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In the wake of Australia getting its ridiculous, anti-open internet link tax passed into law, the push to create similar such laws everywhere else has gone into overdrive. In the US, the main driver of this effort (which has been pushed by legacy newspaper giants) has been an antitrust exemption that would allow the newspapers to collude, in order to put up (what they think is) a joint effort to demand that Google and Facebook pay them for links. The supposed "antitrust" wing of the Democratic party, David Cicilline in the House and Amy Klobuchar in the Senate, have decided that this is a good idea and introduced the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) (here's the House version). Leaving aside the oddity of thinking that the best way to deal with what you believe are dominant firms is to allow other firms to collude and avoid antitrust laws, the entire proposal is silly, and potentially destructive to the open internet.Public Knowledge has put together a letter to Congress explaining why (our think tank, the Copia Institute, has signed onto the letter). In a separate blog post, Public Knowledge notes that while it as an organization has been largely supportive of Cicilline and Klobuchar's antitrust efforts around the tech companies (something we at Techdirt are somewhat less convinced by), this bill is a complete disaster.The key part is exactly what we highlighted was wrong with the Australian law. The idea that this is a competition issue and that newspapers need to be able to band together to have enough clout to negotiate a price for linking to their stories has a totally false underlying assumption, that there's some underlying right to be paid for links. The whole nature of the open internet is that you don't need permission or a license to link to someone else. But this bill seems to think that's not true. And that's a problem.

With streaming games and "let's plays" becoming a dominant force of influence in the gaming world, one of the sillier trends we've seen is video games coming out with "stream safe" settings that strip out audio content for which there is no broadcast license. We've talked already about how this sort of thing is not a solution to the actual problem -- the complicated licenses surrounding copyrighted works and the permission culture that birthed them -- but is rather a ploy to simply ignore that problem entirely. That hasn't stopped this from becoming a more regular thing in the gaming world, even as we've seen examples of "stream safe" settings fail to keep streams from getting DMCA notices.Well, if there were a perfect example of a video game that highlights the absurdity of all of this, it may well be the forthcoming Guardians of the Galaxy title. If you're not familiar with the GotG movies, you should know that retro music plays a major role in the films. The game promises that retro music will be just as important as in the films. And that's what immediately set off concern for game streamers.

Last year -- following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin (and following the protests that followed this unconscionable killing) -- New Jersey's top cop said there would be more transparency and accountability in his state.

Federal funds -- banned since 2015 from being used by states to purchase red light/speed cameras -- are possibly headed back to buying tech that hasn't done anything to make driving safer.In 2012, language was added to the federal transportation bill that denied states federal funding for traffic cameras.

We've noted repeatedly that there are two major reasons US broadband is slow, spotty, and expensive: regional monopolization (a lack of competition), and the state and federal regulatory capture (corruption) that protects it. On the latter front, there's been an absolute army of telecom industry aligned folks, who, for decades, have relied on dodgy broadband availability maps and dubious data to not only pretend there's no real problem that needs fixing, but also to slather companies with subsidies without ensuring that money actually goes toward fixing the problem.Last fall, the FCC held a reverse auction doling out nearly $9 billion from the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), paid into via Universal Service Fund (USF) contributions affixed to your broadband and phone bills. To be very clear: some of this money will absolutely help shore up access in underserved communities. But after digging into the FCC maps of the winning bidders, consumer groups found a long list of examples where we were throwing billions of dollars at companies for deployments that make no sense.For example, Free Press noted that Elon Musk, the second wealthiest man on the planet, managed to game the FCC system and nab $886 million in ratepayer subsidies for his Starlink system. And he did it by promising the FCC that his company would bring broadband to essential US areas like... already connected airports and highway traffic medians:

Earlier this year, we wrote a lot about the ridiculous anti-open internet Australian link tax that is now being pushed elsewhere around the globe. Anyone paying attention to the details knew that it was extreme crony capitalism at work, with the government forcing one set of massive companies (namely, Facebook and Google) to pay another set of massive companies, led by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and Nine. For all the talk of how big tech companies are "monopolies," if you look at Australia's news companies, it's considered among the most concentrated in the world, and has been quite profitable for the likes of Murodch.And while defenders of the bill insist (incorrectly) that the bill is not a link tax, but is merely a "competition bill" to help those few giant newspaper companies "better negotiate" with the giant internet companies, that's bullshit for two reasons. First, it's a "negotiation" to pay for links, and no one should ever have to pay to link to some other site. That's just fundamentally against the concept of an open internet. Second, it's no real negotiation because if Facebook and Google fail to agree to a deal that satisfies the Aussie media bosses, the government can step in and force an agreement on them.Lots of people -- including those in Australia -- noted that this all seemed like a scheme to make Rupert Murdoch richer. And now the Australian competition official, Rod Sims, who "oversaw drafting of the law" has flat out admitted that the whole thing was Murdoch's idea in the first place, though he insists it's "extremely strange" that anyone thinks it's a favor to Murdoch.

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Since its unceremonious exposure by the New York Times, internet-scraping facial recognition tech company Clearview has been the subject of nothing but negative press, lawsuits, and law enforcement denials of its self-proclaimed crime fighting abilities. Apparently to the surprise of Clearview, few people were receptive to the idea of having their personal info scraped from the web by the company and served up to law enforcement officers, private companies security personnel, and any billionaire wondering about what to throw their money at.The dubious legality of its efforts has seen Clearview exit certain markets in the United States. It has also exited an entire nation, pulling the plug in Canada while under investigation by the country's Privacy Commissioner.Earlier this year, the Privacy Commissioner released part of its report, finding that Clearview's offering was mass surveillance that was illegal under federal and provincial laws. The second half of its investigation deals with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and its use of Clearview during investigations. The Commissioner's conclusion? The RCMP also broke the law.

As you've probably noticed, there's a big new "antitrust" push afoot in DC. As you may have also noticed, many of these proposals don't actually do a whole lot to reform US antitrust or monopoly problems in any broad way. Scholars for decades have warned that US antitrust enforcement has become feckless, and that we need to rethink how we approach antitrust in a world in which companies often seem to have more and more power over our lives.The U.S. is dominated by anticompetitive giants in banking, telecom, insurance, health care, air travel, and countless other sectors. And generally, we've historically encouraged them by underfunding our regulators, steadily weakening antitrust enforcement, rubber stamping merger after terrible merger, and replacing competent Judges with bobble head dolls. All under the pretense that doing anything else would be disastrous, while clinging tightly to a consumer welfare standard that sometimes seemed incapable of addressing modern market, labor, and consumer harms.That's a lot to fix, but with this vast interconnected dysfunction being so profitable, and with so many cross-industry corporations (with bottomless budgets and immense lobbying control over Congress) opposed to real reform and oversight, that doesn't seem likely to actually happen. So instead we've been getting something else. A very selective new wave of "antitrust reform" that focuses exclusively "big tech," while leaving sectors like banking or "big telecom" free to run amok. Despite evidence that those latter sectors actually do things that harm consumers (the supposed standard for antitrust).The movement to rein in big tech and shore up antitrust enforcement certainly has valid components, based on justified anger at years of dodgy business practices. But this anger has been proven to be exploitable by folks like News Corporation and AT&T. Both companies are looking to saddle their Silicon Valley competitors in online advertising with rules that don't apply to their own businesses, while simultaneously demolishing constraints and oversight of their own sectors (see: net neutrality, the dismantling of FCC authority, or the steady erosion of media consolidation rules protecting small businesses).Enter Rep. David Cicilline, in charge of the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel. He says Democrats have introduced a suite of different antitrust bills in the belief it will keep "big tech" on its heels, making it harder to defeat one centralized bill. He claims that by narrowly targeting specific issues of antitrust it will be easier to get the 10 Republican votes needed to pass the bills with a 60 vote majority in the Senate. But so far there's no indication the obstructionist GOP, whose interest in "antitrust reform" has generally been of the performative populism variety, has any interest in helping out (last I saw the proposals had about 3 GOP votes in the House, just enough to market the effort as "bipartisan").Meanwhile, many of the bills are oddly selective in what they deem to be a "dominant platform." The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act (pdf), for example, greatly restricts what constitutes a monopolistic offender, making sure to carve out exceptions for telecom giants, Mastercard, VISA, and Walmart. The bill bans companies from owning or operating a business that "presents a clear conflict of interest," but only if the company in question has 50 million monthly active U.S. users and a market cap of over $600 billion:

It's now been eight years since Indiana law enforcement seized Tyson Timbs' Land Rover following his arrest for distributing drugs. In eight years, this case has made multiple visits to the state trial court, the state court of appeals, the state's Supreme Court, and the nation's Supreme Court.This isn't just due to Timbs' tenacity and his desire to have his car returned. His only car -- worth $35,000 when it was seized -- has been sitting in an impound lot for most of decade, all because of criminal charges that netted Timbs $1,200 in fines and one year of home detention.No, these multiple trips are due to the state of Indiana attempting to prevent precedent from being set that would prevent it from seizing whatever it wants whenever it wants. Previous rulings found excessive fines -- in this case taking the form of a $35,000 vehicle seizure over $400 of heroin sold to undercover officers -- violate the Eighth Amendment. And these rulings also reminded the state that it had incorporated that part of the US Constitution years ago and couldn't try to ignore it now just because it still wants to avail itself of Benjamins when ringing up people on nickel-and-dime charges.So, for the third time, the Indiana state Supreme Court is forced to handle the Timbs case because the state has refused to accept every previous ruling that has gone against it, including the one handed down by the US Supreme Court. The opening of the ruling [PDF] expresses some of the court's exasperation with the state's stubbornness.

Summary: The internet is the way that many new musical artists get discovered these days, with perhaps the most famous story being that of that of Justin Bieber on YouTube. Some of this came from finding undiscovered musicians who had talent, and some of it came from finding otherwise unsigned artists who had managed to build large followings themselves.Of course, this latter situation also opened up the possibility of gaming the system to appear more popular than you are in reality. Partly in response to this -- and more likely to prevent gaming views in order to gain advertising revenue -- YouTube put in place a policy of removing videos that appeared to use automated systems to game the number of views.An independent musician by the name of Darnaa sought to gain a following via YouTube, and engaged in a marketing campaign designed to drive traffic and popularity to her videos. In 2012 she had uploaded a video that had received nearly 1.9 million views according to YouTube’s counter. In 2013, another video received over 1.1 million views. In 2014, she uploaded a new video, for a song entitled Cowgirl, which started receiving views as well. Darnaa claimed that these came from a coordinated marketing campaign that cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars.YouTube, however, believed that the views on the video were inflated through artificial means, violating the terms of service. Rather than simply removing the video, or shutting down Darnaa’s videos, the service simply moved the video to a new URL, resetting the counter (and breaking earlier links to the video). Darnaa sent an email complaining about this, and convinced her marketing partners to restart the marketing campaign, leading to YouTube relocating the video a second time, which again, reset the view counter.Darnaa’s music label, the conveniently named Darnaa, LLC. then sued YouTube arguing that moving the location of the video was both a breach of contract, and interference with her business dealings.Decisions to be made by YouTube:

Last month we highlighted what seemed like a fairly silly Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that banning cryptocurrency was the best way to stop ransomware, in response (mainly) to the well publicized ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, which resulted in the company shutting down the flow of oil while it sorted things out. As we pointed out, not only was the idea of banning cryptocurrency unworkable, it was unlikely to do much to stop ransomware. Unfortunately, it appears that a number of other cryptocurrency haters jumped on this moment to push the idea even further, claiming that "society has a Bitcoin problem."Of course, part of the key narrative in all of these pieces is that cryptocurrency and Bitcoin in particular, somehow make it easier for criminals to "get away" with these kinds of ransom demands, highlighting that it is somewhat easier to move around large values of Bitcoin than cash. However, as we noted in our original piece, the idea that cryptocurrency allows criminals to "get away" seemed extremely overblown, as we've seen plenty of cases where criminals using cryptocurrency were caught. And, as if to put an exclamation point on all of this, soon after the huge moral panic, the FBI announced that it had recovered over half of the money Colonial Pipeline had paid.And, as the FBI special agent's affidavit showed, this was done in part by tracking how the money flowed across the public ledger. The NY Times ran an article noting that the FBI's recovery of the money here "upends the idea that Bitcoin is untraceable." A bunch of long time Bitcoin/cryptocurrency followers scoffed at the NY Times article, because they've long known that Bitcoin's public ledger has always made it so that transactions are traceable. But it's actually important for people not deeply in the Bitcoin space to understand this as well. And the problem with so many of the "ransomware is really a cryptocurrency problem" articles, was that they implied otherwise -- that cryptocurrency was somehow totally and completely untraceable.As the NY Times article explains, what's important here is that it demonstrates that for all the hand wringing about cryptocurrencies and ransomware, the reality is that law enforcement is evolving with the times, and using the same kind of law enforcement detective work it's supposed to use to solve crimes.

There is a lot of sturm and drang in the halls of government these days about corporate mergers – or, at least, tech company mergers (oddly, this ire doesn't seem to necessarily extend to all mergers). But despite all the gnashing and wailing there's not a lot of understanding of why they happen. Which is strange, because if you think there's a problem, it would help to understand WHY there is a problem, because that understanding will give clues on how to fix it.So let's think about why a company "merges" with another. I put "merges" in quotes, because usually it boils down to one company buying another – how much of a "merger" it is depends on how similarly positioned the respective companies are and the details of the deal, but regulators today seem most upset about the A part of M&A (acquisition) so let's focus on that aspect. Why would a company want to acquire another?One big reason relates to patent law. Let's say you're a company with a product, and you want to make that product do something more, or better, or have some new feature that it doesn't already have. You could develop it on your own but (a) that will take time you may not have (ex: the market opening may close before you can get it out the door), (b) money you may not have (ex: you may not have the liquidity needed), or other resources you may not have (ex: you may not have the expertise needed or be able to easily hire it), and (c) even if you had what was needed you may still not be able to develop it on your own because it turns out that someone has already developed the best method, gotten a patent on it, and now they can block anyone else from implementing it with at least the threat of litigation if not also actual litigation.So the shortest distance between two points for many companies, especially larger tech companies, is often to simply buy the other company that has the missing piece of the technology puzzle they want. This acquisition then does a few things. For one, it gives the purchasing company access to that technology, which means it could potentially produce a better product. Of course, it also gives the company exclusive access to the technology and lets them block anyone else from using it, including their competitors.In other words, through patent law (and also copyright law, but we'll set that aside for now) we intentionally give companies the power to act like monopolies, even when it's not actually in our interest. So of course we're upset that companies use that power, but the problem is that it's a power we gave them. Splitting them up is not the cure for the problem we created; the only solution is to stop giving them so much monopoly power in the first place.There are at least two things we should do differently. First, we need to stop giving out so many patents full stop (and we need to stop condemning the people calling for fewer to be issued). Too often these patents are not for actually significant innovations (or innovations at all), and all too often they are on subject matter that should be unpatentable. Every few decades or so the US Supreme Court wakes from its slumber to remind the world that, at least under US law, software is not patentable subject matter. But these decisions haven't stopped people from pursuing, and getting, these sorts of patents. So it's very strange that people wonder why there are so many tech companies with software-driven products that have so much market clout, when it's a power our own USPTO has been purposefully giving them.But even where patents are issued appropriately, there are still things we can do to mitigate their anti-competitive effects. One of the problems with patents today is how they give patent holders the ability to shut out other users of the technology. That's why patents can have this harmful effect on the marketplace, and it's also what has put modern patent law out-of-step with the authority granted Congress by the Constitution to pass a patent law at all. Congress gets to legislate in this area for the purpose of "promot[ing] the progress" of science and the useful arts, but the reality of today's patent law is that instead of promoting progress it ends up creating huge obstacles to it.This injunctive power that comes with a patent is also unnecessary to achieve anything that patent law was intended to vindicate. Even accepting as true the idea that innovators need some sort of reward for being the first to innovate something the world would benefit from – beyond, of course, the inherent market advantage that comes from being first – all that means is that if there's some profit to be had from the innovation that the patentholder should get to realize at least some of it. But you don't need the power to shut out all other uses to glean that profit; all you need to do is license it.Of course, backed with the power to enjoin other uses, license fees today are less about reasonable market rates that provide benefit to everyone: the innovator, the implementer, and the public, which now gets to have more innovation in the marketplace at prices the market can bear. Instead, patent revenue today is more about extortive windfalls. The policy change we need is to switch up that balance. And one way to do that is by replacing the current (and often disproportionate) ability of patentholders to enjoin any uses of their technology with some sort of compulsory license system. A compulsory license system means that patent holders cannot say no to competitors and other innovators who want to use or build on their technologies, either directly, by refusing permission, or indirectly, through excessive license fees. Instead the reward for their patent is the reasonable income returned by the license they must offer.There are several upsides to changing patent law this way. For one, even if it somehow diminishes the perceived luster of having a patent that would not be a bad thing: as explained before, the landgrab that has been trying to turn every technological improvement, no matter how small, into a powerfully enforceable monopoly has been at the root of much of the anticompetitive behavior regulators now lament, and discouraging it would, on its own, help mitigate those problems. (Constraining the Patent Office so that it also grants fewer patents, especially specious and/or software ones would help as well.)Secondly, it also means that more people can use the technology, or even build on it. And that's good for society in general. The point of patents is to stimulate that innovation, and this change would do so by clearing the way to it. Furthermore, it would also have the effect of diminishing the monopolistic effects we don't like. Not only would patents now provide less monopoly power, but they would also lessen the incentive companies currently have to acquire other companies in order to horde more of it.Which would also lead to less market consolidation. For instance, smaller companies with a sought after-innovation, instead of being bought out by one company that could now exclusively benefit from it, could stay going concerns and continue to put products in the market. If the innovations were legitimately patentable they could also use those licensing profits to subsidize their own further innovation and product development, and to the extent that fewer innovations may be patentable, the good news is that this reduction in patentability would mean that there would be more technologies available for them to help themselves to in order to compete, even against the companies we currently worry are too big.Of course, there is a catch: compulsory license systems are great in theory but often cumbersome in practice, and, as we see in the copyright space, they can introduce new, unwelcome, and debilitating costs and regulatory impediments. (We'd also want to keep an eye on where non-practicing entities owning patents should be in this ecosystem, if anywhere.) So this isn't a case of "just add water" where tacking any old compulsory license system onto patent law will automatically make everything sunshine and roses. It will take some extremely careful thinking in how to implement.In the meantime, however, we are seeing some other industry adaptations, like patent pools, emerge to help mitigate the extortive power of patents. And, in general, the idea of minimizing the exclusionary control of a patent, including through compulsory licenses, is a good one we would be better served to be thinking seriously about, rather than the zealous appetite to break up companies that has currently seized all of our attention. Especially when these proposed break-ups are so arbitrary, unprincipled, and ultimately costly in ways regulators do not seem to be contemplating.In any case it just doesn't make any sense for the government to on one hand tell companies to go be monopolies and then immediately complain they are being monopolies. The solution to the problem of companies acting monopolistic is to not deliberately give them so much power to be.

This brief clip from an FBI training film helps explain the actions undertaken by agents during a raid on a secure storage facility earlier this year:In March of this year, the US Attorney in Los Angeles, California secured an indictment against a secure vault company, alleging the company was engaged in money laundering, drug trafficking, and hiding taxable assets. None of the company's employees or owners were indicted.FBI agents spent five days turning US Private Vaults upside down. Agents apparently emptied every safety deposit box housed by the business. They did this in complete contradiction of the limits imposed on them by the FBI's own warrant affidavit. Here's Eric Boehm of Reason with some background:

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We noted how while the Biden broadband plan was arguably vague, a big part of its core focus was community broadband. In stark contrast to the Trump administration and GOP -- which think such efforts should be banned -- the Biden administration seems to recognize such efforts are a helpful and organic local response to market failure. While such efforts aren't a mystical panacea, they're a helpful way to both drive some needed regional broadband improvements to underserved areas, and force regional telecom monopolies to try just a little harder.Enter AT&T, which historically has used every trick in the book to prevent community broadband from ever becoming mainstream. That has included dodgy telecom industry funded "studies" falsely claiming such networks are inevitable taxpayer boondoggles, as well as multi-decade support for terrible state laws restricting such efforts, even if locals voted for them.Last week, AT&T CEO John Stankey, in an interview with the Economic Club, insisted that embracing community broadband (read: competition) was "misguided," claiming that it's not the government's job to get into the broadband business:

FBI Director Chris Wray needs to shut the fuck up about encryption.It has been 1,112 days since the FBI promised to perform a recount of encrypted devices in its possession, after overstating it by thousands for months in service of former director Jim Comey's "going dark" haymaking.As of November 2016, the number in the FBI's possession was only around 880 devices. It suddenly jumped to 3,000 six months later. Then it doubled to 6,000 in less than five months. By the end of that fiscal year, four months later, the FBI had added another 1,775 uncrackable devices to its total.That brought the alleged total to nearly 8,000 devices. The actual number -- should the FBI ever get around to releasing it -- is expected to be under 2,000.Add to this the fact that the FBI doesn't seem to be having much trouble hunting down criminals and terrorists. The FBI ran its own backdoored encrypted chat software for months, leading to dozens of arrests around the world. It ran seized child porn servers in order to deliver malware that coughed up identifying info about visitors to illicit dark web sites. Its crack team of undercover agents and informants have put a large number of terrorists behind bars, even though these successes are tainted by the agency's willingness to radicalize people just so it can bust them. And it has obtained all sorts of evidence to use against more than 500 defendants in the January 6th Capitol raid cases.Despite all of this, Chris Wray is still complaining about encryption's supposed ability to render the FBI (and other law enforcement agencies) blind and useless. His recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee takes time to highlight all the FBI's successes. But it also allows Wray to show off the latest in dead horse-beating rhetorical devices.

If you're a fan of gaming giant Nintendo, you really should know by now that Nintendo hates you. More specifically, when Nintendo is presented with a choice to either allow its rabid fans to express their fandom in new and interesting ways or attempt to exert iron-fisted control over every last thing, the company will always, always, always choose control. From taking down fan-games, DMCAing let's plays and much-loved video game music from its properties, or shutting down fan-projects for fiction or movies, the company behaves as though it just can't help itself. To be clear, Nintendo is typically within its rights in taking these actions, but it doesn't have to. This is a choice, not a necessity.And now, on the cusp of this year's Nintendo Direct, the company's E3 presentation that serves essentially as one giant commercial for what's coming out from Nintendo in the near future, the company has put out a statement in Japan insisting that nobody co-stream the event.

How do you respond if you've just been notified you lead the state in discipline cases? Well, if you're Sergeant German Bosque of the Opa-Locka (FL) police department, you take perverse pride in your inability to be a good cop.

It's no secret that the tech industry has lost much of the diversity that was present in its early days and grown into a male-dominated field rife with sexism and gender disparity. Today, many people are work to change this — and one such effort is the GirlCon, which is holding its fourth annual conference for women in tech from June 27th to 30th this year. On this week's episode, we're joined by GirlCon co-founder Kyla Guru and co-director Vidya Bharadwaj to discuss this year's event and the ongoing fight to empower the next generation of women in tech.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.

Last December the Trump administration rushed the appointment of Nathan Simington to the FCC last year, despite Simington having absolutely no real experience or qualifications for the role. That's because Simington was appointed for two other reasons. One being the silly (and utterly hypocritical if you tracked the net neutrality fights) effort by the Trump administration to try and have the FCC target Section 230, which was derailed by Trump's election loss.But the other purpose of Simington's rush appointment was to ensure the FCC would be gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners. Like the FTC, the FCC is comprised of a 3-2 partisan makeup depending on who controls the White House. And while Biden could have easily appointed a new FCC Commissioner to break that gridlock, we're now six months into his tenure with no movement on this front.Granted there are a lot of fires the Biden administration is tasked with putting out. But having a gridlocked FCC during a health and economic crisis where broadband is playing a starring role still isn't a great look. As a result, a coalition of more than 50 consumer groups and unions wrote the Biden camp last week asking for something vaguely resembling urgency on the FCC front:

The tail end of the Bill Barr/Donald Trump DOJ has been marred (I mean… more so…) by a quick succession of reports detailing its targeting of journalists' communications in order to sniff out the source of leaks.The Trump Administration was plagued by leaks and Trump suggested it would be cool if the FBI would go after some journalists. The FBI apparently also thought this was cool. And so the DOJ sent out subpoenas demanding information about phone calls and emails and pinned gag orders to them, keeping targeted journalists from being notified the government was trying to obtain these records.The targets were journalists employed at the papers on the top of Trump's shit list: the New York Times and the Washington Post. (The DOJ also targeted a CNN journalist.) And, in a weird twist loaded with the same First Amendment concerns, the FBI tried to obtain records pertaining to readers of a USA Today article about the killing of two FBI agents during a child porn raid.After the first couple of revelations, President Joe Biden said the DOJ would no longer target journalists.

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Last week we looked at the various antitrust bills written by House Democrats (though with Republicans co-sponsors conjured up at the last minute with an assist from Rupert Murdoch), and noted that none of them seemed likely to really solve the problems of internet consolidation. The crown jewel bill comes from Rep. David Cicilline, who is spearheading this entire antitrust effort. We discussed some of the problems with his bill last week, but a closer reading suggests that it would also create a disaster for content moderation. The bill reads:

The hits just keep on coming. Gag orders are being lifted or expiring and we're finding out even more about DOJ leak investigations under Trump. Under AGs Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, the DOJ targeted journalists, Congressional reps... even readers of USA Today.The DOJ went after journalists working for the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN while trying to hunt down the source of leaks, sending subpoenas to third party service providers hoping to acquire phone records and email metadata.The most recent revelation exposed the DOJ's targeting of Rep. Adam Schiff -- one of Trump's many, many punching bags -- in a leak investigation. The DOJ sent a grand jury subpoena to Apple, seeking metadata for 109 identifiers, specifically 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses. The information sought covered not only Schiff but his staffers and family members. Another Congressional Rep, Eric Swalwell, was targeted by the same subpoena.It appears no third party was left out of the DOJ's attempt to hunt down leakers. The latest news on the DOJ's leak hunting pulls in Microsoft.

There has been a theorem proposed on these pages, originally by Mike himself, for a long time that goes something like this: when a data breach is first reported in the news, the severity of the breach is always, always, always underreported and there will eventually be an admission that the breach was much worse. Despite this not having been my original idea, I nonetheless slapped my name on it and called it The Geigner Effect. If that sort of name-slapping is good enough for former US Presidents, it's damned well good enough for me.Anyway, an example of this is Ninteno's 2020 breach, where user data for the Nintendo Network was stolen, with the number of reported accounts effected magically doubling from 140k to 300k after a few months. It's also happened with Equifax, TJX, and even our own federal government. Perhaps most infamously, it also occurred when Yahoo acknowledged there was an email breach of a few hundred thousand accounts in 2013 that grew and grew over subsequent reports until, eventually in 2017, Yahoo acknowledged that literally every account had been affected.In February, game studio CD Projekt Red acknowledged a breach of their corporate network. That breach was mostly for corporate assets, including source code for several games along with data from CDPR's "accounting, administration, legal, HR, investor relations, and more". Held for ransom, there was no mention in the ransom note one way or the other if user data was effected. CDPR for its part indicated it would not be giving into any monetary demands by the nefarious actors, but indicated it was working with law enforcement authorities to investigate the incident.