Techdirt

For years now a strong narrative has emerged that the increase in teen depression (and suicides) is almost single handedly being caused by social media and cell phone use. Though quite often when you look a little more deeply at the studies in question you'll find they're a bit undercooked, tend to make overly broad assumptions about trends, and are often contradicted by other studies.For example, a 2019 study out of the UK of 12,000 adolescents found that most links between life satisfaction and social media use were "trivial," overall accounting for less than 1% of a teenager's sense of wellbeing. Another study from last year combed through 20 different studies on social media's impact on young adults and kids and found "there doesn’t seem to be an evidence base that would explain the level of panic and consternation around these issues."There's clearly a lot going wrong in the world, and a lot of it emotionally exhausting. Yet for whatever reason cell phone social media usage continues to often get the entirety of the blame for teen depression. An opinion column in the New York Times last week, for example, points to a new study showing a dramatic spike around the world in "teenage loneliness" starting in 2012:

There was a reasonable uproar from the cryptocurrency community this weekend as it appeared that the long fought for Biden infrastructure bill would change some definitions to create a mess for the wider cryptocurrency space.

Welcome to this year's dumbest controversy thus far. A couple of weeks ago, famed ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's announced that it would no longer be selling its products in "occupied Palestinian territory." Indicating that doing so would not align with the company's values, the idea here was that settlements that infringed on territory that was deemed to belong to the Palestinians by international law would be off the company's radar. Not all of Israel, mind you. Just the occupied territories. And that is when everyone lost their god damned minds. Ron DeSantis is seeking to have Florida put B&J and its parent company, Unilever, on a list of companies that should be scrutinized for "boycotting Israel". Jewish leaders indicated that the kosher rating of the ice cream could be altered for the same reason. Except that isn't what B&J are doing. It isn't boycotting Israel at all. It's simply refusing to sell its product in small sections of land that Israel currently occupies.And where this gets into Techdirt territory is that one law firm in Israel is going to so far as to try to screw with Ben & Jerry's trademark rights, arguing now that it can use the B&J trademarks in those territories because the company isn't selling products there any longer.

Last summer, following the George Floyd killing, members of Congress introduced the Justice in Policing Act of 2020. Among other reforms, the bill (since renamed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act) attempted to bring an end to qualified immunity, the Supreme Court-created legal doctrine that allows officers to escape civil rights lawsuits if the court decides no existing precedent would have put them on notice that the violation of rights they committed was actually a violation of rights.This doctrine has made it extremely easy for officers to escape accountability for their actions. If there's no case pretty much on point, the cop walks. While the Supreme Court has recently reconsidered its demands for cases on point, the prevailing rule pretty much still stands: as long as rights are violated in new ways, the rights violation must be suffered by the victim with no hope of compensation. In most cases, this also means the courts never get around to deciding this new violation of rights is a rights violation, so officers remain free to pretend they don't know any better.It's a terrible system and it needs to be changed. Legislation could do it. This legislation apparently can't, though. After being passed by the House on June 25th of last year, it went to the Senate to die. The bill has not moved forward since being placed on the Senate's legislative calendar more than a year ago.Some Congressional reps, however, think qualified immunity is a good thing. They believe police officers just don't have enough protections, even with their unions, large number of powerful political backers, their own set of rights, and the ability to just walk away from the job rather than be punished for their misconduct.Representative Claudia Tenney (New York) is one of those people. Despite facing no serious threat to the doctrine of qualified immunity, Tenney is seeking to have the Supreme Court's doctrine codified into law, preventing the court from walking it back at a future date. It also would punish any local governments that fail to "respect" law enforcement with the same fervor Tenney does.

For a few years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk's Starlink low orbit satellite broadband constellations are harming scientific research. Simply, the light pollution Musk claimed would never happen in the first place is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but not eliminated. Another problem is there are simply so many low orbit satellites being launched, the resulting space junk is creating navigation hazards. US regulators, so far, have done little to nothing about either problem.Enter ViaSat, which clearly isn't keen on having its captive business market disrupted by new competition. Back in January, the company urged the FCC to conduct an environmental review of SpaceX’s low-orbit Starlink constellation, arguing that the fledgling system poses environmental hazards in space and on Earth. Since the 80s, satellite systems have had a baked in exemption from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), excluding their businesses from environmental review. But the sheer scale of what Starlink and Amazon are doing (more than 50,000 low orbit satellites in orbit) should change that equation, ViaSat argues:

Every few years, the Olympics comes along to remind us not so much about the power of personal triumphs in sports, but the vast overreach of copyright laws to control absolutely everything for no damn reason at all.Over the weekend, a pretty amazing story came out of the Olympics. Dutch runner Sifan Hassan was entering the final lap in a 1,500 meter heat, when the runner in front of her tripped, leading Hassan to fall as well. Both runners were then way behind the rest of the pack, with just about 350 meters left to go. Somehow, Hassan got up, and passed 11 other Olympic runners to win the race.The only reason I learned about this was because I saw a tweet by Sports Illustrated writer Chris Chavez that included a clip showing that final lap from the fall to the victory. That tweet went super viral. When I spotted it, it had thousands of retweets. Indeed, the NPR link I put above with the story suggests you watch it by linking to Chris's tweet. Of course, if you go there now this is what you'll see:That missing tweet in the middle was the video.It's unclear if it was NBC or the Olympics (or someone else?) who took it down, but either way this is ridiculous. Yes, you can argue that the copyright holder has a right to take it down, but even that seems debatable. This seems like a pretty clear case of fair use -- a reporter reporting on something.But, even ignoring the fair use argument, this is just so stupid and pointless. Chavez was giving free advertising and promotion to an amazing moment at the Olympics. And it was going viral. Crazy viral. What kind of stupid landlord looks at someone giving them massive promotional value for free and says "we gotta stop that sorta thing!" The infatuation with ownership and control at the expense of word-of-mouth promotion makes no sense at all. It actively holds back interest in the event.

The Techdirt Deals Store is having a semi-annual sale from July 28 to August 4. Get 15% off of physical products using the code ANNUAL15. Get 30% off apps and software with the code ANNUAL30. Get 60% off of online courses with the code ANNUAL60.The 2021 Google Software Engineering Manager Bundle has 12 courses to help you learn software development. You'll learn about Data Science, Python, C#, Java, and more. Two courses will help you prepare for the CISA and CISM certification exams. It's on sale for $40.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Dozens of cities around the nation are relying on early warning tech to help their law enforcement get out ahead of crime. (Well, get out slightly behind crime, to be accurate…) Microphones and sensors placed in strategic locations around cities pick up loud noises and pass this information on to police departments so they can scramble cops to the spotted shot.That's what ShotSpotter does. How well it does it is still up for debate. SpotShotter detects loud noises that might be gunshots, runs everything through some coding, and makes a determination. Maybe the sound is just a backfire or someone setting off fireworks. Or maybe it's actually gunfire.This is what those in the cop business call "actionable intel." The problem is that ShotSpotter isn't as accurate as cops think it is. On the plus side, ShotSpotter appears to be every bit as malleable as cops want it to be.A few years ago, we covered the story of a man who sued Rochester police officers after they used ShotSpotter data (after the fact) to justify shooting him. A lot of things in the narrative didn't add up.Rochester resident Silvon Simmons was headed home from a convenience store around 9 pm when a cop car cut him off. The officer hit Simmons with his spotlight and then opened fire when Simmons ran away from the car. At no time did the officer identify himself as an officer.The Rochester PD attempted to justify this use of deadly force when faced with no deadly threat. Officers said they found a gun in a yard, but it was several houses away from where Simmons was stopped and in the opposite direction of where he had run when confronted by the police officer. The officers then said Simmons had fired on them, prompting them to fire back. Simmons' DNA and fingerprints were not on the recovered gun.So, the PD turned to ShotSpotter. What was originally determined to be "helicopter noise" by a ShotSpotter mic near the scene was changed to "multiple gunshots" at an officer's request. Unfortunately for the officer, ShotSpotter's count of shots fired was too few, as it only included the shots fired by officers. Another request resulted in ShotSpotter finding another gunshot in its recordings -- the one supposedly fired by Simmons at officers from the gun he never had in his possession. That was good enough to get him charged with aggravated assault on a police officer. He spent a year in jail before being acquitted on all charges.ShotSpotter and its law enforcement partners are doing it again. They're altering evidence to fit narratives, as Todd Feathers reports for Motherboard.

When last we checked in with Verizon, the company had just been caught exploiting the government's Covid broadband relief program to upsell struggling Americans to more expensive plans. Now, as Verizon tries to gain regulatory approval for its $6.2 billion acquisition of Tracfone, consumer groups and a small cadre of Senators are wondering if a company that thinks nothing of exploiting struggling Americans in need is a good steward for a discount phone company whose client base is predominantly comprised of low-income Americans.Five U.S. Senators recently wrote the FCC, rather timidly wondering if Verizon would use the acquisition to simply upsell these lower-income Americans to more expensive plans (spoiler: yes):

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Eric with a response to our post about the Vancouver roofing company that got hit with several negative reviews after suing over a single negative review:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, the hack of DNC emails was sweeping the news, revealing things that were important regardless of who conducted the hack (and some things that were just plain embarrassing) while we warned against any disastrous overreactions in response. We also highlighted Trump's worrying response as well as a ridiculous tidbit in the backlash from the DNC itself. IsoHunt settled the last of its lawsuits, an MPAA front group was attacking CloudFlare for not censoring the internet, and the TPP was meeting more resistance around the world. This was also the week that Verizon bought Yahoo, and of course it featured a continuation of the Monkey Selfie saga.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, governments were engaging in a propaganda war against hacktivist groups, Ron Wyden was pressing intelligence officials about their "secret" interpretation of the Patriot Act while other senators were trying to shift attention elsewhere, and Homeland Security was finally 'fessing up to the latest round of domain seizures. We saw worrying copyright rulings and laws in several countries including Sweden, Sierra Leone, and the UK (which offered up a double) — but perhaps the most concerning was in the US, where a judge put another nail in the coffin of the idea/expression dichotomy by allowing a photographer's lawsuit against Rihanna to move forward. But even more problematic than that was the CAFC ruling in the Myriad case that said individual genes can be patented.Fifteen Years AgoWell, this is an unusual one — as I was looking through posts for this section, I got a sense of deja vu, and had a realization: last month, I accidentally messed up the dates somehow and featured posts from this week in the flashback roundup for the final week of June. So you can go check out that link to see what happened this week in 2006, and today I've rounded up a few things that should have appeared in that post:There were trends of gimmicky WiFi offerings and people blaming Google for their own failures; people were still working to figure out what Nathan Myhrvold was up to with Intellectual Ventures while the Supreme Court agreed to look into the question of patent obviousness; the Sony Rootkit fiasco reared its head again as the makers of a virus that exploited the technology were arrested; we wondered why there was so little honesty in the net neutrality debate, and how Senators who voted against net neutrality could be in favor of the broadcast flag; and we looked at just how little impact the Grokster decision had on the world of file sharing.

Last year, a number of police reforms were passed by the city of Washington, DC. These efforts angered the Fraternal Order of Police -- which represents a number of DC Metro police officers -- enough for it to sue. It sued over two reforms in particular: the release of police recordings (body cam or otherwise) and the names of officers involved in shootings of residents.The FOP insisted this was a bad idea. According to the union, releasing this information would place officers in danger. The FOP speculated making officers' names public would subject them to humiliation, possible armed retribution by city residents, and make it ever so slightly more difficult for them to be employed by other law enforcement agencies.It also suggested releasing footage would violate the privacy rights of citizens, including victims and witnesses at the scene. And it insisted the entire thing reeked of due process violations, since there was a chance (probably a pretty good one) that officers would be cleared of any wrongdoing.Well, the court has rejected all of the FOP's arguments and Metro PD officers are going to have to get used to the new level of transparency that now surrounds their use of deadly force. The court likes exactly zero of the FOP's arguments. First, the court [PDF] points out the police union has no standing to bring this suit, no matter which version of standing it attempts to use.Speculating that the FOP will be involved in more defense of officers accused of wrongdoing following use-of-force incidents isn't an injury the court's willing to recognize. (And it's unclear how releasing footage and names would result in more litigation or internal investigations.)

The social media app TikTok was reported to have passed more than 3 billion total downloads in July and was the most downloaded app in the first half of the year. This growth is impressive as it not only was banned in India but is the first app not owned by Facebook to pass 3 billion downloads. Yet in the recent antitrust cases from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the states attorneys general against Facebook, there is little mention of the popular app.This omission is reminiscent of politicians gerrymandering or drawing political lines to benefit their parties’ candidates in re-election. Attorneys general and federal agencies have also relied on excluding competitors or narrowly defining markets to make their cases against Google and Facebook.The FTC led lawsuit against Facebook provides a case in point. The lawsuit accuses Facebook of having a monopoly over “personal networking services.” The FTC argues that products like LinkedIn or Twitter are different from Facebook and shouldn’t be considered as a personal networking service. TikTok with its 3 billion downloads fails to warrant a mention.Even with these exclusions, the FTC contends that Facebook only controls approximately 60 percent of the market yet omits whatever company or companies control the other 40 percent. Unsurprisingly the judge was unconvinced of the claim that Facebook controlled 60 percent of the market and gave the FTC 30 days to amend the complaint to show their work.As other cases against Google move through the process, they will likely face the same struggles at convincing judges due to their gerrymandering. The most recent case filed against Google for allegedly holding a monopoly on app stores in the Android mobile operating system is another example.The lawsuit immediately fails to pass any logical test since Android is not the only, let alone the dominant, mobile platform in the United States. Apple’s iOS has the majority of users in America and is facing its own antitrust lawsuit from Epic games over its supposed app store monopoly. The states try to get around this by claiming the market is specifically "licensable" operating systems, which excludes iOS, but that only highlights how this is gerrymandering the definition to get to a desired outcome.Even ignoring Apple, the Android system is extremely open allowing users to download a variety of app stores and even allowing for “sideloading” or downloading apps directly from the developers without need of an app store. The “Freedom Phone” which uses the Android operating system and purports to protect users from “big tech” comes preloaded with its own app store for example.The problem with these narrow definitions is that it asks judges to ignore the world in which we actually live for ones constructed for the purpose of showing targeted tech companies are monopolies.Other lawsuits contend that Google holds a monopoly over search when Bing and DuckDuckGo are easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection at no cost. Or that Google faces stiff competition from Facebook, Amazon, and a host of other companies to say nothing of more traditional advertisements.Like political gerrymandering, elected officials filing these cases seem to believe there is political gain for being tough on big tech. But as with poorly drawn political maps, judges are proving more skeptical. Judges play an important role in protecting a fair in neutral system from political pressure. This is true for both elections and antitrust.Eric Peterson is the Director if the Pelican Institute for Technology and Innovation. He currently lives in New Orleans

Copyright troll Richard Liebowitz (who once demanded he not be called a copyright troll), who has been suspended from practicing law in NY, continues to rack up embarrassing losses in court. I hadn't realized that after the Southern District of NY suspended Liebowitz, a bunch of other courts followed suit, asking him why he shouldn't be suspended elsewhere. In North Dakota, rather than fighting it, Liebowitz meekly consented to the suspension. In the Southern District of Illinois, Liebowitz didn't even respond to the court's order to show cause, and was thus suspended as well. In the Eastern District of NY he was suspended as well The 10th Circuit Appeals Court suspended Liebowitz as well. That's based on just a quick look -- it may have happened in other courts too.But that really may be the least of Liebowitz's problems. Late last month, the federal district court in Tyler, Texas had to benchslap Liebowitz yet again (right after he was suspended from practicing law in Eastern Texas. The case, once again, demonstrates how Liebowitz may be one of the worst lawyers ever to appear in court. It involved a case in which Liebowitz represented a guy named Robert Berg, who sued M&F Western Products claiming copyright infringement over what he claimed was copied pendants and belt buckles.Among the many, many problems with the entire lawsuit, was the fact that M&F's designs predated those of Berg's. It really is quite something when you sue someone for infringement for a design they released before you did. And, rather than admitting he fucked up, Liebowitz decided to double down. From the benchslap ruling:

Body bags claiming that “disinformation kills” line the streets this week in front of Facebook’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. A group of protesters, affiliated with “The Real Facebook Oversight Board” (an organization that is, confusingly, not affiliated with Facebook or its Oversight Board), is urging Facebook’s shareholders to ban so-called misinformation “superspreaders”—that is, a specific number of accounts that have been deemed responsible for the majority of disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines.Disinformation about the vaccines is certainly contributing to their slow uptake in various parts of the U.S. as well as other countries. This disinformation is spreading through a variety of ways: Local communities, family WhatsApp groups, FOX television hosts, and yes, Facebook. The activists pushing for Facebook to remove these “superspreaders” are not wrong: while Facebook does currently ban some COVID-19 mis- and disinformation, urging the company to enforce its own rules more evenly is a tried-and-true tactic.But while disinformation “superspreaders” are easy to identify based on the sheer amount of information they disseminate, tackling disinformation at a systemic level is not an easy task, and some of the policy proposals we’re seeing have us concerned. Here’s why.1. Disinformation is not always simple to identify.In the United States, it was only a few decades ago that the medical community deemed homosexuality a mental illness. It took serious activism and societal debate for the medical community to come to an understanding that it was not. Had Facebook been around—and had we allowed it to be arbiter of truth—that debate might not have flourished.Here’s a more recent example: There is much debate amongst the contemporary medical community as to the causes of ME/CFS, a chronic illness for which a definitive cause has not been determined—and which, just a few years ago, was thought by many not to be real. The Centers for Disease Control notes this and acknowledges that some healthcare providers may not take the illness seriously. Many sufferers of ME/CFS use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to discuss their illness and find community. If those platforms were to crack down on that discussion, relying on the views of the providers that deny the gravity of the illness, those who suffer from it would suffer more greatly.2. Tasking an authority with determining disinfo has serious downsides.As we’ve seen from the first example, there isn’t always agreement between authorities and society as to what is truthful—nor are authorities inherently correct.In January, German newspaper Handelsblatt published a report stating that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was not efficacious for older adults, citing an anonymous government source and claiming that the German government’s vaccination scheme was risky.AstraZeneca denied the claims, and no evidence that the vaccine was ineffective for older adults was procured, but it didn’t matter: Handelsblatt’s reporting set off a series of events that led to AstraZeneca’s reputation in Germany suffering considerably.Finally, it’s worth pointing out that even the CDC itself—the authority tasked with providing information about COVID-19—has gotten a few things wrong, most recently in May when it lifted its recommendation that people wear masks indoors, an event that was followed by a surge in COVID-19 cases. That shift was met with rigorous debate on social media, including from epidemiologists and sociologists—debate that was important for many individuals seeking to understand what was best for their health. Had Facebook relied on the CDC to guide its misinformation policy, that debate may well have been stifled.3. Enforcing rules around disinformation is not an easy task.We know that enforcing terms of service and community standards is a difficult task even for the most resourced, even for those with the best of intentions—like, say, a well-respected, well-funded German newspaper. But if a newspaper, with layers of editors, doesn’t always get it right, how can content moderators—who by all accounts are low-wage workers who must moderate a certain amount of content per hour—be expected to do so? And more to the point, how can we expect automated technologies—which already make a staggering amount of errors in moderation—to get it right?The fact is, moderation is hard at any level and impossible at scale. Certainly, companies could do better when it comes to repeat offenders like the disinformation “superspreaders,” but the majority of content, spread across hundreds of languages and jurisdictions, will be much more difficult to moderate—and as with nearly every category of expression, plenty of good content will get caught in the net.Reposted from the EFF's Deeplinks blog

We've just written about Germany's constitutional court grappling with the issue of whether government users of zero-days for surveillance have a responsibility to report the flaws they use to the relevant developers. Another senior court in the country has been pondering an even thornier question that is occupying judges and lawmakers around the world: how should social media police so-called "hate speech" on their services in a way that respects fundamental rights on all sides?Germany's Federal Court of Justice issued its judgment regarding two similar cases (pointed out by Matthias C. Kettemann on Twitter). Both involved posts that Facebook removed because it said they went against the social network's community standards governing hate speech. In addition, Facebook temporarily blocked the accounts of the users who wrote the posts. When the lower German courts refused to overturn Facebook's moves completely, the users appealed to the Federal Court of Justice, which not only ordered Facebook to reactivate the two accounts, but also told it to refrain from blocking the re-posting of the deleted comments. The court ruled that Facebook's rules governing the removal of posts and the blocking of user accounts were "invalid", because "they unreasonably disadvantage the users of the network contrary to the requirements of good faith." The court went on to explain its reasoning (translation by DeepL of original in German):

The Techdirt Deals Store is having a semi-annual sale from July 28 to August 4. Get 15% off of physical products using the code ANNUAL15. Get 30% off apps and software with the code ANNUAL30. Get 60% off of online courses with the code ANNUAL60.The All-Access CompTIA A+ And Network Certification Prep Bundle has 12 courses designed to help you prepare for various certification exams. Courses cover CompTIA A+, PenTest+, Security+, Network+, and more. It's on sale for $45. Don't forget to use the code ANNUAL60 to get 60% off.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Disclosure: I was an expert witness for RedBubble in this case (and another case) and submitted some reports regarding this case much earlier in the process, though I did not testify at this trial. I had nothing to do with this trial other than attending it as an interested observer, concerned about litigation involving content moderation. As you can see, however, my opinions on this remain identical to my opinions on content moderation going back basically forever...There's been a lot of talk lately about "repealing" or "reforming" Section 230. We've explained at great lengthy why this would be a mistake and would lead to a ton of frivolous litigation. Section 230 co-author Senator Ron Wyden has referred to this as creating a situation where website operators would face "death by ten thousand duck-bites." Professor Eric Goldman has explained the procedural benefits of Section 230 in that it helps get rid of these cases more quickly. And while some (including myself) have pointed out that the 1st Amendment would still protect most claims, without the procedural benefits of Section 230, we'd still see a ridiculous number of nuisance lawsuits in which companies would have to defend each and every content moderation decision. This would be made significantly worse if the law changes in a manner proposed by folks like law professor Danielle Citron, to require websites to show that their content moderation practices are "reasonable," which would require expensive litigation to determine.The thing is: we have an area where we can actually see this in practice. There is something of a loophole within Section 230: trademark law. From the beginning, Section 230(e)(2) has excluded intellectual property law. For copyright, that gap was filled (not particularly well) by the notice-and-takedown provisions of the DMCA Section 512. But trademark has no official intermediary protections in US law. Experts like Mark Lemley have long advocated for harmonizing the various intermediary laws so that they're all consistent. Many people had thought that perhaps the courts had settled the issue with regards to trademark in the infamous Tiffany case against eBay, in which the courts said that eBay shouldn't be expected to be perfect, and as long as it has some sort of program to deal with counterfeits, then it is no longer liable for counterfeits on its site.However, last summer, a federal judge in LA effectively re-opened the issue in a case brought by the holding company that controls the "Brandy Melville" clothing brand against print-on-demand website RedBubble. Brandy Melville argued that RedBubble was violating its trademarks (and copyrights) in printing some of its designs, and while the judge did toss out much of the case, he allowed a few parts to move forward to a jury trial. The judge said that the Tiffany v. eBay rule didn't necessarily apply -- since that was a case of users selling physical products, whereas with RedBubble, the company would take designs uploaded by users, and pass them on to various print shops for the actual printing. So the open question, in theory, was whether or not that deeper involvement opened itself up to contributory liability (the judge correctly dismissed the claims about direct infringement). There were a few other oddities about the judge's ruling as Eric Goldman noted at the time:

As we've noted previously, the broadband component of the Biden infrastructure bill has slowly been whittled down during "bipartisan negotiations." What was first a $100 billion proposal is now a $65 billion proposal, with things industry didn't like (like support for community broadband) slowly hollowed out. And while the White House fact sheet on the agreement offers some detail on the compromise (which still isn't technically final), it remains arguably vague:

The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's Office has been swamped with negative press coverage centering on its predictive policing program. The Office claims it's not "predictive policing," but rather "intelligence-led policing." Whatever you call it, it sucks.The Sheriff's Office may have some lofty goals that involve stopping crime before it starts, but the supposedly forward-looking policing program does little more than subject past offenders (along with friends, families, and acquaintances) to sustained harassment by law enforcement officers. What's supposed to keep crime down by directing resources to possible serious criminal activity has manifested as multiple visits from officers who do little more than try to coerce people into consenting to unlawful searches and write out nuisance citations for things like missing mailbox numbers or uncut grass.The Sheriff's Office has since spun this off to include students at public schools, presumably to prep kids for a future of pointless harassment by law enforcement officers simply because they have the misfortune of living in Pasco County.Thanks to some lawsuits and investigations, the Sheriff's Office is being a bit more proactive on the notification front. According to this ongoing investigation by the Tampa Bay Times, targets of the "intelligence" program are now being informed they've been blacklisted by the Sheriff's Office.

As Techdirt has reported previously, the use of malware to spy on suspects -- or even innocent citizens -- has long been regarded as legitimate by the German authorities. The recent leak of thousands of telephone numbers that may or may not be victims of the Pegasus spyware has suddenly brought this surveillance technique out of the shadows and into the limelight. People are finally starting to ask questions about the legitimacy of this approach when used by governments, given how easily the software can be -- and apparently has been -- abused. An interesting decision from Germany's constitutional court shows that even one of the biggest fans of legal malware is trying to work out how such programs based on zero-days can be deployed in a way that's compatible with fundamental rights. The court's press release explains:

It looks like Detroit, Michigan is trying to corner the market on bad facial recognition tech. The city's police department is already associated with two false arrests based on bad matches by facial recognition software. This latest news, via Techdirt reader Jeffrey Nonken, shows mismatches aren't just limited to the public sector.

Last week, a New Jersey municipal court judge sided with the town of Roselle Park, New Jersey, and its decision to fine a homeowner for "obscene" signs she had in her yard. The signs weren't obscene in any legal sense of the word -- not even under the ordinance the town claimed she had violated. When the homeowner refused to back down, the town started finding her $250/day.The homeowner, Patricia Dilascio, tried to fight back, challenging the citation in municipal court. Unfortunately for her, the presiding judge misread the law and completely ignored the First Amendment to back the town government and its inexplicable decision to prosecute a handful of "Fuck Biden" signs. According to the town's mayor, "there's no place for profanity by a school and school children" -- a statement that can only be made by someone who's never overhead the things said by school kids when they think no adults are listening.The judge, however, should have been able to read the law and follow a whole bunch of precedent from the nation's top court -- precedent that says the First Amendment firmly protects political speech, even when it includes the word "fuck." In the view of this court, a balance needed to be struck between protecting free speech and sparing hypothetical parents from having to explain the f-word to their hypothetical children.With everyone with any power being stupid about this, the ACLU stepped in to take the case. And that seems to have prompted immediate results.

The Techdirt Deals Store is having a semi-annual sale from July 28 to August 4. Get 15% off of physical products using the code ANNUAL15. Get 30% off apps and software with the code ANNUAL30. Get 60% off of online courses with the code ANNUAL60.The JavaScript DOM Game Developer Bundle has 8 courses to help you master coding fundamentals. Courses cover JavaScript DOM, Coding, HTML 5 Canvas, and more. You'll learn how to create your own fun, interactive games. It's on sale for $30.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

If you read Techdirt, you already know that there have been literally dozens of ridiculous Section 230 reform bills introduced over the last few years. On Wednesday, the House Republicans on the Energy & Commerce Committee decided to not just add to the batch, but to flood the entire zone with a package of thirty-two more Section 230 reform bills. I mean, if you're going to go that far, why not go all the way and write 230 reform bills?I'm not going to go through every bill. That would be a total waste of everyone's time. These bills are not designed to do anything constructive at all. They are not designed to pass. They are not designed to reform Section 230. They are designed for one reason and one reason only: to act as performative grandstanding for a deliberately ignorant base who are kept in ignorance by politicians pushing bills like this nonsense.What I will note, however, is how many of the bills in this package clearly contradict one another (and just how many are obviously unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment in that they seek to regulate speech). In some ways, the package of 32 bills shows why all this focus on Section 230 is nonsense in the first place, and the difficulties of content moderation itself. For example, you have the "Preserving Constitutionally Protected Speech" bill from Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Jim Jordan. That one would punish websites that remove constitutionally protected speech (which is an unconstitutional attack on those websites' 1st Amendment rights). But, uh, then you have things like bills to require companies to remove cyberbullying and remove doxxing (among a few other things).Of course, neither cyberbullying nor doxxing are well defined in those bills, but in both cases the speech described is almost certainly protected under the 1st Amendment. So you have some bills saying removing any speech that is protected by the 1st Amendment should lead to punishment, and other bills that say you are required to remove speech that is protected by the 1st Amendment or face massive penalties. Did no one bother to actually look at this collection of bills and realize they don't work together?There are also a bunch of bills that seem to restate what the law already is. For example, there's one requiring companies to remove child sexual abuse material (though the bill uses the now disfavored term "child porn.") Except, um, that's already the case. Saying it with emphasis in a new law doesn't change that.Anyway, I'm hard pressed to find anything even remotely sounding like a reasonable idea in all of these bills, but to be fair, I didn't have time to go through all 32 bills in full. Perhaps they can pass a bill to force someone to content moderate these 32 bills to algorithmically show me which ones actually have reasonable ideas, and which ones are just performative nonsense. I fear that the final tally will show that all 32 bills are performative nonsense.

Last year, you might recall how a group of eBay executives were arrested for a truly bizarre (an understatement) stalking and harassment campaign aimed at critical reporters. Angry at the critical coverage of eBay by a small news site (Ecommercebytes.com, published by David and Ina Steiner), a team of six eBay executives and employees engaged in a year long campaign of terror against the couple that included death threats, spying on them, and even sending them everything from dead cockroaches and a bloody pig mask. The crew even tried to send the reporters a dead pig, though it never managed to ship.These weren't really low-level employees, either. They included eBay’s senior manager of global intelligence, a manager of eBay's global intelligence center (GIC), a contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst within the GIC, and a senior manager of special operations for eBay’s global security team --and a former cop. And all of them lost their jobs for their decision to engage in this bizarre campaign of terror against what's really just a fairly ordinary and polite industry trade outlet run by a couple of genuinely decent people.This week saw the manager of eBay's global security team Philip Cooke plead guilty to the charges in court. At his sentencing hearing, Cooke insisted that it was eBay's "drinking culture" that was apparently responsible for his atrocious judgement:

Years after it was granted too much power, a federal internal investigations unit created during the presidency of George W. Bush is finally having its dirty laundry aired. The Senate Commerce Committee -- years after the fact -- is finally delivering some oversight of an entity created to root out internal threats.The ITMS (Investigations and Threat Management Service) operated largely under the radar, thanks to its housing within the Commerce Department -- an entity that very rarely raises too many eyebrows. But its reach extended far past the confines of this department. And it was given broad discretion to initiate investigations -- something that led directly to the Justice Department crafting new rules for espionage investigations after a series of failed prosecutions indicated the intel coming from the ITMS was extremely questionable.It was the ITMS that initiated the investigation of a US citizen of Chinese descent who did nothing more than share publicly-available information with a Chinese government official -- an official who happened to be a friend of Department of Weather Services employee Sherry Chen. Chen's prosecution was just a leading edge indicator of the ITMS's lack of accountability and incredible amount of power.The report [PDF] released by the Commerce Committee shows the ITMS wasn't as much interested in rooting out internal threats as it was in rooting out government employees of certain nationalities.

Last fall, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana (a supposedly smart Senator who seems to have decided his political future lies in acting dumber than 95% of all other Senators) introduced an anti-Section 230 bill. He's now done so again in the new Congressional session. The bill is, once again, called the "Don't Push My Buttons" Act and introducing such a piece of total garbage legislation a second time does not speak well of Senator Kennedy.The bill is pretty short. It would create an exception to Section 230 for any website that... uses algorithms to rank content for you based on user data it collects. Basically, it's taking a roundabout way to try to remove Section 230 from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It is not clear why algorithmic ranking has anything to do with Section 230. While social media sites do tend to rely on both, they are separate things. Indeed, part of the reason why social media sites rely on algorithms is because Section 230 helps make sure they can host so much user-generated content, that there needs to be algorithmic rankings to make those sites useable.So, in practice, if this became law, all it would really serve to do is to make social media sites totally unusable. Either, websites would have to stop doing algorithmic ranking of content (which would make the sites unusable for many people) or they'd start massively moderating content to avoid liability -- making sites nearly unusable.And, of course, there's an exemption to this exemption which makes the whole thing useless. The bill will allow algorithms... if the user "knowingly and intentionally elects to receive the content." So, all that will happen is every social media service will show you total garbage with a pop up saying "hey, we can straighten this out for you via our algorithm if you just click here" and everyone will click that button.And that's not even getting into the constitutional problems with this bill. It's literally punishing companies for their editorial (ranking) choices. That's Congress regulating expression. I don't see how this bill would possibly survive 1st Amendment scrutiny. But, of course, it's not designed to survive any scrutiny at all. It's to serve as ever more grandstanding for Senator Kennedy to pretend to be looking out for a base he knows is ignorant beyond belief -- and rather than educating them, he's playing down to them.

Shut up and get in line — that's the message Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan recently broadcasted to FTC staffers. Within her first month as a new commissioner, Khan ordered a stop to all public speaking for "an all-hands-on-deck moment." Evidently, she wants the FTC speaking with only one voice — her own. The gag order is going to run out the top economists and harm the FTC's long-term effectiveness.Khan rose to academic stardom at a young age as a vocal critic of Big Tech, especially Amazon. In her most famous writing, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, she argued for stronger antitrust enforcement even when companies are lowering prices for consumers. Khan's preferred antitrust approach would be a complete overhaul of the current antitrust system and would require a lot of work. However, even if one agrees with Khan that antitrust needs to be rewritten and that this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, Khan's current regime will make that impossible by running out her employees, especially Ph.D. economists.Imagine yourself as a recent Ph.D. in economics from a hotshot university. You're 30 years old, and you just spent 6 years in graduate school, earning $20,000. Before that, you may have spent two years as a research assistant to a professor, earning just as little. You're a top student in your program and have lots of career options in front of you. You could go work at Amazon or Netflix and earn $200,000 a year, base salary. After living on a strict diet of research and Top Ramen in graduate school, that sounds pretty good.Traditionally, federal agencies, like the FTC, compete for the best economists the same way universities compete. They can't match the pay of an Amazon, but they can offer economists a valuable perk: the ability to do research and engage with the scientific community as part of the job.For many economists, who have already demonstrated their passion for research by writing a dissertation and completing a Ph.D., doing research is a huge perk that most private companies don't offer. The FTC knows this. In their own job postings for PhD economists, the FTC explicitly emphasizes their economists' ability to do research. To date, that hiring strategy has worked pretty well for them. Many economists at the FTC are top-notch researchers, with thousands of citations, an impressive feat for a full-time researcher at a university. When the FTC hires new PhDs, they are saying "you can work in public service and still be a successful researcher."Khan's recent policies signal the FTC is now less committed to research and independent thinking. Public academic seminars, where economists present their findings to colleagues throughout the profession, are a key part of the research and publication process. If you cut off economists' ability to present their research and get feedback, you cut off the ability to do research.The real damage will take some time to show itself. Even if the gag order does not run out the current economists, who may be loyal to the FTC after years, the order will still hurt the agency over time. Any successful agency needs to hire quality employees year in and year out. If this policy persists, the FTC will have trouble down the line hiring and retaining high-quality employees, especially economists.Khan might not think she needs these economists right now; after all, she has made clear she opposes the economic approach to antitrust. But when the FTC takes companies to court, as we can expect it will do even more often under Khan, it needs expert witnesses to persuasively argue its case. The private companies pay $1,000 per hour for economists at the top of the profession. The FTC must hire top talent too.If you were against antitrust enforcement and wanted to ruin the FTC from within, Khan's strategy would be nearly perfect. Step 1: Run out all the competent lawyers and rigorous, scientific economists. Step 2: Bring forth a bunch of cases that are poorly argued and lack an economic defense. Step 3: Lose those cases at the current Supreme Court and set a bunch of precedents against the FTC.Brian Albrecht is an assistant professor of economics at Kennesaw State University. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota. He is a Young Voices contributor and writes a weekly economics newsletter (pricetheory.substack.com). Follow him on Twitter: @briancalbrecht.

Earlier this year, the city of New York announced plans to send mental health professionals out to deal with mental health issues, rather than the standard-issue cops-and-EMS response teams. It's an idea that's gained recent popularity, given the difficulty law enforcement officers seem to have when dealing with things they're not specifically trained to handle. And by "difficulty," I mean a lot of people who need professional help were instead being "treated" with force deployment, arrests, and the far-more-than-occasional killing.It's an idea so simple and intuitive it's a wonder it's taken this long to be experimented with in a small number of cities. The success stories seen elsewhere indicate this is something worth trying, if for no other reason than to free up limited law enforcement resources to handle the sort of thing law enforcement officers are trained to handle.The results [PDF] are back on the trial run of New York City's "B-HEARD" (Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division) and they're similarly encouraging. (via Insider)It was a limited deployment, but a successful one.

Devin Nunes' lawyer, Steven Biss has an impressively long track record of losing increasingly silly lawsuits for a variety of clients (beyond just Nunes). Back in January we wrote about a court dismissing a RICO lawsuit brought by "DJ Lincoln Enterprises" against Google, claiming that its search results involved anti-conservative bias. We didn't even mention that Biss was the lawyer on that case, but he was. And, as is all too typical in Biss cases, he never, ever, gives in, even after a court has made it clear the case is going nowhere. Following the January dismissal, Biss filed an amended complaint, and Google had to ask for it to be dismissed again -- and (as you would likely have guessed) the court has quickly and easily dismissed the case.Basically, the court notes that the second amended complaint isn't all that different from the complaint that was already dismissed. And the changes that were made were, well, not particularly convincing. On the RICO claims:

I don't think anyone foresaw the immense amount of fallout that would result from the revelation that Israeli malware purveyor NSO Group's Pegasus software is being used to target phones belonging to journalists, activists, religious leaders, and high-ranking government officials. After all, some of this was already common knowledge, thanks to investigations by Citizen Lab and others delving into the inner workings of this powerful spyware.The malware maker had already weathered plenty of negative press, thanks to its customers' questionable use of its products, as well as NSO Group's willingness to sell powerful exploits to enemies of Israel with long human rights abuse rap sheets.The company is now trying to regain control of the narrative, but its statements and responses have raised more questions than they've answered. NSO claims it has nothing to do with the list of 50,000 potential target phone numbers seen by journalists (a list that contains nearly 200 journalists' phone numbers). It also says it has "no visibility" on customers' use of its malware, which undermines the strength of this denial. NSO also claims it cuts off governments who abuse the product to target journalists, religious leaders, and government officials, but [taps statement above] if NSO doesn't know what customers are doing with the malware, it seems highly unlikely the company is in any position to start cutting customers off.It's not just NSO Group that's angry. Entire governments are now pissed off by these revelations. Not everyone is angry for the same reason, though.In France, the revelation that President Emmanuel Macron's phone was on the list of NSO-linked numbers has resulted in Macron and 14 other French ministers acquiring new phones and numbers. The French government has also opened an investigation into the Moroccan government's use of NSO's Pegasus software, which is seemingly where the targeting of French officials originated.Over in Morocco, the government is angry that it's been named as one of the main perpetrators of questionable targeting.

The Techdirt Deals Store is having a semi-annual sale from July 28 to August 4. Get 15% off of physical products using the code ANNUAL15. Get 30% off apps and software with the code ANNUAL30. Get 60% off of online courses with the code ANNUAL60.The Learn to Code 2021 Bundle has 13 courses to help you kickstart your coding career. Courses cover Ruby on Rails, C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and more. You'll also learn about data science and machine learning. The bundle is on sale for $35. Don't forget to use ANNUAL60 at checkout for 60% off.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

The moral panics around anyone finding "bad" content online are getting out of control. The latest is a truly silly article in the San Francisco Chronicle whining about the fact that there is Nazi content available on the Internet Archive, written by the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, Steven Stalinsky, who is quite perturbed that his own personal content moderation desires are not how the Internet Archive moderates.

For more than a year the Covid crisis has showcased the essential nature of broadband and the high prices Americans pay due to limited telecom competition. While fixing this competitive logjam has long been a work in progress, the pandemic has culminated in renewed efforts to ensure affordable broadband access is a top priority.At the forefront of these efforts was the creation of the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) program, which doles out a $50 per month subsidy to those struggling economically during the pandemic (it jumps to $75 per month for those living on tribal lands). The program ends when funds run dry or the pandemic ends, whichever comes first.Over 825 participating ISPs enrolled a million users in discounted broadband plans in just the first week alone. The EBB is now providing essential, immediate aid to the nation’s marginalized and minority populations, routinely hit the hardest by the lack of affordable broadband. But while the majority of internet service providers (ISPs) are participating in good faith, several of the biggest industry players have exploited the program in a quest to generate additional revenue.Last May, the Washington Post reported that Verizon was exploiting the program to force broadband customers to sign up for more expensive broadband tiers than they currently subscribed to (defeating the point of the whole program):

The administrators of the University of Iowa have just learned a hard (and possibly expensive) lesson about free speech. Of course, as a publicly-funded university, it will be the taxpayers that foot the bill, but hopefully this recent Eighth Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF] will head off future extractions of tax dollars from people who didn't violate anyone's rights.This decision affirms the lower court's determination that the University of Iowa's decision to make a Chiristian student group align itself with the university's ideals was a violation of the group's First Amendment rights. Here's Rox Laird with the background for Courthouse News Service.

If you were to simply input the word "magenta" into the search bar at the top of Techdirt, you will note that two company names seem to keep coming up in the articles: T-Mobile and its parent company Deutsche Telekom. This is because those two companies have been incredibly annoying at with their nonstop bullying of other companies, often in entirely unrelated industries, for daring to use the color magenta in their branding. While some will want to argue that very specific colors can definitely be trademarked, this misunderstands how T-Mobile and DT operate, which is to threaten plenty of companies that use a similar purple color and those that use magenta but in different marketplaces. Notably for the purposes of this post, much of this trademark bullying has occurred in Europe, though not all of it. The point is that DT is a trademark bully when it comes to the color magenta and everyone knows it.Which is what makes it disappointing to see a company like Splunk lose its ability to sue DT in America to have its use of magenta declared non-infringing solely because it has thus far only been bullied in Germany.

Earlier this year, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals awarded qualified immunity to officers who grabbed a tablet from Levi Frasier and tried to delete his recording of them. Frasier happened across these officers applying force during an arrest and decided to record it. The officer didn't like this so they took away his device and tried to find the video to delete it. Apparently unable to locate it, the officer yelled back to his partner that he couldn't find the recording, to which his partner replied, "As long as there's no video, it's ok."The lower court found in favor of the officers, ruling they had reasonable suspicion to detain Frasier because he had lied about recording them, supposedly breaking a law that has nothing to do with lying to officers (at least not in this fashion).

Freedom of speech sits at the intersection of so many of the topics we write about here on Techdirt, and some of our favorite podcast guests are true experts on the subject. One such guest is UCI Law Professor and former UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression David Kaye, who joins us again for this week's episode and a wide-ranging discussion about some of the most pressing and current free speech issues.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.

Over the last few weeks there's been a weird, wasteful, and just silly dispute in which the White House has tried to blame Facebook (and misinformation on Facebook) for not enough people agreeing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 (in light of cases ramping up again). Things have gotten so stupid that two Senators have released a terribly unconstitutional bill attempting to hold Facebook liable for "health misinformation" on its platform.But... is Facebook actually to blame? Mark Zuckerberg (who, um, is obviously not an unbiased party) made a completely valid point in response to all of this: Facebook is available around the globe, yet much of the rest of the world is not seeing the same levels of vaccine hesitancy (indeed, the problem elsewhere tends to be a lack of supply), and that might raise questions as to why Facebook is facing the blame for vaccine hesitancy.

This is a sponsored post. For everyone who subscribes to the free IBM Tech Policy Lab email newsletter via our link, Techdirt receives a small commission. We would not offer this if we didn't actually believe in the value of the newsletter itself, but this is very much sponsored content.If you're a reader of Techdirt, then you're probably deeply interested in tech policy issues. Questions around tech policy have become more and more central over the last few years. Unfortunately, much of the discussion around tech policy is (to put it mildly) not particularly well informed. Last year, IBM launched its IBM Policy Lab as an attempt to build a place to bring together smart thinkers regarding tech and policy -- and to take a long term view on what is the best policy for innovation going forward. There are some really great people behind the project.The IBM Policy Lab includes various policy papers, live events, and discussions on important tech policy issues, and the best way to keep up with what they're talking about is to subscribe to the newsletter. We may not always agree with the recommendations that come out of the IBM Policy Lab, but it has become a good place to really explore some key issues regarding technology and policy in a forward-looking manner.

Last year, Candace Owens (former Turning Point USA's communications director and current "conservative" author/commentator) sued both USA Today and Lead Stories LLC over fact-checking services they provide to Facebook. Owens claimed the labelling of her COVID-related Facebook posts as misinformation caused her to lose ad revenue and hampered her ability to promote her new book.Here's the background on the case from ABC News (which chose not to publish the court document, so here's a link to Justia, which did):

The Intro to Cryptocurrency Bundle has 5 courses to help you learn all about cryptocurrency. You'll learn about disruptive technology, blockchain technology, making money through mining Bitcoin, Bitcoin's monetary policy guarantees, and a whole lot more. It's on sale for $20.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Hoping to capitalize on legitimate animosity against "big tech," AT&T lobbyists and policy makers have been busy recirculating a fifteen-year-old talking point. Namely, that big tech companies should throw billions of dollars at big telecom companies to subsidize their broadband deployments. The argument that AT&T has been pushing since 2004 or so is that since big tech companies get a "free ride" on telecom networks (which has never been true), they should pay telecom giants billions of additional dollars... just because.The argument never made any coherent sense. Tech giants like Netflix and Google pay not only billions of dollars for bandwidth, they also pay billions of additional dollars in cloud, transit, CDN, and other broadband infrastructure. Telecom giants also do this, but they also receive billions upon billions in taxpayer subsidies in exchange for networks that are always mysteriously half-delivered. There's not a day that goes by where some telecom company is getting ridiculous sums of money for projects that don't make sense or simply never get deployed. So if you were serious about reform on this front, that would be the place to start.Instead, AT&T has asked captured regulators like FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to push for a broadband tax on tech. Carr recently pushed the idea in a an editorial over in a Newsweek Op/Ed, and since then outlets from CNET to Axios have been parroting the idea as if it's a good faith effort. It's not. It's an AT&T policy and lobbying missive being dressed up as a legitimate idea by corrupt lawmakers and regulators.Now, Senators Roger Wicker, Shelley Moore Capito, and Todd Young have introduced a doomed bit of legislation dubbed the Funding Affordable Internet with Reliable (FAIR) Contributions Act. It too suggests that "big tech" has gotten a "free ride" on US telecom networks and should be subject to a new tax to fund broadband deployments:

If you'd like some more anecdotal evidence about the useless and general disconnectedness of police unions, have I got something for you. We all know police unions take the worst aspects of policing and amplify them. We know they fearlessly defend even the worst officers from lawsuits, firings, and public criticism. We know they're the main barricade to true accountability, having tied up most cities in protracted legal language that allows cops to do all they can to avoid being fired and, in the off-chance they do get canned, get their jobs back via the arbitration process.Via the Free Thought Project comes this painful howler of a story -- one that involves a police union, an officer awaiting discipline, and an annual award for the top cop in the city. Here's how it went down, as explained by Joe Nelson of the San Gabriel Valley Tribune:

We recently discussed the case of a man who thought Facebook owed him $10 million per day in damages for moderating his posts in which he deployed the n-word. According to this person, Facebook violated about half of the Constitutional amendments when it decided -- as a private company -- that it would not serve as the plaintiff's bullhorn while he shouted racist terms in a crowded social media platform.But that was a pro se lawsuit, one the plaintiff -- with no legal training or expertise (despite listing himself as "attorney-in-fact" on his Facebook profile) -- thought would net him millions of dollars a day for being nothing more than his hateful self.This lawsuit [PDF], however, has an actual lawyer behind it. And by actual lawyer, I mean a lawyer whose representation may be less useful than no representation at all. The lawyer helping the plaintiff bring this constitutional violation lawsuit against Twitter is David Yerushalmi, perhaps best know for being a bit bigoted himself.

Last week, KGW8 had an incredible story about how a couple in Vancouver, Washington were sued after leaving a 1-star review for Executive Roof Services (ERS). The defendants in the lawsuit, Autumn Knepper and Adam Marsh, were (reasonably!) annoyed about the treatment they received from the firm after their landlord had asked ERS to check out the roof to the house, after the couple found it leaking. The experience they had with ERS was not great:

This bill is so bad it was worth a second post.There is a reason that the Constitution contains the provision, "Congress shall make no law […] abridging the freedom of speech." And this new bill proposed by Senator Klobuchar (who really should know better) gets at the heart of it. Because what her bill would do is make a law that, at its core, pointedly interferes with freedom of speech by allowing the government to penalize certain expression. And there is absolutely no reason to believe that its choices for which speech to favor will be sound and healthy ones for society. In fact, given the performance of the previous presidential administration, there's plenty of reason to believe the result would be the exact opposite.The mechanics of this interference are fairly straight forward. Her bill, "The Health Misinformation Act of 2021," would condition Section 230's platform protection to apply only to platforms that moderate user content as the government has decreed they should moderate it. The constitutional problems with this scheme should thus be readily apparent: First, it directly violates platforms' First Amendment rights to moderate user content as they see fit by effectively forcing them to moderate content as the government has decided they should, lest they risk the loss of a critical statutory protection they otherwise would have had. Secondly, the bill inherently allows the government to put its thumb on the scale of deciding which points of view are the allowed ones and which are the ones subject to legal penalty, which obviates freedom of speech since some ideas are obviously no longer effectively free to be expressed if they can attract a censorial government-induced penalty.The Klobuchar bill would like to pretend that the means somehow justify the ends. The government certainly has a legitimate interest in keeping the population alive and healthy, so it's not an inherently corrupt goal she's trying to further with this bill. She just wants to suppress medical misinformation that has been prolonging the pandemic.But there's nothing about the bill that confines it to such benevolent purpose. There can't be, because that's not how government power works, which is why we have the First Amendment because we always need to be able to speak out against the government when it gets things wrong.And we know it gets things wrong. It has gotten things wrong even just with respect to this particular health crisis that the bill is supposedly limited to. At best it made innocent mistakes, like when it discouraged masks early on in the pandemic. But then there were people in the highest offices of government touting hydroxychloroquine snake oil and discouraging social distancing. There are still people in government discouraging vaccines. How can we possibly have a law where the government gets to decide what speech is favored or not when the government itself has, even within the very same health crisis that this bill is supposedly limited to, been so conspicuously unable to reliably make those choices competently? This crisis has already outlasted one administration, and while this one might like to keep people alive with credible, scientific information, the last one did not, and who knows what might be in store with the next one. But this bill would empower a Trump Administration as much as a Biden Administration to take away the right and ability of the public to speak out against its mistakes, no matter how deadly they may be. Because a government that can force platforms to only allow, for example, pro-vaccine messages on its systems can just as easily disallow them as well. And if it does, people will die.Furthermore, if a bill like this could be allowed for this crisis, it could be allowed for any. The government can always articulate some reason for why free expression needs to be curtailed. And throughout history it has regularly tried. A law like this, if it could get on the books, would signal it to keep trying on every policy issue that can possibly bear on our lives and the security and stability of our country – which is effectively all of them. Because today it's health misinformation the government is unhappy about. Tomorrow it could be elections. Policing. Terrorism. The draft. Even potentially something as banal as tax policy. There's always a reason the government can cite for why society should not be exposed to ideas out-of-step with what it has decided are the better ones.But it's the people's job to decide, not the government's. Per the constitution, it's not allowed to be the government's job. The Founders got the government out of the business of choosing which views could be permitted which could be punished with its "make no law" admonishment because there is no way for the government to pick the winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas and not risk serious damage to discourse, and with it the democracy that depends on it.And everyone in government needs to remember that.

This truly is a pleasure to observe. Israeli malware merchant NSO Group -- the purveyor of powerful spyware capable of turning a target's phone into a spy agency's plaything -- is playing a whole lot of defense after leaked data seen by a number of journalists and activists appears to confirm that NSO's customers are targeting… activists and journalists. (And world leaders, religious leaders, NGO employees, and friends and relatives of all of the above…)While the origin of this data remains unclear, it appears to be related to NSO and its customers. And although NSO claims to be very selective about who it sells this powerful spyware to, its customers include governments of questionable character, including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.This has thrust Shalev Hulio, the CEO and co-founder of NSO Group, into the limelight. He's clearly unprepared to be there. His statements and responses to questions are, at best, contradictory. At worst, they're nothing more than deflections that aren't going to persuade anyone that the allegations made by several news agencies and rights groups are false.Here's Hulio's attempt (in an interview with Calcalist) to explain that the list of 50,000 phone numbers couldn't possibly have anything to do with NSO Group: