FCC: Sharing outage reports with State-Local-Other Government Agencies

Thu Feb 20 00:31:28 UTC 2020

I missed this in the announcement of the FCC's February meeting agenda 
next week.

In the early 2000's (after 9/11), the FCC ruled that outage reports were 
"presumptively confidential."  Personnally, I think the real reason was a 
specific carrier used the outage reporting in its sales/marketing, which 
upset the other carriers.  They complained to the FCC about the "misuse" 
of outage reports for several years from the late 1990's.  Yes, I was one 
of those people that used to visit the FCC Public Reading Room to read the 
outage report filings, before things were on-line.

At its February commission meeting, the FCC proposes to change its 
information sharing rules for outage reports to allow sharing with the 
States, District of Columbia, Tribal nations, territories and other 
federal government agencies.

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-362365A1.pdf

- Propose to provide direct, read-only access to NORS and DIRS filings to 
qualified agencies of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Tribal 
nations, territories, and federal government.

- Propose to allow these agencies to share NORS and DIRS information with 
other public safety officials that reasonably require NORS and DIRS 
information to prepare for and respond to disasters.

- Propose to allow participating agencies to publicly disclose NORS or 
DIRS filing information that is aggregated and anonymized across at least 
four service providers.

- Propose to condition a participating agency’s direct access to NORS and 
DIRS filings on their agreement to treat the filings as confidential and 
not disclose them absent a finding by the Commission that allows them to 
do so.

- Propose to establish an application process that would grant agencies 
access to NORS and DIRS after those agencies certify to certain 
requirements related to maintaining confidentiality of the data and the
security of the databases.