers outside the tech sector.

Mr. Doernberg is keeping his fingers crossed. A resident of Woodside, Calif., an upscale town south of San Francisco, he spends his days scouring online job boards and attending networking sessions at diners and church halls across Silicon Valley. One of them is a Thursday morning group that meets in a church in Saratoga, a short drive from his home.

It was set up years ago by Hamid Saadat, an electrical engineer who came to this country from Iran as a graduate student in 1978, worked at a series of semiconductor companies in the area, became a United States citizen and went through the same rite of passage as Mr. Doernberg.

In 2001, just as the technology industry slumped, he lost his job. He was 47 and he soon learned one lesson. In Silicon Valley, it may not matter where you were born, but when.

“As much as we like to believe there’s no discrimination, being younger usually helps,” Mr. Saadat said.

News Analysis: The Dangers of Allowing an Adversary Access to a Network

G. Dagli Orti/De Agostini, via Getty Images The Trojan Horse, as depicted on Greek pottery. The Trojan Horse in modern cyberspace is still something to be feared.

Schoolchildren learn the tale of the Trojan Horse, the giant gift in which Odysseus and a platoon of 30 Greek soldiers hid to gain access to the heavily defended city.

Thousands of years later, it remains a thoroughly modern concept that is increasingly found at the heart of cyberwarfare strategies. Modern Trojan horses are computer code or vulnerabilities hidden in software or hardware that would allow a spy or an attacker to gain access to an adversary’s computers and networks. Find a way to be invited into the computers of your enemy’s weapons and military systems and you can render them useless in the face of an attack.

For more than a decade, Pentagon officials have been anxious about the growing reliance by the United States electronics industry on Chinese manufacturers. As the Internet has become the nation’s critical infrastructure weaving together commerce and power systems and even military command and control, it has become increasingly unthinkable to have a foreign presence in the network. Their fear is that those building and maintaining the network could build in a Trojan horse.

Thus it was striking that the word “Trojan” was not mentioned in a 52-page report issued Monday by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence focusing on the activities of two giant Chinese telecommunications firms, Huawei and ZTE, which have long been suspected of having links to the Chinese government. Beijing has been suspected of trying to steal American corporate and government secrets through computer espionage.

Stuxnet, a surreptitious program that was reportedly designed by United States and Israeli intelligence agencies to afflict the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, had many of the properties of a highly sophisticated Trojan horse. The program was at the heart of a concerted effort to delay or destroy the Iranian Natanz nuclear fuel facility. The attack damaged centrifuges and might have provided a surveillance window into Iranian activities by giving Western intelligence agencies unfettered access to the desktop computers of Iranian project managers.

The program acted as a Trojan horse, perhaps delivered first on a USB memory stick, that then spread through computer networks inside the secret facility before reaching the outside world. A striking map of the paths followed by Stuxnet infection created by researchers at Symantec, the Silicon Valley computer security firm, indicates that Stuxnet actually broke out of Natanz, rather than breaking in, just as the Greek soldiers climbed out of the horse at night.

Possibly because the United States is making Trojan horses, that term — if it exists in the House report on Huawei and ZTE — is said to be found only in a classified annex to the report that has not been made available.

The published report consists of a series of allegations about the activities of the companies, including bribery and surveillance, but little hard evidence. Reports of “suspicious” incidents, including an ostensible case of “beaconing” from Cricket, a Texas wireless operator that uses Huawei equipment, have been heatedly denied by Huawei.

If this issue is important enough, said Richard A. Clarke, who served as the nation’s counterterrorism overseer in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, there should be ways of declassifying the information. “They’re making important accusations,” he said. “Important accusations require important proof.”

According to several former government officials, the real issue is not what has happened in the past but rather what might happen if Huawei gear were widely used in American telecommunications networks. Such use would mean that the company would have to serve and fix the network, requiring extensive access for its technical personnel to telecommunications networks in the United States.

The danger in letting your potential adversary maintain your network has already been demonstrated, according to Mr. Clarke, who wrote in “Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.” In 2007, a remarkably sophisticated computer attack by Israel rendered Syrian antiaircraft radar useless. Israeli aircraft were able to destroy a Syrian nuclear reactor without any response from the country’s military. He says it was vulnerable because the Syrians had relied on outsiders to maintain the network.

Mr. Clarke disputes a recent New Yorker article that asserted that the bombing attack was supported by conventional electronic warfare, which involves jamming or deceiving an enemies’ radar with high-powered radio waves. “Regular electronic warfare fills the frequencies with static and overpowers the frequencies,” he said. “That wakes people up. That didn’t happen. The Syrians didn’t notice the jamming of their radars.”

In 2009, The New York Times reported that an American semiconductor industry executive who claimed to have direct knowledge of the operation said that technology for disabling the radars had been supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.

If his account is true, it may be the real reason that the government has worked so hard to make sure that American computer networks are not made in China.