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Cops are out there giving each other bad advice. An instructor for Street Cop Training -- a New Jersey based provider of officer training programs -- is telling officers it's ok to run facial recognition searches during routine traffic stops, when not encouraging them to go further with their potential rights violations.In a podcast recently uncovered by Caroline Haskins for Insider, Maryland detective Nick Jerman tells listeners there's nothing wrong with running a facial image against publicly available databases during a traffic stop.

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We've said it over and over again, if libraries did not exist today, there is no way publishers would allow them to come into existence. We know this, in part, because of their attempts to stop libraries from lending ebooks, and to price ebooks at ridiculous markups to discourage libraries, and their outright claims that libraries are unfair competition. And we won't even touch on their lawsuit over digital libraries.Anyway, in other book news, you may have heard recently about how a Tennessee school board banned Art Spiegelman's classic graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus, from being taught in an eighth-grade English class. Some people called this a ban, while others said the book is still available, so it's not a "ban." To me, I think school boards are not the teachers, and the teachers should be able to come up with their own curriculum, as they know best what will educate their students. Also, Maus is a fantastic book, and the claim that it was banned because of "rough, objectionable language" and nudity is utter nonsense.Either way, Maus is now back atop various best seller lists, as the controversy has driven sales. Spiegelman is giving fun interviews again where he says things like "well, who's the snowflake now?" And we see op-eds about how the best way get kids not to read books... is to assign it in English class.But, also, we have publishers getting into the banning business themselves... by trying to capitalize on the sudden new interest in Maus.Penguin Random House doesn't want this new interest in Maus to lead to... people taking it out of the library rather than buying a copy. They're now abusing copyright law to demand the book be removed from the Internet Archive's lending library, and they flat out admit that they're doing so for their own bottom line:

NSO Group -- the embattled, extremely controversial Israeli phone malware developer -- finally has some good news to report. It may have a white knight riding to its rescue -- a somewhat unknown American venture capital firm that could help it pay its bills and possibly even rehabilitate its image.

The city of Minneapolis, Minnesota is temporarily ending the use of no-knock warrants following the killing of 22-year-old Amir Locke by Minneapolis police officers. The city's mayor, Jacob Frey, has placed a moratorium on these warrants until the policy can be reviewed by Professor Pete Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University and anti-police violence activist DeRay McKesson.This comes as too little too late for Locke and his surviving family. The entire raid was caught on body cam and it shows Amir Locke picking up a gun (but not pointing it at officers) after he was awakened by police officers swarming into the residence.

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the EARN IT Act and sent that legislation to the Senate floor. As drafted, the bill will be a disaster. Only by monitoring what users communicate could tech services avoid vast new liability, and only by abandoning, or compromising, end-to-end encryption, could they implement such monitoring. Thus, the bill poses a dire threat to the privacy, security and safety of law-abiding Internet users around the world, especially those whose lives depend on having messaging tools that governments cannot crack. Aiding such dissidents is precisely why it was the U.S. government that initially funded the development of the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) now found in Signal, Whatsapp and other such tools. Even worse, the bill will do the opposite of what it claims: instead of helping law enforcement crack down on child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the bill will actually help the most odious criminals walk free.As with the July 2020 markup of the last Congress’s version of this bill, the vote was unanimous. This time, no amendments were adopted; indeed, none were even put up for a vote. We knew there wouldn’t be much time for discussion because Sen. Dick Durbin kicked off the discussion by noting that Sen. Lindsey Graham would have to leave soon for a floor vote.The Committee didn’t bother holding a hearing on the bill before rushing it to markup. The one and only hearing on the bill occurred just six days after its introduction back in March 2020. The Committee thereafter made major (but largely cosmetic) changes to the bill, leaving its Members more confused than ever about what the bill actually does. Today’s markup was a singular low-point in the history of what is supposed to be one of the most serious bodies in Congress. It showed that there is nothing remotely judicious about the Judiciary Committee; that most of its members have little understanding of the Internet and even less of how the, ahem, judiciary actually works; and, saddest of all, that they simply do not care.Here are the top ten legal and technical mistakes the Committee made today.Mistake #1: “Encryption Is not Threatened by This Bill”Strong encryption is essential to online life today. It protects our commerce and our communications from the prying eyes of criminals, hostile authorian regimes and other malicious actors.Sen. Richard Blumenthal called encryption a “red herring,” relying on his work with Sen. Leahy’s office to implement language from his 2020 amendment to the previous version of EARN IT (even as he admitted to a reporter that encryption was a target). Leahy’s 2020 amendment aimed to preserve companies’ ability to offer secure encryption in their products by providing that a company could not be found in violation of the law because it utilized secure encryption, doesn’t have the ability to decrypt communications, or fails to undermine the security of their encryption (for example, by building in a backdoor for use by law enforcement).But while the 2022 EARN IT Act contains the same list of protected activities, the authors snuck in new language that undermines that very protection. This version of the bill says that those activities can’t be an independent basis of liability, but that courts can consider them as evidence while proving the civil and criminal claims permitted by the bill’s provisions. That’s a big deal. EARN IT opens the door to liability under an enormous number of state civil and criminal laws, some of which require (or could require, if state legislatures so choose) a showing that a company was only reckless in its actions—a far lower showing than federal law’s requirement that a defendant have acted “knowingly.” If a court can consider the use of encryption, or failure to create security flaws in that encryption, as evidence that a company was “reckless,” it is effectively the same as imposing liability for encryption itself. No sane company would take the chance of being found liable for transmitting CSAM; they’ll just stop offering strong encryption instead.Mistake #2: The Bill’s Sponsors Readily Conceded that EARN IT Would Coerce Monitoring for CSAMEARN IT’s sponsors repeatedly complained that tech companies aren’t doing enough to monitor for CSAM—and that their goal was to force them to do more. As Sen. Blumenthal noted, free software (PhotoDNA) makes it easy to detect CSAM, and it’s simply outrageous that some sites aren’t even using it. He didn’t get specific but we will: both Parler and Gettr, the alternative social networks favored by the MAGA right, have refused to use PhotoDNA. When asked about it, Parler’s COO told The Washington Post: “I don’t look for that content, so why should I know it exists?" The Stanford Internet Observatory’s David Thiel responded:

We've talked about the hypocrite grifters who run Project Veritas, who, even when they have legitimate concerns about attacks on their own free speech, ran to court to try to silence the NY Times. Bizarrely, a NY judge granted Project Veritas' demand for prior restraint against the NY Times falsely claiming that attorney-client material could not be published.The NY Times appealed that ruling and now a court has... not overturned the original ruling, but for now said that the NY Times can publish the documents, saying that it will not enforce the original ruling until an appeal can be heard. This is... better than nothing, but fully overturning the original ridiculous ruling would have been much better. Because it was clearly prior restraint. But, at least for now, the prior restraint will not be enforced.Still, the response from Project Veritas deserves separate comment, because it's just naively stupid:

Exploit developer NSO Group may be swallowing up the negative limelight these days, but let's not forget the company has plenty of competitors. The US government's blacklisting of NSO arrived with a concurrent blacklisting of malware purveyor, Candiru -- another Israeli firm with a long list of questionable customers, including Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Singapore.Now there's another name to add to the list of NSO-alikes. And (perhaps not oddly enough) this company also calls Israel home. Reuters was the first to report on this NSO's competitor's ability to stay competitive in the international malware race.

So we've noted that a lot of the U.S. politician accusations that Huawei uses its network hardware to spy on Americans on behalf of the Chinese government are lacking in the evidence department. The company's been on the receiving end of a sustained U.S. government ban based on accusations that have never actually been proven publicly, levied by a country (the United States) with a long, long history of doing exactly what it accuses Huawei of doing.To be clear, Huawei is a terrible company. It has been happy to provide IT and telecom support to the Chinese government as it wages genocide against ethnic minorities. It has also been caught helping some African governments spy on the press and political opponents. And it may very well have helped the Chinese government spy on Americans. So it's hard to feel too bad about the company.At the same time, if you're going to levy accusations (like "Huawei clearly spies on Americans") you need to provide public evidence. And we haven't. Eighteen months of investigations found nothing. That didn't really matter much to the FCC (under Trump and Biden) or Congress, which ordered that U.S. ISPs and network operators rip out all Huawei gear and replace it to an estimated cost of $1.8 billion. Yet just a few years later, the actual cost to replace this gear has already ballooned to $5.8 billion and is likely to get higher:

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Senator Richard Blumenthal has now admitted that EARN IT is targeting encryption, something he denied for two years, and then just out and said it.Since the very beginning many of us have pointed out that the EARN IT Act will undermine encryption (as well as other parts of the internet). Senator Richard Blumenthal, the lead sponsor on the bill, has insisted over and over again that the bill has nothing to do with encryption. Right after the original bill came out, when people called this out, Blumenthal flat out said "this bill says nothing about encryption" and later claimed that "Big Tech is using encryption as a subterfuge to oppose this bill."That's been his line ever since -- insisting the bill has nothing to do with encryption. And to "show" that it wasn't about encryption, back in 2020, he agreed to a very weak amendment from Senator Leahy that had some language about encryption, even though as we pointed out at the time, that amendment still created a problem for encryption.The newest version of EARN IT replaced Leahy's already weak amendment with one that is a more direct attack on encryption. But it has allowed slimy "anti-porn" groups like NCOSE to falsely claim that it has "dealt with the concerns about encryption." Except, as we detailed, the language of the bill now makes encryption a liability for any web service, as it explicitly says that use of encryption can be used as evidence that a website does not properly deal with child sexual abuse material.But still, through it all, Blumenthal kept lying through his teeth, insisting that the bill wasn't targeting encryption. Until yesterday when he finally admitted it straight up to Washington Post reporter Cat Zakrzewski. In her larger story about EARN IT, I'm not sure why Zakrewski buried this point all the way down near the bottom, because this is the story. Blumenthal is asked about the encryption bit and he admits that the bill is targeting encryption:

Well, for a story that was already over, this became somewhat fascinating. We have followed the Nintendo vs. GilvaSunner war for several years now. The GilvaSunner YouTube channel has long been dedicated to uploading and appreciating a variety of video game music, largely from Nintendo games. Roughly once a year for the past few years, Nintendo would lob copyright strikes at a swath of GilvaSunner "videos": 100 videos in 2019, a bit less than that in 2020, take 2021 off, then suddenly slam the channel with 1,300 strikes in 2022. With that last copyright MOAB, the GilvaSunner channel has been shuttered voluntarily, with the operator indicating that it's all too much hassle.Well, on the internet, and in our comments on that last post, there began to be speculation as to whether or not it was actually Nintendo behind all of these copyright strikes... or an imposter. Those sleuthing around found little tidbits, such as the name used on the strike not matching up to the names displayed in the past when Nintendo has acted against YouTube videos.It was... strange. Why? Well, because it looked like many people going out and trying to find a reason to believe that Nintendo wasn't behaving exactly as anyone who had witnessed Nintendo's behavior would expect. If this was someone impersonating Nintendo with these actions, it was utterly indistinguishable from how Nintendo would normally behave. Guys, they do this shit all the time.And this time too, as it turns out. You can hear it straight from YouTube's mouth.

The federal government has a problem with secrecy. Well, actually it doesn't have a problem with secrecy, per se. That's often considered a feature, not a bug. But federal law says the government shouldn't have so much secrecy, what with the FOIA being in operation. And yet, the government feels compelled to keep secrets from its biggest employer: the US taxpayers.Over-classification remains a problem. It has been a problem ever since long before a government contractor went rogue with a massive stash of NSA documents, showing that many of the government's secrets should have been shared or, at the very least, more widely discussed as the government turned 9/11 into a constitutional bypass on the information superhighway.Since then, efforts have been made to dial back the government's proclivity for classifying documents that pose no threat to government operations and/or government security. In fact, the argument has been made (rather convincingly) that over-classification is counterproductive. It's more likely to result in the exposure of so-called secrets rather than secure the blanket-exemption-formality that keeps secrets from the general public.Efforts have been made to counteract this overwhelming desire to keep the public locked out of discussions about government activities. These efforts have mostly failed. And that has mainly been due to vague and frequent invocations of national security concerns, which allow legislators and federal judges to shut off their brains and hammer the [REDACT] button repeatedly.But ignoring the problem hasn't made the problem go away, no matter how many billions the federal government refuses to throw at the problem. Over-classification still stands between the public and information it should have access to. And it stands between federal agencies and efficient use of tax dollars. The federal government generates petabytes of data every month. And far too often, the agencies generating the data decide it's no one's business but their own.It's not just legislators noting the widening gap between the government's massive stockpiles of data and the public's ability to access them. It's also those generating the most massive stashes of bits and bytes, as the Washington Post points out, using the words of an Intelligence Community official.

A federal court has delivered a rebuke of police gang databases in, of all things, a review of a deportation hearing.As we've been made painfully aware, gang databases are just extensions of biased policing efforts. People are placed in gang databases for numerous, incredibly stupid reasons. People are designated gang members simply for living, working, and going to school in areas where gang activity is prevalent. Infants have been added to gang databases because cops can't be bothered to perform any due diligence. There's no way for people to know they've been designated as gang-affiliated and, worse, there's often no way to challenge this designation and get yourself removed from these lists, which tend to result in additional harassment by police officers or "gang enhancements" that lengthen sentences for anyone listed in these dubious databases.In 2015, Homeland Security Investigations officers performed a sweep in Boston, Massachusetts, rounding up suspected MS-13 gang members for deportation. This sweep snared Cristian Diaz Ortiz, who was 16, had entered the country illegally, and was now living with his uncle.Oritz applied for asylum, citing the fear of being subjected to MS-13 gang violence if he was sent back to his home country, El Salvador. From the First Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF]:

Summary:On March 10 2021, the Russian Government deliberately slowed down access to Twitter after it accused the platform of repeatedly failing to remove posts about illegal drug use, child pornography, and pushing minors towards suicide.State communications watchdog Roskomnadzor (RKN) claimed that “throttling” the speed of uploading and downloading images and videos on Twitter was to protect its citizens by making its content less accessible. Using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology, RKN essentially filtered internet traffic for Twitter-related domains. As part of Russia’s controversial 2019 Sovereign Internet Law, all Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were required to install this technology, which allows internet traffic to be filtered, rerouted, and blocked with granular rules through a centralized system. In this example, it blocked or slowed down access to specific content (images and videos) rather than the entire service. DPI technology also gives Russian authorities unilateral and automatic access to ISPs’ information systems and access to keys to decrypt user communications.Twitter throttling in Russia meme. Translation: “Runet users; Twitter”The University of Michigan’s researchers reported connection speeds to Twitter users were reduced on average by 87 percent and some Russian internet service providers reported a wider slowdown in access. Inadvertently, this throttling affected all website domains that included the substring t.co (Twitter’s shortened domain name), including Microsoft.com, Reddit.com, Russian state operated news site rt.com and several other Russian Government websites, including RKN’s own.Although reports suggest that Twitter has a limited user base in Russia, perhaps as low as 3% of the population (from an overall population of 144 million), it is popular with politicians, journalists and opposition figures. The ‘throttling’ of access was likely intended as a warning shot to other platforms and a test of Russia’s technical capabilities. Russian parliamentarian, Aleksandr Khinshtein, an advocate of the 2019 Sovereign Internet Law, was quoted as saying that:Putting the brakes on Twitter traffic “will force all other social networks and large foreign internet companies to understand Russia won’t silently watch and swallow the flagrant ignoring of our laws.” The companies would have to obey Russian rules on content or “lose the possibility to make money in Russia.” — Aleksandr KhinshteinThe Russian Government has a history of trying to limit and control citizen’s access and use of social media. In 2018, it tried and ultimately failed to shut down Telegram, a popular messaging app. Telegram, founded by the Russian émigré, Pavel Durov, refused to hand over its encryption keys to RKN, despite a court order. Telegram was able to thwart the shutdown attempts by shifting the hosting of its website to Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services through ‘domain fronting’ – which the Russian Government later banned. The Government eventually backed down in the face of technical difficulties and strong public opposition.

It didn't take long for Citizen -- the app that once wanted to be a cop -- to wear out its law enforcement welcome. The crime reporting app has made several missteps since its inception, beginning with its original branding as "Vigilante."Having been booted from app stores for encouraging (unsurprisingly) vigilantism, the company rebranded as "Citizen," hooking um… citizens up with live feeds of crime reports from city residents as well as transcriptions of police scanner output. It also paid citizens to show up uninvited at crime scenes to report on developing situations.But it never forgot its vigilante origins. When wildfires swept across Southern California last year, Citizen's principals decided it was time to put the "crime" back in "crime reporting app." The problem went all the way to the top, with Citizen CEO Andrew Frame dropping into Slack conversations and live streams, imploring employees and app users to "FIND THIS FUCK."The problem was Citizen had identified the wrong "FUCK." The person the app claimed was responsible for the wildfire wasn't actually the culprit. Law enforcement later tracked down a better suspect, one who had actually generated some evidence implicating them.After calling an innocent person a "FUCK" and a "devil" in need of finding, Citizen was forced to walk back its vigilantism and rehabilitate its image. Unfortunately for Citizen, this act managed to burn bridges with local law enforcement just as competently as the wildfire it had used to start a vastly ill-conceived manhunt.As Joseph Cox reports for Motherboard, this act ignited the last straw that acted as a bridge between Citizen and one of the nation's largest law enforcement agencies, the Los Angeles Police Department. Internal communications obtained by Vice show the LAPD decided to cut ties with the app after the company decided its internal Slack channel was capable of taking the law into its own hands.

We've already talked about the many problems with the EARN IT Act, how the defenders of the bill are confused about many basic concepts, how the bill will making children less safe and how the bill is significantly worse than FOSTA. I'm working on most posts about other problems with the bill, but it really appears that many in the Senate simply don't care.Tomorrow they'll be doing a markup of the bill where it will almost certainly pass out of the Judiciary Committee, at which point it could be put up for a floor vote at any time. Why the Judiciary Committee is going straight to a markup, rather than holding hearings with actual experts, I cannot explain, but that's the process.But for now at least over 60 human rights and public interest groups have signed onto a detailed letter from CDT outlining many of the problems in the bill, and asking the Senate to take a step back before rushing through such a dangerous bill.

In June 2020, in Brattleboro, Vermont, something extremely ordinary happened. Two residents of the community interacted on Facebook. It was not a friendly interaction, which made it perhaps even more ordinary.Here's the ordinariness in all of its mundane detail, as recounted in Brattleboro resident Isabel Vinson's lawsuit [PDF] seeking to have one of the state's laws found unconstitutional.

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AT&T got a lot wrong (and still really can't admit it) with the company's $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner. There were endless layoffs, a steady dismantling of beloved brands (DC's Vertigo imprint, Mad Magazine), all for the company to lose pay TV subscribers in the end.But the one thing the company did get right, with a little help from COVID, was its attacks on the dated, pointless, and often punitive Hollywood release window. Typically, this has involved a 90 day gap between the time a move appears in theaters and its streaming or DVD release (in France this window is even more ridiculous at three years). Generally, this is done to protect the "sanctity of the movie going experience," as if for thirty years the "sanctity of the movie going experience" hasn't involved sticky floors, over priced popcorn, big crowds and mass shootings.During COVID, big streamers like AT&T and Comcast shifted a lot of their tentpole films (like Dune) directly to streaming, which technically saved human lives, but resulted in no limit of raised eyebrows and scorn among the "Loews at the mall is a sacred space you can't criticize" segment of Hollywood. You might recall that AMC Theaters was positively apoplectic when Comcast showed that release windows were a dated relic, declaring it would never again show a Comcast NBC Universal picture anywhere in the world if Comcast kept threatening the sacred release window (the threat lasted about a week).WarnerMedia (in the process of being spun off by AT&T) has faced similar whining from the industry. This week the company was hit with a lawsuit (pdf) by Village Roadshow Films, which claims the company "rushed" the release of The Matrix Resurrections from 2022 to 2021 as part of an (gasp) effort to boost streaming's popularity. All through 2021, AT&T/Time Warner released films simultaneously in theaters and on streaming to boost HBO Max subscriptions. And people liked it.Unsurprisingly, Village Roadshow Films did not, claiming the effort (dubbed "Project Popcorn") was a "clandestine plan to materially reduce box office and correlated ancillary revenue generated from tent pole films that Village Roadshow and others would be entitled to receive in exchange for driving subscription revenue for the new HBO Max service." HBO Max and AT&T telegraphed this intention, so it seems hard to argue this was somehow clandestine. The suit also accuses WarnerMedia of ignoring the fact that piracy would have hurt the overall profits to be made from the film, though, again, metrics proving clear financial harm appear lacking.But just as unsurprisingly, Warner Brothers thinks Village Roadshow Films is just annoyed by reality and shifting markets:

The endless parade of bad news for Israeli malware merchant NSO Group continues. While it appears someone might be willing to bail out the beleaguered company, it still has to do business as the poster boy for the furtherance of human rights violations around the world. That the Israeli government may have played a significant part in NSO's sales to known human rights violators may ultimately be mitigating, but for now, NSO is stuck playing defense with each passing news cycle.Late last month, the New York Times revealed some very interesting things about NSO Group. First, it revealed the company was able to undo its built-in ban on searching US phone numbers… provided it was asked to by a US government agency. The FBI took NSO's powerful Pegasus malware for a spin in 2019, but under an assumed name: Phantom. With the permission of NSO and the Israeli government, the malware was able to target US numbers, albeit ones linked to dummy phones purchased by the FBI.The report noted the FBI liked what it saw, but found the zero-click exploit provided by NSO's bespoke "Phantom" (Pegasus, but able to target US numbers) might pose constitutional problems the agency couldn't surmount. So, it walked away from NSO. But not before running some attack attempts through US servers -- something that was inadvertently exposed by Facebook and WhatsApp in their lawsuit against NSO over the targeting of WhatsApp users. An exhibit declared NSO was using US servers to deliver malware, something that suggested NSO didn't care about its self-imposed restrictions on US targeting. In reality, it was the FBI and NSO running some tests on local applications of zero-click malware that happened to be caught by Facebook techies.But there's more. Recent reports building on the NYT article contain statements that claim NSO approached service providers with (well, let's just say it) bribes to allow access to targets at a higher level that might mitigate some of the defensive efforts deployed by Facebook, Google, and Apple.Here's what's been alleged in newer reports, like this one by Craig Timberg of the Washington Post:

When it comes to silly trademark disputes, Apple has come up for discussion many, many times. The mega-corporation is a jealous defender of all of its IP, but most of our stories have focused on its disputes with companies that created logos that involve any sort of apple or other fruit. Sometimes it's not even companies that Apple is fighting with, but entire foreign political parties. The idea here is that when it comes to logos or trade dress, Apple appears to think that it owns all the apples.But what about the word itself? Well, the company can get absurd at that level, too. For instance, Apple recently opposed the trademark application for a Ukrainian filmmaker's indie opus, entitled Apple-Man.

As you hopefully know, there are two main parts to the DMCA law that was passed in 1998. There's DMCA 512, which is what you hear about most of the time. That's the part that includes the rules for notice and takedown regimes for user uploaded content (among other things). It's got problems, but in its current form has also enabled many important services to exist. The other part, which is much more problematic, is DMCA 1201, which is the anti-circumvention rules -- or you could call it the "DRM" part of the law. This has no redeeming value whatsoever. Under 1201 basically any attempt to circumvent a "technological" protection measure, can be deemed infringing even if the underlying content is never infringed upon. This part of the law is not only not necessary, but it's drafted in a manner that has been regularly abused -- enabling everyone from printer manufacturers to garage door opener companies to argue that simple reverse engineering to create competition is "infringement."In fact, everyone -- even the drafters of the DMCA -- knew that 1201 went too far and would lead to massive collateral damage. Rather than not passing such a bill, Congress came up with its "escape valve" which is the triennial review process, whereby every three years, the Librarian of Congress can magically declare which things are exempt from 1201. This has exempted a few classes of important use cases, but just the fact that (1) these uses need to be renewed every three years, and (2) that you have to ask for permission that can only be granted every 3 years for things that should be perfectly legal... is a problem.Way back in 2016, EFF brought a case challenging the constitutionality of 1201 on behalf of computer security researcher/professor Matthew Green and hardware hacker Bunnie Huang, arguing that the DMCA 1201 liability suppressed their speech by stopping security research and beneficial hacking efforts. In 2019, a court dismissed much of the constitutional challenge, while allowing other parts of the case to move forward.However, those constitutional questions are now on appeal and the EFF recently filed its opening brief. It's worth reading.

We talk a lot about free speech in different countries, and about the history of free speech in the US — but what about the global history of this fundamental concept? A new book released today, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media by Jacob Mchangama, tackles exactly this subject in great and insightful detail. This week, Jacob joins us on the podcast to discuss the sweeping story of free speech throughout the ages and around the world.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.

While Google's Stadia game streaming service arrived with a lot of promise, it generally landed with a disappointing thud. A limited catalog, deployment issues, and a quality that couldn't match current gen game consoles meant the service just never saw the kind of traction Google (or a lot of other people) originally envisioned. In the years since, developers have been consistently abandoning the platform, and Google has consistently sidelined the service, even shutting down its own development efforts as a parade of executives headed for the exists.Now, Google is basically just selling the technology off to other companies eager to give video game streaming a go and succeed where Google couldn't.In the last few months, Google executives have apparently been working on a plan to salvage some aspect of the project by selling Google Stadia tech to companies like Bungie and Peleton. In short, these companies will license the Google tech (now creatively named "Google Stream") for use in their own game streaming services called something entirely different. Google's first party Google Stadia service still exists for now, but it has been "deprioritized" within the company on the way to an inevitable, untimely death:

The UK's internet censorship bill rebranded from "Online Harms" to "Online Safety" last spring. The name change did nothing to limit the breadth of the bill, despite supposedly shifting the focus from "harm" to "safety." Whatever the name, it's still being touted by supporters as a fix for anything anyone doesn't like about the internet.Speech will be policed. Lots of it. Everyone from megalithic Meta to the person running a niche message board will be subject to the new rules, which shifts liability from the posters of unwanted or illegal content to the third parties hosting it.In order to find and remove content found on the ever-lengthening list of "bad" content (which, let's highlight again, includes legal content), platforms and services will have to perform more internal policing of content. This means that, in many cases, encryption for content and communications will no longer be a viable option. To comply with the law -- one that carries potential fines of up to 10% of a company's global revenues -- providers will have to remove end-to-end encryption so they can monitor communications between users.The UK government isn't honest enough to call for the end of encryption. But it's willing to let attrition do its dirty work for it. The anti-encryption agitating continues, despite the UK government's Information Commissioner's Office telling the rest of the government that weakening or eliminating encryption will harm more children than it saves.The bill marches forward, gathering even more speech-harming detritus. As CNBC reports, another round of UK government inquiries has resulted in the proposed law being made even worse.

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At the same time car companies are fighting the right to repair movement (and the state and federal legislation popping up everywhere), they're continuing the quest to turn everyday features -- like heated seats -- into something users have to pay a recurring fee for.In 2019, BMW had to abandon a plan to charge $80 per year for Apple CarPlay. The company, having learned nothing, began floating the idea of charging a subscription for features back in 2020, when it proposed making heated seats and heated steering wheels something you pay a permanent monthly fee for. Last December, Toyota proposed imposing a monthly fee for customers who wanted to be able to remotely start their vehicles.Each and every time these proposals come forward the consumer response is swift and overwhelmingly negative. But with $20 billion in annual additional potential revenue on the table between now and 2030, the industry seems poised to ignore consumers:

More troubling developments for both NSO Group and the country it calls home.Less than a month ago, both entities found themselves in midst of another turbulent news cycle, thanks to reporting from Calcalist that showed Israel police were using NSO spyware to engage in domestic surveillance. Worse, the people targeted weren't just dangerous criminals or suspected terrorists.Instead, like everywhere else NSO malware has been abused, Israeli police forces targeted activists protesting then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's CVOID restrictions, as well as mayors of Israeli cities. Also included on the list of hacking targets were former government employees and "a person close" to a senior politician. In some cases, the police used the malware to phish for information from targets' phones, all without any reasonable suspicion these targets may have committed criminal acts.On top of all that, the police deployed the malware without direct or judicial oversight. Utilizing a loophole in the law, investigators avoided seeking court authorization for these hacking attempts.There's more of that being discovered. The Israeli government is conducting its own investigation of NSO and the use of its spyware. That has resulted in the discovery of more questionable hacking.

We've been talking a bit about industry consolidation through mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the video game industry as of late. The impetus for that discussion has been a series of high-profile acquisitions for several notable companies, namely Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft acquired Zenimax for $7 billion and Activision Blizzard King for a bonkers $69 billion recently, while Sony jumped into the game by acquiring Bungie for $3.6 billion. Of interest for these pages is the different approaches these companies have taken with these acquisitions. Microsoft hemmed and hawed about whether it would start building Microsoft exclusivity for products from its acquisitions, eventually landing on very much embracing exclusivity, while Sony took a much more hands-off approach and stated plainly that Bungie games would still be cross-platform. For those of us interested in digital and technology economies and business models, this is interesting stuff.But there is a name missing here. The traditional "Big 3" in gaming has long been Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. Well, if you like real-world experiments when it comes to business strategies, this looks like it's going to get even more fascinating, as Nintendo is making noises about going an entirely different route.

Throughout the Trump administration, a lot of folks had absolutely no problem with the mindless rubber-stamps appointed to key regulatory positions. Ajit Pai, for example, couldn't have demonstrated regulatory capture any more clearly, rubber-stamping every idiotic whim of telecom monopolies at every conceivable opportunity (often with the help of fabricated data and fraud). Revolving door regulation and unqualified industry lackey appointments hit a fevered pitch not seen at any point in U.S. history, and at every step a long list of organizations and individuals made it abundantly clear they were fine with all of it.Fast forward to Biden's efforts to replace some of these folks, and a lot of these same organizations and individuals that turned a blind eye to the worst aspects of Trumpism are now fanning their face about perceived conflicts of interest, "partisan politics," and all manner of hypocritical injustices.See the intentionally gridlocked nomination of new FCC Commissioner Gigi Sohn, for example. Sohn is popular across both sides of the aisle and, whatever you think of her positions and politics, highly competent. Yet her nomination has been stuck in congressional purgatory for months thanks to completely false claims ranging from she wants to "censor conservatives," to laughable claims from revolving door cable lobbyists that her history as an expert on consumer advocacy means she can't regulate telecom fairly. All coming from industry folks who don't actually believe anything they're saying.The same gamesmanship is also imperiling the nomination of Alvaro Bedoya to the FTC. Bedoya is a professor and founding Director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology and is widely respected. Whatever one thinks of Bedoya's politics and positions, there's no real doubt that he's competent and qualified for the role. But companies that don't really want competent, objective regulators have been working overtime to smear Bedoya in the same way they're working to smear Sohn. Usually through proxy groups and think tanks they funnel money, and then flimsy arguments, to.For example the "American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research" is not really a consumer group. It's one of countless 501(c)(3) nonprofits corporations covertly fund, and use to create the illusion of broad support (or opposition) for/to things big companies want. For example the American Consumer Institute was paid by telecom to scuttle FCC oversight of telecom monopolies, yet pretended to just be an objective organization giving an honest, objective opinion.The group is also popping up in the attacks against Bedoya, attempting to frame him as some kind of radical. Usually, because he's (gasp) levied accurate criticisms at the actually radical modern Trump GOP:

The European Union's data privacy law, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), has caused all sorts of problems since its debut. Its debut was itself a mess, something that immediately resulted in a whole lot of websites simply refusing to allow European users to connect with them.Since it was unclear how to avoid running afoul of the law, it was easier to avoid potential fines by simply cutting European users out of the equation. For everyone else, it was being greeted with a new warning about cookies at nearly every website they visited -- a small hassle to be sure, but a hassle nonetheless.Then there were the truly unexpected consequences of the new law that imposed data-gathering and data-sharing restrictions on any business, whether they were internet-based or not. In some areas, GDPR was read as requiring retailers to notify purchasers of items when the items were returned -- something that would make the exchange of unwanted Christmas gifts extremely awkward.In another weird case, post offices in Ireland removed waste bins from their facilities because customers were throwing out unwanted mail and receipts, resulting the offices' unintentional collection of personal data. When the waste bins went missing, customers resorted to throwing their trash on post office counters and floors, leaving it even more unregulated than it was when the waste bins were still in place.Yet another side effect no one saw coming: the use of Google's Font API was enough to get a website fined by a German court. (via Slashdot)

Last month, we wrote about how the IRS and other federal agencies were starting to require the use of private facial recognition from a somewhat sketchy private company, for people to access their own government's services. The main company in question, ID.me, had made some... questionable decisions that raised serious questions about why the government was forcing people to make use of such a private service.Earlier this morning, Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the Treasury Department calling on them to drop the facial recognition requirement, and within hours the Treasury Department told Wyden it would be "moving away" from that plan, and then the IRS put up a more official statement:

Over a decade ago, we wrote about how Google had to edit out the Australian Aboriginal flag from a logo because of copyright concerns. An 11-year-old girl had won a contest to design a Google logo for Australia Day, and her logo included a simple drawing of the popular Aboriginal flag. Harold Thomas created a (fairly simple) flag design "as a symbol of unity and national identity" for the Aboriginal people in Australia. The flag became quite popular... and then Thomas basically became a copyright landlord, demanding payment for pretty much any usage.In 2019, Thomas did a big licensing deal with a clothing company and proceeded to send out a bunch of cease-and-desist letters to others. It got so bad that the Australian Senate sought to have the government figure out a way to make sure the public could use the flag.Apparently it took over two years, but the "deal" has been worked out -- and it involves the Australian government paying over $20 million to basically buy out the copyright and the former licensing deals, but that still doesn't mean the flag is truly in the public domain:

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This case -- sent to us by Eric Goldman -- touches on a lot of subject matter covered frequently at Techdirt: dead dogs, police officers, the First Amendment, and qualified immunity. Yet the narrative isn't quite what's expected given the elements. And the court's conclusions, while disappointing, are likely the correct application of the law.Here's the background to the case, as recounted in the federal court decision [PDF]:

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 only really help sexual predators. Once the law passed (again, with the overwhelming support of voters) automakers sued to stop it, which has delayed its implementation. Simultaneously, they're pushing legislation that would delay the bill's launch date until 2025, giving them more time to kill it.In the interim, companies like Kia and Subaru have started disabling useful features (like remote start), and blaming the law:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous response to FCC-boss-turned-cable-lobbyist Mike Powell and his comments about how Gigi Sohn should be recused because of her consumer protection work:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2017, the six-strike copyright "voluntary agreement" officially died. Another prominent death was Denuvo DRM for Reisdent Evil 7, which was cracked in five days, which the company hoped was better than nothing. In a more worrying DRM development, the eventually-successful push to codify EME DRM in the HTML5 standard lurched forward. Meanwhile, Congress appeared to be preparing to gut net neutrality and AT&T was downright giddy about Ajit Pai, while we took a moment for a deeper look at the horrors of a Trump presidency.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2012, in the aftermath of the SOPA protests, it was time for reflection on what happened and attempts to channel the energy into other issues — unless of course you were a SOPA supporter, in which case it was time for misleading op-eds and general whining. Protests against ACTA were spreading and starting to get big results, while Hollywood was partying with TPP negotiators. Megaupload users were planning to sue over the shutdown of the site, while ICE seized 300 more sites, mostly to protect the Super Bowl.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2007, Sony BMG admitted that its rootkit violated federal law and agreed to pay to fix damaged computers, Google issued a non-apology over its decision to censor results in China, and YouTube started talking about revenue sharing plans (while Viacom was pulling over 100,000 clips from the site). We looked at the deeper implications of Google's book scanning fight, and the emerging norm of judges citing Wikipedia. Also, this was the week of the (in)famous Adult Swim marketing stunt that shut down the city of Boston due to massive paranoid overreaction.

There's apparently nothing the New York Police Department won't lie about. When it comes to being overseen, the NYPD seems to feel it has no obligation to provide data, answer questions honestly, or cooperate with any accountability efforts.And the NYPD has made it clear it doesn't believe city laws (or even its own internal policies) should apply to it. Multiple legal rulings over the past several years have ordered the NYPD to staff administrative positions with civilian employees, rather than (much more costly) uniformed officers. This is part of being a good public servant -- one that seeks ways to reduce the cost of services provided to the public.It just makes sense. Officers who are out on the street should receive higher salaries that reflect the dangers they face as they perform their duties. If they're just running a desk, the pay should be lower. The fewer higher-paid cops staffing desk jobs, the more money available to hire uniformed officers to work the streets.But the NYPD doesn't want to do that. And since it hasn't, it has had to find ways to cover up its decision to ignore city policies and court orders.

Congress is trying to overload anyone who supports an open internet with terrible bill after terrible bill. Last week, they brought out the "COMPETES Act" (renamed from Endless Frontiers which had already been renamed as "USICA" and then became COMPETES). The underlying concept of the bill actually is important -- reviving American innovation. The Senate version of the bill was mostly good and had broad bipartisan support. However, for reasons I don't understand, Nancy Pelosi allowed the bill to be loaded up with a bunch of items on the Democrats' wish list, including the ridiculously dangerous SHOP SAFE Act.This week, of course, we've been stuck dealing with the reintroduction of the also terrible EARN IT Act in the Senate, and while all of the open internet activists were gearing up to fight that, the House went ahead and voted to approve the COMPETES Act with no changes. It was an almost strict party-line vote, ending up at 222 for and 210 against. One Democrat -- Rep. Stephanie Murphy -- voted against it, and one Republican -- Rep. Adam Kinzinger (who technically is still a Republican) voted for it.This all seems so incredibly counterproductive by Pelosi and the Democrats. I know they want a "win" and when there's a bill that will move they feel they need to hang all sorts of gifts on it, but following the Senate's lead and coming up with a more reasonable bill that wasn't stuff full of bad ideas would have presented this as an actually interesting and useful bill, rather than turning it into a partisan thing. Politics is where policy goes to die. And, unfortunately, it may take parts of the open internet with it.That said, the Senate version does not have the nonsense and dangerous SHOP SAFE bill attached, and the hope is that during the conference process where the House and Senate try to square up the different bills, SHOP SAFE will get left on the cutting room floor, where it belongs.

Chile is in the middle of creating a new constitution -- a process that seems fraught with both huge potential and tremendous risks, especially trying to do it amidst domestic social upheaval (though, I guess that's when most constitutions tend to be written). A process is in place and 155 people are apparently been tasked with creating this new constitution. Apparently, part of the process is open to an element of crowdsourcing, in that people can submit and vote on certain proposals, meaning that a set of three proposals regarding the internet have been put forth:

The First Amendment applies to school students. This is something courts seem to have particular difficulty drilling into the heads of school officials and administrators. Yes, their rights are somewhat limited due to their age and/or time and place restrictions, but they are closer to "fully respected" than "nonexistent" -- the latter of which appears to be the default assumption for far too many educational entities.Schools hope allegations of "disruption" will salvage their rights violations. But in far too many cases, the asserted disruption was localized solely in the minds of the rights violators, resulting in them having to continue facing lawsuits over their actions, rather than having complaints against them judiciously wished away into the qualified immunity cornfield.Such is the case here in legal action involving a college and its violation of a student's rights. (via Volokh Conspiracy) In this case, a student, who dropped a class because she was unhappy with her instructor, was subjected to discipline solely because she (very quietly) made her unhappiness with this professor known.The plaintiff, Rowan Thompson, has an eye condition that makes her sensitive to light. In one class, taught by Dr. Megan Lazorski, avoiding aggravating this condition meant sitting in one of the first three rows. For the most part, Thompson was able to use this option. But in two instances, when she arrived late, seats up front were no longer available. Thompson chose to sit on the floor, which apparently irritated her instructor. In the second instance -- with no other usable seats available -- Dr. Lazorski gave Thompson this option: sit in an available seat or leave the class. Thompson left. Then she dropped the class.She also sought mediation of her dispute over seating. The mediators asked her to submit a review of Dr. Lazorski, utilizing an online form for evaluations and class ratings. Thompson discovered she could no longer do this through the college website's portal since she was no longer listed as a student of Lazorki's.Because the only option the mediator provided wasn't available to her, Thompson emailed her fellow students, asking them to submit their own reviews of Lazorski's class. This is taken from the Tenth Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF]:

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I've already explained the dangers of the EARN IT Act, which is supported by 19 Senators, who are misleading people with a "fact" sheet that is mostly full of myths. As Senator Wyden has explained, EARN IT will undoubtedly make the problem of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) worse, not better.In my initial posts, I compared it to FOSTA, because EARN IT repeats the basics of the FOSTA playbook. But -- and this is very important since EARN IT appears to have significant momentum in Congress -- it's not just FOSTA 2.0, it's significantly more dangerous in multiple different ways that haven't necessarily been highlighted in most discussions of the law.First, let's look at why FOSTA was already so problematic -- and why many in Congress have raised concerns about the damage done by FOSTA or called for the outright repeal of FOSTA. FOSTA "worked" by creating a carveout from Section 230 for anything related to "sex trafficking." As we've explained repeatedly, the false premise of the bill is that if Section 230 "doesn't protect" certain types of content, that will magically force companies to "stop" the underlying activity.Except, that's wrong. What Section 230 does is provide immunity not just for the hosting of content, but for the decisions a company takes to deal with that content. By increasing the liability, you actually disincentivize websites from taking action against such content, because any action to deal with "sex trafficking" content on your platform can be turned around and used against you in court to show you had "knowledge" that your site was used for trafficking. The end result, then, is that many sites either shut down entirely or just put blanket bans on perfectly legal activity to avoid having to carefully review anything.And, as we've seen, the impact of FOSTA was putting women in very real danger, especially sex workers. Whereas in the past they were able to take control of their own business via websites, FOSTA made that untenable and risky for the websites. This actually increased the amount of sex trafficking, because it opened up more opportunity for traffickers to step in and provide the services that sex workers had formerly used websites for to control their own lives. This put them at much greater risk of abuse and death. And, as some experts have highlighted, these were not unintended consequences. They were consequences that were widely known and expected from the bill.On top of that, even though the DOJ warned Congress before the law was passed that it would make it more difficult to catch sex traffickers, Congress passed it anyway and patted each other on the back, claiming that they had successfully "fought sex trafficking." Except, since then, every single report has said the opposite is true. Multiple police departments have explained that since FOSTA it has made it harder for law enforcement to track down sex traffickers, even as it's made it easier for traffickers to operate.Last year, the (required, but delivered late) analysis of FOSTA by the Government Accountability Office, found that the law made it more difficult to track down sex traffickers and did not seem to enable the DOJ to do anything it couldn't (but didn't!) do before. The DOJ just didn't seem to need this law that Congress insisted it needed, and basically has not used it. Instead, what FOSTA has enabled in court is not an end to sex trafficking, but ambulance chasing lawyers suing companies over nonsense -- companies like Salesforce and MailChimp, who are not engaging in sex trafficking, have had to fight FOSTA cases in court.So, FOSTA is already a complete disaster by almost any measure. It has put women at risk. It has helped sex traffickers. It has made the job of law enforcement more difficult in trying to find and apprehend sex traffickers.Already you should be wondering why anyone in Congress would be looking to repeat that mess all over again.But, instead of just repeating it, they're making it significantly worse. EARN IT has a few slight differences from FOSTA, each of which make the law much more dangerous. And, incredibly, it's doing this without being able to point to a single case in which Section 230 got in the way of prosecution of CSAM.The state law land mine:Section 230 already exempts federal criminal law violations. With FOSTA there was a push to also exempt state criminal law. This has been a pointed desire of state Attorneys General going back at least a decade and in some cases further (notably: when EARN IT lead sponsor Richard Blumenthal was Attorney General of Connecticut he was among the AGs who asked for Section 230 to exempt state criminal law).Some people argue that since federal criminal law is already exempt, what would be the big deal with state law exemptions -- which only highlights who is ignorant of the nature of state criminal laws. Let's just say that states have a habit of passing some incredibly ridiculous laws -- and those laws can be impossible to parse (and can even be contradictory). As you may have noticed, many states have become less laboratories of democracy and much more the testing ground for totalitarianism.Making internet companies potentially criminally liable based on a patchwork of 50+ state laws opens them up to all sorts of incredible mischief, especially when you're dealing with state AGs whose incentives are, well, suspect.CDT has detailed examples of conflicting state laws and how they would make it nearly impossible to comply:

Welcome back to Brookside, Alabama, home of the surprisingly expensive traffic ticket. Home to one (1) Dollar General, nine (9) police officers, two (2) drug dogs (one named "K9 Cash" just in case you had any doubts about the PD's intentions), and one (1) Lt. Governor-ordered state audit. Brookside (pop. 1,253) made national headlines for soaking every passing driver officers could find with excessive fines, fees, vehicle seizures, and inconvenient court dates.AL.com's investigation showed that under Police Chief Mike Jones (who was hired in 2018), the small town has seen an increase in traffic fines, topping $600,000 in 2020. The department's overachievers patrolled over 114,000 miles in a single year and issued more than 3,000 citations to passing drivers. Chief Mike Jones still had room to complain, despite his department's funding escalating from $79,000 to $524,000 since he took office. The $600,000 fine figure may have seemed abhorrent to anyone outside the suddenly flush Brookside, but Chief Jones said there was room to improve.The new chief's directives had an immediate effect on officers, who took to the (very few) streets in unmarked cars while wearing unmarked uniforms. The resulting influx of traffic citation defendants pulled officers from the remarkably un-dangerous streets of rural Brookside to perform traffic control for the dozens of out-of-towners driving into Brookside to attend once-a-month court sessions.The officers also decided the gloves were off and treated alleged moving violators accordingly. According to multiple accounts from Brookside victims, cops made up laws, fabricated charges, and used racist language to address drivers.As a result of this unexpected national coverage of Chief Mike Jones's Boss Hoggish practices and policies, Chief Jones resigned his position, leaving it to the Brookside metroplex to decide what to do with all the extra cops it had decided to employ while Chief Jones was making it profitable to be a government employee.Former Chief Jones may be able to duck under the national press radar, but local scrutiny continues, thanks to AL.com. The testimonials continue to pour in, showing Jones and his employees did pretty much everything but shoot someone on Fifth Avenue before being forced to act like real police in the face of the criticism of millions.Drivers who have had the displeasure of interacting with the Brookside PD aren't happy. And their complaints have made their way to social media services. Apparently, a couple hundred feet of interstate traffic isn't the only thing the Brookside PD has been policing. Officers have been monitoring the internet airwaves to silence complaints and ensure the continued flow of excessive fines and fees.

I guess this is nearly an annual thing now. In 2019, we talked about how one YouTuber, GilvaSunner, had over one hundred YouTube videos blocked by Nintendo over copyright claims. GilvaSunner's channel is dedicated to video game music, mostly from Nintendo games. Those videos consist of nothing but that music, as in no footage of video game gameplay. Nintendo, which certainly can take this sort of action from an IP standpoint, also doesn't offer any legit alternative for fans to enjoy this music on any streaming service or the like. Then, in 2020, GilvaSunner had another whole swath of videos consisting of game music blocked by Nintendo over copyright claims. Still no legit alternative for those looking to enjoy music from Nintendo's celebrated catalogue of games.Well, if Nintendo decided to take 2021 off from this annual project, it certainly has more than made up for it by sending copyright strikes to GilvaSunner's channel at a volume of over 1,300 in one day.

Cops lie. It's just something they do.It's something all people do. We just expect cops to do less of it because they're entrusted with enforcing laws, which suggests their level of integrity should be higher than that of the policed. Unfortunately, the opposite often tends to be the case.There are many reasons cops lie. All of them are self-centered. They lie to cover up misconduct, salvage illegal searches, deny deployment of excessive force, and ensure narratives are preserved when challenged in court.They also lie to obtain confessions from criminal suspects. There is nothing illegal about this act. Whether or not it crosses constitutional lines tends to come down to the judgment of the judges handling civil rights lawsuits. There's no hard and fast rule as to which lies are unconstitutional so cops do a lot of lying when trying to fit someone for a criminal charge.Up until recently, it was okay for the Virginia Beach Police Department to use a particularly nefarious form of lying when trying to coax confessions from criminal suspects. While cops will routinely claim evidence and statements point to the person as the prime suspect, very rarely do they actually show this fake evidence to people being interrogated. Not so in Virginia Beach, where fake documents were just part of investigators' toolkits.

It's been almost exactly a year since Florida Man Governor, Ron DeSantis announced plans to try to pass a law that would ban social media websites from taking down misinformation, abuse, and other types of speech. When the final bill came out, at the very last minute, Florida Rep. Blaise Ingoglia tried to sneak in an amendment that carved out Disney, by saying the law didn't apply to any company that owned a theme park. This took other legislators by surprise, as indicated in this somewhat incredible video of Florida Reps. Anna Eskamani and Andrew Learned confronting Ingoglia over this amendment and what it meant:In that video, Ingoglia flat out admits that the goal was to try to carve Disney+ out of the definition of a "social media provider." He says they looked at other possible language changes and adding the "theme park" exemption was just the easiest way to exclude Disney. Of course, that never made any sense. In the video he says, repeatedly, that this is to protect "reviews" on Disney+, which is weird because Disney+ doesn't have reviews. He also tries to make weird distinctions between Disney and Netflix which suggests a really confused understanding of Section 230 and how it interacts with first party and third party content. Amusingly, Eskamani points out at one point that Disney owns other websites -- like ESPN.com -- and asks if they, too, would be exempted from the bill, and Ingoglia responds in the most inane way possible: "as long as they follow their policies, everything should be fine." Which... makes no sense and didn't answer the question.Either way, the bill has since (rightly) been declared unconstitutional (though Florida is appealing), and the issue of the theme park exemption was mostly a sideshow in the ruling.However, it still left many people scratching their heads as to how that came about -- including intrepid reporter Jason Garcia, who filed some freedom of information requests with the Governor's office to see if he could find out the backstory behind the Disney theme park exemption... and, let me tell you, he hit pay dirt. The emails reveal quite a lot. And, as Garcia notes:

Earlier this week we wrote about the problematic reintroduction of the EARN IT Act and explained how it will make children a lot less safe -- exactly the opposite of what its backers claim. Senator Ron Wyden has now put out a statement that succinctly explains the problems of EARN IT, and exactly how it will do incredible harm to the very children it pretends to protect: