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Somewhere between the calls to end encryption and calls to do literally anything about crime rate spikes at this time of year, at this time of day, in [insert part of the country], localized entirely within [add geofence] lies the reality of law enforcement. While many continue to loudly decry the advent of by-default encryption, the reality of the situation is people are generating more data and content than ever. And most of it is less than a warrant away.While certain suspect individuals continue to proclaim encryption will result in an apocalypse of criminal activity, others are reaping the benefits of always-on internet interactivity. Clearview, for example, has compiled a database of 10 billion images by doing nothing more than scraping the web, grabbing everything that's been made public by an extremely online world population.You want facial images free of charge and no Fourth Amendment strings attached? You need look no further than the open web, which has all the faces you want and almost none of the attendant restrictions. "Going dark" is for chumps who don't know how to leverage the public's willingness to share almost anything with the rest of the internet.The Chicago PD knows who's keeping the internet bread buttered and which side they're on. A report from Business Insider (written by Caroline Haskins) highlights an internal CPD presentation that makes it explicit cops have gained plenty from the rise of social media platforms, easily outweighing the subjective losses end-to-end encryption may have recently created.

As many of you know, last week we hosted an online event for the latest Techdirt Greenhouse edition, all about looking back on the lessons learned from the 2012 protests against SOPA and PIPA. Our special guest was Rep. Zoe Lofgren, one of the strongest voices in congress speaking out against the disastrous bills, who provided all kinds of excellent insight into what happened then and what's happening now. In case you missed it, for this week's episode of the podcast (yes, we're finally back with new episodes!) we've got the full conversation and Q&A from the event.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

As many of you know, last week we hosted an online event for the latest Techdirt Greenhouse edition, all about looking back on the lessons learned from the 2012 protests against SOPA and PIPA. Our special guest was Rep. Zoe Lofgren, one of the strongest voices in congress speaking out against the disastrous bills, who provided all kinds of excellent insight into what happened then and what's happening now. In case you missed it, for this week's episode of the podcast (yes, we're finally back with new episodes!) we've got the full conversation and Q&A from the event.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

I already wrote a long post earlier about the very very real problems with the EARN IT Act -- namely that it would make the problem of child sexual abuse material significantly worse by repeating the failed FOSTA playbook, and that it would attack encryption by making it potential "evidence" in a case against a tech company for any CSAM on its site. But with the bill, the sponsors of the bill, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham, released a "Myth v. Fact" document to try to counter the criticisms of EARN IT. Unfortunately, the document presents an awful lot of "myths" as "facts." And that's a real problem.The document starts out noting, correctly:

You may recall the terrible and dangerous EARN IT Act from two years ago, which was a push by Senators Richard Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham to chip away more at Section 230 and to blame tech companies for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). When it was initially introduced, many people noticed that it would undermine both encryption and Section 230 in a single bill. While the supporters of the bill insisted that it wouldn't undermine encryption, the nature of the bill clearly set things up so that you either needed to encrypt everything or to spy on everything. Eventually, the Senators were persuaded to adopt an amendment from Senator Patrick Leahy to more explicitly attempt to exempt encryption from the bill, but it was done in a pretty weak manner. That said, the bill still died.But, as with 2020, 2022 is an election year, and in an election year some politicians just really want to get their name in headlines about how they're "protecting the children," and Senator Richard Blumenthal loves the fake "protecting the children" limelight more than most other Senators. And thus he has reintroduced the EARN IT Act, claiming (falsely) that it will somehow "hold tech companies responsible for their complicity in sexual abuse and exploitation of children." This is false. It will actually make it more difficult to stop child sexual abuse, but we'll get there. You can read the bill text here, and note that it is nearly identical to the version that came out of the 2020 markup process with the Leahy Amendment, with a few very minor tweaks. The bill has a lot of big name Senators as co-sponsors, and that's from both parties, suggesting that this bill has a very real chance of becoming law. And that would be dangerous.If you want to know just how bad the bill is, I found out about the re-introduction of the bill -- before it was announced anywhere else -- via a press release sent to me by NCOSE, formerly "morality in media," the busybody organization of prudes who believe that all pornography should be banned. NCOSE was also a driving force behind FOSTA -- the dangerous law with many similarities to EARN IT that (as we predicted) did nothing to stop sex trafficking, and plenty of things to increase the problem of sex trafficking, while putting women in danger and making it more difficult for the police to actually stop trafficking.Amusingly (?!?) NCOSE's press release tells me both that without EARN IT tech platforms "have no incentive to prevent" CSAM, and that in 2019 tech platforms reported 70 million CSAM images to NCMEC. They use the former to insist that the law is needed, and the latter to suggest that the problem is obviously out of control -- apparently missing the fact that the latter actually shows how the platforms are doing everything they can to stop CSAM on their platforms (and others!) by following existing laws and reporting it to NCMEC where it can be put into a hash database and shared and blocked elsewhere.But facts are not what's important here. Emotions, headlines, and votes in November are.Speaking of the lack of facts necessary, with the bill, they also have a "myth v. fact" sheet which is just chock full of misleading and simply incorrect nonsense. I'll break that down in a separate post, but just as one key example, the document really leans heavily on the fact that Amazon sends a lot fewer reports of CSAM to NCMEC than Facebook does. But, if you think for more than 3 seconds about it (and aren't just grandstanding for headlines) you might notice that Facebook is a social media site and Amazon is not. It's comparing two totally different types of services.However, for this post I want to focus on the key problems of EARN IT. In the very original version of EARN IT, the bill created a committee to study if exempting CSAM from Section 230 would help stop CSAM. Then it shifted to the same form it's in now where the committee still exists, but they skip the part where the committee has to determine if chipping away at 230 will help, and just includes that as a key part of the bill. The 230 part mimics FOSTA (again which has completely failed to do what it claimed and has made the actual problems worse), in that it adds a new exemption to Section 230 that exempts any CSAM from Section 230.EARN IT will make the CSAM problem much, much worse.At least in the FOSTA case, supporters could (incorrectly and misleadingly, as it turned out) point to Backpage as an example of a site that had been sued for trafficking and used Section 230 to block the lawsuit. But here... there's nothing. There really aren't examples of websites using Section 230 to try to block claims of child sexual abuse material. So it's not even clear what problem these Senators think they're solving (unless the problem is "not enough headlines during an election year about how I'm protecting the children.")The best they can say is that companies need the threat of law to report and takedown CSAM. Except, again, pretty much every major website that hosts user content already does this. This is why groups like NCOSE can trumpet "70 million CSAM images" being reported to NCMEC. Because all of the major internet companies actually do what they're supposed to do.And here's where we get into one of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous. It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works -- without fear of liability for any "failure." Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with.EARN IT gets the problem exactly backwards. It disincentivizes action by companies, because the vast majority of actions will actually increase rather than decrease liability. As Eric Goldman wrote two years ago, this version of EARN IT doesn't penalize companies for CSAM, it penalizes them for (1) not magically making all CSAM disappear, for (2) knowing too much about CSAM (i.e., telling them to stop looking for it and taking it down) or (3) not exiting the industry altogether (as we saw a bunch of dating sites do post FOSTA).EARN IT is based on the extremely faulty assumption that internet companies don't care about CSAM and need more incentive to do so, rather than the real problem, which is that CSAM has always been a huge problem and stopping it requires actual law enforcement work focused on the producers of that content. But by threatening internet websites with massive liability if they make a mistake, it actually makes law enforcement's job harder, because they will be less able to actually work with law enforcement. This is not theoretical. We already saw exactly this problem with FOSTA, in which multiple law enforcement agencies have said that FOSTA made their job harder because they can no longer find the information they need to stop sex traffickers. EARN IT creates the exact same problem for CSAM.So the end result is that by misunderstanding Section 230, by misunderstanding internet company's existing willingness to fight CSAM, EARN IT will undoubtedly make the CSAM problem worse by making it more difficult for companies to track CSAM down and report it, and more difficult for law enforcement to track down an arrest those actually responsible for it. It's a very, very bad and dangerous bill -- and that's before we even get to the issue of encryption!EARN IT is still very dangerous for encryptionEARN IT supporters claim they "fixed" the threat to encryption in the original bill by using text similar to Senator Leahy's amendment to say that using encryption cannot "serve as an independent basis for liability." But, the language still puts encryption very much at risk. As we've seen, the law enforcement/political class is very quick to want to (falsely) blame encryption for CSAM. And by saying that encryption cannot serve as "an independent basis" for liability, that still leaves open the door to using it as one piece of evidence in a case under EARN IT.Indeed, one of the changes to the bill from the one in 2020 is that immediately after saying encryption can't be an independent basis for liability it adds a new section that wasn't there before that effectively walks back the encryption-protecting stuff. The new section says: "Nothing in [the part that says encryption isn't a basis for liability] shall be construed to prohibit a court from considering evidence of actions or circumstances described in that subparagraph if the evidence is otherwise admissable." In other words, as long as anyone bringing a case under EARN IT can point to something that is not related to encryption, it can point to the use of encryption as additional evidence of liability for CSAM on the platform.Again, the end result is drastically increasing liability for the use of encryption. While no one will be able to use the encryption alone as evidence, as long as they point to one other thing -- such as a failure to find a single piece of CSAM -- then they can bring the encryption evidence back in and suggest (incorrectly) some sort of pattern or willful blindness.And this doesn't even touch on what will come out of the "committee" and its best practices recommendations, which very well might include an attack on end-to-end encryption.The end result is that (1) EARN IT is attacking a problem that doesn't exist (the use Section 230 to avoid responsibility for CSAM) (2) EARN IT will make the actual problem of CSAM worse by making it much more risky for internet companies to fight CSAM and (3) EARN IT puts encryption at risk by potentially increasing the liability risk of any company that offers encryption.It's a bad and dangerous bill and the many, many Senators supporting it for kicks and headlines should be ashamed of themselves.

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Tech company ID.me has made amazing inroads with government customers over the past several months. Some of this is due to unvetted claims by the company's CEO, Blake Hall, who has asserted (without evidence) that the federal government lost $400 billion to fraudulent COVID-related claims in 2020. He also claimed (without providing evidence) that ID.me's facial recognition tech was sturdy, sound, accurate, and backstopped by human review.These claims were made after it became apparent the AI was somewhat faulty, resulting in people being locked out of their unemployment benefits in several states. This was a problem, considering ID.me was now being used by 27 states to handle dispersal of various benefits. And it was bound to get worse, if for no other reason than ID.me would be expected to handle an entire nation of beneficiaries, thanks to its contract with the IRS.The other problem is the CEO's attitude towards reported failures. He has yet to produce anything that backs up his $400 billion in fraud claim and when confronted with mass failures at state level has chosen to blame these on the actions of fraudsters, rather than people simply being denied access to benefits due to imperfect selfies.Another claim made by Hall has resulted in a walk-back by ID.me's CEO, prompted by increased scrutiny of his company's activities. First, the company's AI has never been tested by an outside party, which means any accuracy claims should be given some serious side-eye until it's been independently verified.But Hall also claimed the company wasn't using any existing databases to match faces, insinuating the company relied on 1:1 matching to verify someone's identity. But this couldn't possibly be true for all benefit seekers, who had never previously uploaded a photo to the company's servers, only to be rejected when ID.me claimed to not find a match.It's obvious the company was using 1:many matching, which carries with it a bigger potential for failure, as well as the inherent flaws of almost all facial recognition tech: the tendency to be less reliable when dealing with women and minorities.This increased outside scrutiny of ID.me has forced CEO Blake Hall to come clean. And it started with his own employees pointing out how continuing to maintain this line of "1-to-1" bullshit would come back to haunt the company. Internal chats obtained by CyberScoop show employees imploring Hall to be honest about the company's practices before his dishonesty caused it any more damage.

Another day, another privacy scandal that likely ends with nothing changing.Crisis Text Line, one of the nation's largest nonprofit support options for the suicidal, is in some hot water. A Politico report last week highlighted how the company has been caught collecting and monetizing the data of callers... to create and market customer service software. More specifically, Crisis Text Line says it "anonymizes" some user and interaction data (ranging from the frequency certain words are used, to the type of distress users are experiencing) and sells it to a for-profit partner named Loris.ai. Crisis Text Line has a minority stake in Loris.ai, and gets a cut of their revenues in exchange.As we've seen in countless privacy scandals before this one, the idea that this data is "anonymized" is once again held up as some kind of get out of jail free card:

Breathalyzers are like drug dogs and field tests: they are considered infallible right up until they're challenged in court. Once challenged, the evidence seems to indicate all of the above are basically coin tosses the government always claims to win. Good enough for a search or an arrest when only examined by an interested outsider who's been subjected to warrantless searches and possibly bogus criminal charges. But when the evidentiary standard is a little more rigorous than roadside stops, probable cause assertions seem to start falling apart.Drug dogs are only as good as their handlers. They perform probable cause tricks in exchange for praise and treats. Field drug tests turn bird poop and donut crumbs into probable cause with a little roadside swirling of $2-worth of chemicals. And breathalyzers turn regular driving into impaired driving with devices that see little in the way of calibration or routine maintenance.Courts have seldom felt compelled to argue against law enforcement expertise and training, even when said expertise/training relies on devices never calibrated or maintained, even when said devices are capable of depriving people of their freedom.Once every so often courts take notice of the weak assertions of probable cause -- ones almost entirely supported by cop tools that remain untested and unproven. Late last year, a state judge issued an order forbidding the use of breathalyzer results as evidence in impaired driving prosecutions. District court judge Robert Brennan said he had numerous concerns about the accuracy of the tests, and the oversight of testing, and the testing of test equipment by the Massachusetts Office of Alcohol Testing.

Back in 2020, we had a post explaining that Section 230 isn't why Omegle has awful content, and getting rid of Section 230 wouldn't change that. Omegle, if you don't know, is a service that matches people, randomly, into video chats. It's basically the same thing as Chatroulette, which got super famous for a very brief period of time years ago. Both services are somewhat infamous for the unfortunately high likelihood of randomly ending up in a "chat" with some awful dude masturbating on the other side of the screen. But, still, there are a lot of people who like using it just for random chats. I have friends who are entertainers who like to use it to test out material on random people. It has a purpose. But, sure there are some awful people on the site, like many sites. And, content moderation of live video chat is quite a challenge.For reasons I don't quite understand, some people blame Section 230 for the bad people on Omegle, and there have been a few recent lawsuits that try to get around Section 230 and still hold Omegle liable for the fact that bad people use the site. As others have explained in great detail, if these lawsuits succeed, they would do tremendous harm to online speech. We've discussed all the reasons why in the past -- but pinning liability on an intermediary for speech of its users is the best way to stifle all sorts of important speech online.So, it's good news to see that one of the first such cases against Omegle was recently dismissed on Section 230 grounds -- and rather easily at that (story first noted by Eric Goldman). The case involved a situation which is, quite clearly, terrible. It involved what's apparently known as "a capper." As explained in the ruling:

The latest disturbing revelation about Israeli malware merchant NSO Group is a bit delayed. NSO has claimed its malware can't be used to target American phone numbers which, even if true, hasn't stopped the malware from targeting Americans.But two years before NSO's malware malfeasance made headlines around the world, the company was inside the United States, demonstrating its products for federal law enforcement. The latest revelations come via Roman Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, writing for the New York Times.

I know that people who identify tribally as Democrats or Republicans often like to accuse the other team of being especially censorial, but the unfortunate fact is that elected officials in both parties seem equally interested in using the power of the state to take away 1st Amendment rights. For every misguided effort by Florida, Texas, or Georgia to attack the 1st Amendment rights of websites, we see a Colorado or New York going in the other direction.For every Republican bill in Congress demanding censorship of some types of content, you have Democrats seeking to censor other kinds of content. You can argue that the reasons behind one side's wish to censor is more pure than the other side's, but that's not how the 1st Amendment works -- and anyone who doesn't realize how any of these laws would be easily (and widely) abused by the other side has not paid any attention to the history of how speech suppressive laws work.Entering into this fray, we have Washington state Governor Jay Inslee, who, at the beginning of the year, announced plans for a law to criminalize "false speech" about elections.

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A report published by Google's transparency team last August made it clear reverse warrants weren't a law enforcement fad, but rather a trend. Google is the recipient of pretty much every so-called reverse (or geofence) warrant issued, thanks to its vast stores of location info. When cops have a crime but no likely suspect, they have the option of turning everyone with a cell phone in the area into a suspect and working their way backwards from this list of data to find the most likely suspects.Google's report showed an exponential escalation in geofence warrant deployments.

For several years the wireless industry has been hyping fifth-generation wireless (5G) as something utterly transformative. For this whole stretch we've been subjected to claims about how the wireless standard would revolutionize smart cities, transform the way we live, result in unbridled innovation, and even help us cure cancer (doctors have told me it won't actually do that, if you're interested).But in reality, when 5G arrived, it was a bit underwhelming. At least in the United States, where speeds were dramatically lower than overseas deployments due to our failure to make middle-band spectrum widely available. And at prices that remain some of the highest in the developed world thanks in large part to consistent consolidation and regulatory capture.Yeah, 5G is important. But not in any sexy way. It provides significantly faster speeds and lower latency over more reliable networks. Which is a good thing. But it's more evolution than revolution. Consumers are generally happy with 4G speeds, and most consumer surveys suggest the number one thing they want is better coverage (which U.S. 5G has struggled to provide because middle band spectrum was scarce) and price cuts.Hoping to excite consumers and regulators, wireless carriers have been desperate to come up with marketing that tries to frame 5G as utterly transformative. Usually this involves marketing that takes something you can already do over 4G or Wi-Fi, attaching 5G to it, and calling it a miracle. Like watching concerts (which you can already do) over 5G. Or getting a tattoo remotely (which you could technically already do over wired, Wi-Fi, or 4G broadband):While 5G hype had slowed a bit in the last six months, the wireless industry jumped back into the fray with a sponsored report claiming that 5G will soon dramatically aid the fight against climate change. The industry study (which was quickly picked up and parroted by loyal telecom trade magazines) insists that 5G will quickly help the U.S. meet its climate goals (which most climate experts say were already woefully undercooked):

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about the police and their hysterical messaging about the supposed on-the-job dangers of coming anywhere near fentanyl:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2017, outgoing FCC boss Tom Wheeler had a message for Trump supporters about the benefits of net neutrality, while cable's congressional allies were lining up to urge Ajit Pai to kill the cable box competition plan. Trump was muzzling federal employees and seeking to trademark "Make America Great Again". Virginia was pushing a protectionist law preventing better broadband, garnering opposition from internet companies. Meanwhile, a judge allowed the lawsuit over PACER fees to continue as a class action, Perfect 10 suffered another loss in court that set more good copyright precedent, and in unfortunate news, a state appeals court said unlocking a phone with a fingerprint doesn't violate the Fifth Amendment.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2012, many on the internet were celebrating the victory over SOPA, getting bolder in calling out the MPAA for lying and opposing Chris Dodd — while SOPA supporters were busy whining, offering fake olive branches, and making up threats. But much attention was also already turning to new issues: the Megaupload shutdown which was causing other companies to turn off useful services (and leading one astroturf group to embarrass itself with a late press release claiming SOPA was necessary to shut Megaupload down), and the ACTA agreement, which was getting the SOPA treatment in Poland with huge crowds on the street and politicians donning Guy Fawkes masks.Fifteen Years AgoIn 2007, the most controversial thing about the MPAA in the eyes of the average person was their movie rating system — and this week they finally agreed to make some small changes to it. The RIAA was telling the CEA to do the impossible and stop making them look evil, while record labels were talking up the idea of getting paid for giving consumers rights they already have. Blu-ray's DRM was cracked (even the creators admitted it) while Apple's DRM was facing legal issues in Norway. And Fox's "piracy czar" was subpoenaing YouTube to find out who was uploading episodes of 24 and The Simpsons.Also, we got an extremely important Section 230 ruling in a case against Yahoo.

As you might expect, Nike often finds itself involved in intellectual property stories. To be fair, the company has been on both sides of the IP coin. There are plenty of stories of Nike playing IP bully: the whole Satan Shoes dustup with MSCHF, its lawsuit happy practice when it comes to counterfeits, and so on. But the company has also found itself on the receiving end of IP action, sometimes very much deserved, sometimes not so much.Among the company's most guarded IP is the trademark the company has on its famous motto: JUST DO IT. Nike has gone after companies, typically during the trademark application process, whenever there is an attempt to trademark a "Just [word] it" phrase. Most of that action has centered around apparel or athletic companies. But now, a business that produces succulent plant arrangements largely advertised on TikTok has found its trademark application for "JustSuccIt" opposed by Nike.

Gaming Like It's 1926: The Public Domain Game JamBy now, you've probably heard about Gaming Like It's 1926, our fourth annual public domain game jam celebrating the new works that entered the public domain this year. The clock is ticking on the jam, but there's still time — entries are due by January 31st, which means you've got the weekend to put something together if you sign up now and get started!(If you need some ideas on how to make a game quickly, check out Story Synth, created by our partner in running these game jams, Randy Lubin.)The jam is open to both digital and analog games (be sure to read over the full requirements on the jam page). There are lots of interesting works entering the public domain this year, including:

It took nearly a year, but the Federal Reserve has finally released its report on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The report fails to live up to the Fed's hype. If anything, it shows a CBDC is a solution in search of a problem.The 40-page report contains so little information, it makes you wonder what the Fed has been working on for all this time. To be fair, the report does offer an idea of how the Fed envisions a CBDC taking shape, but their vision is a bad one. The Fed may have finally made good on its promise to deliver a report, but it has a long road ahead if it intends to deliver a CBDC.The Fed's desired approach is for a CBDC that would be "privacy-protected, intermediated, widely transferable, and identify-verified." That might sound good at first glance, but a closer look reveals that this approach is really quite unfortunate.Protecting the privacy of the American people has been one of the greatest concerns around the design of a CBDC. So it makes sense that privacy was listed first. However, at the opposite end of the list, the Fed hedges on that promise with just two words: "identity verified." Essentially, this means the Fed has abandoned the idea of crafting a CBDC that would act as a digital form of cash. It means people will need to have their identities verified before using the CBDC so that the Fed can keep a record of their transactions. Where cash offers Americans the freedom to make financial decisions in private -- a freedom that should be protected by the Fourth Amendment -- the Fed's CBDC would likely be another avenue for information collection.What's more, it's unclear what real benefits the Fed's CBDC would have for consumers. In the report, the Fed stated that a CBDC could improve the speed of payments, financial inclusion, and the dollar's international status. But those are all areas that are being fixed through other endeavors -- endeavors that will likely be completed before a CBDC reaches the market.For example, both the private and public sectors have been developing networks to speed up payments. For financial inclusion, survey data from the FDIC has found that the number of unbanked households decreases every year as technology makes banking more accessible. That rate of improvement will likely only increase as private sector initiatives to help the unbanked (e.g., BankOn) continue to get off the ground. Finally, every positive step for the dollar will improve its international status. A CBDC might help the United States keep up with the Joneses, but it's not unique in its ability to improve the dollar's status. More so, it is highly unlikely that a "CBDC" is a necessary requirement to compete on the world's stage. People are not going to flock to the Chinese yuan or the Nigerian naira simply because they've "gone digital."A CBDC may be an exciting prospect for central banks, but the Fed is going to need a much more robust set of benefits if it is going to justify experimenting with the money in people's wallets.Just before the report's release, Fed Chair Jerome Powell wrote to Senator Toomey (R-PA) saying, "One critical question is whether a CBDC would yield benefits more effectively than alternative methods." By all accounts, it seems the answer to that question is no. Both the Fed and Congress will have a long road ahead if either one intends to justify the supposed need for a CBDC to the American people.Nicholas Anthony is the Manager of the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives and a contributor with Young Voices.

WeChat is the massively dominant Chinese social media app (plus commerce, plus a lot more), but unlike other apps from China, like TikTok, it has mostly focused on the Chinese market, rather than markets overseas. Nonetheless, it has apparently huge popularity in Australia (which has a large Chinese ex-pat community). As it grew more popular, it's no surprising that Australian politicians began using the service -- even though in order to sign up for an account, you're supposed to be a Chinese citizen. Still, politicians such as Prime Minister Scott Morrison signed up for an account raising some concerns domestically -- though they were mostly dismissed by Morrision and his allies. This was true even after WeChat took down a post by Morrison that criticized a Chinese official.Of course, things got a lot more interesting when Morrison's WeChat account recently... was somehow taken over by a new account called "Australian-Chinese New Life" and locked out Morrison and his staff from using the account. The new account posted:

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has put a final bullet in the telecom industry's attempt to kill state-level net neutrality laws. The ruling (pdf) again makes it clear that the Trump FCC's 2017 repeal of net neutrality didn't follow the law when they also attempted to ban states from protecting broadband consumers in the wake of federal apathy. Basically, the courts keep making it clear the FCC can't abdicate its net neutrality and consumer protection authority under the Communications Act, then turn around and tell states what they can or can't do on consumer protection:

Having seen both Florida and Texas have their "you can't moderate!" social media laws tossed out as unconstitutional (wasting a ton of taxpayer money in the process) you might think that other state legislatures would maybe pump the brakes on trying the same thing. No such luck. There are efforts underway in a bunch of states to pass similarly unconstitutional laws, including Utah, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio (not to mention states like New York pushing in the opposite extreme of requiring moderation). The latest to enter the fray is Georgia with its Common Carrier Non-Discrimination Act, with an astounding 24 ignorant co-sponsors who apparently hate the 1st Amendment.The law is dead on arrival for a wide variety of reasons, but as you might have guessed from the name seeks to just randomly declare social media (and only social media) as "common carriers" and saying they can't "discriminate" (and by "discriminate" they mean, "take down content from Nazis.") The "declarations" on this bill are nonsense disconnected from reality.

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The military has an obvious need for secure communications. It offered its support of encryption even as the NSA tried to find ways to undercut to make its surveillance ends easier to achieve.The problem is the military doesn't have a great plan for securing communications between personnel. Due to tech limitations the Defense Department has yet to overcome (despite billions in annual funding), soldiers are turning to third-party messaging services to communicate orders and disseminate information.

While there's been no shortage of dumb and frustrating tech policy debates in recent years, one of the more positive shifts has been watching the "right to repair" movement shift from the fringe to massively mainstream. Once just the concern of pissed off farmers and nerdy tinkerers, the last two years have seen a groundswell of broader culture awareness about the perils of letting companies like Apple, John Deere, Microsoft, or Sony monopolize repair. And the dumb lengths most of these companies have gone to make repairing things you own both more difficult and way more expensive.Things shifted greatly last July when President Biden formally included some right to repair measures in a broad executive order demanding the FTC craft stricter rules targeting efforts to hamstring independent and consumer repair options. This week the president gave the subject another mainstream boost with statements before the White House Competition Council lauding right to repair (as well as a tweet):

For a while now, the EU has been working on its latest big update to internet regulations, mostly under the umbrella of the Digital Services Act (DSA). Multiple people who have been following the process there have noted how much more thoughtful the process has been for the DSA as compared to internet regulatory attempts in the US, which seem to mostly be driven by which senator thinks they can get the biggest headlines for misrepresenting which particular outrage this week. A more careful, thoughtful approach is definitely appreciated, but that doesn't mean the results will be any good. Last week, the EU Parliament approved the latest version of the DSA in what has been seen as something of a mixed bag.Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer described the final vote as having both "huge success and major setbacks." I'm actually a bit surprised that the EFF seems mostly happy with the result (with a few caveats), though that seems to mainly be because a few really bad ideas didn't make the cut. But, it still seems like an awful lot of bad ideas did make it through.The good parts are that the new DSA mostly retains the E-Commerce Directive's "conditional liability regime" and rejected a proposal that would require "general monitoring" (i.e., faulty filters to try to screen "bad stuff"). There was an attempt to go even further and ban upload filters entirely, but that was rejected. Similarly a proposal to say that courts could not require ISPs engage in full site blocking was rejected.On the good side, this version of the DSA includes a right to pay for digital services anonymously, though it rejected a limitation on requiring a court order for government's to snoop through your data. It also rejected a proposal that would require a court order to remove content -- banning the practice of enabling government agencies to order content removals. This is extremely unfortunate, and an attack on due process.There's a lot more in there that's a mix of good and bad, and the whole thing isn't truly final yet either. But, I still think that overall the DSA will have a hugely negative impact on internet freedoms and free speech, even if it got some small things at the margin right.In the end, I do think that any big "sweeping" set of internet regulations -- whether prepared thoughtfully or not -- are always going to be a disaster. They can't take into account how complex the world is, can't take into account context, and can't take into account the general dynamism of the internet -- and how quickly things change. Not only that, but just the very process of opening up such sweeping regulations that cover so much of how the internet works for users is going to get hijacked by special interests who want this or that thing included in the final regulation.Is the process more reality-based than the US's grandstand-o-rama? Sure. Will the end results be any better? Doesn't seem like it.

For three decades, the DOJ and FBI have barely tried (and always failed) to collect information about use of force by the nation's 18,000 law enforcement agencies. Despite occasional promises to be more thorough and do better, the FBI has, for the most part, done nothing with this opportunity -- one thrust upon it by a crime bill passed in 1994.The biggest problem is that submission of use of force data has always been voluntary. The Department of Justice only directly oversees the FBI. Neither entity can force local agencies to provide this data. These multiple levels of failure have led to the Government Accountability Office suggesting the national use of force database be put out of its useless misery as early as this year, rather than just be another thing tax dollars are wasted on.Local lawmakers could at least compel uniform collection and reporting of this data. They may not be able to mandate the release of this data to federal agencies, but they could at least ensure proper reporting occurs at the local level.Mandates like this are needed. But few localities have them. This sort of accountability must be forced on local agencies. Collecting information on use of force incidents and any attendant complaints or allegations of excessive force does nothing for law enforcement agencies. So, the data collections must be compelled because there's nothing innately compelling about collecting data that may show officers and agencies have unaddressed problems.The lack of accountability means any collections are hit and miss. And that data set is mostly misses. Unsurprisingly, when journalists go looking for this data in hopes of quantifying local law enforcement's generation of (and response to) citizen complaints, they come away with incomplete depictions of patterns and practices. That's the best case scenario. The worst case is journalists discovering agencies aren't compiling this data at all.What's been uncovered in Maine could likely be said about almost any other state in the Union.

At this point, posts about Nintendo getting fan-made games or content removed from the internet over IP concerns are evergreen. Nobody should be surprised by this shit any more, though you should still be either very angry about it, or at least disappointed. The company is almost a caricature of an IP maximalist company: anything and everything that even comes close to touching its IP gets thrown at the company lawyers to deal with. It's bad enough to be parodied by the general public. This is where I remind you that companies like Nintendo have a wide spectrum of avenues for responding to fanworks. Depending on the IP in question, the company could do any of the following besides going legal: let fans have their fun, issue zero-dollar or cheap licenses to fans to legitimize their work, or incorporate fanworks into official releases by either licensing or employing these fans. Plenty of other companies have taken these routes, or others, and have survived just fine. Nintendo never does this.And so, here we are again with Nintendo getting footage of an unreleased fan-game disappeared from the internet, citing copyright. In this instance, one fan made a first person shooter game in the Unreal Engine so you can go hunting Pokémon as violently as possible.

We've noted a few times that Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband service is going to have a hard time meeting expectations. One, while the service is often sold as a near-magical cure for the estimated 20-42 million Americans without broadband access, it only has the capacity to serve somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 users. Due to additional supply chain issues, only about 150,000 users have received access so far. And those who've paid the company $100 to wait in line say the company is incapable of giving them any kind of timeline of when they can expect service.Last fall, reports emerged showing how many of these users had been waiting months for any update whatsoever on the progress of their orders, and that Starlink customer service was utterly nonexistent. Nearly four months later and another report indicates that things haven't seemingly improved much. Customers who've been waiting a year for service say they've seen complete and total radio silence from the company:

Small towns strapped for cash sometimes decide to use their law enforcement agencies to generate a steadily increasing revenue stream. Towns that otherwise would never have been noticed by non-residents have achieved national notoriety by unofficially rebranding as Speed Trap, USA.Sometimes this notoriety leads to punishment by other government agencies. A small town in Oklahoma was banned from enforcing traffic laws by the state's Department of Safety after it came to light the town of 410 people was employing six police officers to haul in nearly $500,000 in fees in a single year -- 76% of the town's revenue.Another small town is generating some national press about its abusive traffic enforcement operations. Brookside, Alabama has only 1,253 residents. But it has nine police officers, two drug dogs (including one named "Cash"), a mine-resistant SWAT vehicle obtained through the Defense Department's 1033 program, and an unquenchable thirst for traffic enforcement revenue.In the last couple of years -- under Chief Mike Jones (who was hired in 2018 and was then the town's only sworn officer) -- Brookside's revenue has increased exponentially. Update: Following this controversy, Jones announced his resignation.

It's been just over 17 years since I coined the phrase "The Streisand Effect," which has totally taken on a life of its own. A key reason for naming it was to hopefully wake up overly aggressive lawyers to the fact that sending a nasty, threatening cease and desist letters to try to suppress information or stop someone from doing something wasn't a good idea. A few years later, a lawyer friend of mine mentioned that he thought that the concept of The Streisand Effect had done its job -- and that many, many corporate lawyers were much more averse to sending out such aggressive letters, recognizing that there might be a better approach. However, I still find it's pretty typical for many lawyers to immediately go for the the nasty threat letter, so it seemed like perhaps the lawyers hadn't quite gotten the message.So... it's kind of a pleasant surprise to see how at least one large company -- and possibly a bunch of large companies -- handled the recent "drop" from the merry pranksters at MSCHF (who are no strangers to legal controversies). The new drop is the C&D Grand Prix, in which MSCHF was selling racecar-style shirts emblazoned with corporate logos from some of the biggest (and most legally aggressive in protecting their trademarks) brands out there:People could buy each shirt, and then there was a special prize: anyone who bought the shirt of the "winner" of the Grand Prix would also get a MSCHF Grand Prix champion's hat. How could a company "win"? By being the first company, whose logoed shirt was for sale, to send MSCHF a cease and desist.What's funny is that we had considered a remarkably similar idea at Techdirt many years ago (though a bit more focused on highlighting some absurdities of trademark law), but decided not to do it because we don't have a giant bank account like MSCHF does.Of course, there were some big questions about how would the various companies respond, and, incredibly, none of the companies (as far as we can tell) actually freaked out about this and went ballistic. It's possible such letters are still coming. However, at least one of the companies prodded by the Grand Prix, Subway, actually took this all in good spirit. Very soon after MSCHF launched the Grand Prix, it tweeted "Two can play this game. Who's interested in this bad boy?" and posted an image of a Subway colored shirt, but with MSCHF's logo on the front:

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In the wake of a tragedy, it's human nature to seek some form of justice or closure. The feeling is that someone should be held accountable for a senseless death, even when there's no one to blame directly. This tends to result in misguided lawsuits, like the multiple suits filed by (far too opportunistic) law firms that seek to hold social media platforms accountable for the actions of mass shooters and terrorists.The desire to respond with litigation remains even when there's a single victim -- one who has taken their own life. That's the case here in this lawsuit, coming to us via Courthouse News Service. Plaintiff Tammy Rodriguez's eleven-year-old daughter committed suicide. Her daughter was allegedly a heavy user of both Snapchat and Instagram. The connection between the platforms and her daughter's suicide is alluded to and alleged, but nothing in the lawsuit [PDF] shows how either of the companies are directly responsible for the suicide.Here's how the complaint hopes to achieve these questionable ends:

In late 2020, Massachusetts lawmakers (with overwhelming public support) passed an expansion of the state's "right to repair" law. The original law was the first in the nation to be passed in 2013. The update dramatically improved it, requiring that as of this year, all new telematics-equipped vehicles be accessible via a standardized, transparent platform that allows owners and third-party repair shops to access vehicle data via a mobile device. The goal: reduce repair monopolies, and make it cheaper and easier to get your vehicle repaired.Of course major auto manufacturers didn't like this, so they set about trying to demonize the law with false claims and a $26 million ad campaign, including one ad falsely claiming the expansion would help sexual predators. Once the law passed (again, with the overwhelming support of voters) automakers sued to stop it, which has delayed its implementation. That same coalition of automakers (GM, Ford, Honda, Hyundai) are pushing new legislation that would delay implementation even further -- to 2025:

The longer we live, the more we become accustomed to cop fiction.We live and let (our rights) die when cops swear in courts they smelled jazz cigarettes while engaging in a pretextual stop. Who can challenge that? A cop says he smelled weed. The defendant says no he didn't. Who's more believable? The cop with the nose or the person accused of multiple felonies?If cops need an assist, they can always call in another witness that can't be cross-examined: a drug dog. The dog "alerted" -- something that means a breed domesticated to please did nothing more than please its handlers. Courts will, again, often grant deference to "testimony" that can't be challenged.The drug warriors of the USA are always in search of the next useful fiction -- something that can be written down on reports, delivered in statements in the press, but never objectively examined by a court of law. That new fiction involves the latest public enemy number one: fentanyl.What cops can't understand is immediately converted into a threat. Brushing aside medical and scientific expertise, cops are now claiming simply breathing the same air as fentanyl is the equivalent of a death sentence -- especially for cops serving bog standard drug warrants. Suddenly, sweeping a house during warrant service is a potential death sentence for officers, no matter how much they've outmanned and outgunned the opposition.The irrational fear of a drug that drug warriors apparently don't understand has resulted in all sorts of amazing claims by officers:

It's hard to believe that even after the huge disaster "link taxes" have been in Europe and Australia that people would push to have them in the United States, and yet here we are. This brewing bad idea has some foolish friends in Congress, who tasked the Copyright Office with doing a study on the viability of importing this nonsense into American law, and via our already over-encumbered copyright law. The Copia Institute filed a public comment as part of this study and provided testimony at a hearing in December. In both, we pointed out that a site like Techdirt is exactly the sort of small, independent media outlet such a scheme is supposed to help yet is instead exactly the sort of small, independent media outlet such a scheme most definitely would hurt.While some of its advocates insist it is not actually a "link tax" being proposed, and instead something fancier-sounding ("ancillary copyright"), the inevitable result will be equally ruinous to the very journalistic interests this scheme is ostensibly supposed to advance by destroying the very thing they all ultimately depend on: the ability to connect to audiences. It will have this effect because the whole point of this scheme is to attack the platforms and services that currently have the nerve to help them make that connection by linking to these media sites. After all, the thinking apparently goes, how dare these platforms and services deliver media outlets this valuable audience attention without paying for the privilege of getting to do them this enormous favor?The defects of this plan to essentially tax the platforms and services that provide media outlets with this critical benefit are significant. For example, it completely offends the goals and purpose of both copyright law and the First Amendment, which exist to help ensure that information and ideas can spread. It offends it by design, by deliberately creating a regulatory regime that punishes the platforms and services that facilitate this spread. It also offends the First Amendment more specifically in how it targets the expressive freedom of the platforms and services themselves to refer people to others’ expression.It is also completely at odds with its own professed goal. These platforms and services are giving media outlets everything they ever said they wanted: audience attention. Yet now these outlets would bite the hand that feeds, and for no good reason. Because even to the extent that this scheme is predicated on the idea of helping journalistic enterprises make more money, it will have the exact opposite effect. No media outlet makes money without an audience. You can’t profit from audience attention if there is no attention. And there won’t be any attention with schemes like this obstructing platforms and services from connecting media outlets and their expression to those audiences.As we’ve seen in other countries, schemes like these have starved media outlets of their audience lifeblood by effectively unlinking them from the world. It has this effect in part because it deters the platforms and services that currently drive traffic to media outlets from being in the drive-traffic-to-media-outlets business anymore by making it way too expensive to do. Sure, with a scheme like this maybe some of the big platforms (Google News, Facebook) might suck it up and pay into the system (although, given what happened in Spain and Australia, when they each at various points refused to continue to do business there in the face of these sorts of schemes, perhaps they wouldn’t). But given all the gnashing and wailing, even at this hearing, that Google and Facebook have too much power, it would make sense to make sure that there could be other platforms and service competitors to Google and Facebook. The more the big ones are resented for driving traffic to other sites the more important it is that it be possible for other platforms and services to be able to exist to do it instead.Yet that diversity in audience-facilitating services is exactly what compulsory licensing schemes like this one foreclose by inordinately exploding the cost of doing business for anyone who might want to build a platform or service capable of referring audiences to other sites. Those costs don’t just come from the money itself needed to pay into the licensing system but also the potentially massive compliance costs associated with not running afoul of such a scheme’s inevitably technical rules and also any defense costs involved with trying to avoid costly liability should someone accuse the service of not complying with those rules quite right. (As we wrote in our comment, the compulsory licensing system for music webcasters illustrates how hugely and deterrently expensive the costs of complying with a compulsory licensing systems like this proposed one can be.)And deterring these platforms and services it isn’t going to do anything to make online journalism more profitable. For one thing, it in no way targets any of the reasons why it may not be profitable, to the extent that’s even the case. After all, if distant corporate owners would prefer to starve local newsrooms in favor of skimming off profits, that’s not a failure of copyright law that’s causing the decline of local news. It’s not even a failure of any particular journalistic profit model.But to the extent that the news business is legitimately under strain, schemes like these don't alleviate that strain because it was not the absence of this sort of ancillary right that caused any of the underlying problems in the first place. More likely culprits hurting the news business are things such as media consolidation, corporate governance models that emphasize quick profits over good journalism, advertising models that are offensive to user privacy, poor site design that doesn’t retain readers' attention, and even paywalls and terrible site design that deliberately repel readership. It would make a lot more sense to correct these actual issues, or at least leave everyone free to innovate better monetization models if they are what’s needed for media outlets to flourish as the economically sustainable entities we want them to be. Instead a scheme like this just papers over the actual problems and by throwing more copyright at everything creates all sorts of chilling new ones that now everyone will have to cope with, no matter how contrary to their expressive or economic interests.Because it WILL hurt them. It will suppress the reach of every media outlet's expression, and with it also their ability to profit from that reach. And it will hurt them this way without delivering any economic return, probably not to anyone but especially not to the smaller, independent outlets. Compulsory licensing systems are often profoundly inequitable, directing most of the money to big incumbent players and very little to the smaller creatives in the "longtail" of the money distribution chart. (Again, see the webcasting compulsory license for an example of this dynamic.) Furthermore, to the extent that some larger media outlets may envision doing special licensing deals with the big platforms like Google and Facebook, which they think they’ll be able to strike in the extortive shadow of a scheme like this, it would still leave everyone else, especially the smaller, independent media outlets without that bargaining power, in even more trouble than they are already in now.Especially when such a scheme will meanwhile make it impossible to monetize audience attention that platforms and services are no longer legally able to freely deliver to them, unless these platforms and services spend a ton of money to comply with this scheme or be willing to risk infringement liability. By chilling these platforms and services it will destroy the Internet ecosystem these media outlets depend on to get that audience attention in the first place. And as a result it will diminish the diversity of independent journalistic voices, who will inevitably fade into unvisited obscurity. You almost couldn’t invent a better system to destroy independent media if you tried.And that is in large part because, as it became clear in the hearing, this proposed scheme ultimately has little to do with actually supporting the economics of journalism writ large. Instead what emerged from the hearing was a perverse sense of entitlement, where some news outlets were arguing that if any audience-facilitating service happened to make money from the exercise of directing audience traffic to them, then this was somehow money that they were entitled to. This scheme only makes sense as a policy designed to pick the pocket of any business that happens to provide any audience facilitating service and is clearly built on a sense of resentment that anyone else might ever in any way profit from linking to someone else's expression, even when it still provides a symbiotic benefit to the media outlet behind the expression by helping it connect to its own audience. Not content to let this generous goose continue to lay all this economic opportunity on their doorstep, advocates of this scheme would rather use regulation like this to slaughter it in the misguided effort to grab up the imagined riches it greedily thinks such a scheme would magically reveal, irrespective how foolishly destructive such efforts would actually be to everyone.

Ten years ago a coalition of strange bedfellows came together to thwart one of the most problematic pieces of legislation in tech policy history. In the process they made history, rekindled waning optimism about the health of democratic process, forged longstanding new alliances across activism, politics, academia, and industry, and redefined what's possible in the tech policy arena and the halls of Congress. Not bad for a day's work.Their motivation was SOPA/PIPA, a ham-fisted attempt to impose a draconian expansion to the nation's copyright laws that experts warned would restrict speech, stifle innovation, and curtail the growth of numerous online communities. The bill crafted an extrajudicial process with contours dictated not by experts, the public, or democratic process, but by entertainment industry lawyers. Thwarting its passage required a unique fusion of DC veterans well-versed in the machinery of Congress, academics with a vast understanding of the issues at hand, and younger activists employing fresh tactics in the fight for an open internet.The result was not only a high watermark in online activism, the lessons learned during the experience will inform coalition building and activism for decades to come. Many of the experts, industry leaders, and politicians who experienced the battle first hand were kind enough to share their thoughts on the experience. Their contributions are outlined here, in case you missed any:Mike Masnick reflected on his experience of the campaign, and discussed how the successes of the SOPA/PIPA fight can help drive optimism for future reform efforts and meaningful change.Tiffiniy Cheng discussed how the activist backlash to SOPA/PIPA not only killed the bill in 2012, the internet blackout campaign and resulting policy victory "shook Congress so profoundly that no significant copyright legislation has been introduced in the ten years since."David Segal wrote about Aaron Swartz's contributions to the SOPA/PIPA fight, and how the battle helped build the cornerstones of his organization Demand Progress.John Bergmayer celebrated the victory that was SOPA/PIPA, but made it abundantly clear there's more work that needs to be done when it comes to preserving an open internet and ensuring that creators are paid appropriately.Parker Higgins discussed how while the SOPA/PIPA campaign was a cornerstone victory, it was only one stepping stone in the context of the broader activist fight for an open internet, freedom of expression, and unfettered access to knowledge online.Babatunde Okunoye wrote about how while the SOPA/PIPA fight was an important victory in the States, there remains a parade of challenges around the world when it comes to fighting for free expression and an open internet.Yochai Benkler discussed the lessons learned from the SOPA/PIPA victory and how they can inform the ongoing fight against crony capitalism and the steady creep of global authoritarianism.Michael Petricone wrote about how the SOPA/PIPA debate helped redefine our understanding of the internet's power and usefulness, and examined how the internet--and the entertainment companies that sponsored the bill--thrived without the need for heavy-handed copyright laws.Lia Holland wrote about how years after SOPA/PIPA, the fight continues to combat exclusionary gatekeepers and monopolized control and implement interoperable, decentralized tools and technologies tailored toward the common good. Christian Dawson discussed the perils of uninformed internet policy, how the SOPA/PIPA debate redefined modern activism, and the need for broad coalitions during the policy challenges to come.Representative Zoe Lofgren detailed her unique vantage point on SOPA/PIPA from inside the halls of Congress, and the inspiration of informed collective action. Paul Geller offered his perspective on the SOPA/PIPA fight from his vantage point at Grooveshark, and how while SOPA/PIPA was an essential victory, it may have been our last chance at forging common sense regulation aimed at protecting entrepreneurs and a vibrant internet. And finally, Paul Keller took a closer look at the SOPA/PIPA fight from the European perspective, documenting how coordinated opposition to SOPA/PIPA helped inspire and galvanize opposition to the EU's equally problematic Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Again, we'd like to extend our immense appreciation to contributors of our latest roundtable, live panel participants, and Techdirt readers, and we hope these conversations have provided value to internet policymakers and everyday internet users alike.

We've talked at length about the issues surrounding automated copyright infringement "bots" and how often those bots get the primary question they're tagged with wrong. Examples of this are legion: Viacom's bot takes down a Star Trek panel discussion, all kinds of bots disrupted the DNC's livestream of its convention, and one music distributor's bot firing off DMCA notices to, well, everyone. Google itself has reported that nearly 100% of the DMCA notices it gets are just bot-generated buckshot.But Google isn't the savior here either. The company also uses automated systems for detecting copyright infringement and, at least in the case of Google Drive, those automated systems occasionally suck out loud at their job.

It's never been a secret that for all of the public claims about how Donald Trump's upcoming social network "TRUTH Social" will be for "free speech" that this was never actually the plan. We noted right up front that its terms of service appeared to be way more restrictive than all the competitors it was criticizing -- and even said it would be a violation of terms to "annoy" anyone working for the site. When Rep. Devin Nunes -- who has a long history of suing people for criticizing and mocking him (i.e., no friend of free speech) -- announced he was retiring from Congress to become CEO of Trump's social network, we noted that he'd be quick to ban people on the site.And, so it's no surprise that Fox Business is reporting that the site will have "strict" content moderation tools in place, in order to make the site "family friendly."

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A few weeks ago, we warned that Congress should not include the ridiuculously dangerous SHOP SAFE bill in the expected USICA bill. Unfortunately, Congress did not listen.On Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi released the text of the renamed America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology and Economic Strength Act of 2022 (or America COMPETES Act). This is for the bill that had already been renamed from Endless Frontiers to USICA. As we noted in our last post, the crux of the bill actually is really important -- as it attempts to build out a much better infrastructure in the US for core research and development into science and technology. If the bill were actually just about that, I might support it.But... the bill is an astounding 2912 pages long.And with nearly 3,000 pages, you would be right in assuming that the House lit this thing up like a Christmas tree full of favors for certain members of Congress. And apparently that includes Rep. Jerry Nadler, who is the main sponsor of the SHOP SAFE Act, which is included in whole -- with no changes, despite the widespread criticism -- in the bill. If you're trying to find it, it starts on page 1672 of the 2912 pages. In other words, buried almost directly in the middle. Gotta hide all the bad stuff, I guess.There are a few other bad bills included in the COMPETES Act as well, but I'm not going to go through each and every bit of nonsense in the 3000 page bill right now. But I will note that the SHOP SAFE bit is not just actively dangerous, but it undermines the rest of the bill. It does the exact opposite of what's on the tin: it will do significant damage to both innovation and competition, and basically lock in Amazon as the only place where people can sell stuff.Nadler might as well have named it the "give Amazon a monopoly" Act. I have no idea why Speaker Pelosi would agree to put this piece of garbage in this bill, other than there must be a lot of favor trading going on. As policy expert Josh Lamel noted (accurately), this bill will make life really difficult for anyone who say, uses Etsy, in order to protect some giant European luxury brands who were asking for this nonsense bill in an attempt to control the online marketplace.

Register now for TODAY's online event featuring Rep. Zoe Lofgren »From the European perspective, the revolt against SOPA that happened 10 years ago is a somewhat distant memory. During the past 10 years we have seen two more inflection points in the fight against excessive copyright enforcement: the successful fight against ACTA in 2012 that was directly inspired by the success against SOPA earlier that year and — much more recently — the fight against upload filters that unfolded between 2016 and 2019 in the context of the EU copyright reform.In this post I will trace the lineage of the struggle against excessive copyright enforcement from the revolt against SOPA all the way to the outcome of the EU copyright reform that was enacted in 2019.From SOPA to ACTAThere can be no doubt that SOPA — had it been enacted — would have had massive consequences for internet users around the globe. While formally a proposal for legislation in the US, it would have changed the operating rules for platforms that are part of the online fabric for most of the global population. Much like the rules of the DCMA and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act are underpinning copyright enforcement and content moderation around the globe, SOPA would have been applied globally.This is partially due to the fact that the platforms targeted by the proposal are primarily based in the US, but also because platforms that operate on a global scale have incentives to comply with rules that apply in sufficiently large markets, which means that regulatory regimes are often exported well beyond the jurisdictions where they have been originally enacted.Seen in this light, the successful revolt against SOPA was as much a win for internet users outside of the US as it was for users in the US. But for internet users and activists in Europe, it also provided the inspiration for their fight against ACTA — the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that was negotiated from 2007 through 2010 by the European Union, the US, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Singapore, Morocco, Japan, and South Korea.In parallel to the protests against SOPA, the EU and the individual EU member states geared up to sign the final ACTA agreement. The protests against ACTA in Europe erupted when — in an act of incredibly poor timing — the Polish government announced on the 18th of January 2012 that it would sign ACTA.This moment unleashed a series of protests that took place both online and offline — in the form of sizable demonstrations in a number of EU member states. The protests that continued throughout the spring of 2012 ultimately lead to the rejection of ACTA by the European Parliament on the 4th of July 2012, effectively killing ACTA less than half a year after SOPA had been defeated.While unfolding in different political venues, the mobilizations against SOPA/PIPA and ACTA share an important characteristic. Both were directed against measures that were extremely one-sided: Both SOPA and ACTA bundled right holder demands for stronger — or rather excessive — copyright enforcement into legislative measures that did not contain any other elements.In both cases a central element was the desire to enlist Internet Service Providers as copyright enforcers. This meant that the mobilization against these measures could rally around a very simple political demand — to stop these measures from being adopted. In both cases the widespread opposition from internet users and platforms (both commercial and non-profit) managed to build up enough political power to achieve this well defined goal.From ACTA to UploadfiltersWith ACTA and SOPA defeated, it took a while for rightholders to launch another attempt to gain additional enforcement powers. In the period between 2012 and 2015, rightholders in the EU started building a new case against online platforms and their users. Instead of targeting internet service providers which had been on the focus of the measures contained in the SOPA and ACTA proposals, this new case focussed on “user generated content” platforms, of which YouTube was the primary example.Driven largely by the music industry — but supported by organised rightholders from across the spectrum — European rightholders developed the "value gap" narrative that claimed that UGC platforms where generating value from the unauthorised upload of copyrighted content by their users that they failed to pass on to the legitimate recipients — the rightholders. To address this supposed “value gap” rightholders demanded legislative measures that would strip UGC platforms of the liability privileges that shield them from legal responsibility for content uploaded by their users.These liability limitations established by the 2001 E-Commerce directive that ensure that platforms are not liable for content uploaded by their users as long as they follow a notice and takedown procedure became the main target of the rightholder lobby which managed to convince the EU Commission to include a proposal to make large UGC platforms directly liable for any content uploaded by their users in its proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market that was unveiled in the fall of 2016.Article 13 of the Commission proposal contained language that would have required large UGC platforms to "take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers."In other words Article 13 — as proposed — would have required platforms to either conclude licensing agreements with rightholders for all content uploaded by their users — an impossible demand — or to block uploads of works identified by rightholders.Digital and civil rights advocates quickly identified the provisions in Article 13 as the most problematic aspect of the Commission's proposal for the CDSM directive and started campaigning against what — in their eyes – amounted to the introduction of mandatory upload filters in the EU.The campaign to stop upload filters and to delete Article 13 that took shape over the following two and a half years recalled many aspects of the previous fights against SOPA and ACTA. As in the revolt against SOPA, the coalition fighting to delete Article 13 included civil society advocacy groups, public interest organisations and a wide range of online platforms.Similar to the mobilization against ACTA, the coalition managed to mobilize large groups of supporters both online — more than 5 million people signed a petition against Article 13 — and offline — in early 2019 more than 200.000 people across Europe took to the streets. The tools and tactics used by the opponents of Article 13 included many of the tools first deployed in the revolt against SOPA — ranging from website blackouts to mass email and social media campaigns directly targeting the responsible law makers.But in the end the campaign to delete Article 13 failed to achieve its objective. During the final legislative showdown — the vote in the EU parliament in April 2019 — a proposal to have a separate vote on Article 13 of the directive was narrowly rejected with a margin of just five votes. As a result it never came to a yes-or-no vote on Article 13 and the European Parliament adopted the entire DSM directive including a heavily modified version of Article 13 with a clear majority.Learning from Article 13Even though it ultimately failed at achieving its objective, the campaign against Article 13 clearly showed excessive copyright enforcement measures have not lost their mobilization potential among internet users. So what was different here?The biggest difference between the campaigns against SOPA and ACTA on the one side and Article 13 on the other side is that the latter was just one measure embedded in a much bigger copyright reform package — the proposed Copyright in the Digital Single Market directive. Where SOPA and ACTA immediately stood out in their one-sidedness and were thus much easier to discredit, the DSM directive was a multi-dimensional legislative package that contained a wide variety of measures that appealed to different sets of stakeholders.In addition to Articles 13 and 11 — a new neighboring right for press publishers — which reflected demands by organized rightholders, the directive also contained proposals for new copyright exceptions benefitting libraries, educational and research institutions and a number of measures strengthening the position of individual creators vis-a-vis publishers and other intermediaries. And while Article 11 and 13 were both highly controversial, these other measures enjoyed support from lawmakers across broad parts of the political spectrum.As a result of this divide-and-conquer approach, support for the project of adopting the directive came from a diverse set of stakeholders who pushed to see "their" issues adopted. Meanwhile lawmakers (and the EU Member States) were bitterly divided between different camps supporting different elements of the directive while rejecting others. These divisions manifested themselves not along party lines but split all major political parties down the middle.In this relatively unstable political climate there never was as clear majority for abandoning the overall project of adopting the directive and so the vast EU legislative apparatus did what it has been designed to do: step by step it pursued its objective towards producing compromise between the various political groups which ultimately resulted in the adoption of the directive at the very end of the legislative term.User rights as a by-product of the fight against upload filters?While the final vote on the directive was very much perceived as an all or nothing decision — the proponents of Article 13 united under the "yes to copyright" banner while the opponents proclaimed to "save the internet" — a retrospective analysis of the adopted measures paints a very different picture.During the course of the legislative wrangling, Article 13 underwent significant changes to accommodate concerns expressed by its opponents. The Final version of Article 13 (now Article 17 after a renumbering of the provisions of the directive) is substantially different from the Commission's original proposal. And while it shares its two main elements — the removal of the general liability privilege for UGC platforms and a de-facto requirement to deploy upload filters — it has accumulated a number of substantial procedural and substantive user rights safeguards that have not been present in the original version.Even more so Article 17 has become a vehicle for harmonizing key user rights by making the previously optional exceptions for quotation, criticism, review, parody, pastiche and caricature mandatory in all EU Member States. In addition, it now imposes obligations on Member States to ensure that these rights can effectively be exercised by users of UGC platforms. All of these amount to tangible improvements for internet users in the EU (for platforms this picture is more complicated).So while the effort to prevent the mandatory imposition of upload filters has clearly failed, the collision of massive SOPA style mobilisations with the EU’s compromise focussed legislative process may have created a rather unexpected outcome: the codification of important user rights and a framework for regulating the use of automated content moderation technologies that had were already in widespread use but so far deployed purely at the discretion of the online platforms.As such, what had originally been perceived as a bitter loss breaking with the tradition of the earlier successes of the mobilisations against SOPA and ACTA, seems more and more like a win for internet users in an admittedly ugly disguise.Paul Keller is Director of Policy at Open Future and President of the COMMUNIA association for the Public Domain where he coordinated the advocacy efforts related to the new EU copyright directive.This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

We've noted for years how AT&T has this pattern in which they'll promise a massive wave of new fiber investment and jobs if they get "x" (X=merger approvals, deregulation, tax breaks, a bunch of new subsidies, whatever). Then, a few years later, somebody will realize they failed utterly to meet those obligations. This happens over and over and over and over again, and not only does AT&T never see much in the way of accountability, nobody in state or federal leadership seems to learn much of anything from the process (usually because they're, well, corrupt).We'd seen a bit of a break from this cycle the last few years as AT&T was fixated on its disastrous $200 billion Time Warner and DirecTV mergers as part of an effort to dominate online streaming and video advertising. With that effort an abject failure, AT&T has shifted back to focusing more on doing something it should have been doing all along: deploying modern generation fiber. Or at least pretending to in a practice I've long affectionately called "fiber to the press release."This week AT&T issued a press release stating it would soon be offering ultra-fast 2 Gbps ($110 per month) and 5 Gbps ($180 per month) fiber tiers to 5.2 million customer locations now, with the goal of offering the ultra-fast options to 30 million locations by 2025. Feeling growing (but very spotty) competitive pressure from community broadband fiber deployments, AT&T also announced that it will be ditching most of its caps, sneaky fees, and surcharges on these faster tiers:

The justice system may say lofty things about debts to society or rehabilitation, but when it all comes down to it, a person in jail is just something to be processed. Whatever happens to them is supposedly well-deserved. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. This catchy phrase also refers to pretrial detainees who haven't been convicted of any crimes but who simply don't have the means (or the judicial permission) to spend their pre-trial days out in the open.The grist goes in the mill and the less the government can spend doing it, the better. The ends matter. The means don't. The United States is the land of the free. Yet somehow, our incarceration rate is higher than countries where human rights supposedly matter less, like Cuba, Turkey, and Russia.Putting people in jail is easy. Cops engage in pretextual stops. Then they deploy handler-pleasing drug dogs or, worse, cheap field drug tests that frequently misidentify legal substances as illegal -- cotton candy, donut crumbs, bird feces, etc.Getting jailed doesn't change the math much. Jails rely on cheap drug tests to ensure inmates and parolees are staying clean. But they don't seem to be much more accurate than the $2 tests favored by law enforcement officers out in the field.Jailed people's freedom may have already been taken. But their return to freedom can be delayed (or denied) due to inaccurate drug tests administered by jails and prisons. The New York Inspector General investigated drug tests used by New York jails and prisons. And those tests aren't much better than the super fallible field tests used to put people behind bars. More than 1,600 prisoners were punished, with 140 sent to solitary confinement -- all based on nothing more than unverified in-prison drug tests. (h/t CJ Ciaramella)The end result of these faulty tests? Unjustified punishment and loss of freedoms for people already subject to plenty of punishment and loss of freedoms. The report [PDF] opens with a handful of representative cases:

Joe Biden entered office a year ago with a mandate to end corporate control of our government by establishing programs to benefit working families and by appointing qualified public servants to execute and oversee those programs.We anticipated all along that Mitch McConnell would resort to his usual tactics and use the Senate filibuster rules to undermine President Biden's legislative agenda. Appointments should have been a different story. Nearly a decade has passed since Senate Democrats put an end to the filibuster for executive nominations, yet Republicans, on behalf of their corporate sponsors, continue to abuse the confirmation process, preventing President Biden from fulfilling his promises to the American people. Senate Democrats should recognize these games for what they are, stop enabling the obstruction, and move forward on approving President Biden's highly qualified nominees.Take, for example, the nomination of Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission. Sohn's strong credentials include co-founding the communications policy advocacy organization Public Knowledge and serving as counselor to former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. She is known as a long-time, tireless advocate for the expansion of affordable internet access - one of the key issues on the Democrats' agenda. There is currently a vacant seat on the FCC, and without a full commission it will be difficult to advance the policies necessary to expand affordable broadband service to the millions of American families left on the wrong side of the digital divide.One person - Sen. Roger Wicker, the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation - is standing in the way.Sen. Wicker is promoting the interests of his big corporate campaign donors by preventing a pro-consumer, pro-worker majority at the Federal Communications Commission. Ever since Gigi Sohn was nominated, he has come up with bogus reasons to delay her confirmation vote. During her confirmation hearing she answered questions for hours. She provided reams of written materials and followed up with answers to additional questions. Six weeks later, Wicker asked for yet more documents and suddenly announced that the committee needed to hold yet another confirmation hearing.Why did he not request such documents in a timely manner? Why did he not submit written questions for the record, standard practice for the committee? Why did he not accept the conclusions of government lawyers who carefully reviewed the very documents he claims to now seek? Because it's not about getting answers. It's about standing in the way of a highly qualified nominee simply because he doesn't like the outcome of the last Presidential election. Sen. Wicker wants an FCC majority that puts corporate profits first, not one that considers what is best for consumers and workers in the industry and that listens to the majority of Americans - Republican and Democrat - who support net neutrality and universal broadband access.Make no mistake. This is yet another Republican attempt to undermine our democratic system and the functioning of the federal government. They might not be scaling the Capitol walls, wearing face paint, threatening to hang elected officials who don't kowtow to their demands, and publicly parading confederate flags in the halls of the Capitol, but Senate Republicans are trying to undermine the 2020 election results by playing every game possible to prevent a duly elected Administration from having qualified nominees serving on federal agencies. We have seen time and time again that Republicans will use every trick in the book to prevent oversight of their powerful corporate benefactors.Unfortunately, after the vote last week by the U.S. Senate, Republican obstructionists will continue to be able to use the legislative filibuster to block critical legislation that will improve the lives of millions of working Americans. But my union helped lead the successful effort during the Obama Administration to eliminate their ability to filibuster qualified and critical nominees so that the federal government can function on behalf of the American people.That is why Senate Democrats must not give in to these outrageous and egregious efforts to draw out the already long confirmation process for qualified nominees like Gigi Sohn. They must recognize these games for what they are and reject the never ending requests for even more hearings when they have had ample time to ask their questions. Senate Democrats must move forward expeditiously to approve Gigi Sohn and President Biden's other highly qualified nominees.Christopher M. Shelton is President of the Communications Workers of America (CWA)

The unexpected rebranding of Facebook's holding company as "Meta" has prompted a good deal of head scratching. Was it because Mark Zuckerberg is now a true believer in the metaverse religion, as the rather cringe-worthy video released at the time of the name change is meant to suggest? Was it perhaps an attempt to change the conversation in the wake of the damning testimony and leaks of Frances Haugen? Or maybe it was just a desperate bid to find a way of attracting younger users now that Facebook is increasingly an old person's social network, as the New York Times pointed out recently:

As you've probably seen, for the last couple of weeks we've been running our Techdirt Greenhouse series of posts looking back on the fight against SOPA from those who were there at the time, including one this morning from from Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who was a key player in Congress stopping SOPA. Tomorrow at 1pm PT / 4pm ET, we'll be having Rep. Lofgren join us for a "fireside chat" looking back at what happened with SOPA a decade ago, but more importantly looking at what's happening today with internet regulations and where things are likely to go. If you want to attend live, please register to sign up. Like many of our recent events, we're using the Remo platform, which has the feeling of an actual in-person event, even while it's virtual. You'll be able to talk to other people at your "table" as well as move around to other tables to talk to other attendees as well. During the talk with Lofgren, you'll be able to submit your own questions as well. So please join us tomorrow...

Register now for our online event featuring Rep. Zoe Lofgren »In 2010 I was in a leadership role on the data science team at Grooveshark.com. These were the pre-Spotify days, and we were trying to transition customers away from elicit downloads to music streaming. Using the YouTube user-generated content model made a lot of sense. We theorized that if YouTube could democratize the distribution of video, allowing creators from all over the world to distribute their art on a speedy, frictionless platform, it only made sense that we could do the same for music.On the information products team, our goal was twofold. First, we aimed to discover trending, unknown artists worldwide and serve them up to record labels hungry for new talent.The second goal was to act as a connector between bands and brands so that artists and labels losing revenue could develop a brand-new channel for monetization. Eventually, we would be able to create affinity profiles on consumers across the globe. That’s something we bragged about back then. Now there’s a bit of shame associated with that type of information collection and rightly so.While indies were quick to license Grooveshark, major labels did not want to give up their gatekeeper status. We signed deals where we could and took down unlicensed music when notified, frequently beating YouTube’s response time. The majors didn’t want the royalties. They wanted to make sure that any artist with a new or innovative sound had to come up through their farm league.Lawsuits weren’t new to Grooveshark. We’d been sued a handful of times in state or federal courts. Often, they were disposed of in summary judgments or settled, turning into the licensing deals that we had been asking for all along.But in November of 2011, Universal Music Group, along with Sony, Warner, and nine other labels, filed a lawsuit against the company and the employees themselves, including me and two junior employees. Generally, employees, especially non-founder, non-participating employees like us, would never be liable for the actions of their employer.Still, because this was copyright infringement, the majors tried to pierce the corporate veil. They accused us of a combined $17 billion worth of copyright infringement. If found liable, I would have been on the hook for some $900 million that could not be discharged in bankruptcy and would be garnished from my earnings for the rest of my life.It was a transparent attempt at intimidating new employees and discouraging prospective employees from accepting a job at Grooveshark or any other fledgling tech company hoping to innovate in the music space. The majors had successfully shut down some 20+ startups before us, but we were well funded, growing quickly, and loved by our 20+ million users. Under the leadership of founders Sam Tarantino and the late Josh Greenberg, Grooveshark had survived every attempt previously made.I remain convinced that I was a party to that lawsuit for one reason and one reason only: I was going to be called as a witness in the House IP subcommittee's second “Sites & Parasites” hearing. I would have testified to the evidence that major labels were feeding erroneous information to DMCA takedown systems and using the court system to structure settlements that would line label coffers but whose proceeds would never make their way to the artists.Thus, they prioritized lawsuits over licensing deals. Knowing that no lawyer worth their weight in salt would volunteer a client for a testimony who is a party to a suit like that, I was served just as we negotiated my appearance before the committee.In the “Sites & Parasites” hearings, representatives from legacy media angled to pass the conveniently titled Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate sister bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). These bills would have given them a virtual veto on any tech platform that allowed users to upload their own content.Speeches, news articles, music, video, and even user comment sections were well within the boundaries of this legislation. The legacy content industries believed that this was their chance to constrain the Internet. So, they fought like it was existential. For Grooveshark, it was existential. Had the legislation been enacted, Grooveshark would have ceased to exist immediately.Though we were early into the fray, Grooveshark was only a minor player in the organizing efforts. The RIAA and MPAA were eventually thwarted when Internet creators, activists, and users alike organized to defend themselves, voluntarily blacking out some of the most significant websites on the Internet, and sending so many emails to congressional accounts that it resulted in the first email server outage in congressional history.Soon after that, SOPA and PIPA were shelved, Spotify sold a portion of itself to the major labels, and we entered a period of detente.Though it took two more years, that lawsuit did end up taking Grooveshark down. $150,000 per month in legal bills will bleed a startup dry, and having big enemies doesn’t inspire the fundraising they’d need to keep the venture growing. I resigned from my position in 2012, and the case against me was settled shortly after.Some may argue that this was the preferable outcome. Major labels now embrace streaming. For better or worse, they participate in the profits of artist merchandise sales, live performance, and other exotic licensing opportunities. I’ve harbored a decade-long resentment against Spotify, but even I can’t argue with the amount of access to new and diverse music that my subscription delivers.As I look back on all the startups that were cut down, the capital squandered, and the artists whose window for global exposure narrowed to just a handful of labels again, I find myself wondering: what did we accomplish in killing SOPA and PIPA?We thwarted a bill that would have resulted in the most powerful legacy industries on the planet securing a veto on any new web 2.0 technology. We made the Internet safe for entrepreneurs. We protected the innovation sandbox that was the safe harbors, and we helped create hundreds of billions of dollars in new business opportunities and the jobs that went along with them.We ensured that the Internet would remain a haven for free speech, popular or not, for another generation.Still, I can’t help myself from wondering: could we have created a system that allowed for sensible regulation, thus pre-empting the maleficence of today’s internet behemoths? Was that our chance? Was that even within the deal space?The negotiators from tech were not organized for a fight such as the one brought to their doorstep in 2010. You can draw a straight line from SOPA to the well-armed giants of tech now, thwarting regulation of any kind, sensible or not. That was their wake up call, and wake up they did.Now the Internet companies are the monied gatekeepers and we are further away from sensible regulation than ever before. Recent disclosures from Facebook insiders suggest that polarizing the body politic is not just about clicks. It’s also a legislative strategy. The more polarized our legislative bodies, the less likely they will be to agree on any reform. Still, if I have to choose a side again today, I would not choose the side of censorship.The Internet remains our best weapon in the fight against tyranny and the suppression of ideas. When they ban books in Texas schools, enterprising students will find them online. When they close polling locations in under-represented neighborhoods, the Internet will organize carpools. When governments silence public figures and force them into hiding for exposing high-ranking officials, the Internet will carry her message across the globe.The Internet does not solve any of these problems. It is merely a tool. Each of us decides if we will use it to divide or unite. Though there may be a price to pay for free speech, the price is far greater if forced to go without it.Paul Geller is the founder of ChannelshiftThis Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

Everything old is new again. New and still abusable. Thomas Brewster reports for Forbes that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is taking advantage of a nearly 40-year-old law to obtain information about WhatsApp users.