Techdirt

Summary: Since the term was first coined in 2004, podcasts have obviously taken off, with reports saying that around 55% of Americans have listened to a podcast as of early 2021. Estimates on a total number of podcasts vary, but some sites estimate the total at 1.75 million podcasts, with about 850,000 of them described as “active.” Still, for many years, actually hosting a podcast remained somewhat complicated.A few services have been created to try to make it easier, and one of the biggest names was Anchor.fm, which tried to make it extremely easy to create and host a podcast -- including the ability to add in an advertising-based monetization component. In early 2019, as part of its aggressive expansion into podcasts, Spotify purchased Anchor for $150 million.However, in the summer of 2020, podcasters began calling out Anchor for allowing others to re-upload copies of someone else’s podcasts, claim them as their own, and monetize those other podcasts. Erika Nardini from Barstool Sports called this out on Twitter, after seeing a variety of Barstool podcasts show up on Anchor, despite not being uploaded there by Barstool.The issue got a lot more attention a month later when podcaster Aaron Mahnke wrote a thread detailing how a variety of popular podcasts were being reuploaded to Anchor and monetized by whoever was uploading them.After that thread started to go viral, Anchor promised to crackdown on copied/re-uploaded podcasts. The company claimed that it had an existing system in place to detect duplicates, but that those doing the uploading had figured out some sort of workaround, by manually uploading the podcasts, rather than automating the effort:

The argument against anything perceived as "defunding" cops or going just a bit lighter on suspected criminals (like decriminalization of drug possession or the elimination of cash bail) is that the criminals will win. Apparently all they've been waiting for is fewer laws so they can break more laws… or something.A few disingenuous people (some of them holding very powerful offices) have claimed it takes nothing more than people being angry at law enforcement to make crime rates rise. Others claim the only way to keep crime rates down is to harshly police every minor infraction.There's no real answer here. Crime rates rise and fall. Mostly, they've been falling. Here in the United States, we've been enjoying historically low crime rates for most of the last decade. But law enforcement opportunists insist on viewing every deviation from this pattern as the start of an alarming trend, one that can be traced to almost any attempt to introduce accountability to policing.Over in Baltimore -- where cops have been on a rampage -- crime rates continue to fall. The backlash from rampant law enforcement corruption has resulted in some changes meant to level the criminal justice playing field and direct law enforcement resources towards more serious crimes. The wild card was a worldwide pandemic. Here's Elizabeth Nolan Brown for Reason:

There were actually a whole bunch of interesting legal questions raised by Nike's trademark lawsuit against MSCHF the weird "structured chaos" organization that seems to basically sell publicity stunts as a business model. It had teamed up with the musician Lil Nas X to sell 666 pairs of upgrade Nike Air Max 97, complete with red ink (and, it claimed, a single drop of blood) inserted in the sole of the shoe. The lawsuit raised issues regarding first sale/resale rights, art, freedom of expression, trademark, ownership, property, dilution, confusion and more. And... all of it's going nowhere, because a settlement has been reached.This isn't that much of a surprise. MSCHF execs have admitted in the past that lawsuits only raise their profile, which may be true, but they're also crazy fucking expensive. MSCHF already got the benefit of the publicity bump from the lawsuit, and now probably sought to get things done and over with as quickly as possible -- and that includes agreeing to issue a "voluntary recall" of the shoes -- 665 pairs of which it had already shipped out. MSCHF also agreed to do the same thing for the much smaller number of Jesus shoes it had sold two years ago in a similar stunt.Of course, the whole thing seems like a charade. It's a voluntary recall, in which MSCHF is supposed to buy back the shoes at their original retail prices "in order to remove them from circulation." But, uh, anyone who has those shoes in their possession now knows that these shoes are way more valuable because of this dispute. I'd be amazed if anyone actually agreed to sell the shoes back to MSCHF, because these shoes just went from already established rare collector's items, to rare collector's items with an even more insane story including the fact that Nike wants them to disappear.In some ways, this form of settlement just shows how ridiculous the lawsuit was in the first place. Nike's statement on the settlement is hilarious:

If ever there was a situation that called for a circumvention of the normal patent process and lifespan, surely it would be the COVID-10 pandemic. It seems obvious that a global pandemic is the perfect situation to go beyond the normal restrictive patent protections for things like therapeutics and vaccines and instead operate from a posture of information-sharing and collaboration so that the world can get back to something resembling normalcy. Instead, products of research that are often based on publicly-funded scientific campaigns are being locked up in patent offices, fought over among patent holders, and used for pure profiteering over a public health crises. It's in that reality that we've had to witness some folks who absolutely know better, such as Senator Ben Sasse, advocate for longer patent protections for COVID-19 treatments, rather than the opposite.But if you thought that this kind of pro-pharma shill work was limited to Republicans like Sasse, fear not oh ye both-sides-ers, because here comes Howard Dean to demonstrate that the other side of the aisle is equally capable of spewing this nonsense. Dean recently penned an op-ed pushing Joe Biden to not issue a special waiver that would allow poor countries access to produce generic COVID-19 vaccines.

Whether you're having a movie night with friends or a presentation with colleagues, the Minolta MN673 Mini LCD Projector is perfect for you. It casts a 120" high-quality image onto any surface. Enjoy crisp visuals with up to 1080P resolution and 800:1 contrast ratio. With HDMI input, you can easily connect the projector to any compatible device. It also has USB and MicroSD inputs. The remote control is also included so you can operate from a distance. It's on sale for $100.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.

Over the last decade or so, the fight between Oracle and Google has seemed incredibly personal -- at least on the Oracle side. Of course, many have argued the main reason for Oracle's attacks on Google were to pressure the company into settling its long-running fight over the Java API -- and the Supreme Court just put an end to that -- so it will be interesting to watch whether or not the attacks continue. But there's an important point buried in all of this. Almost everything Oracle accuses Google of doing... it does itself. Often in much more nefarious ways. I mean, Oracle even copied an API without a license. But Oracle's grand projection in blaming Google for the things that Oracle actually does (in much worse ways) goes way further than that.Late last year reports came out noting that various regulatory attacks on Google around the globe clearly had Oracle's fingerprints all over them -- including claims that Google is a disaster for persona privacy. From a big Bloomberg article:

To be clear: Space X's Starlink broadband service won't be taking on traditional broadband providers in major metro areas. Instead, the company will be using thousands of low orbit satellites (with lower latency than traditional satellite broadband) to deliver marginally decent service to under-served rural Americans, assuming it winds up being profitable longer term. In a country where an estimated 42 million can't get any broadband at all (during a raging pandemic, no less), any improvement helps.At the same time, many Musk fanboys and press outlets continue to overstate Starlink's (which provides speeds "up to" 100 Mbps for $100 per month plus a $500 first month equipment charge) overall impact. And many telecom analysts continue to try and temper this unbridled enthusiasm, warning that by Musk's admission, the service isn't going to have the kind of capacity necessary to truly disrupt the traditional fixed broadband market. That includes Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett, who has been trying to calm investors in traditional broadband companies worried about Starlink's disruptive potential:

Any cursory review of our stories involving DRM will leave a sane reader with only one impression: the spectrum of customer viewpoints on video game DRM ranges from total and complete disgust and hatred to tolerance of DRM as an annoyance. In other words, there is no positive side of this spectrum. There are no gamers that are pro-DRM, only those that put up with it. On the flip side, there are many folks who not only hate DRM in video games, but also many who are quite wary of what that DRM is and is doing on or to their machines. There are historical reasons for this, from DRM support falling off and bricking previously bought games to DRM practices that appear to install shady shit on gamers' PCs.In these modern times, it would be absurd to suggest that the general public has mostly graduated to a new level of technical proficiency... but I think we can also say that the average gamer is probably more aware of how these games operate and install on their machines than they have been in the past. Which is probably why, in 2021, it was a really bad idea for one game publisher to use anti-piracy measures that install what sure looks like unknown, shady software on customer machines.

Some really fantastic news if you believe in (1) the wonderful work the Internet Archive does and (2) the future of a more decentralized internet (and, for what it's worth, you should believe in both of those things). The Filecoin Foundation has donated 50,000 FIL to the Internet Archive. This is approximately $10 million worth of Filecoin, which represents the largest single donation to the organization. Obviously, by the amount alone, this is a big deal and hugely important for an Internet Archive that is currently facing an existential legal attack by publishers who hate the very idea of libraries.But it's doubly interesting, because Filecoin is a key component that many are hoping will empower a new more distributed web. And it appears that the Internet Archive is looking to take advantage of this aspect as well (as it should):

The protests that swept the nation following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin were often greeted by police violence -- exactly the sort of police activity protesters were protesting against.The largest police force in the nation -- the New York City police department -- was no exception. The NYPD has its own brutality problems and its share of dead citizens in its wake, but it appeared to have learned nothing from these experiences. It responded to protests with its own brand of violence and its own lack of personal responsibility, something encouraged by its expansive union contracts and decades of mayoral support.The Intercept has obtained an internal manual for protest response by the NYPD's "Strategic Response Group." The SRG was tasked in 2015 with responding to unusual events, like terrorist attacks and, for some reason, largely peaceful protests. The SRG has its own internal problems that haven't been addressed by NYPD brass -- aligning it with the rest of the force, which hasn't been held accountable by the NYPD for years.Here's an assessment of the SRG and its standard M.O., as summarized by Ali Winston of The Appeal last October:

Last week the NY Times had an incredible article about how the Trump campaign tricked donors into giving way more money than they meant to, using so-called "dark patterns" (i.e., tricky UI design and wording) that got many people to think they were donating one time, but instead accidentally signed up to contribute the same amount every month. The Trump campaign ended up having to return an astounding $122 million of the money it raised in refunds, much of it due to these tricks.

As we've noted a few times, 2021 is seeing record interest in new right to repair laws. Driven by grass roots activism, such laws are being pushed in more than fourteen states. Most variations not only protect your right to repair hardware you own, they open the door to more independent repair shops, and fewer corporate giants attempting to monopolize repair (Apple, John Deere, Microsoft, Sony, many more).Unsurprisingly, said companies are engaged in a lot of theatrics to undermine such efforts, including false claims that such laws will create a boom in sexual predators, raise prices, or turn otherwise peaceful American towns and cities into diabolical meccas for hackers. This coordinated assault on such laws has been effective in states like Colorado, where the state legislature recently shot down one such legislative effort, even after hearing testimony about how repair restrictions are harming health care providers during COVID by hamstringing access to essential repair technology and documentation or replacement parts:

Who wants to work on a messy desk? Focus on your productivity and not on tangled wires with this Trio 3-in-1 Aluminum Desktop Charging Stand. This stand holds your phone vertically or horizontally for the perfect angle to read messages, watch videos, listen to music and play games. It also has two other slots for your smartwatch and wireless earphones. With built-in cable management, this stand helps organize your cables to avoid knotting. Each slot has enlarged anti-scratch rubber cushions to prevent your devices from slipping and scratching. It comes in 4 different colors and is 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.

As a bit of a reminder/disclaimer, Charles Harder was the main lawyer in the lawsuit against us, in which the plaintiff said directly that his intent was that we needed to be shut down. Of course, Harder's bigger claim to fame was his success in shutting down Gawker, thanks to a concerted effort by a billionaire who didn't like Gawker's reporting.Harder has, in fact, relished his reputation for threatening and suing news organizations that publish information his clients dislike. Hell, he just published a whole book in which the title itself champions the fact that he killed off Gawker. Over the years, we've seen Harder threaten and/or sue plenty of media organizations over completely ridiculous things. He sued the New York Times over an opinion piece on behalf of Donald Trump's campaign (and lost), he helped a cryptocurrency company sue Forbes for an article about how the company was structured, he tried (and failed) to get multiple books about Donald Trump blocked from publication -- including suing over the book by niece Mary Trump and threatening a suit over Steve Bannon's book. He also threatened the New York Times over its big Harvey Weinstein expose.In fact, nearly every aspect of Harder's claim to fame is built around his ability to threaten or sue media organizations into silence.And the impact of his lawsuits has been very real. There have been stories about the Gawker Effect creating a real chill on investigative reporting, especially into malfeasance. And I've certainly spoken about the chilling effects of the lawsuit that was filed against me.Given all of that, it's incredibly rich for Harder to now publish an op-ed decrying "cancel culture." And, yet, that's exactly what he's done. In a piece that originally appeared on InsideSources and is now popping up in actual newspaper op-eds, like the Jacksoville Journal-Courier, Harder argues that we need to stop trying to cancel people for speech. The whole thing would make me laugh if it didn't make me actually feel ill.

As a bit of a reminder/disclaimer, Charles Harder was the main lawyer in the lawsuit against us, in which the plaintiff said directly that his intent was that we needed to be shut down. Of course, Harder's bigger claim to fame was his success in shutting down Gawker, thanks to a concerted effort by a billionaire who didn't like Gawker's reporting.Harder has, in fact, relished his reputation for threatening and suing news organizations that publish information his clients dislike. Hell, he just published a whole book in which the title itself champions the fact that he killed off Gawker. Over the years, we've seen Harder threaten and/or sue plenty of media organizations over completely ridiculous things. He sued the New York Times over an opinion piece on behalf of Donald Trump's campaign (and lost), he helped a cryptocurrency company sue Forbes for an article about how the company was structured, he tried (and failed) to get multiple books about Donald Trump blocked from publication -- including suing over the book by niece Mary Trump and threatening a suit over Steve Bannon's book. He also threatened the New York Times over its big Harvey Weinstein expose.In fact, nearly every aspect of Harder's claim to fame is built around his ability to threaten or sue media organizations into silence.And the impact of his lawsuits has been very real. There have been stories about the Gawker Effect creating a real chill on investigative reporting, especially into malfeasance. And I've certainly spoken about the chilling effects of the lawsuit that was filed against me.Given all of that, it's incredibly rich for Harder to now publish an op-ed decrying "cancel culture." And, yet, that's exactly what he's done. In a piece that originally appeared on InsideSources and is now popping up in actual newspaper op-eds, like the Jacksoville Journal-Courier, Harder argues that we need to stop trying to cancel people for speech. The whole thing would make me laugh if it didn't make me actually feel ill.

Over the last decade Russia has accelerated the government's quest to censor the internet. That was most conspicuous with the passage of a 2016 surveillance bill that not only mandated encryption backdoors, but effectively banned VPN providers from operating in the country unless they were willing to spy and censor at Putin's behest. Many VPN providers weren't keen on that, so they simply stopped doing business in the country.More recently, Russia has been engaged in a bit of a hissy fit over Twitter's unwillingness to censor things the Russian government doesn't like. And while Twitter has been trying to filter more illegal behavior and pornography at the government's behest, the company hasn't been censoring broader content at the rate Putin and pals prefer. So as punishment, Russia has taken to throttling user access to Twitter to a rather 1997-esque 128 kbps, or about the speed of an old IDSN line. Granted the ham-fisted gamesmanship Russia has been engaged in has already resulted in some notable collateral damage:

It's no secret that TorrentFreak, a mainstay news site covering copyright and filesharing issues, gets more than its fair share of errant DMCA takedowns and other wayward scrutiny. This is almost certainly a function of the site's chosen name, though the sheer volume of mistaken targeting of the site also serves as a useful beacon for just how bad policing copyright has become. If you can't get past a news site having the word "torrent" in its name, then we should probably all admit we're operating at a very silly level of IP enforcement.And yet it keeps happening. Most recently, TorrentFreak reported on a request made to Google to delist a post the site did on how popular The Mandalorian was with pirates.

Summary: NASA's historic landing of a mobile rover on the surface of Mars created many newsworthy moments. Unfortunately, it also generated some embarrassing takedowns of NASA's own footage by YouTube's copyright flagging system, ContentID.NASA uploaded its own footage of the landing -- footage that was public domain given that it was a work created by the U.S. government. US copyright law says that any work created by the US government cannot be granted a copyright. It is, instead, in the public domain, and can be used by anyone without restriction. Unfortunately, the use of this public domain footage in news broadcasts created by Scripps (owner of multiple TV stations as well as a significant ABC stakeholder) put a chain of events in motion that ultimately saw NASA's footage taken down by YouTube.The problem was YouTube's ContentID. Once Scripps uploaded its footage, ContentID bots began crawling the site seeking matches. ContentID is structured in such a way that it believes that if content is uploaded by a private entity, that entity has a legitimate copyright over it -- even if the content is in the public domain, shareable freely by all. Shortly thereafter, NASA footage began disappearing while Scripps' broadcasts utilizing NASA footage stayed live.This unfortunate outcome is common enough NASA reps are used to having to contact YouTube to get their own public domain uploads restored.Decisions to be made by YouTube:

It doesn't happen often, but it's always good to see a federal court push back against claims of "training and expertise." This phrase is often used to excuse rights violations and horrendous judgment calls -- somehow asserting that the more cops know, the less they should be held directly responsible for their acts.The case being handled by the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court deals with some drug warriors and their willingness to work backward from their assumptions to something they sincerely wanted to believe was probable cause for a search. But the Appeals Court sees no "training and expertise" here. Instead they see officers motivated by hunches, which are not synonymous with probable cause, much less reasonable suspicion.Here's the court's ultimate conclusion [PDF], which is supported by the lack of support for the cops' arguments, which relied heavily on assertions of "training and expertise."

The future Digital Services Act (DSA), dealing with intermediary liability in the EU, is likely to be one of the region's most important new laws for the online world. At the moment, the DSA exists only as a proposal from the European Commission. In due course, the European Parliament and the EU's Member States will come up with their own texts, and the three versions will ultimately be reconciled to produce legislation that will apply across the whole of the EU. As Techdirt reported last month, the Commission's ideas are something of a mess, and the hope has to be that the text will improve as the various arms of the EU start to work on it over the coming months.The French government, however, is unwilling to wait before it can start imposing intermediary liability on the US Internet giants it seems to hate so much. It has decided to bring in key parts of the DSA immediately -- even though it doesn't formally exist -- using what it calls a "pretranscription" of the proposed EU law. Next Inpact has the details (original in French), but what matters most is the way the "pretranscription" of the DSA clashes with an important existing EU law, the e-Commerce Directive. The European Commission explains:

An impressive trove of public records obtained by BuzzFeed shows just how pervasive facial recognition tech is. Law enforcement agencies are embracing the tech, often with a minimum of accountability or oversight. That's how toxic tech purveyors like Clearview -- whose software relies on a multi-billion image database scraped from the web -- get their foot in the door to secure government contracts.Despite being used for years, facial recognition tech has yet to prove it's capable of recognizing the right faces more often than the wrong ones. The accuracy gets even worse when it's deployed to recognize faces of women and minorities -- and given law enforcement's history of disproportionate enforcement -- it will be minorities harmed by the inaccurate tech more often than not.What BuzzFeed has done with these Clearview records is compile a searchable database that allows readers to see if their local agencies have tried out the tech. Clearview's tech has yet to be subjected to outside review and its method of obtaining images -- scraping them from public posts on the web -- leaves a lot to be desired in terms of accuracy. (Unfortunately, as the EFF's Dave Maas points out, this doesn't mean BuzzFeed has made the dataset public -- only its interpretation of the data. But we'll take what we can get.)The upshot? Lots and lots of experimentation. The downside? Very little oversight or explicit permission. According to the information BuzzFeed obtained, more than 335 US law enforcement agencies have at least tried out Clearview's facial recognition AI, and many of those searches had nothing to do with investigations.Several of the responding agencies appear to be paying little attention to the actions of their employees:

The Introduction to UX/UI Design Bundle has 5 courses that cover all the basics of user experience and user interface design. You'll get an introduction to color theory, topography terms, composition principles, product functionality, and more. Courses also cover e-commerce, accessibility, and data collection. The bundle is 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.

What is it with state legislators not having anyone around them who can explain to them how Section 230 works, leading them to push incredibly stupid state bills? We've written about both Republicans and Democrats pushing bills to modify Section 230, ignoring how 230 likely pre-empts those attempts (if the 1st Amendment doesn't already).Many of these bills misunderstand Section 230, the 1st Amendment, or how content moderation works. Though, many of them misunderstand the law in fairly predictable ways. Last week three state Senators in North Carolina -- Senators Ted Alexander, Kevin Corbin, and Todd Johnson -- surprised me. Oh no, it's not that they were some state elected officials who actually bothered to understand Section 230, because trust me, they did not. But they surprised me in that they misread Section 230 in a novel and completely ridiculous way that I'd not seen before. It's so bad that it causes me to question the great state of North Carolina: how do you elect people this bad?The bill has all the trappings of many of the dumb Republican state 230 bills that think (incorrectly) that they can compel websites to host speech (something that is not allowed under the 1st Amendment). But this one takes it up a level. The bill is officially entitled: An Act to Enact the Stop Social Media Censorship Act to Prohibit Certain Social Media Websites from Censoring Certain Political or Religious Speech. That is already quite a mouthful. First it's act to enable another act, which says that it will stop to prohibit? I mean, c'mon guys.But here's where things get just... wrong. The authors of the bill claim (wildly incorrectly) that Section 230 has a "state law exemption" that allows them to "cure abuses of Section 230." Here's what the bill says:

Economists repeatedly warned that the biggest downside of the $26 billion Sprint T-Mobile merger was the fact that the deal would dramatically reduce overall competition in the U.S. wireless industry. Data from around the globe clearly shows that the elimination of one of just four major competitors sooner or later results in layoffs and higher prices due to less competition. It's not debatable. Given U.S. consumers already pay some of the highest prices for mobile data in the developed world, most objective experts recommended that the deal be blocked.It wasn't. Instead, the Trump FCC rubber stamped the deal before even seeing impact studies. And the Trump DOJ not only ignored the recommendations of its staff, but former Trump DOJ "antitrust" boss Makan Delrahim personally helped guide the deal's approval process via personal phone and email accounts. Both agencies, the vocal chorus of telecom-linked industry allies, and many media outlets all behaved as if all of this was perfectly legitimate and not grotesquely corrupt.At the heart of the DOJ's approval was a flimsy proposal that involved giving Dish Network some T-Mobile spectrum in the hopes that, over seven years, they'd be able to build out a replacement fourth carrier. As we noted at the time, there was very little chance this plan was ever going to work. In part because the remaining three wireless carriers (T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T) have every incentive to fight against a major fourth wireless competitor emerging from this mess. But also because Dish has a long history of spectrum hoarding and empty promises in wireless (just ask T-Mobile circa 2019 or so).And there have been several hints that we're already stumbling along this doomed trajectory. Including the 6,000 layoffs (so far) that the merging companies promised wouldn't happen if regulators approved the deal.Last week, for example, Dish Network complained to the FCC that T-Mobile wasn't being particularly cooperative on a number of fronts, including their supposed spectrum and network sharing arrangements. To help build this "new" fourth wireless network, T-Mobile gave prepaid mobile brand Boost Mobile to Dish. But Dish is annoyed that the Sprint CDMA network, which is currently in use by many of these customers, is being shut down prematurely, making it harder for Dish to get an operational foothold:

Back in February of 2020, we wrote about several odd attempts by Activision to use the DMCA takedown process to try to bury leaks of content in its Call of Duty game franchise. It all started with the company attempting to first take down Reddit posts that showed leaked cover art for Call of Duty: Warzone, before Activision then attempted to have Reddit unmask the poster of the image in an attempt to track down where the leak came from. While Activision certainly isn't the first company that has attempted to bury leaks using DMCA notices, it was a fairly high profile attempt, which, of course, just meant that the Streisand Effect took over and suddenly tons of people were seeing the image in media outlets reporting on the matter, such as at Techdirt.One would think the lesson learned from that episode would be that trying to unboil an egg like this through the DMCA process was futile. Instead, it seems that Activision thought the lesson was that it should go after media outlets. Recently, content for an upcoming map addition to Warzone leaked and VideoGamesChronicle (VGC) reported on it.

Larry Klayman is a famous lawyer. Perhaps more infamous than famous at this point, but he's a lawyer in every jurisdiction he hasn't been sanctioned in yet. But fear not! Klayman will get disciplined wherever possible, if only to own the libs.Own the libs, he may. But federal courts refused to be owned. And Klayman -- who I will freely admit was at least willing to mount a solid challenge to NSA surveillance -- will apparently have a bit more free time to tend to his herd of free-range libs (whom he apparently owns)… at least according to those willing to continue supporting his urge to blog post through it.The DC Circuit Court of Appeals, on the other hand, does not care how many libs Klayman has owned through stunt litigation. Instead, it has expressed its displeasure as courts often do by imposing limits on Klayman's litigational escapades.So, how owned are the libs? Let's ask the court [PDF]. (via Reason)

We've got another podcast cross-post for you this week! Mike recently joined the Cato Institute Daily Podcast to discuss the PACT Act — the more "serious" proposal for Section 230 reform that is still riddled with problems that will do damage to the entire internet. Listen to the full conversation with Mike and Cato's Will Duffield on this week's episode.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

What is it with the NY Times publishing incredibly ridiculously wrong and confused articles and op-eds about Section 230? It's gotten to the point that you have to think that they're doing it on purpose. I've covered the NY Times getting 230 wrong (often in totally embarrassing ways) over and over and over and over and over again. And those are just examples from the past two years.You'd think that maybe -- just maybe -- someone at the NY Times would now take the time to more carefully review any of their pieces on Section 230. But, apparently that's not in the cards for the NY Times. The latest entrant is Timothy Egan, a long term journalist and NY Times opinion writer, who doesn't seem to have any actual knowledge or experience regarding this topic. But apparently at the NY Times that makes you qualified to make grand pronouncements based on your feelings. The title of Egan's piece suggests that maybe it's going to present an interesting argument regarding free speech: I Used to Think the Remedy for Bad Speech Was More Speech. Not Anymore. I mostly disagree with this line, but there have been some interesting, and often thought-provoking arguments regarding this over the last few years.But Egan's is a weirdly facile argument that suggests he's never had a chance to explore any of the deeper issues here, nor engage with any of the widespread scholarship on the topic. It presents the argument in a jumbled confusing mess... and then blames Section 230. All of it is wrong. He tries to lump in gun violence into this argument in a way that... I don't understand at all:

I thought we had put this sort of idiocy behind us, but I see it's back again. In 2011, some German politicians suggested the country's youths be required to obtain some sort of internet driver's license following a party that got out of hand after a private Facebook invite was accidentally made public. Somehow, obtaining an ID to use social media services would prevent this from happening in the future, but officials were extremely light on details.Five years later, our own DHS came up with pretty much the same idea. The DHS's attaché to the European Union suggested the online presence of terrorists and child pornographers demanded an across-the-board reduction in privacy for everyone. The only difference here was the analogy: rather than a driver's license to use the internet, all internet "travelers" would have to display some form of internet "license plate," making them readily identifiable to the government.Two years later the idea resurfaced again, with the UK security minister pretty much repeating the DHS's suggestion from 2016: an internet driver's license that would allow law enforcement and other government agencies to readily identify anyone online, like predators grooming children in chat rooms or perpetrators of harassment.But that was the last decade. Surely, we've seen the folly of demanding ID to use the internet, what with the serious complications it can cause for plenty of people who aren't engaged in criminal activity. Anonymity protects more than just the worst internet denizens. If this idea has had a decade to stick and still hasn't, perhaps it's time to finally let it go… oh never mind. Just last month, Senator John Kennedy announced his plan to introduce a online anonymity ban. If you need a list of reasons why this is a bad idea, Mike Masnick helpfully included a very long one in this post.Less than two months later, the Australian government is pitching its own anonymity ban.

Bring amazing audio wherever you go with the Raycon E50 Earbuds. These Bluetooth headphones are designed to offer quality audio with a truly tangle-free experience that allows you to move freely while you work out, commute, and more. With a rechargeable case, these earphones can last the whole day with 25 hours of playtime. They also come with 6 different sized soft silicone tips. Designed to be secure, comfortable, and provide a perfect fit for everyone. Available in 6 different colors, they're on sale for $65.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.

Last week we noted that there was some fairly mixed up pressure mounting on UK politicians to block encryption from some confused charities which (falsely) thought that ending encryption would somehow protect children. We also noted that many of the politicians pushing to end encryption... were using encrypted messaging themselves in an effort to dodge public records requests.And now more news is coming that the UK government is getting serious about ending encryption. UK Home Secretary Priti Patel -- who has been pushing to end encryption for a while now -- seems to be using the misguided statement from the charity mentioned above, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), as an excuse to bring about the end of true end-to-end encryption in the UK:

For a long time now, we've explained how broadband usage caps are bullshit. They serve no technical purpose on the network, and aren't genuinely helpful in managing congestion. Their real role is several fold: one, they let ISPs charge US consumers (who already pay some of the highest prices in the developed world) even higher rates; two, they let ISPs falsely advertise a lower price than they actually charge; and three, they can be abused anticompetitively (exempting an ISP's own streaming content from caps while still penalizing a competitor like Netflix).Despite this, regulators historically haven't much cared, even during a pandemic showcasing how affordable broadband is essential for survival. And ISPs keep slowly expanding the adoption of such caps across the states in the hopes nobody will notice (think of the boiling frog metaphor with you as the frog).That includes Colorado-based Wide Open West (WOW), which recently announced it would be implementing new usage caps and overage fees for its subscribers starting June 1, 2021. Utterly tone deaf to the fact there's a pandemic and economic crisis going on, the ISP attempts to soften the blow by pretending that costly, confusing broadband caps and overage fees are akin to delicious pizza:

The DEA's love for taking cash from travelers has gotten it sued. Again. In August 2019, DEA agents -- working with TSA agents -- took more than $80,000 from Rebecca Brown, who was carrying her father's (Terry Rolin) savings through an airport on her way home to put it in a bank account he could use to pay for dental work and truck repairs.Working under the assumption that the mere existence of cash is illegal, the DEA and TSA lifted the cash from Rebecca Brown, claiming it was "suspicious." A lawsuit followed in January 2020. Shortly after the filing of the lawsuit, the DEA agreed to return the $82,000 it stole from the retiree and his daughter.The lawsuit, however, continues. The Institute for Justice is representing multiple plaintiffs who've had their cash taken by the TSA and DEA. This return of funds helps Rebecca and her father, but it doesn't stop the DEA and TSA from continuing to declare nearly any amount of cash "suspicious" before taking it from travelers.Earlier this year, the magistrate judge [PDF] taking the first crack at the case recommended the agencies not be allowed to exit the lawsuit. The government argued the plaintiffs had no standing because traveling with cash is a personal choice -- one that can be made at any time to give rise to claims of possible future injury. Yes, it's a stupid argument. And here it is:

If it seems like the topic of preserving antiquated video games as art keeps coming up, that's because it's very much starting to become a popular topic in the gaming industry and among the gaming public. The headwinds facing the proper preservation of this ever-growing subsect of culture are fairly clear. The very tools that have been used by fans to keep these older games alive and playable have too often been viewed as a threat to some gaming companies. As with all things in life, copyright is also getting in the way, as are some industry groups coming out against vile threats like museums and curation groups looking to keep old games alive for the public. Even preserving old game manuals is a prospect that only survives because of fair use.One recent suggestion we discussed was to make it part of the the game development culture to publish the source code for any PC game publicly. If this sounds like a bonkers idea that would risk a game developer all of its income, well, Doom did this, so no you're wrong. But, as we also discussed recently when Sony officially announced it was ceasing support of the PlayStation Store for PSP, Vita, and PS3 owners, this suggested cure does zero for console games.Well, I can't say for sure that whoever is crafting PR and messaging for Microsoft's Xbox is a Techdirt reader, but you sure might think so if you see how they're crafting the messaging around their big backwards-compatibility push.

A little over a year ago, a DC watchdog group had asked the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate Rep. Devin Nunes over his total failure to disclose who the hell is paying for all of his various frivolous SLAPP suits. As the group, Campaign Legal Center noted, Congress is forbidden from receiving free legal services unless they have set up a Legal Expense Fund -- and at least at the time of the investigation request, Nunes had not done so, despite having filed a bunch of lawsuits over the previous year.As far as I can tell, nothing ever happened regarding that, but the issue is again worth exploring. Devin Nunes has been losing his lawsuits (badly) but continuing to push on with them anyway. In the fall of 2019, Nunes sued Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson claiming racketeering (It's Not RICO, Dammit), because (he bizarrely claimed) they were harassing Nunes by filing a different ethics complaint against him. Nunes had some silly story about how Fusion GPS was trying to "interfere" with his "investigation." The "investigation" being Nunes' laughable attempt to argue that the Steele Dossier was illegal.Anyway, a year ago that case was easiliy dismissed with the court warning Nunes' lawyer Steven Biss that, while he could refile, if they didn't add more substance to the complaint, they may face Rule 11 sanctions. In a move that will surprise no one, Biss/Nunes still filed an amended complaint last April. Now the case has been dismissed again. For reasons that I'm not clear on, over the summer the case was reassigned to a different judge, and that's why the new dismissal is from Judge Rossie Alston, rather than Judge Liam O'Grady, who handled the first dismissal.The judge does the basic "It's Not RICO, Dammit" analysis to highlight that the Nunes/Biss claims of racketeering are ridiculous:

A little over a week ago, we wrote about how Senator Elizabeth Warren clearly went over the line in threatening to punish Amazon for its speech through the use of antitrust laws. As we noted (pretty clearly, though many ignored it) at the time, there may be plenty of other reasons to use antitrust laws against Amazon, but no government official should ever even jokingly suggest that he or she would use the power of the government (via antitrust) to punish an entity for speech.In response, many Warren supporters got incredibly mad at me, insisting that because (1) Amazon is big and (2) Warren has supported this position before, then it's perfectly fine for her to have said what she did. It was not.On Friday, we got to see the same thing from the other side of the aisle. After Major League Baseball announced that it would move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest of Georgia's new voting law, Rep. Jeff Duncan from South Carolina, stated out loud on Twitter that he intended to punish the company by drafting legislation to remove MLB's somewhat infamous antitrust exemption.As we said with Warren, there may be very good reasons to remove MLB's antitrust exemption. In fact, I'd argue there are compelling reasons to do so. But, announcing plans to do so as punishment for MLB's clear protest over Georgia's voting law is pretty clearly an affront to the 1st Amendment. Rep. Duncan is stating directly that he wants to punish a company for protesting a law that he agrees with. This creates a real chilling effect. It may not chill MLB directly, but it likely would chill many other companies from speaking out for fear of retaliation from Duncan and his colleagues in Congress.It was wrong when Senator Warren did it, and it's just as wrong with Rep. Duncan does it. It's also wrong for Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee to do it, jumping on Duncan's new bandwagon.Punishing companies using antitrust laws (even if there are good underlying reasons to explore those antitrust issues) for their expression should never be supported, cheered on, or allowed. Just as we called on Warren to take back what she said, we now are saying Duncan, too, should take back his direct threat of punishment for speech. Unfortunately, since everything in politics these days seems to be it's okay to punish "enemies" and to support "friends" this will never happen. But it sure would be nice if we had politicians with principles who knew that it's wrong to punish anyone for speech, even if you disagree with their speech (and agree that the "punishment" is warranted for other reasons).

"Training and expertise." Let's talk about it.This boilerplate phrase shows up in search warrants and other law enforcement paperwork -- something used a preemptive defense for whatever rights violations might occur subsequent to these sworn statements. Using "training and expertise" as the foundation for a defense against lawsuits and accusations of bias is handy: it shows the officer was being "reasonable" and only engaged in a roadside fishing expedition or hurled a flashbang grenade into a toddler's crib because all of this "training" led officers to believe criminals often engage in [Action X], thus justifying law enforcement [Action Y].But this blanket assertion is as useless and full of shit as this Tenth Circuit Appeals Court decision granting qualified immunity to officers who detained someone for recording them while they assaulted an arrestee. (h/t Brad Heath)Remember, the "training" is important. When raising a qualified immunity defense, it's always helpful to point out you couldn't possibly have known better because you were "trained" to react to certain stimuli with certain actions. The "training" (along with the years of "expertise") sets the stage. A cop is only as good as their training. And if the training left something crucial out, how is a cop to know the rights violations they engaged in were rights violations? It's not like we expect cops to be legal experts, despite the fact their job is literally enforcing the law.So, let's get to the legal contortions [PDF] the Tenth Circuit deploys to excuse cops who should not have been allowed to claim they didn't know better when they infringed on a citizen's First Amendment rights.Here's how it starts:

Today was a weird one for Justice Thomas. Along with his bizarre and confusing dissent in the Oracle/Google case, he has done another one of his random walks down conspiracy theory nonsense lane on an unbriefed issue in which he gets to, once again, attack the 1st Amendment. He's done this a few times now. Two years ago he did this in writing an unprovoked attack on the 1st Amendment regarding NY Times v. Sullivan. Last year, he did it with an unprovoked and bizarre attack on Section 230. And now he's done it again.Today, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal on the Knight 1st Amendment Center case, in which both the District Court and the Appeals Court made it clear that when a government official, using social media in an official capacity, allows replies on a posting (such as a tweet), they are creating a public forum in that space, and therefore cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination -- including blocking individuals for speech they disagree with.A bunch of very confused and clueless people have (incorrectly) taken to arguing that this somehow means that Twitter itself is a "public forum" and cannot moderate content. That has always been very, very wrong. The courts were clear that they were only talking about the space beneath a public official's statements. The simplest way to think of it is this: If the government rents out an event hall to let the President give a speech, it cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination in blocking people from coming into the hall to hear the speech. That does not mean the event hall itself is now permanently a public forum, or that the event hall owners cannot block people they have banned from their property from attending the speech, or any other events.And, basically, the argument has stayed with very confused and clueless people... until today, when Justice Thomas decided to put it front and center. It's hard to state how ridiculous this is. Not for the first time, Justice Thomas seems to have become the old cranky uncle who believes in conspiracy theory nonsense. Everything about what he writes here would fit more neatly into a Breitbart comment section or an OANN rant. That it's coming from a Supreme Court Justice is just crazy. Let's break this down bit by bit.

The 2021 Complete Learn to Code by Making Games in Unity Bundle has 8 courses to help you learn how to build your own games. You'll learn how to build games with Unity, Blender, Construct 3, MagicaVoxel, and more. You'll learn how to build different types of games from battle royales to shooters and others. 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.

It's taken over a decade, but the Supreme Court has finally said that Google's copying of the Sun Java API for Android was clearly fair use in a 6-2 ruling (Barrett did not take part since she was not on the Court when the case was heard). The background of this case is actually kind of important to understanding what just happened, so here's a quick(ish) recap.As you'll probably know, this case began in 2010 when Oracle, which had just taken over Sun, sued Google for patent infringement. The patent parts were quickly tossed out and what remained was what referred to as a "sideshow" to the main event: a question about whether APIs could be covered by copyright. Pretty much all historical evidence, including an important Supreme Court ruling from the 1990s, said no, interfaces are not covered by copyright.Oracle and friends then spent the next decade deliberately gaslighting basically everyone who doesn't understand what an API is, and insisting that it's the same as executable code. The district court, under Judge William Alsup, who somewhat famously taught himself Java to better understand the issues in the case (he already knew how to code and was a hobbyist programmer), correctly found that APIs are not subject to copyright as they represent a "system or method of operation" which is explicitly not covered by copyright, as per Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act.Rather than go to the 9th Circuit (as it should have) the case went to the Federal Circuit, which hears all patent appeals. That was because the case began as a patent case, even though it no longer was. CAFC judges are somewhat infamous for never finding a patent issue they couldn't screw up, and decided to extend that to copyright. In the ruling overturning the lower court, they made it clear that because they were code illiterate they could not understand the difference between executing code and an API, even though it's like the difference between a novel and a dictionary.The case went back to the district court, where the jury this time sided with Google, this time saying that the use of the code was covered under fair use. That whole trial was a little weird, because reading between the lines, you could see that nearly all the arguments for why copying an API was fair use were really about why an API shouldn't be covered by copyright at all (as per Alsup's original ruling) and then squeezing that square peg into the round hole of fair use to make it work. Once again, however, CAFC got flummoxed by an API looking like code and overturned -- which is quite crazy because CAFC had, in its first ruling, insisted that the jury should decide this issue (as a matter of fact) and then when the jury said "fair use" CAFC suddenly decided that it was a matter of law that it could overrule.Finally, we get to the Supreme Court. From oral arguments, it wasn't clear where the court was leaning -- with some good questions and some crazy questions. But with today's ruling, it's clear that the smarter questioners won out. The majority opinion was written by Justice Breyer, who has always been the best Justice on copyright issues, and had the support of Justices Roberts, Kagan, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Sotomayor.Breyer starts out by noting (thankfully, unlike the CAFC judges) that it's important to understand just what an API actually is.

So if you've read Techdirt for any amount of time, you should be pretty well clued in to the fact that US telecom is a heavily monopolized, feebly regulated mess. Regional cable giants like Comcast and Charter absolutely dominate the market, resulting in 83 million Americans being stuck under a monopoly (see this ILSR report). The result of regional monopolization and captured, feckless regulators is obvious and has been for a good thirty years: high prices, comically bad customer service, spotty coverage, and slow speeds. It's not really a debate, though some telecom-allied policy folks like to pretend otherwise.Yet every time broadband and the digital divide is trending in headlines, the cause of US broadband dysfunction simply isn't mentioned. For example, as the Biden administration released its new broadband plan this week, numerous news outlets once again dipped their toe into trying to cover the digital divide. And time after time after time, news outlets explain that the digital divide exists, but they somehow never inform readers why. When the subject is covered it's just some thing that appeared one day, like Godzilla out of the ocean.Over at USA Today, for example, the problem was framed like this:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with a response to Georgia's attempts to punish Delta for the CEO's statement about voting laws:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, while forensic experts were exploring the DOJ's recently announced ability to get into Sayed Farook's iPhone, the DOJ was saying that it only applies to that specific model and sticking by its request for Apple to help it with other devices — all while refusing to tell Apple how it did it. Meanwhile, the Copyright Office was seeking comments on the DMCA notice and takedown provisions, and given the huge problems and spate of automated takedowns, we obviously had some thoughts to submit.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, we were debunking the claim that bad things happen when works fall into the public domain, writing about how greater IP enforcement doesn't work, and pointing out how sometimes it's best to just let people copy. Another judge rejected the idea that the DMCA requires a proactive approach from service providers, while it turned out that a judge who gave approval to the lumping together of multiple unrelated copyright claims was a former RIAA lobbyist. This was also the week that we saw a very worrying ruling on fair use (which would later be overturned in an important appeals court decision that has recently become very relevant again) when a judge said Richard Prince's appropriation art is infringing.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, a new German law was set to give casual file sharers significant jailtime, while TorrentSpy was fighting the MPAA's attempts to reinterpret the Supreme Court's opinions on file sharing. The DRM makers were getting ever more elaborate even as more and more people were pointing out that copy protection doesn't work. YouTube was seeking to shake its reputation as a piracy haven with legit partnerships, and a ten-minute video limit that is hard to imagine today. This was also the week that Apple's lawyers, in their trademark fight with the record company of the same name, brought out the now-famous "moron in a hurry" test.

A few days ago, we discussed the problem of video game preservation as a matter of art when developers, publishers, or platforms shut down certain services. The point of the post was fairly wide-reaching, with the focus being on the idea that game developers in the PC space should embrace the habit of releasing their source codes for games and let the gamer ecosystem take over. While that's an idea I find extremely interesting, it doesn't really apply to the console gaming space. And it was rumors of the shutdown of certain Sony PlayStation stores that kickstarted the whole conversation.Well, that rumored shutdown is now reality. And it's roughly half as bad for the purposes of game preservation as was expected.

Summary: Twitter allows parody accounts to remain live (often over the protests of those parodied), provided they follow a narrow set of rules -- rules apparently intended to make sure everyone's in on the joke.Here's everything Twitter users agree to do when creating a parody account:

Punishing people or companies for their speech is never something any politician should ever be engaged in. It's why we called out Elizabeth Warren recently. And now we'll call out Republican legislators in Georgia, who tried (but failed) to punish Delta in direct response to its CEO's comments. The details honestly don't matter here, because all that matters is "politicians looking to punish speech" but we'll give the basic background.As you may have heard in the news, a week ago, Georgia passed a big new voting bill that has been quite controversial. In short, like many recent bills, in the name of "election integrity" the law is likely to make it more difficult for some people to vote. Once again, there remains vanishingly little evidence of voter fraud in elections, and bills like this one generally appear to be a fig leaf for trying to disenfranchise voters who are more likely to vote for Democrats.Initially Delta put out a statement that applauded some of the provisions in the bill (the parts that did expand some early and absentee voting). But praising those aspects of the bill was seen as approving the entire bill, which angered lots of people -- leading to calls to boycott Delta. It didn't then take long for Delta's CEO to come out with a surprisingly harsh condemnation of the law, which seemed like a pretty sharp turnaround from the original statement praising pieces of the law.In response to that, Republican lawmakers in Georgia set out to take away certain tax breaks for Delta. Now, there may be perfectly good reasons to remove such tax breaks, but doing so directly in response to the CEO's statement, is not how any of this is supposed to work. But, the legislators in question seemed so sure that this was the right culture warrior stance to take that they didn't even try to hide the reasoning behind some made up argument. They just out and out admitted that this was punishment over speech:

Last month, the DOJ announced it had secured indictments against an encrypted device maker, claiming the company had violated all sorts of laws by selling these to criminals. This closely mirrored the DOJ's earlier prosecution of Phantom Secure, another encrypted device maker it accused of aiding and abetting criminal enterprises.Sky Global was the most recent target. Both prosecutions seem a bit performative though. The FBI -- which participated in both investigations -- has been making the case for years that encryption benefits criminals far more than it benefits non-criminals. The FBI isn't much for subtlety. It doesn't hint that it believes secure communications are something only criminals need. It comes right out and says that in Congressional testimony and any place that allows its directors to speak.But devices with more secure options aren't just the playthings of criminals. The desire for more secure communications dates back to the days of burner phones. Sure, criminals loved burners. But so did journalists and their sources, as well as dissidents, government critics, and anyone who desired to keep their communications free of malicious interference and interception.Encryption is the target. The FBI has made this clear. Anyone paying attention can see this. The ongoing prosecution of Sky Global -- a company offering encrypted devices and an encrypted messaging service it rolled itself -- has inadvertently exposed how little encryption actually matters when it comes to criminal investigations.Sky Global's takedown involved a phishing attack that resulted in compromised devices and exposed communications. The takedown of EncroChat -- another network/service provider accused of hooking up criminals with encrypted devices/communications -- made encryption seem like no big deal.The investigation -- which spanned several countries -- culminated in more than 1,000 arrests. The communications platform utilized the Signal protocol, which is freely available to be utilized by anyone with a desire for more secure communications. At the time the arrests took place, officials made it clear Signal's protocol had not been compromised. From Joseph Cox's report on EncroChat's takedown:

Lawyer Steven Biss has built up quite a reputation for himself over the past few years, especially in filing highly questionable, obviously bogus SLAPP suits on behalf of Rep. Devin Nunes and a rotating cast of characters in and around Trumpist orbits. For example, he just recently was the lawyer for Jack Flynn, the brother of disgraced (briefly) former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, in suing CNN for pointing out that the Flynns had repeated some standard QAnon conspiracy nonsense in a video recorded at a family barbecue, and posted online with some QAnon hashtags. Jack was in the video which was then featured in a CNN story about QAnon. The crux of the defamation claim is this:

The2021 Complete Resume Builder Bundle can help you land your dream job with AI-powered resume software, 100 matching templates for cover letters and resumes, and tips for job hunters. Rezi is a best-selling, AI-powered resume builder that lets you quickly create optimized, ATS-friendly resumes and cover letters tailored to specific job descriptions. Resume Inventor has designed a resume bundle with the best and well-decorated resume templates for professionals. You'll learn how to create a great resume and LinkedIn profile to help you get noticed. You'll also learn interviewing tips and tricks. The bundle is 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.

Sure, we all love secure communications. And government officials shouldn't be afraid of using encrypted communication options. But they need to remember their obligations to the public. Security can often be converted to obscurity. And yet, government officials migrate towards encrypted messaging options, but not for security reasons. Instead, they choose the same options they decry in public. Encryption is for criminals they claim, even as they avail themselves of the "criminal" option to "protect" themselves from the public they serve.Lawmakers continue to demand "lawful access" to encrypted/fleeting communications. And they do this while utilizing the same services. Whatever it takes to keep the general public from viewing the sausage-making process. It's not just a US thing. Our counterparts in the UK are just as hypocritical, as the BBC reports.