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India's Information Technology Act has been problematic since its inception. Almost a decade ago, it was deployed to justify the arrest of an Indian citizen who'd done nothing more than criticize a politician, insinuating the politician had used his position to amass personal wealth.Once the politician complained, the government ignored available libel law, which would have resulted in a civil case and opted to use a clause of the IT Act which allowed prosecution for "sending an email or other electronic message that causes annoyance or inconvenience." That's how the law was used in 2012.The 2021 version of the law is much more dangerous. Folding into the act passed in 2000 are new rules about national security. This escalates the Act's abusability, since nearly anything can be called a threat to national security and drastically limits the defenses those targeted by this part of the act can raise.Added into this revision are new mandates for social media companies, which allows the government to hold companies responsible for content created by their users. There's a long list of forbidden content that starts with child sexual abuse material and terroristic content and ends with things like "promoting tobacco use," "blasphemy," and "harms minors in any way."It is those changes that have resulted in the banning of 20 supposedly "anti-India" YouTube channels.

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Senator Amy Klobuchar really is taking to her role as the Senator most eager to set up a Ministry of Truth in the government. Klobuchar has always been terrible on tech/internet issues, but she's really taken it to a new level in the past year or so. Over the summer, she released a blatantly unconstitutional bill that literally would empower the Director of Health & Human Services to declare what counts as health misinformation and make social media websites liable for it (imagine how that would have played out under a Trump administration -- because Klobuchar apparently can't remember that far back).Last week, she sent a ridiculous letter to Mark Zuckerberg demanding he explain Facebook Meta's handling of misinformation regarding the election. A dozen other Senators -- including many who have unfortunately long histories grandstanding against the internet -- signed on to the letter as well.

For years the broadband industry has successfully convinced the U.S. government to remain fixated exclusively on broadband coverage gaps, not the overall lack of broadband competition. That's in part because they've known for decades that substandard maps mean policymakers have never really known which areas lack or need access. That's helped create an ecosystem where we throw billions upon billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies at regional monopolies every year, in exchange for broadband networks that are routinely half-completed.With a record $42 billion broadband investment on the horizon, the industry is obviously worried that some of that money might go toward (gasp) added competition. As in, not just used to expand access to the estimated 20-40 million Americans without broadband, but funding to help bring new competitors to the estimated 83 million Americans living under a broadband monopoly. That regional monopolization, as we've long documented, is why U.S. broadband tends to be expensive, spotty, slow, and with terrible customer service.Of course you can't just come out and acknowledge you don't want money going toward encouraging broadband competition, even though more competition would greatly benefit consumers, small businesses, and countless internet-based economies. So instead the industry's biggest players (and the politicians and regulators paid to love them) like to complain about "overbuilding," or the act of creating "duplicative" broadband networks in "already served" areas. This is generally framed in such as a way as to make it sound as if broadband in most parts of the country is already wonderful, and spending any money to expand access in these "already served" areas would be completely wasteful.That rhetoric and language was quick to pop up in a House Republican letter sent to the two agencies overseeing fund distribution: the NTIA (pdf) and FCC (pdf). In the letters, lawmakers profess they're just super duper worried about the potential for waste:

In early 2019, a whistleblower revealed some ugliness emanating from the United Arab Emirates: former NSA analysts working for a private company hired to perform counterterrorism work for the government were spying on journalists, activists, and the occasional American citizen on behalf of their royal benefactors.Why these analysts were working for known human rights abusers was unclear. Why they decided this work should involve targeting people who weren't terrorists, but rather critics of the UAE government, was similarly left unexplained. The program was called Project Raven and former employee Lori Stroud was the only person involved willing to speak publicly about its activities. Everyone else -- from the NSA to the UAE government -- refused to comment.More than two years later, the harms perpetrated by these former analysts were given a price tag. Three former US intelligence community analysts (two of which worked for the NSA) were fined $1.68 million for utilizing powerful hacking tools to target dissidents, activists, journalists, and the occasional American citizen for the UAE government. The tools used included "Karma," which was capable of remotely compromising targets' phones without any interaction from phone owners, allowing for wholesale collection of photos, emails, text messages and location information.Over the years covered in the indictment (which resulted in the fines mentioned above), the analysts began with Project Raven, which migrated from Cyberpoint (a company associated with Italy's infamous Hacking Team), before finally ending up as a wholly-UAE-owned company called Darkmatter.It's this company that's now being sued by one of its targets, a Saudi activist represented by the EFF.

Horizon Worlds is a VR (virtual reality) social space and world building game created by Facebook. In early December, a beta tester wrote about being virtually groped by another Horizon Worlds user. A few weeks later, The Verge and other outlets published stories about the incident. However, their coverage omits key details from the victim’s account. As a result, it presents the assault as a failure of user operated moderation tools rather than the limits of top-down moderation. Nevertheless, this VR groping illustrates the difficulty of moderating VR, and the enduring value of tools that let users solve problems for themselves.The user explains that they reported and blocked the groper, and a Facebook “guide”, an experienced user trained and certified by Facebook, failed to intervene. They write, “I think what made it worse, was even after I reported, and eventually blocked the assaulter, the guide in the plaza did and said nothing.” In the interest of transparency, I have republished the beta user’s post in full, sans identifying information, here;

It's becoming quite a theme: basically every industry is blaming the internet for anything wrong happening in their industry and the legacy media is more than willing to help out. The latest is the supposed "surge" in shoplifting and retail crime. You've probably seen the stories, and maybe the shaky video coverage of the big smash and grab runs at some big San Francisco stores. This is being leveraged by those retailers in a variety of ways, including in a push to roll back policing reforms, but also to attack the internet. We've talked about the problems of the INFORM Act, which is being pushed heavily by large retailers. If you read that letter (sent to Congressional leaders by a bunch of big retailers), it uses those stories of theft to say we need to pass new regulations about internet sales:

To be subservient to the Chinese government is to be in a constant state of (mandated) denial. The government has a narrative to project. No, that's not an accurate depiction. The state has a narrative to enforce.An obscene amount of oppression and death is apparently nothing to be ashamed of. And how could the government be ashamed of it? It never happened. Whatever violence Chinese citizens saw perpetrated against them was merely the actions of a heroic and patriotic government, inflicting death and misery for the greater good. Of course, the only beneficiaries of this "greater good" are those inflicting death and misery. Hence the friction between fact and government fiction.To make things easier for the people who serve the government (rather than the other way around), the Chinese government has spent years trying to eliminate the friction. Having a singular narrative may not fool people, but it at least gives them an official timeline to follow, which makes it easier to maintain "citizen scores" and stay off the radar of a government more interested in curbing thoughtcrime than actual crime.The Chinese government's steady incursion into the day-to-day activities of Hong Kong residents has been greeted with heated, sustained protests from residents of the region, as well as international condemnation. Neither of these reactions have slowed the Chinese government's roll. Neither has its tacit agreement with the British government to leave Hong Kong unmolested until 2049. Since 1999, the Chinese government has inflicted its will on the extremely profitable region, stripping it of the democracy and independence that allowed it to flourish.When regular laws just weren't effective enough in shutting down Hong Kong protests, the Chinese government introduced a new national security law. With this vague and easily abused justification for crushing dissent, the Chinese government made resistance untenable by threatening protesters and critics with life sentences for daring to challenge the narrative.Then it began erasing history. The Chinese government had already cleared the slate in China, eliminating its past misdeeds by rewriting textbooks, jailing dissenters, and creating an insular web overseen by multitudinous censors. Then it came for Hong Kong, using its "national security" pretext to jail journalists, target documentarians, and prevent artistic works challenging the official narrative from being displayed.Now, it has come for the last physical remnants of its checkered past. Erasure is here if you want it. If you have no monument to atrocities, did the atrocities even happen?

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We've noted for years how U.S. telecom giants aren't particularly competent when it comes to wandering outside of their core competencies (building and running networks, lobbying the government to hamstring competitors). As government pampered regional monopolies who haven't had to try particularly hard for decades, stuff like competition, innovation, adaptation, and creativity are often alien constructs.It routinely shows in the failed products they try to launch: mobile payment platforms that share names with terrorist organizations; Millennial-targeting streaming video platforms nobody actually wanted to watch; news websites that aren't allowed to write about the news; "me too" apps, app stores, and other products that can't compete.AT&T in particular has showcased telecom's knack for face plants with its $200 billion acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, which was supposed to cement the telecom's place as an advertising and mobile media giant. Instead, the company somehow managed to lose millions of subscribers while laying off tens of thousands of employees, despite receiving no shortage of regulatory favors and tax breaks to make it easier to succeed.After recently spinning off the entire media fiasco, AT&T's now jumping ship from its ad ambitions as well as it tries to recover from the massive debt load creating by its megamerger fiasco. The company last week quietly announced it would be selling Xandr, its programmatic advertising marketplace, to Microsoft:

It's always fun to watch each new entrant into the social media market that rushes in claiming that it is the "true" supporter of "free speech" learn about the necessity of some level of content moderation. We watched it happen with Parler, the site set up by Trump benefactor Rebekah Mercer. And now we're watching it happen with former Trump spokesperson Jason Miller -- who is so supportive of "free speech" that he once sued a news org for reporting on something he didn't want public (he lost badly and was told to pay legal fees). GETTR has already had some fun learning that content moderation is necessary (and not a necessary "evil" -- just necessary). But now it's gone up a level.Of course, it was just a month ago that Miller was running his mouth, attacking Twitter and claiming that Jack Dorsey was "strangling free expression" at Twitter and "censoring opinions he doesn't like."So it seems noteworthy that just a few weeks later, it's Miller who is... doing the same thing. Specifically, GETTR banned Nick Fuentes, a pathetic wannabe neo-Nazi, who seems to spend all of his time just trying to troll people into being mad about what a sad little white nationalist he is. GETTR claimed that Fuentes violated its terms of service which, um, is the same thing that Twitter does when it bans people because that's how it works.But then GETTR went even further -- including much further than anything I've seen Twitter ever do. It started banning a word associated with Fuentes and his followers: "groyper." It's not worth getting into the history of groyper, but suffice it to say, it started as an alternative to the old alt-right co-opting of the Pepe the frog cartoon, and then just became a truly pathetic chant that Fuentes' followers chant as a sort of talisman to make sure they ward off anyone with more than a dozen brain cells. Anyway, Fuentes' little band of misfit children started filling up GETTR with "groyper spam" to protest the ban of Fuentes, and so Miller and GETTR just... decide to ban the word "groyper" from the site entirely. As the Daily Beast discovered, it's just not allowed at all.Say what you want about Twitter "strangling free expression" but I don't recall the company ever blocking your ability to post a single word in an effort to stop a bunch of sad edgelord teenagers from overflowing the site with protest spam. And, of course, as anyone with more than a little bit of experience in the content moderation space knows, doing simple word filter bans is not just silly, but also totally ineffective, as Arizona's dumber-than-you-can-believe State Senator Wendy Rogers highlighted with the addition of a few "o's":The key point here is that every website needs some level of content moderation or it becomes a total and complete cesspool that is basically unusable. Every website realizes that eventually. The idea that GETTR is any more "supportive of free speech" is nonsense. It just has a different set of rules that it will enforce somewhat arbitrarily, and it will make mistakes just as Twitter, Facebook, and other sites make mistakes. Of course, as a marketing tool, GETTR will continue to lie and claim that it is somehow uniquely more supportive of free speech, when that's all a bunch of nonsense.

In a spectacular bit of self-ownership, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) took to Facebook to brag about stealing money from a person at Love Field Airport.If you can't read the text or see the picture, it's a photograph of a Dallas PD drug dog standing next to several piles of money. The caption, written by the DPD, says:

Racism and policing go hand-in-hand. It's been this way ever since police forces were created for the purpose of tracking down escaped slaves and returning them to their owners. Flash forward 150 years and very little has changed other than the ending of slavery.Unsurprisingly, the advent of social media platforms and the increase in smartphone use has exposed the racism that still flows through far too many law enforcement agencies. Multiple investigations have been triggered by the exposure of bigoted communications between officers. It hasn't exactly resulted in a nationwide reckoning for racist officers, but it has at least seen a few bad apples tossed from barrels across the country.If cops aren't worried about what happens to them -- as is evidenced by their carefree deployment of casual racism -- it's doubtful they're too worried about what happens to the general public. They claim to be the thin blue line standing between us and criminal chaos, but their racist words are erasing that line, allowing criminal suspects to return to the streets.The Torrance Police Department in California is the epicenter of the latest garbage racist cop shitstorm. And rightfully so, given what's been uncovered there. Convictions and pending criminal cases are now in jeopardy because of officers texting each other things like this:

Don't kid yourselves, techbros. Predictive policing is regular policing, only with confirmation bias built in. The only question for citizens is whether or not they want to pay tech companies millions to give them the same racist policing they've been dealing with since policing began.Gizmodo (working with The Markup) was able to access predictive policing data stored on an unsecured server. The data they obtained reinforces everything that's been reported about this form of "smarter" policing, confirming its utility as a law enforcement echo chamber that allows cops to harass more minorities because that's always what they've done in the past.

We've long written about how you don't really own what you buy in the modern era. Books, games, and other entertainment can stop working on a dime due to crappy DRM. Game consoles you've purchased can find themselves suddenly with fewer features. Or worse, hardware you've bought thinking you'd own it for a decade can wind up being little more than a pricey paperweight.But quite often, products that should work for years just slowly stop being supported, leaving you with hardware that gradually becomes less and less useful. We saw this recently when Sonos initially bricked still working (and expensive) speakers. The phenomenon popped up again this week when Google announced that its OnHub router, launched back in 2015, will no longer be supported starting next year. The products will still technically function as a basic router, but they'll no longer see security updates, and many of the cloud-based functionality and advanced features will be stripped from the devices.To be clear this isn't an end of the world type of scandal. Google's providing 40% discounts to OnHub owners off of new Google routers (which will experience the same fate in a few years). The Hub also had some initial performance problems, and was quickly supplanted in Google's lineup by its Google WiFi (now Nest) products a year after they launched. But the downgrades are still part of an annoying shift in which companies hype all manner of cloud-based functionality at launch, then gradually strip functionality away once they no longer want to pay to support their own products:

Sometimes tough questions about rights have to be asked even when central figures are far from sympathetic. Good case law is sometimes made by bad people (or, at least, people accused of doing terrible things).But the questions must be asked. That's what the courts are for. They're a check against government overreach. And this case, coming via the Volokh Conspiracy, involves a defendant who's unlikely to gain much mainstream support.Jonathon Shroyer is a talk show host who works for Infowars. He's also -- according to the DOJ -- one of thousands who raided the Capitol building last January. Technically, he's a journalist, given that he collects information and reports it on his Infowars show. He may not be a journalist in the traditional sense, but there are many people who perform "non-traditional" journalism, even if they haven't hitched their wagon to an entity mostly known for pushing outrageous conspiracy theories.Shroyer joined other Infowars figures in a demonstration on January 6th, calling for the election to be overturned. Then he went further. This is from the magistrate's order [PDF] asking the DOJ to explain itself:

This is so bizarre. Last month we wrote about how the incredibly hypocritical oafs at Project Veritas were, on the one hand, screaming about their own press freedoms (for potentially legitimate reasons) while simultaneously trying to get a prior restraint order against the NY Times using the famed press silencers at the censorial thuggish law firm Clare Locke. Somewhat incredibly, on Christmas Eve a New York Supreme Court judge granted the request.At issue is that the NY Times apparently got access to some memos that Project Veritas's lawyer had sent to Project Veritas, apparently about how Project Veritas' brand of secret filming and selectively edited "journalism" might violate various laws. PV ran to court to stop the Times from publishing anything from the documents, and got a ridiculously broad order that could be read to say that the NY Times couldn't even continue reporting on PV. Incredibly, Project Veritas, whose entire genre of "reporting" revolves around obtaining information through deceit, claimed that the NY Times could be stopped under a law that allows for the "suppression of information improperly obtained." Can't see how that might come back to bite PV, now.The NY Times rightly pointed out that this order was clearly prior restraint and unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. The complicating factor here is that the censorial hypocrites at PV are suing the NY Times for alleged defamation, and claim that the information obtained by the NY Times reporters "relates directly" to the case at hand. The Times, on the other hand, pointed out that the information in the memos they obtained "have nothing to do with the subject matter in the underlying defamation action" and actually predate the PV video at issue in that case. More importantly, the NY Times noted (correctly!) that a news organization cannot be prevented from reporting on newsworthy info, even if that information is attorney-client privileged info, so long as they came by it via the news gathering process (i.e., not via discovery and the legal process in the lawsuit).And, here, it's impossible that the documents were obtained via discovery because discovery hasn't even happened yet in the lawsuit.But the judge, Charles Wood, says that Project Veritas "has met is burden of showing the subject memoranda were obtained by irregular means, if not both irregular and improper." The judge goes on a long digression about the importance of attorney-client privilege, but seems to totally miss the fact that it only matters with regards to being able to deny certain discovery requests, and that a third party news organization is simply not bound by the attorney-client privilege of a lawyer and a client if the material is obtained through their reporting.The court then addresses the 1st Amendment issues here... by basically brushing them off and saying it's no big deal. It goes through a long discussion on prior restraint and how the Supreme Court has rejected attempts at prior restraint in the past, but then seems to think that attorney-client privilege trumps that. It's bizarre. Even more bizarre is a weird aside about how our smart phones "beep and buzz" with information the judge believes is unimportant.

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Hey The North Face! Hi, how are you? We keep meeting like this and I really wish it would stop. As you may recall, last month, the "brand protection" company that you hired, Yellow Brand Protection, currently owned by Corsearch, sent us a completely bogus legal threat claiming that our news story from nine years earlier -- about someone you threatened for creating a parody image of a patch (not an actual patch and not for sale) saying "Hey Fuck Face" -- was somehow infringing.I realize this can get confusing, so let me spell that out for you again more clearly. Nine years ago, someone Photoshopped a fake patch parodying The North Face logo, with one that said "Hey Fuck Face." They posted it to Flickr. You guys lost your shit and filed a bogus takedown notice on this obvious parody that was not being used in commerce in anyway. But, much worse, nine years later, you had your "brand protection" company send us -- a news organization -- an even more bogus takedown for our reporting on it.That story got a bit of attention, and you had an executive reach out to me and admit that this "is obviously such a ridiculous mistake" and that you were "trying to figure out what happened." You also said you were "digging into it" and thought maybe someone had just "hit the wrong button." Your exec was very nice about it and apologized for the inconvenience and said that you'd use this as a learning experience to "course correct."I appreciated that.So... what I don't appreciate is that after all of that, Yellow Brand Protection/Corsearch apparently decided to escalate this matter a month after all of this went down. I assumed that after you realized how "ridiculous" this was and moved to "course correct" that at some point you informed Yellow Brand Protection to knock it off. Either you did not, or you don't yet realize just how much money you're wasting with them. Because on December 17th (again, a month after I thought this was all sorted out) Corsearch's "Vice President of Enforcement," Joseph Cherayath (who used to do internet enforcement for the City of London police, infamous for their completely confused and incorrect approach to intellectual property enforcement) upgraded the threat, sending a takedown demand not to us -- but to our CDN provider, Cloudflare.This now gets slightly more serious, because Cloudflare passes it on to our hosting company, who then demands that we do something about this potential legal threat, so rather than before where we could just ignore it, we need to go and explain to our hosting company why they shouldn't kick us off or go talk to their lawyers on how to deal with this. And at the same time, we have to go reach out to Cloudflare to make sure they know that we're not -- as Joseph Cherayath falsely claimed in his letter to Cloudflare -- "infringing on my client's IP rights by misusing the 'The North Face' trademark to sell counterfeit products."So, now you're not just wasting a little of my time, you're wasting a lot of it, along with two other companies, and putting me in a position where my site is at risk.So... yeah, forgive me for asking why do you still employ Corsearch for anything? And next time you're looking to use this as a learning experience and to course correct, could you do it without risking my entire site being taken offline? Please?

For years a growing number of US towns and cities have been forced into the broadband business thanks to US telecom market failure. Frustrated by high prices, lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of community broadband option. And while the telecom industry routinely likes to insist these efforts always end in disaster, that's never actually been true. While there certainly are bad business plans and bad leaders, studies routinely show that such services not only see far better customer satisfaction scores than large private ISPs, they frequently offer better service at lower, more transparent pricing than many private providers.Undaunted, big ISPs like AT&T and Comcast have waged a multi-pronged, several decades attack on such efforts. One, by writing and buying protectionist laws in dozens of states either hamstringing or banning cities from building their own networks, often in cases where private ISPs refuse to expand service. Two, by funding economists, consultants, and think tankers (usually via proxy organizations) happy to try and claim that community broadband is always a taxpayer boondoggle -- unnecessary because private sector US broadband just that wonderful.Of course if you ask actual American consumers, they generally support towns and cities building better, faster broadband networks if they've been historically underserved. And they most certainly don't approve of Comcast buying state laws that eliminate their voting right to make local infrastructure decisions for themselves. A recent Consumer Reports survey found that three out of four Americans support community broadband efforts:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PaulT with a comment in a thread that tangentially devolved into antivaxxer nonsense:

Citizen Lab has uncovered more state-level spying targeting political opponents and journalists. There's a twist to this one, though. One of those targeted had his phone infected by two forms of malware produced by two different companies. And yet another twist: both companies have their roots in Israel, which is home to at least 19 entities that develop phone exploits. Here's the summary from Citizen Lab:

While arguing that video games are a form of art and should be respected as such has been a personal drum I've enjoyed beating for a decade, it's worth acknowledging just how far the public has come in its acceptance. While I spent a great deal of time ten years ago trying to get people, especially older folks, to see the light on this topic, the idea that video games are an artform has become far less controversial. As more people experience games, they've come to recognize better that games exhibit all the traditional hallmarks of an artform: creativity, political and ideological expression, efforts at preservation, and fights over expression in the courthouse.But, of course, that doesn't mean that everyone is convinced. So every once in a while comes a news story that gives me the opportunity to pull the old drum and sticks out and get back to playing persuasive percussion. Today that story is that a little bit of history was made by indie video game Hades, which has become the first game ever to win a Hugo Award.

Texas consumers recently learned the hard way that regulatory capture can prove to be fatal. Texas energy companies (and the regulators and lawmakers who love them) ignored a decade-plus of warnings that they needed to harden their utility infrastructure in the face of climate change. As a result, we're still measuring the casualties. Not only did 700 Texans die after they lost power during a brutal cold snap last February, but a new report by ProPublica found that an additional 1,400 Texans were hospitalized, and at least 7 died.A joint investigation by ProPublica, NBC, and The Texas Tribune found that lax regulatory oversight (aside from, yes, poor human decision making) was a primary reason people keep dying from something so avoidable as carbon monoxide poisoning:

We were just highlighting how rules that enable the easy takedown of content on social media will always lead to over-blocking, and this is why we should be quite careful about government attempts to mandate content removal -- like those of Senator Amy Klobuchar to require websites to remove "health misinformation." It's not like we don't have tremendous evidence of this. Daphne Keller over at Stanford has been keeping tabs on studies of "over-removal", with the key culprit being copyright law.In the US, copyright law remains the main tool for silencing speech (which is why there's still a very strong argument that the DMCA fundamentally has a 1st Amendment problem). It didn't get that much attention, but a recent revelation from Twitter about removing networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior online, reveals just how US copyright law can be weaponized by foreign governments to silence critics -- and it should be a very loud warning to those looking to create government mandates for the removal of information online.Twitter shared the details of these removals with the Internet Observatory at Stanford and it's from that organization's report that the details of what happened here come. However, Stanford IO released reports on a bunch of different networks at once, so what happened with Tanzania seems to have gotten less attention than the overall set of examples. But the Tanzania example should send up signal flares about why making it easy to remove content online is so dangerous.For years we've highlighted a tactic that people have used to silence others: faking a copyright on material and then claiming infringement. The tactic is stupidly brilliant. If you find some content you don't like, just copy it onto your own website/blog and then backdate it so it looks like it came out before the content you want to have deleted. Then, send a DMCA takedown notice claiming that yours is the original, and the actual original is infringing.A year ago, the good folks at Access Now spotted how they had been alerted to Tanzanian activists being silenced on Twitter through this technique:

The Fifth Amendment implications of compelled password production has reverted from "somewhat settled" to "not settled at all" in the state of Illinois.In 2019, an Illinois appellate court said the Fifth Amendment protects people against compelled password production to unlock devices. As the court pointed out in that decision, investigators had zero interest in the password itself. They were interested in what it would give them access to, which was all the evidence allegedly on the locked phone.The state relied on the "foregone conclusion" theory. In the government's view, the only information it needed to know with certainty is that the phone belonged to the suspect and that the suspect knew the passcode to unlock it. But the appellate court said that wasn't the right conclusion. What investigators wanted was access to the phone's contents, and it could not compel production of a passcode just to see if its guess about evidence contained in the phone was correct.

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Last week the State Department released its United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking Annual Report 2021, and it's... a weird document in so many ways. Anti-human trafficking policy making is one of those issues that just seems to attract some very, very bizarre people -- as you might have noticed from the world of Pizzagate and Q-Anon. Human trafficking is (1) a very real problem, (2) a very serious problem, (3) just generally horrific for all the reasons you know, but (4) happens way less than most people think (especially given how much people focus on it). Obviously, continued efforts to prevent all human trafficking are important, and so I can understand why the State Department set up this advisory council. However, they seemed to staff it with a bunch of folks who have a very clear incentive to play up the issue as much bigger and more threatening than it really is.And perhaps that explains the report's incredibly bizarre, incorrect, and just weird thoughts on the internet and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. First, they have a section that looks like it was directly written by The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), which while you might think that's a group with relevant expertise, is not. The group was founded in 1962 as "Morality in Media" and has spent decades trying to stop anything they deem to be smut. They only changed their name to NCOSE because it played better in the media to tie their anti-porn, anti-obscenity obsession to exploitation. They were also a major force behind FOSTA, which they always viewed as a step towards making all porn illegal.One of the group's big lobbying campaigns is to convince states to pass laws declaring pornography to be a "public health issue." It's not, of course, but this group's entire existence doesn't make much sense if they can't convince more prudes that nekkid people are destroying society. Which, fine, if outlawing porn gets you off, do what you have to do, but I don't see why the State Department needs to support that kind of nonsense. Yet, right in this report we get:

Despite the relentless hype leading up to the deployment of 5G, and all the lopsided favors regulators gave wireless carriers on behalf of 5G, and all the lobbying and DC rhetoric about how the U.S. was engaged in a "race with China" over 5G -- U.S. 5G continues to be... largely mediocre.A number of recent studies have already shown that U.S. wireless isn't just the most expensive in the developed world, U.S. 5G is significantly slower than most overseas deployments. That's thanks in large part to our failure to make so-called middle band spectrum available for public use, resulting in a heavy smattering of lower band spectrum (good signal reach but slow speeds) or high-band and millimeter wave spectrum (great speeds, but poor reach and poor reception indoors). The end result is a far cry from what carriers had spent the last three years promising.Now another Ookla report has emerged showing that while U.S. 5G availability is going well, the actual speeds users are getting rank among the worst in the developed world:

Because law enforcement just can't stop taking money from innocent people, here's another roadside shitshow that has resulted in an attempt to force the government to give back money it flat out stole.This one has a couple of twists. First, it involves body cameras, so the whole depressing farce can actually be watched as it unfolds. The second twist is the federal government, which arrived (via cell phone) to pitch in with the theft.This is what happened to Stephen Lara, 16-year military veteran and innocent person, as he traveled through Nevada on his way to visit his daughters in California.

There's not much privacy in prison. And there's going to be even less. Inmates are warned that all calls are monitored. How often this goal is achieved is impossible to say, but tech advances are making it a reality. Attorney-client privilege is supposed to be respected in prisons, but we've already seen instances where it hasn't been, thanks to automated monitoring equipment.What's already been a problem is going to get worse. AI is doing the eavesdropping, and it's far from perfect. A new report from Thomson Reuters shows prisons are investing heavily in automation to ensure as many conversations as possible originating from prisoners are recorded, captured, and mined for useful info.

It was only a few months back that Amazon released its MMO game New World. While there was a bunch of hype around the game, it was met critically with mostly a collective "meh". While the lack of exuberant reviews focused mostly on bland gameplay that doesn't survive its honeymoon period, there were also bugs. So, so many bugs. So many bugs, in fact, that both gamer media covered them in detail and entire Reddit threads were created to discuss them.This isn't unique to New World, of course. With the unfortunate industry trend of releasing a game first and then day 1 patching most of the problems out of it afterwards, there are a ton of these stories. But what makes this one different is that a YouTuber created a video about one of the bugs and then alerted Amazon to it so that they could fix it, only to have Amazon issue a copyright strike against his channel.

We've noted for years how much of the hysteria surrounding 5G health hazards aren't based on actual science. In fact, 5G in general is arguably less powerful that previous standards; especially millimeter wave 5G, which struggles with distance and wall penetration. Most 5G health freak outs you'll see online are often based on a twenty year old misinterpreted graph that doesn't actually say what folks claim it does. That's not to say it's impossible that cellular technology could be harming human health, just that the evidence we have so far absolutely does not point in that direction.Of course facts and data aren't particularly popular in the post-truth era, leading to endless continued freak outs over 5G. Some of which have proven notably dangerous to wireless company technicians, who've been increasingly targeted by conspiracy theorists. They've also resulted in a sub-market of grifters, offering "solutions" to a problem that isn't real (see this faraday cage enclosed router, for example).Some of these grifts have proven to be a bit more harmful to their target audience however. For example the Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection (ANVS) in the Netherlands just had to issue a warning that several brands of “quantum pendants” and other “negative ion” jewelry marketed as "anti-5G" were in fact radioactive and dangerous to human health:

Spyware is spyware. It doesn't matter who's deploying it. Proctorio -- the snitchware maker that helps schools keep tabs on distance learners -- has made headlines here for abusing the DMCA to silence security researchers who found flaws in the remote surveillance software. Bogus claims were filed and Proctorio is currently being sued by the EFF and one target of its censorial bullshit.It was only a matter of time before someone took advantage of the omnipresent anti-cheat spyware, which takes control of students' cameras and microphones to keep an eye on them as well as track their internet activity to ensure they aren't searching the internet to find answers to tests. That's a lot of centralized power enabled by expansive, mandatory permissions. It was bound to be exploited sooner or later. And sooner was the most likely outcome, considering Proctorio sometimes seems more interested in silencing critics than addressing the harms its software poses.RTL News reports that students in the Netherlands may have been working with compromised computers for months, thanks to exploitation of Proctorio's anti-cheat software.

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I still find myself somewhat amazed at how otherwise intelligent people seem to lose their entire minds over the fact that there's a fair bit of misinformation out there. Robert Reich is not a dumb guy, but like so many these days, he seems to work himself up in a lather about things he doesn't seem to understand. He has an opinion piece at the Guardian about his suggestions to restore American democracy... and apparently part of that is throwing out the 1st Amendment. Which is, you know, quite a choice. I won't comment on his first and third suggestions (voting rights and money/politics) because those aren't my areas of expertise, but when he dips his toe into Section 230 and misinformation, I have to point out that everything Reich writes in this piece is so far beyond wrong that it would need to ask directions just to get back into the vicinity of "just kinda wrong."

Law enforcement has a pretty cavalier attitude towards private property. Whatever property they aren't unjustifiably seizing from drivers and passengers, they're razing to the ground. Sometimes they destroy whole houses during plain vanilla warrant service. Other times, situations are determined to be stand-offs in need of wholesale destruction, even when officers are facing down an empty house.You'd think this sort of brazen and unjustified destruction would result in successful lawsuits to recover costs and damages incurred by these actions. But you'd be wrong. A successful lawsuit for law enforcement destruction of private property is more rare than a successful lawsuit over property seized via asset forfeiture.Courts tend to defer to law enforcement expertise, often opining that this collateral damage is just an unfortunate side effect of good police work. Officers are free to overcome any obstacles placed in the way of their objectives, and if that means entire walls of houses need to be destroyed, that's just the way it is. Who are we (this is the judges speaking) to second-guess decisions made in the heat of the moment, even when said moment is a daylong "standoff."Two Appeals Courts have issued precedential decisions that affect two entire circuits (the Ninth and Tenth), which make lawsuits brought in those jurisdictions even more unlikely to prevail. But a recent lawsuit -- featuring representation by the Institute for Justice (which has also had success fighting bogus forfeitures) -- has just experienced some limited success. It was brought by a woman whose residence was the victim of an overzealous Texas SWAT team that apparently felt the only way it could apprehend a suspect was by causing more than $50,000 of damage to her home.It's not like the McKinney PD didn't have options. Vicki Baker, the plaintiff, gave them plenty, as Billy Binion reports for Reason.

More troubling news has surfaced about Apple's and China's relationship. Apple relies on Chinese manufacturing to make its phones and the Chinese government relies on its massive amount of power to leverage deals that allow it to achieve its ends, many of which are oppressive.An exclusive report by The Information (paywalled) details a $275 billion deal Apple struck with the Chinese government, apparently in hopes of exempting the company from new regulations that would have negatively affected its products and services. That deal was signed in 2016 and apparently includes an option for a sixth year, which would extend it through 2022.Here's what appears to have been the end result of this deal, which required Apple to invest heavily in China and work with the government to develop new technologies and cultivate Chinese tech talent. The South China Morning Post notes Apple is now back on top of the Chinese phone sales charts.

Folks may know that when Jonas Salk created the polio vaccine he chose not to patent it, and when asked who owns the patent on it, responded: "Well... the people I would say. There is no patent... Could you patent the sun?"Whenever people bring this up, patent maximalists -- especially those in the pharma world -- like to come up with all sorts of excuses about how that was "different" somehow. My favorite excuse was that he did this because "the public had funded the vaccine."Fast forward to today. Moderna, somewhat famously, helped produce one of the very first COVID vaccines using its mRNA technology. It's a great thing (I got two Moderna shots in my own arm as soon as I could). You may have heard a lot about Moderna as well. While the company had been around for a decade, this vaccine is its first product on the actual market. It had been experimenting with mRNA technology, but hadn't actually come out with anything until the COVID vaccine.But -- and this is the important part -- it was the US government, and by that we mean "the US public," who mostly funded Moderna's COVID vaccine... and it was actually US government employees who did a lot of the important work. At the beginning of the pandemic, the US government gave Moderna $483 million dollars to work on the COVID vaccine. A few months later it gave another $472 million.Also, Moderna now admits that US government employees were critical to the development of the vaccine:

Clearview is again on the receiving end of an order demanding it delete all the local data it scraped from thousands of websites and social media platforms.Canada led the way in booting the facial recognition company, ordering its exit in February. A government investigation concluded Clearview had broken the country's privacy laws with its web scraping and ordered it to delete all Canadian data.Australia was next, kicking Clearview out in November. It too concluded (after an investigation) that laws were broken by the country. The United Kingdom followed suit, more or less. It didn't kick Clearview out but threatened it with a $23 million fine and forbade it from processing any more data collected in the UK.Now, it's France's turn. The GDPR is in play this time, which means this announcement is likely to be followed by similar orders from other members of the European Union. Richard Nieva reports on the latest for BuzzFeed.

For good reasons, Alex Berenson has been dubbed the "pandemic's wrongest man." He played up the fact that he once wrote for the NY Times and turned that into a weird, shady attack on pot, before going all in on medical misinformation. In the early days he played down the threat of COVID, and has since become a leading vaccine disinfo spreader. He had built a large Twitter following for his nonsense, and shortly before his Twitter account was finally shut down, he had warned that if it was shut down he would sue Twitter... for defamation. Then, once he was banned, he (in typical grifter fashion) immediately went into fundraising mode even though the extraordinarily wealthy heir of a frozen food fortune promised to fund such a lawsuit.It's unclear whether or not your frozen TV dinners from the 1980s are now funding it, but a Berenson has now filed his long-awaited lawsuit against Twitter. Somewhat amazingly, given the multitude of bad legal theories put forth in the complaint, it doesn't include a defamation claim. Instead it has eight claims, and they start out laughable and, incredibly, only gets worse from there:

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Thanks to the ongoing onslaught of negative press involving malware merchants like Israel's NSO Group, tech companies whose devices and platforms have been used to deploy exploits targeting journalists, activists, and religious leaders are punching back. You're a human rights abuser with high-dollar spyware at your disposal? Too bad. Ask for a refund, I guess.Apple sued NSO Group for targeting iPhone users a few weeks ago. It also began notifying users who were targeted by NSO spyware, potentially nullifying further surveillance efforts by unfriendly nation-states.But before Apple got in on the anti-NSO action, Facebook sued the company for using WhatsApp to deploy malware. Both lawsuits contain some troubling implications for the CFAA -- something that could pose future problems for researchers who scrape data and security researchers who search for security flaws. The unintended consequences of this litigation have yet to be seen, but it's enough to justify holding your applause until the lawsuits have run their course.Denying state actors the fruits of their purchased spyware labor is now the name of the game, something that benefits everyone. Facebook (now Meta) has just thrown a decently-sized tech wrench into the malware works of an unknown number of entities.

"Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it" isn't just a quaint saying. Especially in tech or telecom policy. If you don't learn from the mistakes you made the last time you tried to tackle a complex policy issue, you're just going to repeat some or all of the process and see similar results. But it often seems as if the United States has a severe allergy to learning from history and experience, especially if it's in certain companies' best interests that we not learn from our past policy failures (see: banking, airlines, insurance, energy, health care, pharma...).Our inability to learn from past mistakes is particularly pronounced in telecom where we just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Back in 2010 the Obama FCC released a massive, heavily-hyped "National Broadband Plan." The goal of this plan was to bring broadband to everyone who needed it, driving innovation and bolstering the entirety of the internet economy. As we noted at the time, the plan wasn't likely to see much success because it failed to identify and target the real cause of U.S. broadband dysfunction: limited broadband competition (monopolies), and the state and federal corruption that protects monopolies.Eleven years later, as we gear up for yet another massive broadband investment and plan, few folks in telecom policy have bothered to look backward to help us look forward. Except perhaps Christopher Terry, Assistant Professor of Media Law and Ethics at the University of Minnesota. He's made a bit of a habit of popping up to remind policymakers that their massive 2010 broadband "fix" wasn't much of one. And he often doesn't get the attention he deserves:

It's widely known that artists of all kinds often get a raw deal from the contracts they sign. But this kind of legal unfairness is not the only danger they face: copyright can also be turned against creators in other, illegal ways. For example, according to a report on MarketWatch:

NSO Group spent years supplying some of the world's most untrustworthy governments with powerful spyware capable of completely compromising targeted devices. It managed to weather a few years of reports tying its malware to surveillance of journalists and activists, but all hell broke loose earlier this year, resulting in a steady stream of reports linking its tools to surveillance of government officials, journalists, dissidents, government critics, religious leaders, and, in one incredible case, the ex-wife of the king of Dubai.It couldn't have come at a worse time for NSO. It has racked up an impressive amount of debt, something it likely assumed it would be able to manage as it continued to grow its market. That growth has stalled but the payments must still be made. NSO was downgraded by ratings firm Moodys, which warned that NSO was in danger of defaulting on its debts.That, combined with Israel drastically reducing NSO's customer base and the blacklisting by the US Commerce Department, has resulted in the company considering shutting down its offensive spyware division (the one responsible for developing Pegasus) and putting its remaining assets up for sale.It might not be that easy to divest, nor find a way back to solvency. Bloomberg reports that one of NSO's debt managers has decided it's no longer interested in providing these services to this particularly toxic asset.

If you've spent any meaningful time trying to build a "smart home" you've probably run face first into no shortage of problems. Gear is expensive, frequently complicated, and more often than not different devices don't play well together. It's a sector filled with various walled gardens by gatekeepers looking to lock you into one ecosystem, placing the onus on consumers to figure out which devices work with other devices and ecosystems, forcing the end user to spend countless calories trying to fix interoperability issues when they inevitably arrive.The resulting mess has slowed adoption by those who (quite understandably) find dumb home tech (ordinary door locks, for example) to be the smarter option.While various standards have tried to unify the space, they've not been particularly successful. In part because the central control of all these devices has been fractured across different standards and technologies (Zigbee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth) all jostling for primary control despite none of them working particularly well. Enter Matter, a new open-sourced connectivity standard created by over 200 companies that's attempting to bring some sanity to the space.Matter is an emerging communication protocol leaning on numerous existing technologies -- Thread, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ethernet -- with the goal of letting all of your smart home devices communicate with each other locally, without the need for a controlling gateway and hub. The Verge has a great breakdown on how the standard hopes to accomplish this (namely by being IP-based and integrating with existing technologies):

Let me be clear upfront: I'm a huge fan and supporter of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. After all, just last week, that organization stepped up to defend my rights after Representative Thomas Massie decided to trample on them. The Knight Institute was also the publisher for my Protocols, Not Platforms paper, and their guidance and editorial support with that paper were tremendously helpful. I've been involved in a few other projects with them as well, and have found every one of them worthwhile.But, I have to admit that I'm perplexed by an argument the Institute has been putting forth, including in an amicus brief regarding Florida's unconstitutional social media law, and more recently in the pages of the NY Times, arguing that while the laws in both Florida and Texas are clearly unconstitutional, that the 1st Amendment arguments by the internet company trade groups go too far, and would create wider problems for the internet.I think the argument is incorrect -- and it seems somewhat odd for a "First Amendment Institute" to be arguing that the 1st Amendment does not, in fact, protect editorial discretion. There is, of course, some more nuance to the argument, but the NY Times piece summarizes the argument here:

A case involving the first criminal suspect to be notified by the DOJ that evidence against him was derived from Section 702 surveillance has just reached an end. The Tenth Circuit Appeals Court has decided there's nothing wrong with the government's FISA-enabled warrantless surveillance programs. It also says the word "speedy" can be redefined at will by the government's national security concerns, changing the definition to "however long it takes."The ACLU, which helped represent the US resident whose communications were collected and intercepted with FISA court orders, summarizes the outcome of this decision:

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