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Last week, the district court Judge Robert Pitman wrote an excellent ruling tossing out Texas' silly content moderation law as clearly unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. As was widely expected, Texas has appealed the ruling to the 5th Circuit (undeniably, the wackiest of the Circuits, so who knows what may happen). However, in the meantime, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also asked the lower court to have the law go into effect while waiting for the appeals court to rule!

Concurrent with Apple's announcement that it was suing Israeli tech company NSO Group over its iPhone exploits was its announcement that it would be notifying customers of suspected hacking attempts utilizing NSO's extremely powerful Pegasus malware.

For years now, we've been highlighting how book publishers are at war with libraries, and see ebooks and ebook pricing as a key lever in that war. With regular books, a library can just buy the book and lend it out and do what they want with it. But not ebooks. Because of a broken copyright law, publishers retain excess control over ebooks, and they lord that over libraries, arbitrarily raising prices to ridiculous levels, limiting how many times they can lend it out before they have to "repurchase" the ebook, and generally making it as difficult as possible for libraries to actually be able to offer ebooks.This is because of a broken copyright system that gives publishers way more control over ebooks than traditional hardcopy books. And book publishers have spent the past decade abusing that power. In an ideal world, Congress would get its act together and fix copyright law and properly add first sale rights for digital goods like ebooks. But, without that, some states are trying to step in and fix things, including Maryland, which earlier this year passed a law that would require publishers to sell ebooks to libraries at "reasonable" rates.With the law set to go into effect next year, helping more Maryland residents get access to ebooks in the midst of a still ongoing pandemic, the book publishers have continued their Grinch-like ways, and sued to block the law. The complaint says that this is an attempt by state law to route around federal copyright law, and since the 1976 Copyright Act, state copyright laws are pre-empted by federal law.The complaint spews a lot of nonsense and propaganda about "the importance of copyright" to "the ultimate benefit of the public" which is laughable -- especially coming from book publishers who have gone out of their way to use copyright to fuck over the public. But, as ridiculous as it is from a societal level, the publisher's reading of the 1976 Act might convince a court. It is true that the 1976 act says that states can't pre-empt federal copyright law, so the publisher's argument is that this law is a route around that.I assume that Maryland will argue, forcefully, that this is not a copyright law or an attempt to route around federal copyright law, but rather something else entirely. Indeed, as some have noticed, the Maryland law is deliberately "modest." It only says that if a publisher is already offering ebooks, it also has to make sure it will sell to libraries at a reasonable price. It's not forcing publishers to offer ebooks at all -- just make sure that the publishers can't treat consumers and libraries differently. And, as the libraries argued in the runup to this bill passing, there is historical evidence that a law that only impacts contracting does not impede on copyright:

When a reporter sends inquiries about claims made on your website, the best response is obviously to threaten them with a lawsuit. That should ensure a steady stream of positive press and deter them from asking further questions about claims made on your website.Oh, wait. It's the other thing. It ensures you'll be at least temporarily enshrined as an asshat and litigious thug, especially when the reporter is only asking questions any logical person might when coming across these claims.That's what just happened to Isabella Cheng of IPVM, a long-running and respected authority on security cameras and other video surveillance technology. Here are just some of IPVM's credentials:

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CNN, the news organization that, until recently, employed Chris Cuomo, and still employs Jeffrey Toobin, and is (for the moment at least) owned by AT&T which funded an entire extremist propaganda TV network just to appease President Trump (not to mention being absolutely terrible on privacy issues), wants you to hate social media. There may be reasons to hate on social media, but it's difficult to take CNN seriously when it presents itself (1) as some unbiased party in this discussion, and (2) puts forth an article that is nothing more than blatant moral panic propaganda about kids and social media.Are there dangers to kids on social media? Maybe! Are there benefits for kids on social media? Maybe! Does the article only present one side full of anecdotes without any actual data? You bet. The article presents a couple of anecdotes about teens with depression, and then just insists that it's because of social media. Apparently it may surprise CNN's reporters to learn this, but teenagers (and adults) have been dealing with depression for a long, long time, including before social media existed. Again, it's entirely possible that social media creates image problems for teens, but the article repeatedly just insists its true without evidence. It opens with a pure anecdote that is designed to pull at the emotional heart strings.

Earlier this year Apple received ample coverage about how the company was making privacy easier for its customers by introducing a new, simple, tracking opt-out button for users as part of an iOS 14.5 update. Early press reports heavily hyped the concept, which purportedly gave consumers control of which apps were able to collect and monetize user data or track user behavior across the internet. Advertisers (most notably Facebook) cried like a disappointed toddler at Christmas, given the obvious fact that giving users more control over data collection and monetization, means less money for them.By September researchers had begun to notice that Apple's opt-out system was somewhat performative anyway. The underlying system only really blocked app makers from accessing one bit of data: your phone's ID for Advertisers, or IDFA. There were numerous ways for app makers to track users anyway, so they quickly got to work doing exactly that, collecting information on everything from your IP address and battery charge and volume levels, to remaining device storage, metrics that can be helpful in building personalized profiles of each and every Apple user.Privacy advocates and the press noted how this was all giving Apple users a false sense of security without really fixing much. Privacy experts and press outlets also repeatedly informed Apple this was happening, but nothing changed. In fact, the Financial Times notes that six months after the feature was introduced, Apple has further softened its stance on the whole effort:

Earlier this year Apple received ample coverage about how the company was making privacy easier for its customers by introducing a new, simple, tracking opt-out button for users as part of an iOS 14.5 update. Early press reports heavily hyped the concept, which purportedly gave consumers control of which apps were able to collect and monetize user data or track user behavior across the internet. Advertisers (most notably Facebook) cried like a disappointed toddler at Christmas, given the obvious fact that giving users more control over data collection and monetization, means less money for them.By September researchers had begun to notice that Apple's opt-out system was somewhat performative anyway. The underlying system only really blocked app makers from accessing one bit of data: your phone's ID for Advertisers, or IDFA. There were numerous ways for app makers to track users anyway, so they quickly got to work doing exactly that, collecting information on everything from your IP address and battery charge and volume levels, to remaining device storage, metrics that can be helpful in building personalized profiles of each and every Apple user.Privacy advocates and the press noted how this was all giving Apple users a false sense of security without really fixing much. Privacy experts and press outlets also repeatedly informed Apple this was happening, but nothing changed. In fact, the Financial Times notes that six months after the feature was introduced, Apple has further softened its stance on the whole effort:

The US, UK and Australia have all announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The reason given for the move is because of human rights abuses in China, particularly in the turkic-speaking region of Xinjiang. Techdirt has been writing about the Chinese authorities' use of technology to censor and carry out surveillance on the local Uyghur population, among others, for some years. One of the most controversial aspects of China's policy in the region is the use of huge detention camps. According to the authorities there, these camps are for educational and vocational training. Human rights organizations call them internment camps; some governments speak of "genocide" against the Uyghurs.Given the highly sensitive nature of the topic, it is naturally hard to ascertain what is really happening in these camps. One solution is to use satellite imagery to peek inside China's tightly-controlled borders. Perhaps the best-researched investigation using this technique appeared on BuzzFeed News last year. The main article, and the four follow-ups, revealed the hitherto unknown scale of the internment camps, but were necessarily limited by their use of an extreme physical viewpoint -- the view from space.A Chinese travel blogger going by the name of Guanguan decided to investigate on the ground some of the camps located by BuzzFeed News, by driving to them. The remarkable 20-minute video summary of his travels provides unique views of the camps, which complement the satellite imagery used by BuzzFeed News. Specifically, they show in some detail side-views of the camps. This allows Guanguan to make reasonable guesses about which camps are indeed for education and training of some kind, and which ones are likely to be high-security internment camps.The video is well-worth watching in its entirely, since it provides probably our best glimpse yet of the reality of China's internment camps for Uyghurs and others (wisely, Guanguan seems to be out of China now). In fact, the quality of the video images is such that IPVM, which specializes in covering the world of video surveillance, was able to recognize several of the security cameras used at the internment camps. There are a few cameras from the Chinese company Dahua Technology, but the majority identified come from Hikvision. This, Techdirt readers will recall, is the company whose director of cybersecurity and privacy said that IoT devices with backdoors "can't be used to spy on companies, individuals, or nations." IPVM reported that Hikvision "declined to comment" on these latest findings. Its article noted that the visual evidence of Hikvision cameras being used in multiple internment camps, the result of an interesting unplanned, ad-hoc collaboration between Western journalists and a Chinese video blogger, is likely to make things even worse for a company already blacklisted by the US government.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

As previously noted, Space X, Amazon, and others are pushing harder than ever into the low-orbit satellite broadband game. The industry, pockmarked by a long road of failures, involves firing thousands of smaller, cheaper, lower orbit satellite constellations into space to help supplement existing broadband services. The lower orbit means that LO satellite service will offer lower-latency broadband than traditional satellite offerings, which for 15 years or so have been widely maligned as expensive, slow, and "laggy," with annoying monthly caps.And while these services should absolutely help bring some additional options to rural Americans, nautical ventures, and those out of range of traditional service, folks shouldn't get their hopes up in terms of broader disruption of the uncompetitive U.S. telecom market. The physics involved in satellite transmission means there will always be limited capacity and odd throttling and network management restrictions, meaning it won't really make much headway in highly monopolized major metro areas. In short, the tech is absolutely a positive advancement, but it's not going to be the game changer many think.Enter the other major problem: the gold rush into the low orbit satellite space without much in the way of regulatory oversight has resulted in an explosion of space traffic and debris that's already causing genuine harm. The tens of thousands of additional low orbit satellites being flung into orbit without much of an over-arching plan not only make space navigation immeasurably more complicated and dangerous, the light pollution created is having clear and profound harms on astronomy and other research. Harms researchers say can't be mitigated with technology.While regulators in the U.S. have taken a few steps to mitigate space debris, most experts say it's not enough. And regulators have done even less to manage the low-orbit gold rush's impact on science. Generally, the modus operandi has been to kiss the ass of companies like Amazon and Space X in this space, letting them dictate the cadence and rules of deployment. The same approach is occurring in the EU, and it's starting to raise some hackles:

Well, it couldn't happen to a more deserving shitheel. Clearview, the tech company with 10 billion facial recognition images and zero shame, has now been uninvited from the largest portions of the British Empire.In February of this year, the Canadian government officially asked Clearview to get off its lawn following an investigation by the country's Privacy Commission. The Commission concluded Clearview's modus operandi -- scraping images and personal data from hundreds of websites -- violated the nation's privacy laws. By that point, Clearview had already pulled out of the Canadian market, but not before allowing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to test drive its product. (This test driving was also determined to be illegal.)Nine months later, the Australian government did the same thing, coming to many of the same conclusions. Local laws were ignored by Clearview when it scraped the web for personal info, cutting Australian residents out of the consent loop. The Australian government told Clearview to get the hell out, to which Clearview responded that it did nothing wrong and that it had stopped selling to Australian government agencies months before, when the investigation was initiated.That left the county seat of the British Empire (so to [very colloquially] speak), the United Kingdom itself. As Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch, the UK government is offering an incentive plan to Clearview to hasten its exit.

As has been a hot topic of discussion of late, YouTube has a copyright enforcement problem on its hands. To be fair, this problem has existed for some time, but due to some recent transparency from YouTube itself over how often it receives claims and enforces them, the scale of this problem is becoming more widely known. In YouTube's minor defense: this is difficult challenge to overcome. The platform operates internationally, which means that it often finds itself attempting to navigate the nuances of copyright laws throughout the world. Still, to say it's not a problem would be silly. And, frankly, YouTube's creative community is becoming more and more vocal about it.Take Mark Fitzpatrick, for instance, the operator of the Totally Not Mark YouTube channel. Fitzpatrick releases a video a week covering mostly anime topics, primarily either reviews of anime shows or episodes, alongside some let's draws for anime images and characters. He has had this channel for several years and has well over half a million subscribers. This is all fairly straightforward fair use stuff. And, yet, Mark was slammed with a series of copyright claims on 150 of his videos over the course of a day or so, resulting in those videos being taken offline.

The spies are back to complaining that the always-on digital world and the omnipresence of surveillance devices (both public and private) is making it difficult to do spy stuff.Last January, sources were telling Yahoo that it's no longer enough to carry around a few fake documents to get past customs and engage in spycraft -- not when the cover identities are bereft of the digital detritus generated by simply existing in a connected world. And it's difficult to move about unobserved when every street light, business, and front porch has a camera attached to it, monitoring activity 24/7/365.The report also noted that online access to a large variety of information also made it more difficult to engage in covert activities. Russian counterintelligence agents were apparently able to sniff out CIA agents working in US embassies by looking for things like prior postings in certain countries, pay bumps for hazardous work, or mismatches in salary for employees with similar titles. Some of this investigative work could be achieved by utilizing open source information gleaned from government sites and professional-oriented platforms like LinkedIn. Data from the massive Office of Personnel Management hack likely filled in the rest of the details.It isn't all losses, though. The same surveillance apparati that made it difficult for covert operatives to maintain cover also made it easier for them to track their targets. But the overall tone of the report was that undercover work needed to undergo an extensive overhaul or it would be rendered almost entirely useless.It's been almost two years since that report was released. Since then, surveillance tech has become even more ubiquitous, with governments and private citizens alike installing more cameras and monitoring other people's movements and activities more frequently.The complaints from agencies utilizing covert surveillance haven't changed, though. What used to be extremely difficult is now almost impossible, according to this report from the Wall Street Journal. (alt. link here)

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The common "accepted knowledge" these days among many is that the rise of disinformation and conspiracy theories must be driven by social media, and Facebook in particular (with Twitter and YouTube right behind). This theory has always seemed a bit bonkers, and we've pointed to multiple detailed, data-driven studies that showed that cable news was a much bigger driver of misinformation than social media. Specifically, it found that conspiracy theories and misinformation and the like didn't actually "go viral" until after it appeared on cable news.So, it's good (but not at all surprising) to find yet another study pointing out the same thing. This one, first highlighted by MediaPost, involved a big survey exploring the spread of conspiracy theories -- and found that the mainstream media is often the biggest vector, rather than social media.

The US Senate this week approved a new five-year term for Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, making her the first permanent FCC chair in agency history. Technically the first female chair was Mignon Clyburn, who temporarily served as interim chair before Tom Wheeler was appointed boss back in 2013. Rosenworcel's term was set to expire at the end of the year, raising some concerns that her re-nomination would stall, leaving the GOP with a 2-1 FCC majority at Biden's FCC.While that scenario was avoided, Rosenworcel's appointment still leaves the agency gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners, and incapable of having a voting majority on any policy issue of substance. If you recall this was quite by design; the GOP rushed to appoint Trump ally Nathan Simington to the commission late last year in a quick appointment process that took less than 30 days. This was at the behest of the telecom and media sectors, which very much don't want the Biden FCC rolling back any of the Trump-era deregulatory favors, whether that's net neutrality or media consolidation rules.To that end, telecom giants like AT&T, hand in hand with Rupert Murdoch, are now focused on blocking Biden's other FCC pick, Gigi Sohn, from being appointed to the FCC so Rosenworcel can't actually use her Democratic majority. That has involved pushing the false claim through trusted news outlets that Sohn wants to "censor conservatives," despite absolutely zero evidence that's actually true.This being the post-truth era (especially in the GOP), that doesn't seem to matter. Saule Omarova, a Cornell Law School professor and Biden's pick for comptroller of the currency, backed out of her nomination this week because the banking industry was worried she might actually hold them lightly accountability for something. The banking industry in turn got the GOP to run a campaign accusing Omarova of being a "communist" because she was born in the Soviet Union:

Clearview has burned its bridges inside the facial recognition tech industry. Despite it being largely morally malleable, the industry as a whole appears to have cut ties with CEO Hoan Ton-That's startup, which relies on more than 10 billion images scraped from the web to generate a database for its customers to match faces with.The company played it fast and loose upon rollout, handing it out to whoever seemed interested, inviting them to run searches against photos of friends and family members. The "give it a spin" invitations were handed out to government agencies as well, inviting cops to play image roulette with Clearview's ever-expanding database.To date, the efficacy of Clearview's AI remains untested. Clearview did finally volunteer to have the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) examine its product for accuracy but only allowed it to run a one-to-one test -- the kind that would, for instance, allow a phone user to unlock their phone via facial recognition.This is not the product Clearview sells. Clearview sells one-to-many matching, relying on images and other personal info scraped from the internet. This practice has alienated the internet. It has also gotten Clearview kicked out of two countries and served with multiple lawsuits. Consequently, other facial recognition tech companies are cursing Clearview both over and under their breath as the company somehow manages to remain viable in the face of months of negative press coverage.Persona non grata status apparently applies to even other controversial facial recognition tech companies. AnyVision spent some time in the media spotlight for being used by the Israeli military to surveill Palestinians. It managed to take down Microsoft with it (albeit temporarily), exposing the tech giant's pinky-swear-rejection of enabling abusive surveillance to be the lip service it was. AnyVision doubled down on its first mistake(s) by threatening to sue news agencies that reported on this factual development.AnyVision resurfaced a couple of years later as the company behind pervasive surveillance systems deployed by Texas public schools. AnyVision appeared to be good at what it did. It matched faces per school hot lists and let administrators know any time those faces were detected. A little too good, perhaps. The system racked up 164,000 "hits" during its seven-day test run, returning as many as 1,100 matches for a single student.AnyVision is back. Sort of. It has rebranded as Oosto, divested itself of some of its more problematic deployments, and is now taking shots at Clearview.Back in September, it argued that facial recognition companies selling to government agencies should offer customers a blank database -- one the end users could fill with mugshots and persons of interest. This was a clear shot across Clearview's bow. Clearview's main selling point is its scraped database of 10 billion images. AnyVision also forwarded this suggestion to a number of government bodies, including the UK's Surveillance Commissioner and the NIST.It's always good to be wary of private companies pleading for the government to regulate them more. It often means incumbents are looking for better ways to stave off competition by helping enact rigorous guidelines that upstarts can't afford to implement. And AnyVision's suggested "fixes" for facial recognition tech obviously aims to exclude Clearview from the government market in multiple countries, making it that much easier for the rebranded company to find customers in need of controversial tech that at least won't be as controversial as Clearview.The war of words continues, albeit behind a paywall:

Summary: In early May 2021, writer and researcher Mariam Barghouti was reporting from the West Bank on escalating conflicts between Israeli forces and Palestinian protestors, and making frequent social media posts about her experiences and the events she witnessed. Amidst a series of tweets from the scene of a protest, shortly after one in which she stated “I feel like I’m in a war zone,” Barghouti’s account was temporarily restricted by Twitter. She was unable to post new tweets, and her bio and several of her recent tweets were replaced with a notice stating that the account was “temporarily unavailable because it violates the Twitter Media Policy”.The incident was highlighted by other writers, some of whom noted that the nature of the restriction seemed unusual, and the incident quickly gained widespread attention. Fellow writer and researcher Joey Ayoub tweeted that Barghouti had told him the restriction would last for 12 hours according to Twitter, and expressed concern for her safety without access to a primary communication channel in a dangerous situation.The restriction was lifted roughly an hour later. Twitter told Barghouti (and later re-stated to VICE’s Motherboard) that the enforcement action was a “mistake” and that there was “no violation” of the social media platform’s policies. Motherboard also asked Twitter to clarify which specific policies were initially believed to have been violated, but says the company “repeatedly refused”.Company Considerations:

For a long time now, it's been fairly clear that consumer safety was an afterthought for some of the more well known companies developing self-driving technology. That was made particularly clear a few years back with Uber's fatality in Tempe, Arizona, which revealed that the company really hadn't thought much at all about public safety. The car involved in the now notorious fatality wasn't even programmed to detect jaywalkers, and there was little or no structure at Uber to meaningfully deal with public safety issues. The race to the pot of innovation gold was all consuming, and all other considerations (including human lives) were afterthoughts.That same cavalier disregard for public safety has been repeatedly obvious over at Tesla, where the company's undercooked "autopilot" technology has increasingly resulted in a nasty series of ugly mishaps, and, despite years of empty promises, still doesn't work as marketed or promised. That's, of course, not great for the public, who didn't opt in to having their lives put at risk by 2,500 pound death machines for innovation's sake. Every week there's new evidence and lawsuits showing this technology is undercooked and dangerous, and every week we seemingly find new ways to downplay it.This week the scope of Elon Musk's failures on this front became more clear thanks to a New York Times piece, which profiles how corner cutting on the autopilot project was an active choice by Musk at several points in the development cycle. The piece repeatedly and clearly shows that Musk overstated what the technology was capable of for the better part of the last decade:

Apple's announcement that it was suing Israeli malware purveyor NSO Group for targeting iPhone users was coupled with another, equally dismaying (I mean, for NSO…) announcement: it would be informing targets of malware anytime it detected a suspected intrusion.Actually, this may be more of a concern for NSO's customers. After all, they're still paying the same licensing fees even if their targets are being warned of hacking attempts. It can't make them happy and -- since it appears many of NSO's customers like to target non-terrorists and non-criminals -- there's really nothing they can do about it. Local entities may be sworn to secrecy with court orders (if those are even obtained) but there's nothing preventing Apple from alerting users that malware might be present on their phones.Given the long list of seemingly inappropriate targets for NSO's Pegasus spyware -- which includes journalists, activists, dissidents, government critics, political figures, religious leaders, lawyers, ex-wives, etc. -- Apple's policy is the Right Thing To Do. NSO's customers agree to use the spyware to target terrorists and dangerous criminals. They clearly don't do that. If NSO won't stop them (and it won't [until very recently]), this is one way to mitigate the damage.And so the disclosures have flowed. A Polish prosecutor who dared to offend the ruling party in that country was one of the first notified by Apple's new program. Since then, the floodgates have opened, potentially ruining the surveillance plans of several governments. Here's Carly Page for TechCrunch, rolling out the details on Apple's unwelcome mat.

Any cursory look at Techdirt for stories involving YouTube and copyright issues will give you a very accurate impression of the state of all things copyright for the platform: it's a complete shitshow. You will see all kinds of craziness in those posts: white noise getting hit with a copyright claim, labels claiming copyright on songs in the public domain, and all kinds of issues with automated systems like ContentID causing chaos. That really is a sample platter rather than the whole meal, but it's also worth noting that YouTube knows this is a problem.To that point, the platform recently put out its first "Copyright Transparency Report" that teases out all kinds of numbers for copyright claims on YouTube videos. As with any statistical report, how you view it is going to come down to how you want to slice and dice the numbers. For instance, it's worth noting that over 99% of the copyright claims YouTube receives comes from ContentID, an automated system. More to the point of this particular post, you will likely also witness copyright enforcement advocates focus on numbers like this from YouTube's own report.

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Missouri Governor Mike Parson is nothing if not committed to shamelessly lying. As you'll recall, after journalists from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ethically informed the state that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website included a flaw that revealed the social security numbers of over 600,000 state teachers and school administrators, Parson responded by calling the reporters hackers and vowing to prosecute them. Again, the DESE system displayed this information directly in the HTML, available for anyone to see if they knew where to look. That's not hacking. That's incompetent computer security.So far, this has mostly played out as expected. A month after the revelations, DESE finally admitted it fucked up and apologized to the teachers and administrators and offered them identity fraud protection services. Then, last week, a public record request revealed something incredible, though perhaps not surprising: the FBI had already told Missouri officials that no hacking took place and DESE had prepared a statement (correctly) thanking the journalists for alerting them to their own fuck up... but that statement was ditched in favor of the nonsense one claiming that the journalists "hacked" the system. As we said in that last story, right at the end it notes that the Highway Patrol investigation, instigated by Parson, was "still active."And now Parson is still standing by the ridiculous claim that the reporters are hackers. As for how he could possibly claim that after the revelation of internal documents on the situation? Well, Parson is trotting out the old "fake news" bullshit:

For several years now a steady parade of scandals have showcased how the collection and sale of consumer location data (to governments and data brokers alike) is a hugely unaccountable mess with few if any guardrails. And every week or so a new scandal emerges making that point abundantly clear. This week it's the unsurprising revelation that "security" and "family safety" app Life360, which lets parents track the location of their kids, has been selling access to this data to data brokers for years:

There's something different about being a cop. The training, the atmosphere, the culture… all of it leads to officers handling crime differently than regular people. Even when they're the ones committing it.A normal person doesn't do the things Newark police officer Luis Santiago did. While driving on the Garden State Parkway, Santiago struck and killed 29-year-old Damian Dymka. This is what Officer Santiago (who was off-duty and in his own vehicle) -- with all his training, expertise, and knowledge of applicable laws -- did next:

We'd already noted how Elon Musk's Starlink isn't going to be the broadband disruption play many people had imagined. The service lacks the capacity to really provide broadband to more than 500,000 to 800,000 users during its first few years in operation (for context, somewhere between 20 and 40 million Americans lack access to broadband, and another 83 million live under a broadband monopoly). With a $100 monthly cost and a $500 first month equipment fee, it's also not doing any favors for the millions of Americans who lack access to affordable broadband.Eventually, with a fully upgraded fleet of 42,000 low orbit satellites years from now, Wall Street analysts estimate Starlink could potentially reach upwards of 6 million users. But again that's an optimistic high end guess, and it requires that everything go swimmingly the next few years.Everything is not going swimmingly. Chip shortages initially delayed Starlink's exit out of beta. And now a new leaked email suggests that Musk is warning about a potential bankruptcy for Space X if the company can't sort out production of the company's Raptor engine:

Our lives are lived at the intersection of vast systems (economic, technological, and beyond) that are incredibly complex and often chaotic, and it's hard to understand and embrace what author Neil Chilson's new book, Getting Out Of Control, calls "the emergent mindset." On this week's episode, Neil joins us to discuss his book and why you can't simply "control" complex systems.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.

Sidney Powell, the self-proclaimed "Kraken," has managed to turn a bunch of potentially defamatory allegations and unabashed pro-Trump showboating into actual money. I mean, she probably had before this, what with the Trump camp being hip deep in grifters at all times. (And neck deep in people who apparently just love being grifted.)But this time it's the grifter, alleged defamer, and spectacular flameout being relieved of money. Sidney Powell -- along with several other lawyers who sued over Michigan election results (most notably, fellow grifter L. Lin Wood) -- has already been sanctioned by a federal court. Back in August, Judge Linda Parker ran Powell and her legal arguments through the judicial woodchipper, leaving nothing but minute chunks of election fraud rhetoric and MAGA blood scattered across the 110 pages of masterclass excoriation.For instance:

Back in 2008, Verizon proclaimed that we didn't need additional consumer privacy protections (or opt in requirements, or net neutrality rules) because consumers would keep the company honest. "The extensive oversight provided by literally hundreds of thousands of sophisticated online users would help ensure effective enforcement of good practices and protect consumers," Verizon said at the time.Six years later and Verizon found itself at the heart of a massive privacy scandal after it began covertly injecting unique user-tracking headers into wireless data packets. The technology allowed Verizon to track users all over the internet, and the company neither bothered to inform users it would happen, or gave users any way to opt out. It took security researchers two years before security researchers even realized what Verizon was doing. Verizon ultimately received a $1.35 million fine from the FCC (a tiny portion of what Verizon made off the program), but still uses the same tech (albeit with functioning opt-out) today.A few years later and it's not clear Verizon has actually learned all that much. The company last week began expanding its data collection and monetization once again, this time via a new "Verizon Custom Experience" the company says will help it "personalize our communications with you, give you more relevant product and service recommendations, and develop plans, services and offers that are more appealing to you." In reality that means Verizon is expanding the collection of data on the websites you visit, the people you communicate with, and the apps you use.Of course Verizon isn't asking user permission before enrolling them in this new exciting "experience," and while the company claims it emailed users to inform them they were being opted in, many customers (including myself) never received any such notification. So while users can opt out through a fairly simply opt-out process, most users aren't going to know they're enrolled in the first place. And Verizon being Verizon (where most of its apps and services are shoddy copies of better products), nobody really wants any of this stuff in the first place:

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This weekend, Representative Thomas Massie got an awful lot of attention for tweeting a picture of what I guess is his family holding a bunch of guns. It generated a bunch of outrage, which is exactly why Massie did it. When the culture war and "owning" your ideological opponents is more important than actually doing your job, you get things like that. Some might find it a vaguely inappropriate to show off your arsenal of weaponry just days after yet another school shooting, in which the teenager who shot up a school similarly paraded his weapon on social media before killing multiple classmates, but if that's the kind of message that Massie wants to send, the 1st Amendment and the 2nd Amendment allow him to reveal himself as just that kind of person.However, as someone who continually presents himself as "a strict constitutionalist," it's odd that Massie seems to skip over the 1st Amendment in his rush to fetishize the 2nd. That's why the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University has now sent a letter on my behalf to Rep. Massie letting him know that he is violating the 1st Amendment in blocking me and many others on Twitter.To be honest, I had avoided tweeting about Massie's armory family portrait, because the whole thing was just such a blatant cry for attention. But then I saw that some other users on Twitter were highlighting that Massie was blocking them -- in some cases because they had tweeted at Massie a remixed version of the portrait, replacing the guns with penises. I made no comment on his photo, or his desperately pathetic desire to "own the libs" or whatever he thought he was doing. But I did tweet at him to inform him that under Knight v. Trump, he appeared to be violating the 1st amendment rights of those he was blocking.He appears to meet the conditions laid out in that and other rulings on this issue. Massie is a government official, who uses his Twitter account for conducting official government business, and who is then blocking users based on their viewpoints.In response to me pointing out that it violates the 1st Amendment for him to block people in this way... Rep. Massie blocked me.Seems a bit ironic for a "strict Constitutionalist" to block someone for merely pointing out that public officials blocking someone via their official government accounts violates the 1st Amendment. But, I guess that's the kind of "strict Constitutionalist" that Rep. Thomas Massie is. One who will support just the rights he wants to support, and will quickly give up the other ones, so long as he can be seen to be winning whatever culture war he thinks he's waging.This is pretty unfortunate. For all of Massie's other nonsense, he has actually been quite good in defending the 4th Amendment rights of the American public against surveillance. Perhaps he only believes in the even-numbered Amendments?Either way, our letter points out that his actions appear to violate the 1st Amendment, and asks that he unblocks me and everyone else that he has chosen to block.

There's no reason for the New York Times to be this bad at reporting. It has plenty of resources and a slew of editors, and yet we get headlines like this one, which says something completely false:If you can't read/see the screenshot, this is the original headline attached to an article that says nothing of the sort:

Take-Two Interactive continues to find itself in the news for all the wrong reasons. The game publisher and parent company of Rockstar Games, the studio behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise, had a reputation built for itself for making great AAA video game titles. More recently, its reputation centers more on its aggressive actions on all things intellectual property. The company has gone after its own modding community, seeing it as a threat to its release of a shitty anthology of past GTA games. The company has also found itself going after companies in totally unrelated industries over the silliest of trademark concerns. And, most recently, there was speculation that there was a threatened opposition to the trademark application filed by Hazelight Studios for its indie hit game It Takes Two, as though anyone were going to take that common phrase and confuse it with the much larger game publisher.That was left to speculation because Hazelight abandoned the application without explanation, though now we find that it was at least partially done due to the threat from Take-Two.

In a bit of a Monday afternoon surprise, Rep. Devin Nunes has announced that he's retiring from Congress this month to become the CEO of Trump's new media company, Trump Media & Technology Group -- a company which apparently now has tons of money in the bank (even if from sketchy sources) but also is facing a newly revealed SEC investigation that might require someone who actually understands this stuff, rather than a very thin-skinned politician who sues people who criticize him.Note to Devin: you can't sue the SEC for defamation.There's all sorts of speculation about why Nunes would do this now. He's actually a pretty powerful Congressional representative, and in line to be in charge of some very powerful committees if, as is widely expected, the Republicans retake control over the House next year. But, he might also see the writing on the wall. Earlier in his career he was winning elections by a pretty wide margin, but the last two elections have actually been pretty tight. And, with California going through its redistricting process, he may have realized there was a high likelihood he'd lose next time around. Also, we know that watchdog groups have asked for an investigation into some of Nunes' activities.And, then, of course, there are all the many, many frivolous lawsuits he's filed over the last few years, with the first one remaining the most notable and the most ridiculous: suing a satirical cow that made fun of Devin Nunes online. The fact that he'd sue a satirist for making fun of him does not suggest someone who believes very strongly in free speech.So it should be extra interesting to see just how Devin Nunes handles content moderation questions for Truth Social now that he's in charge. Will he allow @DevinCow to have an account there? Or will he prove himself to be a hypocrite -- complaining about "censorship" on other sites, but actively engaging in the same (or more selective and biased) moderation on his own site? The press release from TMTG with quotes from Nunes reads as quite laughable when you realize he's suing satirical accounts on Twitter that made fun of him:

Some good news for Clearview, the bottom dweller of the facial recognition field. The prodigious scraper of web content has finally submitted its algorithm (the one it actually sells to government agencies) to the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and has obtained a score that justifies its frequent blustering about how accurate its AI is. Here's Kashmir Hill with the details for the New York Times.

Israeli exploit seller NSO Group has long past reached the limits of its non-denials and deflection attempts. There's only bad news on the horizon for the tech company, which would be a lot less disheartening for the company if it hadn't been preceded by months of bad news.Already considered morally suspect due to its decision to sell powerful phone hacking tools to human rights violators, NSO has since proven to be pretty much amoral. Investigations uncovering abuse of its spyware to hack phones of journalists and activists began to surface three years ago before a leaked database of alleged spyware targets was given to investigators and journalists. Since then, NSO has waged a losing battle with a seemingly endless onslaught of revelations that put its hacking tools in the hands of bad actors and its powerful spyware (Pegasus) in the phones of journalists, activists, lawyers, diplomats, politicians, and religious leaders.NSO was sued by WhatsApp and Facebook in 2019 for using the messaging app to send malware to targets. It was sued by Apple just a couple of weeks ago for targeting iPhone users. It is facing investigations in a handful of countries, including its home base. It has been blacklisted by the US Commerce Department and its list of governments it can sell to has been drastically trimmed by the Israeli government, from 102 to 37.The question now is: does NSO Group even feel it when news breaks about additional misuse of its spyware? Or does it just prompt an exasperated "what now?!" from its execs as it tries to figure out how to remain viable in the future? Whatever the case is, this latest revelation isn't going to get its Commerce Department blacklisting lifted any time soon.

Last week, we called out a questionable move by Twitter to put in place a new policy that banned images or videos that included someone without their permission. The company claimed that this was to prevent harassment and also (for reasons I still don't understand) buried the fact that this was not supposed to apply to public figures or newsworthy media. However, as we pointed out at the time, the standard here was incredibly subjective, and wide open to abuse. Indeed, we pointed out examples in that article of the policy clearly being abused. And even as Fox News talking heads insisted the policy would only be used against conservatives, in actuality, a bunch of alt right/white nationalists/white supremacists immediately saw this as the perfect way to get back at activists who had been calling out their behavior, leading to a mass brigading effort to "report" those activists for taking pictures and videos at white nationalist rallies and events.In other words, exactly what we and tons of others expected.And, a few days later, Twitter admitted it messed up the implementation of the policy -- though it doesn't appear to be rolling back the policy itself.

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The Chinese government is truly, undeniably, utterly evil. Anyone saying otherwise has something to sell (most likely to the Chinese people or their government). Private companies and public entities alike have kowtowed and capitulated rather than face the ferocity of the easily angered government and/or risk losing access to a marketplace containing a few billion people.China has embraced its own version of capitalism to create the leverage it now wields against those who offend it, no matter where else in the world they might be located. It sees even more opportunity in ultra-lucrative Hong Kong and has taken direct control of the region. It refuses to acknowledge Taiwan's existence as a separate country and demands apologies from world leaders and professional athletes when they make the "mistake" of acknowledging yet another lucrative region China wishes to directly control.It has rolled out multiple layers of oppression to keep its citizens in line, starting with pervasive widespread surveillance that ties into "citizen scores" that limit opportunities for those the government believes aren't patriotic enough. It is engaged in the erasure of its Uighur Muslim population, utilizing concentration camps, disappearances, brutality, and a war of attrition designed to eliminate these "unwanteds" completely in the coming years.Is China irredeemable? I guess it all depends on what you think of redemption. The underlying basis of Christianity is that no one is completely irredeemable (even if far too many Christians seem to believe certain people are). Our penal system, in a much more half-hearted way, conflates punishment with rehabilitation, as if the best way to turn your life around is to see it destroyed. China isn't a Christian nation, so that ends that part of the speculation. And China most likely believes people can be punished into contrition, which will "redeem" them while allowing the state to remain intact. Can China ever be anything than increasingly worse versions of itself?Sanctions and public condemnation haven't had any effect. The Chinese government isn't too big to fail. Nothing ever is. Just ask the former USSR (which, unfortunately, is resembling its old self more and more every day.) But it is too big to care what anyone else thinks. The first step towards redemption is realizing you need to be redeemed. Will China ever reach that starting point?It seems unlikely. The government likes things the way they are. And its vision for the future is the elimination of any roadblocks to complete power. But it still struggles to control the narrative, despite constantly finding new ways to limit the spread of information it doesn't approve of and its rewriting of even very recent history to excise anything that might suggest the state is immoral, fallible, or dangerous to the citizens it oversees.Which brings us to this, which isn't the worst thing China has done. Instead, it's just another example of the Chinese government tossing aside concerns about its public image. Press freedoms are practically nonexistent in China. And now the government is planning to actively target journalists who refuse to play by its rules.

We'd already noted how telecom and media giants are hard at work trying to scuttle the nomination of consumer advocate Gigi Sohn to the FCC. Sohn is not only a genuine reformer, she's broadly popular on both sides of the aisle in telecom and media circles. So companies like AT&T and News Corporation, which enjoyed no limit of ass kissing during the Trump era, are working overtime to come up with some feeble talking points loyal politicians can use to oppose her nomination. It's not going well.About the best they could come up with was the entirely false claim that Sohn wants to "censor Conservatives." Anybody who actually knows Sohn knows the claim isn't true, and she's historically gone well out of her way to embrace policies that encourage diversity in media and speech, even when she doesn't agree with the speaker. Despite being a nonsense claim, it has been broadly peppered across the right wing echo chamber, including the usual columns at Breitbart, editorials by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Tucker Carlson, and elsewhere.The claim popped up again at last week's nomination hearing before a Senate Judiciary Committee courtesy of Senators Ted Cruz and Dan Sullivan:

This week, we've got a lot of commonalities among the winners. Both top comments on both sides are very similar responses to the same thing! On the insightful side, both winners come from our post about how the FBI showing up at a journalist's door is intimidation, and both are replies to someone who questioned this assertion. In first place, it's an anonymous response:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, Trump's telecom adviser was saying he wanted to dismantle the FCC because broadband monopolies aren't real — while Trump was appointing a third anti-net neutrality advisor to his team, Wall Street was dreaming of megamergers under his administration, and AT&T was showing everyone what the death of net neutrality would look like. Meanwhile, folks were lining up to seek action from Obama in his final days, with congressional staffers who reined in 1970s surveillance calling on him to pardon Ed Snowden, Dianne Feinstein asking him to declassify the CIA torture report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee seeking the declassification of evidence of Russian election interference.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, the SOPA fight continued. The mainstream press started to step up in opposition, with the NY Times, LA Times and Wall Street Journal all publishing pieces against the bill. Another DNS provider came out against it, as did educators who were worried about its impact on education. On the other side, an ex-RIAA boss was ignoring all criticism and claiming complaints are just attempts to justify stealing, the MPAA was offering false concessions, NBC Universal was threatening partners to get their support, and a highly questionable "consumer" group released an extremely misleading report claiming the public liked SOPA. Meanwhile, at least one court was acting like it was already law.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, the explosion of online video was leading to all sorts of misplaced blame for various issues (including lock picking apparently) while Disney was complaining that notice-and-takedown was too burdensome and Google was trying to pay off big entertainment companies to leave YouTube alone. Legal questions around embedding infringing content were heating up as well. Meanwhile, the RIAA finally succeeded in getting the US to pressure Russia into shutting down Allofmp3, the UK decided against extending copyright terms, and an appeals court held up yet another ruling that states can't ban video games.

Two years ago, the Wisconsin Supreme Court handed down a pretty important decision, only somewhat tempered by its limited jurisdiction. It decided Section 230 immunity applied to the buying and selling of guns via a third-party platform, Armslist.Survivors of a mass shooting in Wisconsin tried to hold Armslist directly responsible for the criminal act, arguing that the site's facilitation of sales that bypassed local regulations on gun sales (mainly background checks) allowed the shooter to arm himself illegally. The shooting may have been on the mass shooter, but Armslist was apparently an accomplice because its marketplace allowed someone who shouldn't have had access to guns to acquire one.The plaintiffs hoped to bypass Section 230 immunity with arguments that centered on negligence. The Copia Institute (a Mike Masnick joint) filed an amicus brief on behalf of Armslist, asking the court to reject arguments that would carve some very damaging holes in Section 230 protections.The court found in favor of Armslist, specifically citing Section 230.

It's been said that any time a bill in a legislature is named after someone who died, you know there's going to be problems with the bill. That's because most of those bills are responses to truly horrific or tragic circumstances, but then our natural inclination is to go too far in diminishing the rights of the public in response to a single horrific scenario. This is, unfortunately, the case with the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act of 2021. The events that precipitated the bill are, undeniably, awful and tragic. In the summer of 2020 an obviously mentally unwell lawyer, who had represented a client before US District Judge Esther Salas, went to her home, dressed as a FedEx delivery person, and shot and killed Judge Salas's son, Daniel Anderl (as well as shooting and injuring Salas' husband, Mark Anderl). The shooter then took his own life.Obviously, everything about that story is horrific, and there are all sorts of things that it should lead us to think about regarding policies that protect human life and how we deal with things like mental health. But, rather than taking a bigger look at things, Congress set out to try to create a special class for protection: federal judges. And, yes, there are reasons to make sure that federal judges are safe, and it's perfectly reasonable to support the underlying goals of such a bill. But, this bill goes too far. The underlying setup in the bill is that it wants to hide personal information about judges at the request of those judges -- who are labeled (oddly) as "at risk individuals" in the law.The law then bans "other businesses" from posting any information on an "at risk individual" (i.e., a judge) if that individual sends a request to take down the information:

Jack Dorsey has left Twitter, which he co-founded and ran for more than a decade. Many on the American political right frequently accused Dorsey and other prominent social media CEOs of censoring conservative content. Yet Dorsey doesn't easily fit within partisan molds. Although Twitter is often lumped together with Facebook and YouTube, its founder's approach to free speech and interest in decentralized initiatives such as BlueSky make Dorsey one of the more interesting online speech leaders of recent years. If you want to know what the future of social media might be, keep an eye on Dorsey.Twitter has much in common with other prominent "Big Tech" social media firms such as Facebook and Google-owned YouTube. Like these firms, Twitter is centralized, with one set of rules and policies. Twitter is nonetheless different from other social media sites in important ways. Although often discussed in the context of "Big Tech" debates, Twitter is much smaller than Facebook and YouTube. Only about a fifth of Americans use Twitter and most are not active on the platform, with 10 percent of users being responsible for 80 percent of tweets. Despite its relatively small size, Twitter is often discussed by lawmakers because of its outsized influence among cultural and political elites.Republican lawmakers' focus on Twitter arose out of concerns over its content moderation policies. Over the last few years it has become common for members of Congress to decry the content moderation decisions of "Big Tech" companies. Twitter is often lumped together with Facebook and YouTube in such conversations, which is a shame given Dorsey's views on free speech.Dorsey has been more supportive of free speech than many on the American political right might think. Did Twitter, under Dorsey's leadership, adhere to a policy of allowing all legal speech? Of course not. Did Twitter sometimes inconsistently apply its policies? Yes.But no social media site could allow all legal speech. The wide range of awful but lawful speech aside, spam and other intrusive legal speech would ruin the online experience. Any social media site with millions or billions of users will experience false positives and false negatives while implementing a content moderation policy.Yet Dorsey defended keeping former President Trump's Twitter account live, and expressed concern about suspending Trump's Twitter account in the wake of the January 6th coup attempt.It became clear in the last few years that Dorsey is open to new ideas that may end up being considered mainstream eventually. We are still in the early years of the Internet and social media and users are used to centralized platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But, increasingly, there are decentralized alternatives, and a few years ago Dorsey announced the decentralized social media project BlueSky, with the goal of moving Twitter over to such a system eventually.Dorsey has not been shy about his passion for decentralization, citing the cryptocurrency bitcoin as a particular influence, "largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be."I predict that in the coming years decentralized social media will gradually become more popular than current centralized platforms. As I wrote earlier this year:

Kudos for open records laws proving to us that not only is Missouri Governor Mike Parson a technologically illiterate hack, but he's a lying one as well. You'll recall, of course, that in October, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on how the state's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website was designed in such a dangerous way that it was exposing the social security numbers of state teachers and administrators, and rather than thanking the journalists for their ethical disclosure of this total security fail by the state, DESE and Governor Parson called them hackers and asked law enforcement to prosecute them. Governor Parson continued to double down for weeks, insisting that reporting this vulnerability (and failed security by the government he runs) was malicious hacking until DESE finally admitted it fucked up and apologized to the over 600,000 teachers and administrators whose data was vulnerable -- but never apologizing to the journalists.The Post-Dispatch, whose reporters potentially still face charges, put out an open records request to find out more about what the government was saying and discovered, somewhat incredibly, that before DESE referred to them as hackers, it already knew that it was at fault here and even initially planned to thank the journalists. As the documents reveal, the FBI flat out told DESE that this was a DESE fuckup and DESE had sent Gov. Parson a planned statement that thanked the journalists:

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Over the past couple of years, the US government -- working with law enforcement agencies around the world -- has managed to shut down cell phone services it alleges were sold to members of large criminal associations. These prosecutions have allowed the DOJ to push the narrative that encrypted communications are something only criminals want or need.But in multiple cases, encryption was never a problem. Investigators were able to target criminal suspects with malware, allowing access to communications and data. The FBI, along with Australian law enforcement, actually ran a compromised encrypted chat service for three years, allowing the agencies to round up a long list of suspects from all over the world.One of those targeted by these long-running investigations was Canada-based encrypted phone provider Sky Global. The DOJ claimed the company sold phones to criminals and even secured an indictment that charged Sky CEO with assisting in the distribution of at least five kilos of cocaine (this amount triggers mandatory minimum 10-year sentences). This claim was based not on CEO Francois Eap's own actions, but the alleged actions of his customers, some of whom engaged in drug dealing.That was added to RICO allegations Eap is facing. But, so far, the US government has made no attempt to extradite Francois Eap and put him on trial. A new report by Joseph Cox for Motherboard possibly shows why the government is hesitant to make this any more of a federal case than it already is. Sky Global is fighting back in court, submitting internal communications that show it made efforts to assist in investigations and refused to remotely wipe phones it could tie to criminal activity.Sky has filed a motion seeking the return of seized domains [PDF]. In it, the company details how it cooperated with law enforcement and attempted to deter criminals from buying its phones. At this point, Sky Global is effectively dead, even though prosecutors have yet to secure a conviction of Eap or anyone else employed by the company. The DOJ has seized all of the company's websites, making it nearly impossible to continue to sell phones or provide services to existing customers.The exhibits included with Sky’s filing show in new detail the effort Sky took to remove criminals from its platform.

For decades regional U.S. telecom monopolies have often refused to deploy broadband into low ROI areas, despite billions in subsidization. At the same time, they've fought tooth and nail against towns and cities that attempt to improve their own regional broadband infrastructure. Often by using a bunch of sleazy and disingenuous arguments, or, in some cases, literally buying and writing state laws that block locals from deciding what they can and can't do with their own local infrastructure. The only real goal: protect giant regional monopolies from disruption and competition.In Maine, Charter (which sells broadband and TV under the Spectrum brand) has been waging a not so subtle war against the town of Leeds, which is contemplating a community broadband network. Charter took the time to help create a phony grass roots group dubbed Maine Civil Action, which bombarded locals with pamphlets telling them such a project would be an inevitable taxpayer boondoggle resulting in worse service (that's false, if you were unaware, not only do plenty of community broadband operations operate in the green, data suggests they routinely provide significantly cheaper, better broadband):

"Probable cause on four legs." That's the cop nickname for drug dogs, which need to do nothing more than something only perceptible to the officer/trainer to allow officers to engage in warrantless searches. For years, drug dogs and the "odor of marijuana" have allowed both cops and dogs to follow their noses to all sorts of otherwise-unconstitutional searches, much to the delight of law enforcement and its desire to make easy busts and seize cash.Then came the creeping menace of legalized marijuana, which meant cops in some states could no longer assume the odor of marijuana was reasonably suspicious enough to convert pretextual stops into full-blown searches. These legal changes also promised to put their dogs out of business because they were trained to detect weed along with other illicit substances. With marijuana no longer necessarily illicit, the dogs became more of a problem than a solution. As far too many law enforcement officials claimed, the legalization meant the literal death of drug dogs, rather than just a speed bump on the road to warrantless searches.Marijuana has been legal in Colorado since 2012. And yet, cops still use drug dogs that obviously cannot indicate via an "alert" whether it has detected now-legal weed or something still actually illegal under state law. That inability to tell officers "hey, I detected a legal substance" is now causing problems for drug convictions and their underlying drug dog-enabled searches.The Colorado Court of Appeals has just ruled [PDF] that a drug dog alert no longer generates the required amount of probable cause necessary to allow cops to engage in deeper, broader searches of people and their property. (via FourthAmendment.com)Here's how it began: