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We've long noted that community broadband networks are just an organic response to the broken, uncompetitive US broadband market. While you'll occasionally see some deployment duds if the business models aren't well crafted, studies have shown such networks (there are 750 and counting now in the States) offer cheaper, faster service than many incumbents. In short, these communities grew so frustrated with America's mediocre, patchy, and expensive broadband service, they built their own.This direct threat to incumbent revenues is a major reason why ISP lobbyists have passed protectionist laws in more than 21 states trying to block your town's ability to even consider the option. It's also why you'll often see the telecom sector and its various, obedient tendrils routinely try to claim these networks are a vile menace to free speech (they're not) or a guaranteed waste of taxpayer funds (again, not true at all).Here in reality, many of these networks are outperforming their private sector counterparts. Chattanooga's EPB, for example, was rated one of the best ISPs in America by Consumer Reports, despite Comcast's efforts to sue the effort out of existence. And this week, PC Magazine's ratings of the fastest and most popular ISPs showed that Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU), a locally-owned utility providing broadband out of Cedar Falls, Iowa, offers the fastest averaged speed ratings the magazine's researchers have ever seen:Verizon's Fios was the top rated private ISP, and notice where they fall in the comparison above. From the full report:

France's brand new hate speech law barely made it a month before being struck down. Passed in the middle of May by the French Parliament, the new law turned regular police into internet police, allowing French law enforcement to determine what content ran afoul of new restrictions on hate speech and terrorist content. Cops would decide what should be censored and would issue the censorship order, all without ever having to run it by a judge.The new law took what was bad about Germany's hate speech law and amplified it by eliminating judicial impartiality. Once any content was determined by law enforcement to be illegal, it was up to platforms to remove it immediately or face being fined.As it stands now, no one will have to do anything. Politico reports the law has failed to survive a Constitutional review.

Way back in 2013, when the world was still a logical and sensical place, we wrote about a group of Finnish doctors experimenting treating those afflicated with ADHD with video games. This certainly must have struck many as an odd path to take, what with my generation being raised largely by parents that insisted that video games were bad for us. Specifically, at least in my household, there was great concern that these games would shorten attention spans and cause us to get ADHD in the first place.We didn't hear a great deal more on this novel use of video games until recently, but it's still heartening to see that the FDA made a small bit of history recently by approving gaming treatment for those with ADHD. In this case, a game specifically designed to improve cognitive functioning can be prescribed by a doctor.

The state of California has lost again in its attempt to punish IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) -- and IMDb alone -- for ageism perpetrated by [checks notes] movie studios who seem to refuse to cast actresses above a certain age in choice roles.The law passed by the California legislature does one thing: prevents IMDb (and other sites, theoretically) from publishing facts about actors: namely, their ages. This stupid law was ushered into existence by none other than the Screen Actors Guild, capitalizing on a (failed) lawsuit brought against the website by an actress who claimed the publication of her real age cost her millions in Hollywood paychecks.These beneficiaries of the First Amendment decided there was just too much First Amendment in California. To protect actors from studio execs, SAG decided to go after a third-party site respected for its collection of factual information about movies, actors, and everything else film-related.The federal court handling IMDb's lawsuit against the state made quick work of the state's arguments in favor of very selective censorship. In only six pages, the court destroyed the rationale offered by the government's finest legal minds. Here's just a sampling of the court's dismantling of this stupid law:

Advertisers want to know everything about you. So do sites that buy ad inventory and allow middlemen to let their trackers run free, tracing people from site to site, following them into their email inboxes, and tracking them across platforms and devices if need be.BlueKai, owned by Oracle, deploys these pervasive trackers, sinking its hooks into a reported 1% of the world's internet traffic. BlueKai is the kind of clever no one really respects. It's more along the lines of "devious." But it is very, very effective.

With work, school and healthcare moving online, data privacy and security has never been more important. Who can see what we’re doing online? What are corporations and government agencies doing with this information? How can our online activity be better protected? One answer is: encryption. Strong encryption has always been an important part of protecting and promotingour digital rights.The majority of your web traffic is already encrypted. That’s the padlock in your URL bar; the the S –for “secure”– in HTTPS. This baseline of encryption is the result of decades of dedicated work by privacy-concerned technologists aiming to safeguard users’ personal information and address pressing demands for data and transaction safety. Web traffic encryption allows us to feel confident when we buy or bank online, access our medical records, and communicate on social media.Unfortunately, there’s a geyser of internet traffic that remains unencrypted, leaving our personal information still vulnerable to exploitation. Every day through a seamless process, our computers and phones make thousands of lookups through the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS is the way computers and phones find the IP address for any internet resource you want to access, whether it’s a website and all the content it contains, or an online messaging service, or the background connections made through mobile apps.Thanks to the DNS, you can type in a memorable URL (cnn.com) instead of having to remember a long string of numbers (like 151.101.193.67, one of CNN’s IP addresses) to visit a website.But while most of your web traffic is encrypted, your DNS lookups probably aren’t. The architects of the DNS system designed it in the 1980s, long before it became apparent that some would exploit this design for their own gain—or that repressive regimes would use it to censor and stifle dissidents.The privacy concerns are easy to understand. Many of the domains you visit might be descriptive enough to give away what you’re doing on a particular web site or service—whether they are partisan political websites (“this person is a Republican!”), mortgage lenders (“this person wants to refinance!”), health websites (“this person seems to have a medical condition we can monetize!”), or certain websites you'd rather keep private. In other words, someone in the network sitting between you and a certain website might not know what you’re doing on a website—but they know you’re doing it on that website!This enables the daily commercial exploitation of consumer data. As we speak, corporations can exploit the DNS to track and monetize your online activity. Thanks to the loosening of U.S. federal broadband privacy laws in 2017, Internet service providers (ISPs) like Verizon, ComcastXfinity and CharterSpectrum are allowed to bundle and sell this lookup data to data brokers so they can build better personal and behavioral profiles—which are then rented out to companies that want to target you with personalized ads and appeals. For vulnerable communities, however, this infringement on privacy can lead to deeper erosion of other rights when, for example, analysis of someone’s online history profiles them as being “under-banked”, “financially vulnerable” or as targets for predatory loan offers. It’s a bit like a librarian selling your reading history to a psychologist.Moreover, while DNS is an essential point of control for network administrators and service providers, that control can be problematic. On one hand: the DNS enables the implementation of important mechanisms from malware identification, to enforcement of corporate and local policies, to monitoring and testing of different network tools. On the other hand, if you as a user are trying to access some information during a period of social unrest, a government wanting to prevent you from accessing that information could force ISPs to block that content or tamper with the DNS responses your computer gets. Because DNS lookups also expose your IP address and MAC address (the hardware address of your device), they could also gain insight on your device’s location.On top of all that, the vulnerability of the DNS system is also a security issue: A 2016 Infoblox Security Assessment Report found that 66% of DNS traffic was subject to suspicious exploits and security threats, from protocol anomalies (48%) to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks (14%). The study also showed that the biggest concerns for ISPs were downtime and loss of sensitive data, which translates into users not being able to access the online resources they need, or sensitive data of users’ lookups being leaked or stolen.Thankfully, new technical protocols for encrypted DNS that directly address these issues are on the rise;. Encrypted DNS protects access to resources and the data integrity of DNS queries by preventing DNS packet inspection and actions trying to tamper with the DNS responses your computer gets. It shields against leaks of user data like IP/MAC addresses and domains, keeping users from being tracked and monitored, and makes it difficult for censoring bodies to be able to intercept and block the content you can access.Some technology companies and ISPs are already ahead of the curve and working on protecting their users. In 2019, Mozilla published its Resolver Policy for listing DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) providers in Firefox’s settings options, followed by Comcast launching their Encrypted DNS Deployment Initiative (EDDI), and by Google defining the requirements to list DoH providers in Chrome’s settings.These are not the only companies starting to take action in protecting users' online data, but many more need to step up. And for DoH there’s no time like the present: the currently low number of devices using DoH eases the adoption curve for ISPs testing and deploying encrypted DNS services, making the implementation of updates and maintenance easier for early adopters, while, on the other hand, as the number of devices using these services goes up, more edge cases will be discovered and the same functions will become increasingly more difficult.ISPs that prioritize data privacy can distinguish themselves with customers, partners and civil society. By taking steps to safely deploy secure and encrypted DNS communications to protect their users, ISPs like Comcast have taken the lead and increased goodwill with activists, technologists and vendors. ISPs that don’t adopt privacy-preserving measures will remain subject to increasing public scrutiny and critique. ISPs implementing their own encrypted DNS services will also avoid reliance on third-party implementations and increase DNS decentralization, to everyone's benefit.Our global reality has been forever altered in the wake of this pandemic. Many of us are living most of our lives online. Inequities and exploitation that had been ignored have come into sharp focus, and the needs of a society in civil unrest add to the many reasons why the privacy and security of individuals is a right that needs to be enhanced and protected.More than ever, customers are paying close attention to the companies that respect them, their families and their rights. DNS providers and ISPs must work together on the implementation and deployment of measures that will strengthen DNS. Choosing short-term profit over people is a losing business proposition, and the first movers will reap even larger rewards in consumer trust.Joey Salazar is a software engineer, open source developer and Senior Programme Officer at Article 19, where she leads the IETF engagement program focusing on policies, standards, and protocol implementations.Benjamin Moskowitz is the Director of Consumer Reports' Digital Lab, which conducts rigorous research and testing of connected products and advocates for consumers' rights online (lab.cr.org).

No one involved in the search of journalist Bryan Carmody's house last May is innocent. Every new piece of information shows the San Francisco police officers -- as well as any supervisors signing off on their paperwork -- knew raiding a journalist's home to find the source of a leaked autopsy report was going to treat the First Amendment and the state's journalist shield law as a doormat.The leak originated in the police department, which is where the SFPD should have begun and ended its investigation. Instead, officers misled a judge to get search warrants approved to search Carmody's home and the contents of seized electronics. A few months later, all five warrants were being tossed by the five judges the cops lied to, who pointed out the SFPD had purposely withheld information that would have identified the warrants' target as a journalist.This led to a settlement being paid to Carmody nearly a year after the raid of his home. The city agreed taxpayers should give Bryan Carmody $369,000 for the violation of his rights and lawful protections by the city's protectors and servants.Three months later, more damaging news has surfaced, thanks to a public records request filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. It looks as though a cover-up was in place from the initiation of the bullshit investigation. It wasn't enough to lie to judges. Officers were instructed to create no impartial record of the raid of Carmody's home.

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You know the drill, right? The FBI keeps insisting that it has a "going dark" problem due to encryption making it impossible to access key evidence of supposedly criminal behavior, in theory allowing crime to happen without recourse. The problem, though, is that nearly every single bit of this claim is false. It's kind of stunning.

AT&T informed its union employees last week that the company would soon begin yet another round of layoffs, after repeatedly promising that industry deregulation and its $42 billion tax cut would result in job growth and a major network investment boom. According to the Communications Workers of America, AT&T says it's laying off 3,400 technician and clerical jobs across the country over the next few weeks. They're also shutting down over 250 AT&T Mobility and Cricket Wireless stores, which will eliminate another 1,300 retail jobs.While many will imply these layoffs are due to COVID-19, they're simply part of a longstanding workforce reduction effort at AT&T. According to the union, AT&T has now eliminated 41,000 positions since receiving a $42 billion Trump tax cut. The CWA conveniently provided a chart, drawn from AT&T earnings reports and filings, that show what AT&T's been up to:The problem: AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson went on live television in 2017 and insisted that the Trump tax cut would result in "thousands of high paying jobs":

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with some opening thoughts in the comments about schools ending contracts with police:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, we saw some hall-of-fame FUD about Edward Snowden from the Sunday Times in the UK. The piece was rapidly trashed by Glenn Greenwald, leading News Corp. to abuse the DMCA in an attempt to hide the criticism. Facing ongoing scrutiny, the reporter who wrote the piece eventually admitted that he just wrote down whatever the government told him, and the editor doubled down on this suggesting that any questions about the story should be directed to the government. Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier was making a much more reasonable point about the same core issue: that Russia and China probably have the Snowden docs, but not because of Snowden.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, we looked at yet another example of how ludicrous it is to expect YouTube to magically know which videos are infringing, while Rapidshare was countersuing Perfect 10 over copyright trolling, and music publishers were trying to pile on the already-dead Limewire. The Hurt Locker producers were deep in their copyright shakedown scheme, while at the same time touting their free speech rights against the soldier who claimed they used his life story. One ISP tried to get very creative and charge users to block file sharing to avoid copyright strikes — and ended up installing malware that broadcast their private information. Meanwhile, long before today's ongoing dust-up that is drawing everyone in, we covered an earlier conversation about "fixing" Section 230.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, we saw the latest in a long string of reports urging the recording industry to embrace file sharing, while some people were working on yet another pipe-dream of universal DRM, and libraries were developing their systems for limiting the use of digital materials as though they were physical. Amazon was trying to patent more basics of e-commerce, while a patent troll reared its head with a 1998 patent that appeared to cover transmitting any information over a network, at all. And we saw the clearest death-knell for the VCR when Wal-Mart announced it would stop selling VHS movies.

Lawyer Daniel Horwitz has a wonderful write-up for NYU's Journal of Legislation & Public Policy on why we need a federal anti-SLAPP law. It's a quick, but thoughtful overview (and, full disclosure, I gave him a couple of small points while he was researching the article), that details not just the need for more SLAPP laws in general, but specifically a federal anti-SLAPP law. As he makes clear in the piece, there are just way too many ways to get around state anti-SLAPP laws (if a state even has one, which many don't):

Ajit Pai's FCC majority is almost never skeptical about the claims made by giant broadband providers. Yet the FCC is expressing doubt that Elon Musk's looming, well-hyped satellite broadband service Starlink will deliver on its promises.One of the downsides of traditional satellite service isn't just high prices, slow speeds, and usage caps -- it's latency. Traditional broadband delivers somewhere in the range of 20-30ms, whereas the physics of traditional satellite broadband means service usually delivers a 200ms response time; lag that's usually very noticeable. Space X's Starlink satellite service operates using far more satellites in far lower orbits, meaning latency should be dramatically improved. But Ajit Pai's FCC has been expressing doubts that the service will be able to deliver the low latency it's promising the public.Despite the fact that Starlink could be very helpful in rural markets (its primary target), the FCC originally blocked the company from getting any rural broadband subsidies whatsoever. But last week in an order, the FCC reversed course (pdf), stating that Starlink could receive these funds. But the FCC was quick to express skepticism that Starlink can deliver broad commercial service with latency under 100ms, as it has been claiming:

In New York City, the government's surveillance tools are being turned against it. This is wonderful news for all citizens who still have the power to inject accountability and transparency into a system that wholeheartedly resists it. To keep tabs on misbehaving cops, activists are using the city's cameras to watch their watchers. Lorenzo Franceshi-Bicchieari has the details for Motherboard.

Earlier this week you may have heard about the so-called "Wednesday night massacre", in which the newly Trump-appointed head of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), Michael Pack, got rid of the heads of the various divisions he now runs:

It's not often you see a sitting judge condemn years of case law, especially when some of it is case law he likely helped convert into circuit precedent. But with everyone's eyes currently on brutal cops and the system that has encouraged lawless behavior by law enforcement, very few people are sitting on the sidelines of the ongoing discussion. The killing of George Floyd by a police officer has resulted in demonstrations around the country, giving very few politicians, judges, and police representatives an opportunity to remain silent.Perhaps the spiciest current take on qualified immunity -- the Supreme Court-created legal doctrine that allows lots of cops to escape civil rights litigation -- belongs to Judge Don Willett, who dissented from Fifth Circuit Appeals Court opinion with this devastating indictment of this extra right.

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As you've probably heard by now, earlier this week, the Justice Department went to court to sue former National Security Advisor John Bolton regarding his book (which is highly critical of the President), entitled The Room Where It Happened. Lots of people have lots of opinions regarding Bolton, Trump, and the book, but I'm going to focus specifically on the legal dispute here, which in some ways is reminiscent of the lawsuit filed over Ed Snowden's book, which meant that the government can take all the proceeds of that book.The key issue in both of these lawsuits is that when you work in the US intelligence community, you are required to sign a lifetime contract that forbids publishing any manuscript or giving any speech related to your intelligence work, without the content first going through "pre-publication review." For years (going well beyond this administration) there have been claims that pre-publication review is used not just to protect classified information (its official purpose), but also to hide unclassified but potentially embarrassing information from public view. Indeed, there is a separate lawsuit, filed by Timothy Edgar and some other former intelligence officials challenging the pre-publication review process as a form of prior restraint and of creating chilling effects against speech, and thus against the 1st Amendment. In April, the judge dismissed that case.The court rejected the prior restraint argument by noting that the plaintiffs signed a contract, and you can absolutely waive your 1st Amendment rights by contract if you so choose. The court is a bit more open to the chilling effects claim, but eventually rules against them, citing other cases that more or less said these kinds of government contracts are fine and not in violation of the 1st Amendment. It also suggests that if there's a remedy to be sought here, the proper venue is through legislative change, rather than through the judicial system. In summary, the court says:

Before regulators signed off on T-Mobile's $26 billion merger with Sprint, executives like former CEO John Legere told anybody who'd listen that the merger would create oodles of new jobs from "day one." With the ink barely dry on the deal, it's abundantly clear that's not happening.Last month, T-Mobile laid off an estimated 6,000 employees from its Metro prepaid division, layoffs that had everything to do with the merger, and nothing to do with the COVID-19 crisis. And on June 15th, hundreds of Sprint employees were unceremoniously fired as part of a six minute conference call during which nobody was allowed to ask questions:

Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York isn't one to suffer the federal government's many fools. Five years ago, Rakoff resigned from the DOJ's rigged forensics committee -- one supposedly formed to tell the DOJ what it was doing wrong when analyzing and testifying about forensic evidence. Rakoff received a personal call from the DOJ's Deputy Attorney General who told him the Commission would not be examining the handling of pre-trial evidence. In other words, the Commission could not make any recommendations about disclosures about means and methodology used by forensic investigators to defendants prior to trial. Rakoff resigned, calling out the government for its "trial by ambush" practices.More recently, Judge Rakoff demanded to know why every single one of the DEA's 179 reverse sting operations targeted minorities. The stings involve the DEA telling targets a shipment of drugs is coming in and how to intercept it. There are no real drugs arriving and the DEA swoops in to arrest people for attempting to make off with nonexistent drugs. It then uses the imaginary amount of drugs to recommend prison sentences. Somehow, the fake amount always clears the bar needed to demand a mandatory minimum 15-year sentence.Judge Rakoff is back and he's still angry. He's been handling litigation over ICE's nasty practice of camping out at courthouses to arrest people for immigration violations. ICE figures this is a great place to find people because they're compelled to show up. Immigration agents aren't just picking up accused criminals. They're also hauling off witnesses and crime victims. (h/t Courthouse News Service)The lawsuit was filed by the New York State Attorney General, who sought an injunction blocking ICE agents from trolling state courthouses for undocumented immigrants. ICE has been blocked, and Judge Rakoff wastes no time excoriating the agency for its actions. From the opening of the decision [PDF]:

As the country continues to witness massive protests throughout the states, focused on changing the way policing is done in the country, it's useful to remember that not everyone can protest in the streets. Even for those who would love to carry the message that police violence against minorities, or really anyone, is massively out of control, there are factors that might keep them home. Such as a global pandemic that has been addressed by the federal government like a little league shortstop kicking a ball around without being able to pick it up. See, there are a great many people in this country that are either at higher risk for devastating effects from COVID-19, or who are immunocompromised. Where do they go in 2020 to protest these problems?Well, thanks to the outlet that is gaming in the era of COVID-19, they go protest in The Sims, of course.

I'm all for heavily compensating whoever comes up with an effective treatment or vaccine for COVID-19, but our existing setup seems designed to encourage scamming and grifting. For years, we've talked about the evil that is the Bayh-Dole Act, which encouraged universities to patent every damn thing (most of which was funded from federal government grants) and then sell off those patents to industry. While it's made a bunch of people rich, it's been such a disaster in so many other ways. First it's done massive harm to university research (rather than the opposite as its backers promised). It significantly decreased information sharing and collaboration (keys to innovation breakthroughs) because universities kept demanding ideas be kept secret so they could patent them and lock up the output of any (again, mostly taxpayer funded) research.A key result of Bayh-Dole is that many, many universities all set up "tech transfer" offices, in the belief that they'd be able to cash in on all these patents being licensed to industry. But, of course, like so many patent holders, universities vastly over-estimate the value of the patent, and under-estimate the value of actual execution. So almost all (with just a few limited exceptions) university tech transfer offices have been dismal failures, and lost universities money, rather than being profit centers. Of course, that created an opportunity... for patent trolls. One of the world's largest patent trolls, Intellectual Ventures, was literally built off of this scam: swooping in to "rescue" desperate tech transfer offices at universities, buying their patents off them for pennies, and amassing a huge collection to shakedown actual innovators. And of course, some universities -- including the University of California -- got directly into the patent trolling business themselves.If you want to see a case study on how this works in the age of COVID-19, look no further than the story of the antiviral therapy called EIDD-2801. My and your taxpayer money helped fund the development of the drug (taken in pill form, originally for the flu), by a grant from the federal government to Emory University for $30 million (only about half of which has been spent). But, just as the COVID-19 situation heated up, there was a recognition that pharma firms might be eager to find new drugs to treat the disease. George Painter heads Emory's tech transfer operation, and also (coinkydinks) holds some patents related to EIDD-2801. In what lots of people considered to be a weird move, he quickly sold off the rights to EIDD-2801 to a "biotherapeutics" company called Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, that didn't seem to have much in the way of, well, anything:

Tennessee's new anti-SLAPP law has resulted in another bogus defamation lawsuit being dumped by a plaintiff before it could do any more damage… to the plaintiff. The great thing about anti-SLAPP laws is they shift the financial burden to the person bringing the lawsuit. If the lawsuit is completely without merit -- like many of those filed in Tennessee before the new law -- the plaintiff pays the defendant's legal bills.The new law appears to have slowed the flow of vexatiously bullshit lawsuits into Tennessee courts. But there are some brave, but mostly stupid, plaintiffs willing to take the new law out for a spin. Carl Vonhartman is probably more stupid than brave. He sued Kortni Butterton for defamation after she wrote a Facebook post (on a private, invite-only page) about her experience with Vonhartman after she rejected him on a dating app.

So, this one brings me back. A few decades ago, I spent a lot of time hanging out with skinheads. And back then, it was all too common to have to go through the standard explanation: no skinheads are not all racists. Indeed, original skinheads in the 1960s were working class Brits with an affinity for Jamaican music, immortalized in songs like Skinhead Girl and Skinhead Moonstomp by the Jamaican band Symarip -- and that meant that many of the original skinheads were also immigrants to the UK from the Caribbean. It was only in the 1980s that a group of newer skinheads started associating with various fascist movements in the UK. Of course, as with so many things, the media picked up those neo-nazi skinheads, and ignored the roots of the movement. In response to the media suddenly believing that all skinheads were nazis, many started associating with the "SHARP" movement (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice -- though also a play on the fact that skinheads like to dress "sharp"). There's a lot more to all of this and a lot of sub-cultures and sub-groupings, and there are plenty of skinheads who are neither racists nor officially "SHARPs" but I'd kinda thought I'd left all that debate and culture behind many years ago, only to have it crashing back into my consciousness last week with the news that Facebook had kicked off a ton of anti-racist, and SHARP skinhead accounts, believing that they were racists.

Back in 2014 the FTC sued AT&T for selling "unlimited" wireless data plans with very real and annoying limits. The lawsuit noted that, starting in 2011, AT&T began selling "unlimited" plans that actually throttled upwards of 90 percent of your downstream speeds after using just two or three gigabytes of data. AT&T spent years trying to wiggle out of the lawsuit via a variety of legal gymnastics, including at one point trying to claim that the very same net neutrality and FCC Title II rules AT&T was attempting to kill, prevented the FTC from holding it accountable.Nearly a decade after the battle began, the company agreed last fall to a $60 million settlement with the FTC without actually admitting any wrongdoing. Though AT&T has also been attempting to tap dance around several other lawsuits over its not really "unlimited" data plans with varying success. A separate 2015 class action continues to stumble through the court system, and AT&T lawyers continue to engage in... creative efforts to derail it.The California class action argues, among other things, that AT&T was being secretive when it downplayed the hidden restrictions on its unlimited data plans (which is correct). To try and disprove this claim, a recent AT&T filing (pdf), spotted by Stop The Cap, introduces a dozen media reports (including an old one by myself) critical of AT&T's efforts. The logic being that because news outlets were writing about how sleazy AT&T was being, customers couldn't possibly have been surprised by the restrictions on their "unlimited" data plans:

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Back in May, we wrote about something of an economy springing up around Nintendo's hit game Animal Crossing. With so many folks enduring the hardships of layoffs, or unable to find work, it turns out there are people making very real world money selling in-game assets and collecting payment outside of Nintendo's platform, which doesn't have a method for these types of transactions. This sort of thing fascinates me on many levels, perhaps mostly in how nearly perfectly this highlights the reality of income disparity in America. Some folks have to farm digital bells to make money by selling them to people with enough money to buy them.But we also mentioned in that post that Nintendo is notoriously protective over how its games are played and used. On top of that, the only real way to be effective in this economy is to screw around with the clock and timer settings on the console itself to speed up the harvesting process. That, too, is the sort of thing that normally gets Nintendo's fur up. So, it's perhaps not surprising that Nintendo has pointed out recently that all of this violates its Terms of Service, though the company has remained cryptic as to exactly what it plans to do about it.

One of the most frustrating things out there is the idea that content moderation choices made on various platforms are coming directly from the top. Too often, I've seen people blame Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg for content moderation decisions, as if they're sitting there at their laptops and twiddling their fingers over who gets blocked and who doesn't. Over the last decade or so, an entire industry has been built up to figure out how to make internet services as usable as possible, to deal with spam, and abuse, and more. That industry is generally called "trust and safety," and as a new industry it has grown up and professionalized quite a bit in the last decade -- though it rarely (if ever) gets the respect it deserves. As I mentioned on a recent episode of The Pivot podcast, many of the assumptions that people make about content moderation unfairly malign the large crew of people working in trust and safety who aren't interested in political bias, or silencing voices, but who legitimately are working very, very hard to figure out how to balance the many, many tradeoffs in trying to make internet services useful and welcoming to users.That's why I'm really happy to see a new organization launch today, the Trust & Safety Professional Association, along with a sister organization, the Trust & Safety Foundation.

Because today wasn't insane enough, just hours after Senator Josh Hawley released his ridiculous bill to flip Section 230 on its head and turn it from a law that protects against frivolous lawsuits into one that would encourage them, the Justice Department has released recommendations for Section 230 reform that appear to have been written by people who haven't the first clue about how content moderation works online.Professor Mark Lemley sums it up best:

Caught between COVID-19 and cop violence, and now risking their health to protest these conditions, Black communities need a comprehensive anti-racist public health response to this growing pandemic. Instead, some U.S. states are investing in apps to contain the virus.George Floyd died, unable to breathe, with Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee pressed into his neck for almost nine minutes. According to the full autopsy report released by the victim’s family, Mr. Floyd had also tested positive for COVID-19 weeks prior to his death. While Mr. Floyd was asymptomatic and the virus was not a contributing factor in his death, thousands of Black people throughout the United States have died, breathless—collateral damage in a double pandemic that has taken too many Black lives. COVID-19 has sickened at least 1.9 million people and killed more than 100,000 in the U.S., the highest death toll across the globe. Black people are disproportionately represented in both the number of infections and the number of deaths.To contain the viral pandemic, cities and counties across the U.S. are adopting something called Technology Assisted Contact Tracing (TACT), using cell phone apps as a means of identifying people diagnosed with COVID-19, notifying people who have been in contact with them of possible exposure to the disease, and advising them of protocols to limit the spread of the virus.I talked to a Bay Area nurse who conducts coronavirus contact tracing, and she described how understaffed, committed teams of medical professionals and others are working tirelessly to find sick and potentially sick people. As the President quickens the pace of “re-opening” the economy, public health experts have insisted that dramatically increasing U.S. capacity to implement contact tracing is a necessary step. But the costs and dangers, especially to Black and other underserved communities, may be greater than the benefits.In many cities, massive manual contact tracing efforts are underway, engaging nurses and other medical staff, as well as laypeople, in making thousands of phone calls to identify, notify and educate people who may be infected with COVID-19. Contact tracing is considered a basic practice in epidemiology. Digital contact tracing is intended to accent these sorely needed existing manual contact tracing efforts, making them less expensive, and more effective and efficient.But digital contact tracing or ‘TACT’ is not just a neutral scientific project. There are some real limitations to the technology that render it potentially ineffective and possibly harmful in Black, Latino and Native communities, and amongst low-income or homeless people. Some experts say at least 60% of a nation’s population must participate as app users for it to work. But, those hardest hit by the virus may also be least likely to have the access and means to use the apps.What Exactly is Digital Contact Tracing?Here’s the simple version for non-techies like me: Proximity tracing apps are a way to figure out if two people were in the same location at the same time. Proximity tracing involves using bluetooth detection, GPS tracking, or a hybrid of the two. This proximity detection capacity is powered by either the bluetooth detection framework that has recently been added to smartphones by both Google and Apple, or by existing GPS tracking.Cell phone users download an app with a GPS-based location logger or proximity detection capacity. When a person is confirmed by a medical professional as having COVID-19, a medical provider certifies the diagnosis, and the infected person’s GPS data or proximity tokens are uploaded to the app’s server. People could indicate on the app, provided by public health officials with an opt-in by the user, that they’d been infected. Those who’d been nearby would receive a notification so that they could self-quarantine or, ideally, seek a diagnosis.On its face, this kind of cell phone based proximity detection and notification system sounds really good, simple and necessary. As a person who grew up watching my mother suffer and die from sickle cell anemia and then my wife and friends suffer and die from cancer, I know what it is to be desperate for a way to avoid the tragedy of dying in a hospital alone. But, as global climate change and inequality exacerbates existing societal fractures, we have to decide as a nation whether our use of digital technologies will expand government surveillance, as digital contact tracing apps do, or shrink it.App InequityA Pew Research Center survey from 2019 found that Blacks and Latinos are more likely than whites to use a smartphone for a broader range of activities, but these communities and lower-income smartphone users are about twice as likely as whites to have canceled or cut off service because of the expense. That same study found that some 19 percent of U.S. adults do not have smartphones—a proportion that rises to 29 percent among those in rural areas, 34 percent among people who did not graduate from high school, and a staggering 47 percent among people over the age of 65.These proximity notification apps work on smartphones and could use a tremendous amount of someone’s data plan. Signal strength and availability of Internet WiFi is another major challenge, since these apps could require a fairly robust data plan. Using a large amount of data also often requires Internet access, yet more than 21 million Americans don’t have access to high speed Internet.What’s more, the apps’ ability to recognize proximity means that the app can tell if two people are close to each other, but cannot target with enough specificity to tell whether or not there is a wall, or PPE between them. This can lead to false positives, especially in densely populated areas. In addition, though one person may have the app, if the person beside them does not, the app can produce false negatives by failing to identify a potentially infected person. In both of these scenarios of dense population and sporadic app availability, we can imagine how Black communities would be disproportionately impacted by the technology’s limitations.Inequity = IneffectivenessThese equity barriers mean the apps just won’t be as effective as they are designed to be.For these apps to work, there are multiple decision points that create a barrier to use. A person has to download the app. Then they must disclose medical information. Finally, they must choose to quarantine and follow public health recommendations provided by the app or a follow up health provider.At each point, equity challenges -- from the disproportionate representation of Black and Latino workers performing front line essential services to crowded and substandard housing -- lessen the likelihood of Blacks and Latinos voluntarily using and therefore gaining benefit from proximity notification apps.Suspicion of public health workers and the medical establishment as a whole may be one of the most significant barriers to Black and Latino participation in digital contact tracing, despite the disparate impact of COVID-19 on these communities.African Americans represent about a third of deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, and 30% of known coronavirus cases, though they comprise only 13% of the U.S. population. Black people are hospitalized for coronavirus complications at three times the rate of white people. In 21 states, Blacks are dying at substantially higher rates. This trend of disproportionate Black dying, while associated with a new virus, has a long and painful history. Since the trans-Atlantic slave trade began in the 1600’s, Black people in the Americas have been deprived of quality food, housing, health care, clothing and all the things a person needs to remain healthy.At the same time Black people live under extraordinarily stressful conditions, from recurring police violence and over-policed communities, mass incarceration, employment and educational discrimination and so much more. As a result, Black bodies have become more susceptible to conditions like heart disease and diabetes. Black people are more likely to die from all types of cancers.Despite the evidence that generational deprivation caused by systemic white supremacy has had a powerful hand in creating these racial health disparities. Black people are consistently blamed for their poor health outcomes and for their disparate rate of death from coronavirus, from U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams’ recent remarks in the press that encouraged Black people to ‘take better care of themselves” to prevent COVID-19 deaths—to President Trump’s recent suggestion that protests for Black civil rights caused a spike in coronavirus rates. Latinos also comprise a greater share of confirmed cases than their share of the population, and share similar health disparities. The Navajo Nation has been hit especially hard.Black people are not only blamed for the durability of this virus, they are also punished for it. Ninety percent of people arrested in encounters related to social distancing in New York City have been Black or Latino, and some of the arrests captured on video have been extremely brutal. Arrests are conducted by officers without adequate personal protective equipment, and those arrested on a charge of failing to adequately social distance end up in jails where social distancing is impossible. Though it’s clear we can’t police our way out of this pandemic, it seems some cities are committed to continuing to use excessive, brutal and discriminatory policing to enforce social codes.Blamed for the underlying conditions that make Black people more likely to die from COVID-19, criminalized, left behind by government relief funds and steeped in a history of medical bias and government misuse of personal data—Black communities, alongside Latinos, Native American, lower-income, undocumented and some Asian communities have little reason to trust government contact tracing apps.The technology only works if federal and state dollars are subsequently invested in impacted communities, appropriate interventions in place. For example, in New Orleans, health officials identified equity barriers in their drive-through testing strategy for the coronavirus. Census tract data revealed hot spots for the virus were located in predominantly low-income African-American neighborhoods where many residents lacked cars. So they changed their strategy and sent mobile testing vans into the community, instead of having the community come to them. But these interventions are few and far between.Perhaps the biggest effectiveness barrier for Black and other underserved communities is inequity in testing. Testing generates data, and Technology Assisted Contact Tracing apps rely on robust data generated by robust testing. So what happens when Black communities are denied robust testing due to structural inequalities and implicit bias in the medical system?In April 2020, 30-year-old Rana Zoe Mungin, a beloved Black teacher in Brooklyn New York, died from COVID-19 after twice being denied testing. Under pressure from civil rights groups and public health advocates, cities and states have begun to collect race-based data on who is getting sick and dying from this virus. Right now, race or ethnicity is known in about half of all cases and in 90 percent of deaths. Without adequate testing, there is insufficient data for the apps to track contacts. Without adequate testing, appropriate protection and accessible health care, contact tracing apps do not ease the burden or hardworking public health officials. In fact, under-utilized contact tracing apps may misdirect health care workers and make the job of containing the virus even harder.Privacy ChallengesWhile early exposure notification using proximity detection apps could be minimally useful, its potential usefulness does not outweigh another very real threat: spying. These apps are likely to be created by developers who have limited experience with managing privacy concerns and sensitive medical data, yet the privacy parameters will be left to each app developer. An inexperienced app developer with limited privacy and contract tracing background could cause real harm. Though Google and Apple have gone a long way toward managing privacy concerns, not every state is going to use the Google/Apple API.In the rush to a technological fix, cities and states may overlook what’s needed to protect highly sensitive data being collected and placed in centralized, government run databases. This data needs to be locked down with clear use agreements when governments are entering into contracts with private companies, including app developers and database developers like Salesforce. A patchwork state to state, city to city, approach with no federal privacy standards or use agreements could be a significant threat to user data. It can be really hard to genuinely protect privacy, especially if the political will to protect all users equally isn’t there.For these reasons alone, Black people have good reason to be skeptical of contact tracing apps. But history provides an even better reason. After the terrorist attacks on 9-11, Americans were told that the Patriot Act, a new Department of Homeland Security, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were critically necessary. All three came into being in the direct aftermath of those attacks and were deployed domestically during the U.S invasion of Afghanistan. The Patriot Act installed new powers that were supposed to target terrorism, but have since been used to fuel racial profiling, while DHS has fueled a burgeoning system of digital surveillance and multi-state cooperation through the use of fusion centers. We’ve already experienced the way expanded surveillance powers for one purpose can be transferred and used for another.Right now, the Pandemic is already providing a distraction to dramatic expansions of existing surveillance powers. The US Senate recently failed in its attempt to limit law enforcement agencies’ access to web browsing data without a warrant, which reinforced the government’s expansive surveillance powers. Though it’s clear that facial recognition is not the solution to what is now a public health crisis, controversial tech company Clearview says it's in talks with federal and state agencies to track COVID19 using facial recognition. Face-scanning systems are already in use or under consideration in the coronavirus response. Tampa General Hospital in Florida recently implemented a screening system that includes thermal-scanning face cameras that look for fevers, sweating, and discoloration. Texas-based Athena Security has been pitching a similar product to grocery stores, hospitals, and voting locations.The COVID19 Consumer Data Protection Act would require companies to get consent from individuals to collect health information, device information, geolocation, or proximity information. It would also make companies disclose why their data is being collected, how it will be handled, who it will be transferred to, and how long it will be retained. But advocates are concerned it doesn’t go far enough. It certainly would not protect Black app users from the potential pivot from government sponsored pandemic surveillance to police surveillance.Proximity Apps Must Be Coupled With Comprehensive Public Health StrategiesIt’s clear that inequality, not ignorance, is fueling COVID-19 infection rates in America. When racial disparities are coded as biological medical problems caused by the patient, rather than political problems caused by long-standing structural inequalities, it creates a wall of mistrust between patients and providers that is already limiting the success of manual contact tracers. Louisiana has invested millions of dollars, but fewer than half are answering the phone. The same barriers will exist when trying to get people to use an app that wants to track your location and share your medical information.To contain the virus in Black communities, contact tracing apps have a role to play, but it can never function successfully as a primary solution. It’s clear some states will build their own apps and if they do, they should follow these principles for Technology Assisted Contact Tracing. But instead, cities should strengthen and invest in the human infrastructure for contact tracing and public health that is rooted in relationships and trust. Build small, nurse-led medical teams, and invest in technological solutions that can help bring medicine into people’s homes, reach people on the street, speak to those for whom English is not their first language. Connect people to testing and real services in real time. And if they end up sick, alone and dying -- advocate for them in hospitals.Over-reliance on technology cannot solve massive social problems, but it can create them. An app cannot bridge structural inequalities baked into American healthcare. The effectiveness of the proposed contact tracing apps seem limited comparative to potential negative impacts. If we skip over these disparities, if we pour resources and direct investment toward technical fixes without also repairing what has prevented Black patients from getting the best medical care available, it will be a huge, ineffective and expensive distraction. This may be at least one of the reasons contact tracing apps haven’t really taken off in the U.S. thus far. Some states have invested in the apps, but most still do not and many have no immediate plans to adopt one.Contact tracing or proximity apps could help limit the spread of the virus among some populations, but without a comprehensive public health agenda, it won’t be enough to save Black lives.Malkia Devich Cyril is an award winning activist, writer and public speaker on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation and collective grief; as well as the lead founder and former Executive Director of MediaJustice — a national hub boldly advancing racial justice, rights and dignity in a digital age. After more than 20 years of leadership, Devich-Cyril now serves as a Senior Fellow at Media Justice.

More details about the leak of CIA hacking tools are coming to light. And they're not making the CIA look any more deserving of its "Intelligence" middle name.The "Vault 7" leak detailed the CIA's exploits -- ones targeting cellphones and a variety of smart devices. Encryption still works, though, but devices have to remain uncompromised by exploits. Since they aren't, encryption won't stop agencies like the CIA from intercepting communications or inserting themselves into private conversations.The prosecution of the accused Vault 7 leaker has been a nightmare of its own, with the government having difficulty pressing its case even as it uncovers evidence the leaker continued to leak sensitive information after being incarcerated.The latest report, by Ellen Nakishima and Shane Harris of the Washington Post, shows the CIA was far more interested in developing tech weapons than ensuring its hoard of exploits remained in its possession.

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So there were rumors about Senator Hawley's bill to reform Section 230 earlier this week, saying that it would remove 230 protections if you used targeted ads. Today, Hawley released the actual plan, which is very different, but even dumber. It would certainly turn the GOP from the party that wanted to push for tort reform and limit frivolous and vexatious lawsuits into the party that encouraged an avalanche of wasteful litigation.The shortest version of the bill's likely impact is that it would create an army of "content moderation troll" lawyers, because you could sue any platform that you felt removed your content unfairly and get $5,000 plus attorney's fees. With a bit more detail, the bill requires that a platform have clear terms of service and any moderation would have to be tied back to those terms -- which pretty much shows that whoever wrote this pile of shit has no idea how content moderation works, and the fact that you need to keep adjusting the actual content moderation practices, because dishonest people who are trying to abuse your system are always trying to game things to stay "technically" within the "terms" while still wreaking havoc on your platform.The bill then says that if a platform makes any design or operation decision that is not in "good faith", anyone can sue them for $5k and attorneys' fees. Note that this seems to go beyond just moderation decisions. It includes a platform making design decisions that you dislike. That's... crazy. There's also the question of what is actually meant by "good faith" and all the 1st Amendment issues that raises, because determining what is and is not "good faith" is a straight up editorial decision, and the whole point of the 1st Amendment is that the courts can't jump in to second guess editorial decisions.To be clear, this law's attempt to expand "good faith" seems to be purposely made in bad faith to simply overwhelm internet platforms with tons of lawsuits.This bill flips the entire purpose of Section 230. As Jess Miers said, this bill seems to take the immunity from civil suits in the law and turns it into a private right of action for tons of frivolous and vexatious lawsuits.It is not a serious attempt at reform. It's an unconstitutional pile of crap that seems to serve no other purpose than to allow whiny aggrieved grifters to shake down every platform for their moderation and design choices.

For much of the last year, T-Mobile and Sprint insisted that their $26 billion megamerger would result in untold amazing "synergies," lower prices, and better service. You know, pretty much the complete opposite of what US telecom merger history indicates and antitrust experts had predicted. And so far, the antitrust experts have had it largely right; the company has been busy laying off employees at its prepaid division (despite repeatedly claiming this wouldn't happen), and the DOJ's attempt to cobble together a fourth replacement carrier out of Dish Network appears to be bogged down in infighting.This week, T-Mobile's wireless network experienced a massive, twelve hour outage that left users unable to call or send text messages:

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order in response to protests around the nation triggered by the cold-blooded killing of a black man by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.To be fair, it's much more restrained than the law enforcement-focused directive Trump released shortly after being elected. That one -- sent out under the misleading title "Law and Justice" -- basically told America disliking cops was wrong and possibly per se Unamerican. Here's a direct quote from the administration's opening shitpost, which has since been disappeared from the White House's site:

I think it's fair to say that the lawyers for wrestling's WWE have found themselves playing the heel in the past. Perhaps it's the result of the company being run by known crazy person Vince McMahon, who has found his way to our site by being an IP protectionist among other things. WWE's lawyers have tried some pretty nefarious methods for going after those they believe violated WWE's intellectual property rights. For instance, they tried to get the mailing address of the operator of a streaming site by falseloffering a gift bag.But the legal team never tried to simply and incorrectly make DMCA claims on the videos of other wrestling operations... until now. Bar Wrestling, which is described as an independent wrestling promotion, routinely films its matches and events, and puts them online for free, including on Twitter. For some reason, a lawyer for the WWE issued a takedown on one tweet with Twitter, which complied and removed the content.

In response to one of its own officers killing an unarmed, cuffed black man by kneeling on his neck until he was long past dead, the Minneapolis City Council pledged to defund the police department. It did this as the city burned and protests erupted around the nation. It maintained this pledge as city schools said "no thanks" to offers of assistance from police officers seeking to bring this level of violence to public schools and state colleges.At that point, it was all talk. But it was talk the Council could back up. It had a veto-proof majority willing to disassemble the system that hadn't worked for years and replace it with something new. But it was still talk until it was put into action. And it has now been put into action, as Scott McClallen reports for The Center Square.

So, earlier today, NBC reported that Google had "banned" two well known websites from its ad platform, namely The Federalist and Zero Hedge. The story was a bit confusing. To be clear, both of those sites are awful and frequently post unmitigated garbage, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. But, it turns out the story was highly misleading, though it will almost certainly be used to push the false narrative that the big internet companies are engaged in "anti-conservative bias" in moderation practices. But that's wrong. Indeed, it appears what happened is exactly what Google has done to us in the past, in saying that because of certain comments people put on our stories, they were pulling any Google ads from appearing on that page. Now we've explained why this is a dumb policy, that only encourages bad comments on sites to try to demonetize them, but it's not got anything to do with "anti-conservative bias." Also, it's just pulling ads from a single page, not across the board.But that's not how NBC presented it. Indeed, NBC's coverage is weird in its own way. It took a report from a UK-based operation that put together a blacklist of websites it says should be "defunded" for "racist fake news." Of course, "racist" is in the eye of the beholder, and "fake news" is not a very useful term here, but whatever. NBC reporters took this report and reached out to Google to ask about these particular pages, and that set off Google's usual review processes, and the recognition that some of the comments on the page violated Google's ad policies on "dangerous and derogatory" content (the same thing we got dinged for above). Google, as it does, alerted the Federalist to this content and warned that if it wasn't corrected, ads would be removed on that page (Google claims that Zero Hedge's page had already gone through this process prior to the communication from NBC). While the fact that Google did a review after NBC's request for comment may upset some, this is the nature of content moderation: much of it happens after an inbound report is made in some form or another.Of course, as the story got bigger and bigger and spun out of control, even Google had to come out and clarify that The Federalist was never demonetized, but rather that they called out specific comments that would lead to ads being pulled on that page:

Pop quiz: a couple publishes a relatively small news website critical of your massive and hugely profitable corporation.Do you:A: Simply ignore the criticism.B: Consider whether the grievances are legitimate then take steps to improve your company, orC: unleash a brutal, summer long campaign of terror and surveillance that includes sending the website publishers threatening DMs, live spiders, pornography, and dead pigs.Apparently if you're employed at eBay, the answer is an enthusiastic C. Six (now former) executives and employees of eBay are facing federal charges after they participated in massive, grotesque harassment campaign targeting the publishers of a small news outlet (Ecommercebytes.com, published by David and Ina Steiner) critical of eBay. Said harassment campaign included sending porn to the Steiners' neighbor under their name, and also sending them live spiders, bloody pig masks, cockroaches, and even a dead pig fetus. Why? They were upset by both the newsletter and anonymous commenters:

Protests linked to the George Floyd killing are still occurring on a daily basis around the nation. With increased citizen activity comes increased police activity. Apparently, police departments can't handle these protests on their own. In some states, the National Guard has been called in. In others, surveillance tech on loan from federal agencies is being deployed to keep an eyes on protesters.The DEA apparently doesn't have enough to do during this current civil unrest, so it has asked permission to spy on protests in hopes of catching someone committing federal crimes. No one asked the DEA to do this. It inserted itself into this situation and apparently couldn't even find enough DEA agents to volunteer for its First Amendment incursions. A mixture of 25 volunteers and voluntolds are headed to major cities to keep an eye on stuff completely unrelated to the job of drug law enforcement.Federal agencies have apparently decided the current situation demands an increase in domestic surveillance. A group of 35 federal legislators want to know why. A letter [PDF] sent to the FBI, DEA, National Guard, and CBP lets these agencies know their overseers aren't exactly impressed with this opportunistic spying. The mini-coalition says the following behavior is unacceptable and possibly inexplicable:

Techdirt has written a lot about corporate sovereignty -- also known as "investor-state dispute settlement" (ISDS) -- which allows companies to haul countries before special tribunals for alleged loss of profits caused by new laws or regulations. One industry's use of ISDS that Techdirt has been following particularly closely is tobacco. As a typically brilliant John Oliver segment explained back in 2015, Big Tobacco companies have used corporate sovereignty clauses in international trade and investment deals to sue countries for daring to try to regulate cigarettes, advertising or packaging. Thankfully, that didn't turn out so well. Philip Morris tried to use ISDS to roll back plain-pack laws, but cases against Australia and Uruguay were both thrown out. The tide against the use of corporate sovereignty by tobacco companies to undo health protection laws has turned so much that special carve-outs have been added to trade deals to prevent this kind of corporate bullying.But the tobacco industry had one last trick up its sleeve. John Oliver noted five years ago that Big Tobacco persuaded three countries -- Honduras, Dominican Republic and Ukraine -- to file complaints with the World Trade Organization (WTO) against Australia, claiming the plain-packaging law violates trade agreements. As an article in the Financial Review explains, they were later joined by Indonesia and Cuba. A dispute panel backed Australia in June 2018, but Honduras and the Dominican Republic appealed against that decision. Now the WTO's Appellate Body has made its final ruling:

Last week, the Internet Archive announced that it was going to close the National Emergency Library two weeks earlier than it had originally planned to do so, because of the disappointing lawsuit against the organization by most of the major publishing houses. As we said when that lawsuit was filed, while the publishers may win (and may force the entire Internet Archive to close), it's still a blatant attack on culture. And, of course, the lawsuit isn't just over the National Emergency Library, but the entire concept of Controlled Digital Lending, the underpinning of the Internet Archive's OpenLibrary, which lets you check out scans of books in a one-to-one relationship with physical books the library holds.If you came down from space without understanding the history of copyright, there is no way this would make sense to you at all. The publishers are suing a library for making information available to people while they're stuck at home during a pandemic and all the physical books are locked up. Whether or not it meets the technical boundaries of fair use is one question. Whether or not the lawsuit is an abhorrent attack on access to knowledge and culture is another altogether.Indeed, in a separate blog post, the Archive made it clear just how impactful the NEL has been. It includes a huge list of testimonials.

Putting cops in schools has proven to be a disaster. Treating discipline problems like criminal acts has turned students into criminals and placed vulnerable kids in the hands of sadists who feel force deployment and power flexing are the best responses to common in-school issues.The latest public response to the killing of an unarmed black man by a white cop has supercharged the debate over police presence in schools. The flash point for these demonstrations acted first. The Minneapolis school board dumped its contract with the police department and at least one state college followed suit.It's now happening elsewhere. C.J. Ciaramella reports for Reason that Portland, Oregon's schools will no longer play host to local police officers.

It’s safe to assume that most people recognize patent trolling as a problem, one that arises from our uniquely inefficient legal system. If we were given the opportunity to redesign patent litigation rules from scratch, why would anyone intentionally create a system so costly and uncertain that bad faith actors have a financial incentive to file weak lawsuits against cash-strapped startups that are better off paying extortive settlements than actually winning the case? And yet, some privacy advocates are openly calling for policymakers to replicate this disastrous state of affairs through a new regime of private enforcement for proposed state and federal comprehensive consumer privacy laws.In two recent posts on the Greenhouse, Joe Jerome and Ernesto Falcon outlined the debate about how to optimally enforce privacy laws; arguing that private rights of action in some form are necessary to make companies take consumer privacy seriously and claiming that industry’s preference for public agency enforcement reflects a desire to make privacy rules functionally toothless. While I disagree with their ultimate conclusion, I understand the skepticism of leaving enforcement up to chronically underfunded regulatory agencies with a subpar track record of curtailing privacy violations. I also agree with Jerome’s conclusion that a strict private vs. public enforcement dichotomy has created a “ridiculous impasse.” As an advocate for startups, I’m just the sort of industry representative positioned to answer his call for a more nuanced conversation around privacy enforcement:

This is a real travesty. Reporter Maria Ressa (and research Rey Santos Jr.) have been convicted of criminal "cyber libel" in the Philippines, and now face fines and possibly years in jail for their reporting -- a direct attack on free speech and a free press in the Philippines.For a few years now, we've been reporting on the various attempts by the Filipino government to silence Maria Ressa, a famous reporter in the Philippines, who founded the news site, Rappler. Ressa is a force of nature, and has been reporting careful, detailed, but embarrassing articles about the Filipino government that has upset many people there. There were some trumped up "tax evasion" charges (based on the government misrepresenting the nature of a grant from the philanthropic Omidyar Network), but there have been a number of other questionable legal attacks as well. A year ago, we noted at least 11 questionable lawsuits, including one in which Ressa was arrested in early 2019 under claims of "criminal cyber libel" for an article about businessman Wilfredo Keng and his close connections to former chief justice of the Filipino Supreme Court Renato Corona. Keng claimed that parts of the article -- that claimed he had "alleged links to illegal drugs and human trafficking" -- were defamatory.There were all sorts of problems with the charges, including that the "cyber libel" law in question was enacted four months after the story ran, and just the idea that there is such a thing as criminal, rather than civil defamation, should raise huge concerns, especially in a country like the Philippines that has free speech built into its Constitution (it's their 4th Amendment and is modeled very closely on the US's 1st Amendment: "No law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances").You'd think that would make the cyber libel law unconstitutional, but so far the courts don't seem to think so. The ruling, which can be appealed (and almost certainly will be), raises all sorts of questions. For example, as noted above, the law passed months after the article was published and the prosecutors convinced a judge that didn't matter because Rappler later corrected a few typos in the article, and those corrections were done after the law was put in place -- so therefore it seemed to count as a new publication. There was also the problem of the statute of limitations (it seems that's referred to as the "prescription period" in the Philippines). The statue of limitations for libel is 1 year, and Keng's complaint was filed 5 years after the article. But prosecutors played some bizarre legal games to say that "cyber libel" did not apply under standard libel laws in the Filipino code, but rather was a "special law" and as such, had a 12 year statute of limitations -- an interpretation that had legal experts in the Philippines scratching their heads.As for the actual claims, Keng did not dispute the key point of the article (regarding an SUV that he owned being used by the former chief justice), but rather was upset about statements concerning his alleged "shady past" which were based on two reports (including a government intelligence report they had obtained) that the reporters mentioned. However, Keng argued that those claims were false, and provided Rappler with a certificate from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency that apparently cleared him of any wrong doing. In response, Rappler claimed that the government intelligence report it had seen was not from the DEA, and they would investigate the DEA's certification, though it appears that investigation was never completed.But the judge seemed to think that was enough for cyber libel:

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For all of the talk about being #1, America's broadband networks are routinely mediocre. The U.S. consistently ranks among the middle of the pack in speeds and overall availability, while Americans continue to pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for both fixed and mobile broadband. The reasons aren't mysterious: we've let a bunch of telecom monopolies not only dominate the sector, we've allowed their corrupt influence over state and federal lawmakers and regulators to become so pronounced, they dictate most US telecom policy and literally write the law. Both with a relentless focus on hamstringing competition.We then stand around with a dumb look on our collective faces, wondering what went wrong. Rinse, wash, repeat.This week, the US had the honor of falling out of the top ten nations in terms of average broadband speeds. The data, gleaned from Speedtest.net's Global Index, indicates that the United States is now 11th, behind behind Macau, Denmark, and Sweden. Not a great showing given the countless billions in subsidies thrown at providers to shore up coverage, and the endless lip service (see: FCC boss Ajit Pai's breathless supposed dedication to curing the digital divide) US policy makers have thrown at the problem for the better part of the last twenty years.Historically, we adore blaming our failures on this front on things like geography, insisting the only reason the United States is so mediocre at broadband is because it's just so big. But after decades of mediocrity, and billions in monopoly tax breaks and subsidization, that excuse long ago became hollow. Especially when you notice that the US is now ranked 33rd in average mobile download speeds, behind even larger countries like China: