Supreme Court justices showed significant concern over the possibility of Orwellian ramifications concerning warrantless tracking using secretly installed GPS devices, during oral argument in Jones v. U.S. Tuesday. The high court is deciding the constitutionality of the practice under the Fourth Amendment. The issue was raised in the investigation and trial of Antoine Jones, who was suspected of dealing cocaine and was tracked with GPS for a month without a valid warrant. Much of the hearing focused on the “reasonable expectation of privacy,” as defined by Katz v. U.S., and the effect of changing technologies on police surveillance.

The special master overseeing discovery on the various court challenges to AT&T/T-Mobile ordered Sprint Nextel to give AT&T various internal documents it has requested by Nov. 21. AT&T filed a subpoena for the Sprint documents Sept. 26. Last month, Special Master Richard Levie noted in the order, AT&T narrowed its document request to those necessary to refresh the record in the case. In a filing with the U.S. District Court in Washington last week, AT&T listed 47 continuing areas of interest, including whether Sprint has plans for a “business combination” with T-Mobile if the AT&T/T-Mobile deal is blocked in federal court.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s staff cancelled a meeting with industry that was supposed to have been convened to discuss the pending broadband outage reporting order (CD Nov 7 p2), commission and telecom officials told us Monday. Nearly 30 executives from industry -- including executives from USTelecom, CTIA, NCTA and the VON Coalition -- were to have sat down with Genachowski’s special assistant, Josh Gottheimer, Tuesday to lay out their concerns about the order. It was canceled because of a “scheduling conflict,” Gottheimer said in an email Monday.

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell opposes any move to set aside a contiguous swath of spectrum within the 700 MHz band for unlicensed use, he said Monday in a speech to the Global Forum in Brussels. McDowell said establishing a separate unlicensed allocation in the TV band would work against efforts to make the TV white spaces available as a kind of super Wi-Fi. McDowell has been a strong advocate of making the white spaces available as quickly as possible (CD Jan 28 p2). The FCC approved its original white spaces order three years ago.

Dish Network expects to get FCC approval in “relatively short order” for its acquisitions of TerreStar and DBSD, moving it closer to starting to build out a national wireless network, Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen said Monday. The FCC comment period ended Nov. 3 and if Dish gets commission approval, it could close on the purchases within 60 days, analysts said. Dish last week agreed to pay $114 million to Sprint to settle a legal battle tied to TerreStar and DBSD, it said Monday in an SEC filing. Sprint claimed it was owed $220 million by TerreStar and DBSD, and the settlement resolves the claims (CD Nov 7 p1), Dish said.

A “negligible” amount of Skype customers expect to be able to make emergency calls from their accounts, the company told the FCC in reply comments on docket 11-117. Skype hired research company Penn Schoen Berland to do an online survey of 1,001 paying Skype customers about their attitude to the service, the company said. It found that “less than 5” percent of Skype customers “indicate they would be likely to use Skype to place an emergency call,” the company said.

An unusual appeal of an FCC Media Bureau order gets a rare hearing Wednesday at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Cablevision and cable programmer Madison Square Garden Holdings appealed last month a pair of bureau orders against the companies and in favor of the two biggest telcos, rather than waiting for the full commission to act. Even rarer, said media lawyers not part of the case, is the New York court’s agreement to hear oral argument on the request for the 2nd Circuit to stay the bureau’s rulings (CD Sept 23 p5). The rulings gave AT&T and Verizon access to HD feeds of two regional sports channels owned by MSG, which used to be part of Cablevision.

Industry is worried that the FCC is apparently trying to put together an order on VoIP outage reporting for the December meeting, telecom lobbyists told us Friday. CTIA, USTelecom, NCTA, the VON Coalition and NTCA, among others, have all exchanged emails in recent days seeking letters and organizing meetings with FCC staff, urging the FCC not to adopt standards for “outage” that industry believes are arbitrary and unnecessary (CD Aug 10 p7).

Dish Network and Sprint Nextel settled a years-long legal battle over the cost of relocating broadcast auxiliary spectrum from the 2 GHz band, the companies said Friday. The confidential settlement should help Dish in its pursuit of FCC approval for the company’s purchase of DBSD and TerreStar, which control a combined 40 MHz of S-band spectrum, said industry executives. Dish is buying the companies out of bankruptcy. Other wireless filers in the proceeding pointed to procedural concerns.

An industry coalition and the Interior Department clashed sharply on what the FCC should do next to curb bird deaths caused by wireless towers. The written comments largely tracked points both sides made during a Sept. 20 FCC workshop (CD Sept 21 p 11). The comments were in response to a draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) released by the commission. The FCC found in that document that communications tower collisions kill millions of birds every year, but the numbers must be weighed against the overall U.S. bird population, estimated at 10 billion birds (CD Aug 30/10 p5).