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The Chicago Police Department isn't willing to police itself. That much is apparent from the actions of its officers, which includes the department setting up an inner city "black site" where arrestees were separated from the rights and representation in order to coerce confessions.Nonexistent oversight has led directly to horrific outcomes, like unjustified killings and -- in just one jaw-dropping stat -- 100 misconduct accusations resulting from a single SWAT team raid of a wrong address.Will it ever get better? It seems unlikely. In Illinois, police accountability isn't even an afterthought. Some reforms were passed earlier this year but with a large concession to police departments: a partial burial of officers' misconduct records.

I don't know how in the world I missed this over the past couple of years, but I'm just in time to introduce you to a trademark lawsuit brought by the Dairy Queen people against W.B. Mason, an office supply and grocerer, over the latter's "Blizzard Water" brand. This story actually starts back in 2017, when W.B. Mason applied for a trademark on the water product. The company had actually been selling Blizzard Water since 2010, but the trademark application appears to have been what made Dairy Queen aware of that.And as a result, Dairy Queen filed suit over trademark claims. Dairy Queen argued in its initial complaint that its "Blizzard" mark is famous, which, yeah it is. It also argued that W.B. Mason selling Blizzard Water in its stores was going to cause confusion of origin or association with the buying public. Which... no, come on now. Ice cream is not water and no moron in any kind of hurry is going to confuse the two. Why does Dairy Queen say that product difference doesn't matter? Well, from the filing...

Outside of Clearview's CEO Hoan Ton-That, it's unclear who truly likes or admires the upstart facial recognition tech company. In the short time since its existence was uncovered, Clearview has managed to turn itself into Pariah-in-Chief of a surveillance industry full of pariahs.Clearview hasn't endeared itself to the sources for its 10-billion image database, which are (in descending order) (1) any publicly-accessible website/social media platform, and (2) their users. The company has been sued (for violating state privacy laws) in the United States and politely asked to leave by Canada, which found Clearview's nonconsensual harvesting of personal info illegal.It has subpoenaed activists demanding access to their (protected by the First Amendment) conversations with journalists. It has made claims about law enforcement efficacy that have been directly contradicted by the namechecked police departments. It has invited private companies, billionaire tech investors, police departments in the US, and government agencies around in the world to test drive the software by running searches on friends, family members, and whoever else potential customers might find interesting/useful to compile a (scraped) digital dossier on.Clearview intends to swallow up all the web it can. Caroline Haskins' report for Business Insider (alt link here) catches Clearview's vice president of federal sales pretty much saying the only way to avoid being added to Clearview's database is to stop being online.

How big of an embarrassment is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Beyond all the anti-vax nonsense, he filed a ridiculously embarrassing lawsuit against Facebook because he was fact checked. The case was laughed out of court earlier this year. And now he's trying to abuse the courts to out a pseudonymous blogger for writing about how RFK Jr. spoke at a German rally last year that appeared to be organized by folks with ties to rightwing extremists.Paul Levy from Public Citizen, who is trying to stop RFK from succeeding in this bullshit effort, has a blog post with all of the details.

It keeps coming up, the all-too-common, and all-too-erroneous, trope that "you can't shout fire in a crowded theater." And it shouldn't, because, as a statement of law, it is completely wrong. It's wrong like saying it's legal to rob a bank. Or, perhaps more aptly, it's wrong like saying it's illegal to wear white after Labor Day. Of course such a thing is not illegal. It's a completely made-up rule and not in any way a reflection of what the law on expression actually is, or ever was. And it's not without consequence that so many people nevertheless mistakenly believe it to be the law, and in so thinking use this misapprehension as a basis to ignore, or even undermine, the otherwise robust protection for speech the First Amendment is supposed to afford.This post therefore intends to do two things: explain in greater detail why it is an incorrect statement of law, and also how incorrectly citing it as the law inherently poisons any discussion about regulating online speech by giving the idea of such regulation the appearance of more merit than the Constitution would actually permit. Because if it were true that no one could speak this way, then a lot of the proposed regulation for online speech would tend to make more sense and also raise many fewer constitutional issues, because if it were in fact constitutional to put these sorts of limits on speech, then why not have some of these other proposed limits too.But the "fire in a crowded theater" trope is an unsound foundation upon which to base any attempt to regulate online speech because it most certainly is NOT constitutional to put these sorts of limits on speech, and for good reason. To understand why, it may help to understand where the idea came from to end up in the public vernacular in the first place.Its origins date back to a little over a century ago when the Supreme Court was wrestling with several cases involving defendants having said things against government policy. In particular, President Wilson wanted the United States to enter what eventually became known as World War I, and he wanted to institute the draft in order to have the military necessary to do it. He got his way and these decisions have become part of our history, but at the time they were incredibly contentious policies, and people spoke out against them. The government found this pushback extremely inconvenient for generating the public support it needed. So it sought to silence the loudest voices speaking against it by prosecuting them for their messages.In the case of Schenck v. U.S., the defendants had been distributing flyers encouraging young men to resist being drafted. Yes, maybe sometimes you could say such things, the Court decided in upholding their convictions, but sometimes circumstances were such that such expression was no longer permissible. And the standard the Court used for deciding whether it was permissible or not was whether the speech presented a "clear and present danger."But this was a decision that has since been repudiated by the Court. Even Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who himself had written the decision, soon came to believe that the standard he articulated in Schenck for what speech could be punished reached too much speech, and he said as much in his dissent in the subsequent Abrams v. U.S. case, which was another one where the defendants were being prosecuted for ostensibly interfering with the government's wartime policy.Over time the rest of the Court joined him in the view that the First Amendment protected far more speech than its earlier decisions had allowed. Today the standard for what speech can be proscribed is the much narrower one articulated in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which said that speech can only be prosecuted if it is intended to incite "imminent lawless action" (read: a riot). It didn't mean provocative speech that might inflame feelings (even the speech of a KKK member was protected) but something far more precipitous. It is still left room for some speech to be unprotected, but this more restrained standard is much less likely to prohibit too much speech, as the standard from the Schenck decision had.In the wake of this later jurisprudence limiting what speech can be punished we can today more easily see, in hindsight, how the Schenck decision let the government suppress way too much speech, which is why the courts have moved away from it. For instance, war, and even the draft, remain controversial issues, but we now expect to be able to speak against them. Moving away from Schenck has made it easier to intuitively understand that the public has the right, and must have the right, to speak against the powerful, including the government. Even if well-intentioned in its actions the government may nonetheless be wrong to do what it wants to do, and what if those intentions are not noble? The greater the impact of the action the government wants to take, the greater the need to be able to speak against it – and often the greater the government impulse to shut that speech down.But what's key for this discussion here is that, despite the obvious error of the Schenck decision, people are still quoting a part of it as if it were still good law, as if it were EVER good law, and as if the part they are quoting did not itself perpetuate the same fundamental mistake of Schenck and put too much speech beyond the reach of First Amendment protection – which creates its own danger.Because it was in the Schenck decision where Justice Holmes included the casual mention about not being able to shout fire in a crowded theater. It was a line that itself was only dicta – in other words, it was never actually a statement of law but rather a separate musing used to illustrate the point of law the decision was trying to articulate. It wasn't what the case was about, or a statement that was in any other way given the robust consideration it should have been due if it were to truly serve as a legal benchmark. After all, what if the theater was actually on fire? Would saying so be illegal? Ironically, the people getting the law wrong by citing this line also tend to cite it incorrectly, because what is often omitted from the trope is that Holmes suggested the problem would only arise by "falsely" shouting fire. But even if this criteria were to be part of the rule, might not such a rule deter people from shouting alarm even if the theater was actually burning? Justice Holmes slipped that single line in the decision as a truth, but it was one he had only just suddenly conjured out of whole cloth. Nowhere did he address the implications of such a rule, or what it would mean when history mistook it as one.Because it is not the rule. It never was the rule. And it never, ever should be cited today as being the rule. From almost the moment it was judicially uttered it was already out of step with our understanding of what the First Amendment protects, and it has only gotten more and more detached as our understanding of the First Amendment's protection and purpose have gotten more precise. Modern jurisprudence has made clear that it is in only the rarest exception where freedom of speech can be impinged. It is therefore legally wrong to suggest otherwise, and even more legally ignorant to use this line to do it.Perhaps more importantly, though, even if it were the rule, it shouldn't be. Even back in the day of firetrap theaters stuffed with flammable celluloid it was of dubious value as a rule proscribing speech because sometimes speech really needs to be said, and thus it is important – maybe even of critical importance – that such speech not be chilled. The same is no less true today. Indeed, the more contentious public discourse is, and the higher the stakes, the more important it is that everyone be free, and FEEL free, to express themselves. We can't have people too scared to speak against misuses of power because they might run afoul of someone deciding that certain ideas should not be said. Yet it's that fear of recrimination that often is what silences people more than any specific sanction. And it's that fear that deprives the public of any benefit of whatever they had to say.Which is why our understanding of the First Amendment's protection has come to be far more broad and permissive than such a rule about crowded theaters would ever allow, because it is the only read of the Constitution that gives the First Amendment its true protective utility. When we speak of the law regarding free speech we speak of a law that understands it's better to have too much speech, including some that is valueless, than to risk losing the speech that has value. And it's a rule that applies just as much to speech online as off, as the Supreme Court also announced in Reno v. ACLU. All of our discussions about online speech should therefore start there, with that principle, and not around single throwaway lines from long discredited opinions that try to pretend that speech is ever so easily unprotected.

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Journalist Dan Froomkin, who is one of the most insightful commentators on the state of the media today, recently began a new effort, which he calls "let me rewrite that for you," in which he takes a piece of journalism that he believes misled readers, and rewrites parts of them -- mainly the headline and the lede -- to better present the story. I think it's a brilliant and useful form of media criticism that I figured I might experiment with as well -- and I'm going to start it out with a recent Washington Post piece, one of many the Post has written about the leaked Facebook Files from whistleblower Frances Haugen.The piece is written by reporters Jeremy Merrill and Will Oremus -- and I'm assuming that, like many mainstream news orgs, editors write the headlines and subheads, rather than the reporters. I don't know Merrill, but I will note that I find Oremus to be one of the most astute and thoughtful journalists out there today, and not one prone to fall into some of the usual traps that journalists fall for -- so this one surprised me a bit (though, I'm also using this format on an Oremus piece, because I'm pretty sure he'll take the criticism in the spirit intended -- to push for better overall journalism on these kinds of topics). The article's headline tells a story in and of itself: Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation, with a subhead that implies something similar: "Facebook engineers gave extra value to emoji reactions, including ‘angry,’ pushing more emotional and provocative content into users’ news feeds." There's also a graphic that reinforces this suggested point: Facebook weighted "anger" much more than happy reactions. And it's all under the "Facebook under fire" designation:Seeing this headline and image, it would be pretty normal for you to assume the pretty clear implication: people reacting happily (e.g. with "likes") on Facebook had those shows of emotions weighted at 1/5th the intensity of people reacting angrily (e.g. with "anger" emojis) and that is obviously why Facebook stokes tremendous anger, hatred and divisiveness (as the story goes).But... that's not actually what the details show. The actual details show that initially when Facebook introduced its list of five different "emoji" reactions (to be added to the long iconic "like" button), it weighted all five of them as five times as impactful as a like. That means that "love," "haha," "wow," and "sad" also were weighted at 5 times a single like, and identical to "angry." And while the article does mention this in the first paragraph, it immediately pivots to focus only on the "angry" weighting and what that means. When combined with the headline and the rest of the article, it's entirely possible to read the article and not even realize that "love," "sad," "haha," and "wow" were also ranked at 5x a single "like" and to believe that Facebook deliberately chose to ramp up promotion of "anger" inducing content. It's not only possible, it's quite likely. Hell, it's how I read the article the first time through, completely missing the fact that it applied to the other emojis as well.The article also completely buries how quickly Facebook realized this was an issue and adjusted the policy. While it does mention it, it's very much buried late in the story, as are some other relevant facts that paint the entire story in a very different light than the way many people are reading it.As some people highlighted this, Oremus pointed out that the bigger story here is "how arbitrary initial decisions, set by humans for business reasons, become reified as the status quo." And he's right. That is the more interesting story and one worth exploring. But that's not how this article is presented at all! And, his own article suggested the "reified as the status quo" part is inaccurate as well, though, again, that's buried further down in the story. The article is very much written in a way where the takeaway for most people is going to be "Facebook highly ranks posts that made you angry, because stoking divisiveness was good for business, and that's still true today." Except none of that is accurate.So... let's rewrite that, and try to better get across the point that Oremus claims was the intended point of the story.The original title, again is:

To gain regulatory approval for its $26 billion merger with Sprint, T-Mobile made numerous promises. One was that the deal would immediately create jobs (there've been 5,000 layoffs so far). Another was that the company would work closely with Dish Network to help them build a fourth wireless network that would replace Sprint, theoretically "fixing" the reduction in competition the deal created. As predicted, that plan isn't working out so well.T-Mobile was supposed to closely shepherd Dish's own network build over a period of 7 years, but the two companies have proven largely incapable of getting along. Recently, Dish accused T-Mobile of shutting down its 3G (CDMA) network (which Dish is currently using as it builds a 5G network) prematurely. T-Mobile in turn accused Dish of being too cheap to pay for 4G and 5G upgraded phones for its fairly tiny userbase. This week T-Mobile balked, issuing a hilariously passive aggressive press release saying T-Mobile would be leaving its 3G network on for a little bit longer because Dish was, effectively, incompetent:

Interpol has become a weapon. The international consortium of law enforcement does have a legitimate purpose. It's there to prevent people from escaping justice just because they've left the country where they've committed crimes. It's a worthy goal, but it's an easily abused mechanism.For instance, there's Turkey's government, which really wants to keep its top position on the "Most Journalists Jailed" list. It can't do this without the help of Interpol. In 2018, Turkey sent "red alert" notices to Interpol seeking journalists accused of whatever bullshit the government made up in hopes of having police forces in other nations round up the two self-exiled writers the government wanted to punish.The problem is ongoing. And it may be getting worse, according to this report from Josh Jacobs for The Guardian.

When I became a parent nearly seven years ago, I tasked myself with reading up on what to expect and how to be a good parent. Among many more important things, one prominent point of reading that led to many discussions in our household was screen time for children. And, as you might expect, that conversation has been ongoing to date. There are lots of theories out there about just how much screen time kids should get at certain ages, but the unifying force behind those theories typically is that it should be relatively limited. Some nations have even gotten into the game of forcing screen time limitations on children, or at least many have gone that route for targeted types of screen time, such as video games.But what if I told you that all that worrying done by parents, all the reading on the topic, and all of the effort put into it by governments is basically for nothing? Well, that seems to be the main conclusion reached by a new study that finds that the impact of recreational screen time on children is statistically negligible.

Summary: A major challenge for global internet companies is figuring how to deal with different rules and regulations within different countries. This has proven especially difficult for internet companies looking to operate in China — a country in which many of the most popular global websites are blocked.In 2015, there was an article highlighting how companies like Evernote and LinkedIn had avoided getting blocked in China, mainly by complying with the Chinese government’s demands that they moderate certain content. In that article, LinkedIn’s then-CEO Jeff Weiner noted:"We're expecting there will be requests to filter content," he said. "We are strongly in support of freedom of expression and we are opposed to censorship," he said, but "that's going to be necessary for us to achieve the kind of scale that we'd like to be able to deliver to our membership."Swedish journalist Jojje Olsson tweeted the article when it came out. Six years later LinkedIn informed Olsson that his own LinkedIn profile would no longer be available in China after referencing the Tiananmen square massacre in his profile.

The increasing reliance on tech by law enforcement means the increasing reliance on private companies. It's inevitable that tech developments will be adopted by government agencies, but a lot of this adoption has occurred with minimal oversight or public input. That lack of public insight carries forward to criminal trials, where companies have successfully stepped in to prevent defendants from accessing information about evidence, citing concerns about exposed trade secrets or proprietary software. In other cases, prosecutors have dropped cases rather than risk discussing supposedly sensitive tech in open court.Elizabeth Joh's new article for Science says corporations are making existing transparency and accountability problems in law enforcement even worse.

For reasons I don't fully understand, over the last few months, many critics of "big tech" and Facebook, in particular, have latched onto the idea that "the algorithm" is the problem. It's been almost weird how frequently people insist to me that if only social media got rid of algorithmically recommending stuff, and went back to the old fashioned chronological news feed order, all would be good in the world again. Some of this seems based on the idea that algorithms are primed to lead people down a garden path from one type of video to ever more extreme videos (which certainly has happened, though how often is never made clear). Some of it seems to be a bit of a kneejerk reaction to simply disliking the fact that these companies (which many people don't really trust) are making decisions about what you may and may not like -- and that feels kinda creepy.In the past few weeks, there's been a bit of a fever pitch on this topic, partly in response to whistleblower Frances Haugen's leak of documents, in which she argues that Facebook's algorithm is a big part of the problem. And then there's the recent attempt by some Democrats in Congress to take away Section 230 from algorithmically recommended information. As I noted, the bill is so problematic that it's not clear what it's actually solving.But underlying all of this is a general opinion that "algorithms" and "algorithmic recommendations" are inherently bad and problematic. And, frankly, I'm confused by this. At a personal level, the tools I've used that do algorithmic recommendations (mainly: Google News, Twitter, and YouTube) have been... really, really useful? And also pretty accurate over time in learning what I want, and thus providing me more useful content in a more efficient manner, which has been pretty good for me, personally. I recognize that not everyone has that experience, but at the very least, before we unilaterally declare algorithms and recommendation engines as bad, it might help to understand how often they're recommending stuff that's useful and helpful, as compared to how often they're causing problems.And, for all the talk about how Haugen's leaking has shown a light on the "dangers" of algorithms, the actual documents that she's leaked might suggest something else entirely. Reporter Alex Kantrowitz has reported on one of the leaked documents, regarding a study Facebook did on what happens when Facebook turns off the algorithmic rankings and... it was not pretty. But, contrary to common belief, Facebook actually made more money without the News Feed algorithm.

Another set of plaintiffs insisting social media platforms have it in for "conservative" users have lost in court. The hook for this lawsuit is the (specious) claim that government officials' statements saying social media services should do more to curb the spread of misinformation (COVID, elections, etc.) somehow transformed these private companies into state actors. So, when they did decide to moderate the conspiracy theorists' accounts, it was ACTUAL CENSORSHIP.Here's Eric Goldman's summary of the case, the plaintiff, and the lawsuit's outcome.

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A big open question regarding Rep. Devin Nunes' never ending series of lawsuits against the media has been who is funding those lawsuits. As a watchdog group highlighted last year, House rules require certain steps be followed if a Member is receiving free legal services, and it did not appear that Nunes had followed those steps, and if Nunes were actually paying for those legal services, House rules required that he not be receiving a discount for them, which the watchdog group noted was worth investigating.The funding of these lawsuits has now become an issue in a case that... was not directly filed by Rep. Nunes. As you'll recall, Nunes sued reporter Ryan Lizza and Esquire publisher Hearst over an article regarding Nunes' family, and the farm they own in Iowa. A few months after Rep. Nunes' lawsuit, Nunes' family filed a separate lawsuit over the same article, against the same defendants, using the same lawyer as Nunes, Steven Biss.A year ago, a district court judge dismissed Rep. Nunes' lawsuit, though the appeals court recently revived that lawsuit in a truly bizarre decision. The family's case against Lizza and Hearst was on shaky ground, but was allowed to proceed on a very narrow claim.Over the last few months we've talked about how the proceedings in that case have gone completely off the rails in ways that I've honestly never seen before in years of following some pretty intense cases.But one of the issues at play in the case is... who is funding the family's lawsuit. That became an issue, because if Rep. Nunes himself is funding the case and is the real party of interest in the lawsuit, that impacts the standard under which defamation must be shown (notably, whether or not the actual malice standard applies). And, Nunes's family has admitted that it (1) isn't paying, and (2) has little involvement in the lawsuit, despite being the plaintiffs. From some recently unredacted filings:

Earlier this year, we noted how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had launched a bad faith effort suggesting that "big tech" gets a "free ride" on the internet, and should be forced to fund broadband expansion. Carr's argument, that companies like Google and Netflix somehow get a free ride (they don't) and should "pay their fair share," is a fifteen year old AT&T lobbyist talking point. AT&T's goal has always been to "double dip"; as in not only get paid for bandwidth by consumers and businesses, but to get an additional troll toll simply for, well, existing.AT&T has long tried to offload its (often neglected or half-completed) network build and maintenance costs to somebody else to make investors happy. That somebody else is usually taxpayers, who've thrown billions in pointless tax breaks and dubious regulatory favors at the company in exchange for fiber networks that are always (so mysteriously!) left half completed and jobs that never arrive. Now AT&T (and their broadcaster allies) want tech giants to pay as well.Over at the right wing Washington Examiner, you can see how this effort is framed in order to sell it to the public and regulators:

The use of automatic license plate readers by law enforcement has steadily increased over the past decade. The theory is a never ending documentation of vehicle movements results in more solved crimes and recovered stolen vehicles. Assertions about law enforcement efficiency have driven other tech acquisitions, ranging from repurposed war gear like Stingray devices to facial recognition software.But there's another force at work, one driven by private companies and aggressively marketed to private parties. Ring, Amazon's doorbell/camera acquisition, has driven its growth by portraying daily life as inherently unsafe -- a portrayal aided by its partnership with hundreds of law enforcement agencies, who often act as an extension of its marketing department.Another growth market in the private sector relies on what's normally considered to be law enforcement tech: license plate readers. Flock Safety sells plate readers to gated communities and homeowners associations, promising peace of mind to residents who often have nothing to be worried about. Residents in low crime areas are told crime is headed their way. And people inherently suspicious about anyone they don't immediately recognize were more than happy to inflict surveillance tech on anyone passing through their neighborhoods.But Flock, like Ring, isn't just for those who've kept up with or surpassed the Joneses. Flock has managed to make inroads into less spectacular neighborhoods, giving residents access to a wealth of plate/location data that is often shared with local law enforcement.

Felony murder is a truly bizarre artifact of the American justice system. It's simply not enough that there are thousands of laws that can be used to charge people who have allegedly broken them. But felony murder (and its offshoots, which include other crimes like manslaughter) allows prosecutors to charge people for crimes they didn't commit.It works like this. Two people perform a robbery. One waits in the car. The person inside the business kills someone during the robbery. Prosecutors charge the driver with "felony murder" because they can, arguing that the person's presence at a crime scene makes them as culpable as the person who actually committed the crime.It's ridiculous. But it's probably never been more ridiculous than this. Idaho resident Jenna Holm was arrested in May of last year following a traffic stop where she waved a machete at deputies and was tased into submission. During this arrest, a deputy arriving at the scene (Sgt. Randy Flagel) struck and killed Deputy Wyatt Maser with his patrol car.Not content to deal with this unfortunate accident by mourning the officer killed in the line of duty, prosecutors decided to charge the arrestee (who was not driving and did not hit the deputy) with felony involuntary manslaughter, keeping her locked up with a $100,000 bond.These charges stuck despite an internal investigation by the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office finding that the officers on the scene were almost completely responsible for the accident that killed Deputy Wyatt.

It's another crossposted episode this week! Mike recently joined the Tech Policy Press podcast alongside Block Party founder Tracy Chou for a conversation about using middleware and interoperability to craft a new, less centralized online ecosystem. You can listen to the whole conversation on this week's episode.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.

Invasive searches of people's phones at border crossings and international airports have become standard operating procedure for US border control agencies. The usual justifications have been made: national security and preventing contraband from crossing the border.Those claims may have some merit, but it doesn't explain why the number of invasive searches has exploded over the past few years, even though the number of border crossings hasn't. It also doesn't explain why agencies like Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) continue to claim the program is too important to be curtailed, yet somehow not important enough to be competently supervised or quantified.For the most part, courts have agreed with the government's assertions that searching devices without warrants or (in many cases) articulable suspicion is just good national security work. Only one court has pushed back, requiring searches to be limited to rooting out suspected contraband, rather than just examining phone contents until agents find something to get reasonably suspicious about.The Supreme Court said warrants are needed to search the contents of cell phones. Unfortunately, our nation's borders have long been considered blanket warrant exceptions -- an exception that extends 100 miles inland from every border and international airport. It also limited this to searches "incident to an arrest," and in many cases, people whose devices are searched at the border are never arrested.This ruling tends to work well away from the border, since seizures of phones without an arrest is generally considered an obvious violation of rights, which makes any subsequent searches illegal. But this phrase doesn't do much to limit searches at the border where rights are assumed to be mostly waived, making the initial seizures lawful, paving the way for warrantless searches that may violate the Fourth Amendment, but in a place where courts have said violating the Constitution is cool and good.And so the courts, having abdicated their checks and balances mandate, tell plaintiffs "hey, if this bothers y'all, maybe ask Congress to get it changed." Because if Congress says it's ok to waive all rights near the border, who are the courts to decide direct Supreme Court precedent applies to border phone searches?Well, maybe the courts need to do a little local application because Congress can't be arsed. A bill to restore the Fourth Amendment at the border has been submitted and denied in the past. It's back again. Maybe this time -- given the increasing distrust of law enforcement and federal border control efforts -- it will get further than it has in the past.Here's the EFF's summary of Ron Wyden's "Protecting Data at the Border Act," which (against all sanity) offers up the novel idea that the federal government should respect people's rights.

It was the longest delay in staffing U.S. telecom agencies in Presidential history, but a White House announcement states the administration will promote interim boss Jessica Rosenworcel to be permanent FCC boss, while appointing former Tom Wheeler advisor and consumer advocate Gigi Sohn to fill the third empty Democratic Commissioner seat. Sohn played a major role in both the crafting of net neutrality rules (since demolished by telecom sector lobbyists during the Trump era) and the FCC's broadband privacy rules (also since demolished by telecom sector lobbyists during the Trump era).Another agency that's increasingly doing interesting work on broadband (see their recent, more accurate mapping efforts) is the NTIA, which will now be helmed by Alan Davidson. All three choices are broadly popular, understand the potential of competent regulatory oversight and the pitfalls of incompetent overreach. And while maybe not as paradigm-rattling as Lina Khan's appointment to the FTC, all three will collectively be a notable sea change from the Trump era which, with the occasional exception, involved doing pretty much whatever AT&T and Comcast wanted.There was some initial talk about Gigi Sohn being appointed FCC boss, but that would have involved demoting Rosenworcel (whose term ends at the end of this year). Given Sohn's history of consumer and net neutrality advocacy, she likely wasn't as popular among entrenched telecom providers, making an FCC boss confirmation hearing more contentious. Still, consumer groups see Rosenworcel as somebody they can work with, and are generally positive about both picks:

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Over the weekend, the Telegraph (not the most trustworthy or reliable in a batch of UK news organizations that have long had issues with accuracy in reporting) claimed that the latest (and most high profile) Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, was prepared to come out against encryption. This (quite rightly) raised the hackles of multiple encryption experts. As people were getting pretty worked up about it, the Telegraph (silently, and without notice) changed the headline of the piece (from "Facebook whistleblower warns ‘dangerous’ encryption will aid espionage by hostile nations" to "Facebook whistleblower warns company's encryption will aid espionage by hostile nations") as well as the actual text of the story, to suggest a slightly more nuanced (but still not great) view -- effectively saying she supported encryption, but was concerned that Facebook would use encryption as a "see no evil" kind of blindfold to problems on its platform.

I've noted for a few times that the very obvious dysfunction in "big tech" has proven to be the gift that keeps on giving for "big telecom." While tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook get the entirety of (often very justified) attention for dodgy business practices and terrible judgement, telecom has basically been forgotten in the DC Policy conversation. While lawsuits and Congressional posturing all focus on expanding oversight of "big tech," "big telecom" and "big media" have been able to lobotomize most of the oversight of its own businesses, despite engaging in all the same (and sometimes worse) dubious business practices.An FTC report on privacy reiterated that forgetting about telecom and media was a mistake. The FTC's latest report on privacy noted largely what most people knew: telecom and cable companies collect an absolute ocean of data on U.S. consumers, then "sell" access to that data to third parties (they usually just call it something else) without being clear about it. They then provide users with opt out and transparency tools that are intentionally cumbersome, if they work at all. This data then bounces around the internet creating potential harm and abuse among countless parties, whether stalkers, law enforcement, people pretending to be law enforcement, or other corporations.The FTC found that many ISP and cable companies "privacy policies" are utterly theatrical in nature. As in they're designed to be so cumbersome as to deter people from using them (which companies then use as evidence that consumers "don't care about privacy"). Other times the "opt out" tools don't work at all, and in some cases they result in even more user data being collected. None of this is made particularly clear to the end user:

The saga of Google's Stadia product has been long, winding, and mostly disappointing. The initial launch of Google's platform, billed as a Netflix-style video game streaming service, was underwhelming and plagued with Obamacare-like rollout issues, failed promises, underperforming adoption rates, and a paltry catalogue of games on the platform. Other than that, the launch of Stadia went off without a hitch.But the problems continued. The in-house development studio Google setup to make games for Stadia was nixxed without ever having produced a single game, support for the platform suddenly became a non-thing due to staffing cuts, and more Stadia staff headed for greener pastures.With all of that, you might think that Stadia has been destined for a grave next to Google Plus. And maybe that's still the case, but it seems Google is going to take the long way to get there if it is, as the company has made some vague noises about Stadia no longer being a platform for gamers to stream games on directly, but rather a platform for other companies to try to make, you know, actually successful.

Last week we wrote a bit about Trump's new planned social media website, Truth Social (which forbids too many capital letters, so I will oblige by not capitalizing the entire "Truth" part of the name, as Trump's branding apparently prefers). We mostly focused on the ridiculous terms of service (forbidding capital letters among other things), and the fact that it was already kicking people off the system (who only got on the system because Trump's coders apparently failed to properly secure the site pre-launch). We also talked briefly about how it appeared to be a reskin of Mastodon, and that's potentially an interesting legal issue, because it certainly appears to be violating the AGPLv3 license for Mastodon.But, perhaps a more interesting story right now... is how the grift behind all of this is combining the whole Gamestonk craze and the NFT craze... and the SPAC craze to make absolutely no sense at all.We had mentioned in passing in the original post that Trump's new company -- Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) -- was formed via a reverse merger using a SPAC. Such deals have become a popular sort of backdoor way to take a private company public, though, they're usually combined with some additional private investment (known as a PIPE -- a Private Investment in Public Equity) in order to afford the "takeover" of the private company that is becoming public. SPACs aren't new -- hell we wrote about Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak creating a SPAC back in 2006. But in the last few years, they've been all the rage.But, Trump's SPAC deal is raising some eyebrows -- or frying some brains. My favorite analysis is the one done by the always excellent Matt Levine at Bloomberg where you can basically hear him tearing his hair out at the absurdity of it all and gradually watch as he comes to terms with the fact that nothing at all matters and it's all nonsense. As Levine notes, the real grift here is that it doesn't matter one bit if Trump has a good business plan for Truth Social or TMTG, because he's going to walk away with tons of cash just from the stock deal.

Malware merchant NSO Group's year of embarrassment continues. Leaked data published in July appeared to show NSO malware (namely its phone-hijacking malware Pegasus) had been used to target dissidents, journalists, religious leaders, and prominent politicians.NSO reacted by first claiming the data showed nothing of the sort or at least was unrelated to its malware and its customers. Then it made contradictory claims, saying it terminated contracts when it discovered abuse of its products and that it had no visibility into its customers' actions. Puzzling.Then things somehow got worse. Countries accused of using NSO Group malware to target critics and journalists decided to sue critics and journalists. Israel's government opened an investigation into the Israeli company. Another investigation found the government of Bahrain was engaging in exactly the kind of abuse NSO claimed it didn't allow. And, thanks to some pretty ugly divorce proceedings, it came to light that the Dubai's king had used the malware to spy on his ex-wife and her lawyer.The debacle continues. An investigation by Citizen Lab -- which has uncovered previous misuse of NSO's software -- reveals an American journalist was targeted multiple times by NSO's hacking tools.

Plenty of people have raised concerns that Donald Trump's sketchy new social media site, Truth Social, is just a lightly reskinned Mastodon, which is violating Mastodon's fairly strict AGPLv3 license. As we had previously discussed, the aggressive (and sloppy) terms of service for the site claim that the code is proprietary, and even claims that "all source code, databases, functionality, software, website designs, audio, video, text, photographs, and graphics on the Site (collectively, the “Content”) and the trademarks, service marks, and logos contained therein (the “Marks”) are owned or controlled by us or licensed to us..."Of course, part of the reason that Mastodon uses such a license is to encourage others to take the code and build on it if they abide by the terms of the license. And the nature of Mastodon's license is that if you use it, you must make the complete source code available of what you build with it. The key bit of the license:

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Last year, when everybody was freaking out over TikTok, we noted that TikTok was likely the least of the internet's security and privacy issues. In part because TikTok wasn't doing anything that wasn't being done by thousands of other app makers, telecoms, data brokers, or adtech companies in a country that can't be bothered to pass even a basic privacy law for the internet era. If we're serious about security and privacy solutions, we need to take a much broader view.For example, while countless people freaked out about TikTok, none of those same folks seem bothered by the parade of nasty vulnerabilities in the nation's telecom networks, whether we're talking about the SS7 flaw that lets governments and bad actors spy on wireless users around the planet or the constant drumbeat of location data scandals that keep revealing how your granular location data is being sold to any nitwit with a nickel. Or the largely nonexistent privacy and security standards in the internet of broken things. Or the dodgy security in our satellite communications networks.This week, Crowdstrike drove this myopia home again with a new report showcasing how Chinese hackers have compromised global telecom networks for years. The security firm found that since 2016 or so, a (likely Chinese state backed) hacking organization dubbed "LightBasin" or "UNC1945" targeted global telecom companies and was able to compromise 13 of them since 2019. First accessing an eDNS server through an SSH connection from the network of another compromised company, the hackers were able to obtain a trove of telecom data including subscriber information, call metadata, text messages and more, helping them develop a wide collection of snooping tricks:

Last month we launched out Plagiarism Collection of NFTs, plagiarized from law professor/conceptual artist Brian L. Frye's paper (and NFTs) called Deodand. The content isn't just about plagiarism, they're instructing people to experiment with plagiarism, so they seem perfectly set up for being plagiarized. And, since straight plagiarism doesn't add much value, we decided to take his text, and make it a lot nicer by creating wonderful, colorful, animated GIFs, turning them into NFTs and auctioning them off on OpenSea.Of course, we were realizing, you haven't really seen these NFTs up close -- so today I'm posting all of them for you to see. If you'd like to own the NFT associated with any of them, just click through and bid in the auction:I think my personal favorite is Plagiarism Piece 2, though others have been growing on me. I was unsure about Plagiarism Piece 7 and Piece 8, but the more I look at each of them, the more both have been growing on me...

The Supreme Court spent decades making it all but impossible for citizens to successfully sue law enforcement officers for violating their rights. The Supreme Court created the doctrine of "qualified immunity" nearly 40 years ago and has spent most of the intervening years honing it into a nearly impenetrable shield for officers who violate rights.But over the past year, the Supreme Court seemed to recognize it had perhaps placed too many limits on lower courts, leading them away from examining the case at hand and towards affirming QI defenses because no precedential case had identical facts: i.e., excessive force deployed at 6 pm on a Tuesday is completely different than excessive force deployed at 7 am on a Wednesday, etc. And if no previous facts aligned with the current facts, courts had no reason to examine the facts in front of them, steering them away from creating new precedent that would put officers on notice that violating rights on a Wednesday morning also wouldn't be tolerated.The past twelve months have been somewhat anomalous for the Supreme Court. It has reversed three appeals court decisions awarding qualified immunity. The three reversals were important. The Fifth Circuit was home to two of the reversals -- a circuit notorious for its aggressive protection of law enforcement officers. But the lack of an official opinion suggests the Supreme Court is in no hurry to limit qualified immunity's coverage.The latest shadow docket release [PDF] from the Supreme Court contains two more unofficial orders on qualified immunity decisions. But these go the other way, reversing appellate decisions that stripped officers of their qualified immunity shield. (via Reason)In one case (via the Ninth Circuit), police officers reporting to a call from two teens about their mother's drunk ex-boyfriend menacing them in their home arrested Ramon Cortesluna. According to the arrestee, his rights were violated when Officer Daniel Rivas-Villegas knelt on his back with his knee while he was already face down on the ground. The Ninth Circuit said this was excessive force, citing another case where an unarmed arrestee was seriously injured when he was restrained face down by an officer's knee.The Supreme Court, however, says the Ninth Circuit's cited precedent isn't on point enough. The cited case dealt with an unarmed person and a noise complaint. This case deals with a man who had a knife on him and was allegedly trying to saw his way into a room where the two frightened teens who made the 911 call had barricaded themselves. The similarity is the knee to the back as a restraint method and the Supreme Court says that's simply not enough.The second rejection is headed back to the Tenth Circuit. In this case, a woman called the cops on her ex-husband, who was drunk and wandering around outside of her house. Officers arrived and followed the man into the garage, where the man grabbed a hammer and held it over his head, ignoring orders to drop the tool. When he refused, the officers on the scene shot and killed the man. The entire confrontation was captured on the officers' body cameras.The Tenth Circuit said no immunity because the officers' decision to follow the man into the garage created the danger they responded to by killing him. The Supreme Court says the Tenth Circuit is wrong. Not only that, it says it shouldn't even need to be having this discussion in the first place.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Trump's attempts to evade a copyright lawsuit:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, we followed up on the previous Friday's ridiculous arrest of Amy Goodman for covering the North Dakota oil pipeline protests, with prosecutors changing their charges from trespassing to the even more ridiculous charge of rioting, only to have them rejected by a judge. An appeals court ruling confirmed what everyone knew about NSA surveillance — that it could be used to investigate domestic suspects — while a tribunal in the UK determined that intelligence agencies there had been illegally collecting data in bulk for more than a decade. Comcast was sued for misleading feeds that it claimed were about "transparency", T-Mobile was fined by the FCC for abusing the definition of "unlimited" data, and the FTC was warning that AT&T's court victory on throttling could screw over consumers for decades to come. Meanwhile, Team Prenda suffered yet another huge loss with an order to pay over $650,000 for a bogus defamation lawsuit.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, copyright troll lawyer Evan Stone was appealing a judicial slapdown and sanctions, another mass infringement lawyer was complaining about the number of people fighting back, and Righthaven was still trying to avoid paying legal fees (though the court wasn't having it) while also facing an imminent dismissal in yet another lawsuit. Ron Wyden was continuing to point out the problems with PROTECT IP while we took a look at the connection between that bill and Wikileaks censorship. This was also the week that we first wrote about the birth of CreativeAmerica, the latest astroturf organization from the entertainment industry.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, Belgian newspapers were doubling down on their "victory" in getting delisted by Google with demands to be removed from MSN as well, while a News.com editor was using the fight as a springboard for a ridiculous column about how Google is "immoral". Mostly, though, things were shaking out regarding Google's YouTube acquisition: it was causing turbulence for Google's existing advertising deals, there was a revelation that YouTube had given equity to record labels on the morning of the deal, and we noted that attacks from politicians might be an even bigger deal than attacks from the entertainment industry (and Universal Music chose this week to sue a bunch of other video sites instead). Meanwhile, the Authors Guild lawsuit over Google's book scanning was getting off to a very, very slow start.

How much of a violation needs to take place before it's a Constitutional violation? It's a trick question, at least in the hands of the right judge. With the wrong judge, a minimal violation is considered excusable, or at least salvageable by any number of Fourth Amendment exceptions.But with the right judge, any Fourth Amendment violation is a Fourth Amendment violation, no matter how small or how fleeting it is. That's how we get to this decision [PDF], handed down by the Supreme Court of Idaho, which not only calls on cops to do better with their drug dog handling, but also tips the hat to recent decisions involving parking enforcement measures. (via FourthAmendment.com)Here are the facts of the case:

Eddy Grant, responsible for the banger Electric Avenue, has made it onto our pages a couple of times in the past, most recently over a copyright spat with Donald Trump. At issue in the lawsuit was the Trump campaign sending around a video of a "Trump/Pence" train zipping by, with a Biden hand-car chugging behind it. While there were lots of references to Biden sniffing people's hair (seriously, what is that?) and other silly jabs, the real problem is that the entire video has Electric Avenue playing as its soundtrack. Eddy Grant didn't like this, of course, and sued over it. Trump tried to get the suit tossed on fair use grounds, arguing that the use of the song was transformative... but that isn't how it works. Simply using the song in a way the author didn't intend doesn't make the use transformative. Were that the case, every commercial advertisement out there would feature copyrighted songs as backgrounds to selling all manner of things. Again, not how it works and the court refused to toss the suit in response to Trump's Motion to Dismiss.And so now this whole case moves forward and Trump is once again asserting fair use in his answer to the complaint... but with a twist! More on the twist in a moment, but first the fair use argument.

Yeah, it can suck when you fail to handle FOIA requests properly and give the public more information than you intended to. It sucks for the government. It doesn't suck for the public, which is rarely treated to anything more than the most minimal of transparency.Unfortunately, government agencies don't always react well when they've screwed things up. Sometimes the blowback is limited to ineffectual shouting or paper waving. Sometimes, however, it's a lawsuit seeking a court order to prevent people from accessing (or sharing) documents they've legally obtained from a government agency.Cut to Virginia, where it's the latter option being deployed:

Of all the places to come across illegal facial recognition tech deployment, a convenience store chain is certainly one of the strangest. The tech wasn't deployed to stop shoplifting or keep unwanted people off the premises. Instead, somewhat ironically, it was deployed to help 7-Eleven convenience stores quantify how well it was doing in the customer service department.Here's Campbell Kawn for ZDNet (via Slashdot):

Hey Missouri: stop electing technically illiterate dipshits. First you had Claire McCaskill, one of the key sponsors of FOSTA (who is still defending it years later). You got rid of her, but replaced her with Josh Hawley, who seems to think his main job in the Senate (besides whipping up support for insurrectionists and planning his run for the Presidency) is to destroy the internet and reshape it according to his own personal vision.And then there's your governor. We wrote about him a few years ago when he claimed (ridiculously) that the 1st Amendment meant he could withhold public records (which is not how any of this works). But, of course, last week, his tech ignorance broke into prime time after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ethically disclosed that the state's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website was including teacher & administrator social security numbers in the HTML. DESE pulled down the pages, but not before calling the journalists "hackers." Parson then doubled down and called for the journalists to be prosecuted. And then kept insisting that viewing HTML source code was hacking.For the past week people on Twitter have been repeatedly mocking Parson for this, but he just won't give up, and neither will the United Missouri PAC that is a huge Parson supporter and was even fined last year by the Missouri Ethics Commission over improper contributions and failure to report the contributions to Parson.Earlier this week, United Missouri seemed to think that Parson's blatant technical illiteracy was worth doubling down on and turning into a culture war against "the fake news." It produced a video that is so embarrassing and cringeworthy it feels like a parody.I mean, the transcript is so stupid that it makes me wonder about the quality of education in Missouri that someone could be this clueless.

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So for years I've noted if you really want to understand why U.S. broadband is so crappy, you should take a long, close look at Frontier Communications in states like West Virginia. For decades the ISP has provided slow and expensive service, routinely failed to upgrade or repair its network, and generally personified the typical bumbling, apathetic, regional monopoly. And its punishment, year after year, has generally been a parade of regulatory favors, tax breaks, and millions in subsidies. At no point do "telecom policy leaders" or politicians ever try to do much differently.Case in point: Frontier, fresh off of an ugly bankruptcy, numerous AG and FTC lawsuits over repair delays, and repeated subsidy scandals, is positioning itself to nab yet more subsidies from the state of Wisconsin. Frontier is asking the state of for $35 million in additional grants, despite the fact Wisconsin was just one of several states whose AGs recently sued the company for being generally terrible. Folks familiar with the company argue it shouldn't be seeing a single, additional dime in taxpayer resources given fifteen years of scandal:

A college has done something dumb and unconstitutional. Not all that surprising. Neither is the response, coming from Adam Steinbaugh and FIRE (Foundation for Rights in Education).Emerson College may be a private university, but that doesn't mean it can just ignore the First Amendment. In fact, it says it won't ignore these rights, which obligates it to uphold them. This is Emerson College in its own words (archived link in case the college decides to disappear it):

It takes a special kind of hubris to appropriate music and lyrics not just from another artist, but another cultural genre of artists, and then threaten someone else for "stealing" what you've "stolen". Meet Barry Mann. If that name doesn't sound terribly familiar to you, fear not, as he is known for the 1961 hit song Who Put The Bomp? and other songs from decades ago. And if that song title doesn't sound familiar, you've almost certainly heard the song. To jog your memory, it includes such made up words as "ramalama ding dong". See, those are called vocables: made up syllables used to effectuate rhythmic form rather than meaning. You can listen to the song below to get an idea of what I'm talking about."The Mann", which is what I'll be calling him from here on out, is still kicking at 82 and apparently is learning a new hobby: threatening other artists with copyright claims. He and/or his legal representatives apparently sent a cease and desist notice to Le Tigre, a feminist punk band, over a song called Decepticon. See, Decepticon takes a couple of lyrics found in The Mann's song and repurposes them to become a feminist anthem. For that and one additional reason that we'll get into later, Le Tigre filed suit for declaratory relief of The Mann's copyright infringement claim. Here is Decepticon so you can go hear for yourself just how copyright-infringe-y this all isn't.Between the suit and the song itself, you should notice a number of things. First off, you may be thinking to yourself that this song sounds decidedly retro for punk music. That's because the song came out twenty years ago and has long been Le Tigre's most famous song. Why a lawsuit is only being filed now is an open question. In addition, the use of the lyrics is minimal and the song itself is nothing remotely like The Mann's song.

One of the more common violations of the First Amendment is viewpoint discrimination. When entities run into speech they don't like, they often steamroll Constitutional rights in their hurry to shut this speech down.The government is allowed some time and place restrictions on speech, but it is very limited in its options. To expand these options, government entities will often say things about "public safety" to justify their incursion on people's rights. These justifications rarely justify the overreach.Maybe these things happen because governments (incorrectly, in some cases) assume those whose rights have been abridged won't sue. Maybe they happen because governments assume nebulous "public safety" concerns won't be examined thoroughly if they are sued. Or maybe they just assume that, because they're using the public's money to both violate rights and defend against accusations of rights violations, none of this really matters because it isn't any particular government employee's money at stake.That brings us to this case [PDF], where a Maryland federal court has ruled the government had no justifiable reason to shut down a "prayer rally." What it did have were some unjustifiable reasons, which were mainly related to the speakers and the kind of speech the government expected to be uttered… I mean, if it hadn't unconstitutionally shuttered the event. (via Courthouse News Service)Here's some brief background by the court, which doesn't highlight the most likely trigger: alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos, who has been banned from [name a social media platform].

More than two years ago we wrote about a truly bizarre ruling in a truly bizarre copyright lawsuit against Cloudflare. As you (perhaps?) know, Cloudflare is a popular CDN provider, helping websites (including Techdirt) provide better access to users while helping to mitigate things like denial of service attacks. In this case, the plaintiffs, Mon Cheri Bridals -- a maker of bridal dresses -- sued Cloudflare because websites out there were selling counterfeit dresses. If you know anything about copyright (and counterfeiting) law, you should be scratching your head. Counterfeiting is not about copyright. It's about trademark. But the dress company (for reasons I still don't understand), made the stretchiest of stretchy arguments to say that (1) the counterfeit sellers were posting images of the dresses, and (2) those images were protected by a copyright held by the dress maker, and (3) because the counterfeiting sites posting the allegedly copyright infringing photos used Cloudflare for CDN (not hosting) services, that somehow makes them contributory liable for the copyright infringement.Even worse, the complaint itself was extremely confused about the DMCA and how it works with regards to the DMCA 512 safe harbors. Different companies are treated differently under 512, and Section (b) companies for "system caching" (which is what CDNs do) are treated differently under the law than Section (c) hosting companies. However, the whole "notice and takedown" aspect of the law only applies to Section (c) type companies. But the lawsuit simply ignored that and assumed that Cloudflare should be a (c) company, rather than a (b).And, astoundingly, as we wrote about two years ago, the judge refused to dismiss the case, but let it move forward past the motion to dismiss stage -- meaning that it went through some very expensive discovery and other efforts before finally getting to the summary judgment stage, and now more than two years later, the judge granted dismissal on summary judgment. And, kinda like his refusal to dismiss, the opinion is kinda short and doesn't get into much in the way of detail. But at least this time it gets it right.

The Chicago PD -- fronted by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) [itself fronted by John Catanzara, "one of the most frequently-disciplined officers in the history of the Chicago PD"] -- is fighting the city of Chicago's vaccine mandate.Yes, the thin blue line between criminals and the safety of the public has decided it will not stand between the spread of the virus and the safety of the public. Or, indeed, the safety of its officers, apparently. As COVID-19 continues to kill more officers five times faster than gunfire, Chicago PD officers have decided they'd rather die from something preventable than receive a vaccine.Disgraced-officer-turned-police-union-president John Catanzara is the one making the most noise about the city's mandate and is weaponizing the PD's lack of self-care against the mayor and the city itself.

Wireless subscribers of Verizon's Visible prepaid service received a rude awakening after hackers compromised their account, then ordered expensive new iPhones on their dime. Last week a company statement indicated that "threat actors were able to access username/passwords from outside sources," then utilize that access to login to Visible customer accounts. Hacked users say the attackers then utilized that access to order expensive kit, and, initially, getting Visible to do anything about it was a challenge:

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People suing Twitter and Facebook for acts of violence committed by terrorists have yet to talk a court into agreeing with their arguments. Utilizing federal anti-terrorism laws as a way to circumvent discussion of First Amendment and Section 230 issues has worked to a certain extent. It may not have handed any wins to plaintiffs, but it has prevented precedent that would work against these clients (and their law firms -- both of them) when attempting to define "insanity" through repeated failure.Via Eric Goldman comes another loss in court for plaintiffs attempting to sue social media companies over an act of terrorism, in this case the mass shooting in an Orlando, Florida nightclub that appears to have no ties to any organized terrorist group.Despite being given multiple attempts to convert the complaint into something actionable, the plaintiffs failed to do so. This is largely because social media companies aren't even indirectly responsible for acts of terrorism. More specifically in this case, the Pulse Nightclub shooting wasn't even, legally speaking, an act of international terrorism. That means there's no cause of action under the plaintiffs' legal vehicle of choice, the Anti-Terrorism Act.From the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision [PDF]: