Techdirt

Earlier this month, we noted that Charter (Spectrum) had been lobbying the FCC to eliminate conditions affixed to its 2015 merger with Time Warner Cable. As part of those conditions Charter had to not only adhere to basic net neutrality (regardless of the fact that lobbyists had already killed FCC net neutrality rules), but it was also prohibited from imposing arbitrary, bullshit usage caps and overage fees, or engaging in the kind of "interconnection" shenanigans that caused Netflix streams to slow for Verizon customers earlier this decade. It also had to expand broadband coverage, which it failed utterly at.Most of the conditions are fairly minor, expire in another few years anyway, and by and large protect consumers from the kind of behaviors cable and broadband monopolies are known for. As Charter lobbies the government, it's employing some... strange bedfellows in its quest to kill the conditions. In New York that apparently includes the Niagara Falls Boys and Girls Club, which wrote a letter to the FCC urging the regulator to prematurely axe the conditions:

A couple of years ago, investigators in California used a DNA matching service to track down the so-called "Golden State Killer." Uploading a sample of the suspected serial murder's DNA, they were able to identify distant relatives of the suspect. Using these sentient clues, investigators eventually worked their way back to the suspected killer, who had eluded authorities for years.Shortly after this made news, GEDmatch informed users that law enforcement had never approached the company directly to acquire this information. Instead, investigators created an account and uploaded samples, bypassing anything GEDmatch might have had in place to limit use by government agencies. GEDmatch said the only way customers could ensure their DNA info wouldn't be obtained by law enforcement was to not use the service at all.A month later, it went a step further. It opted all users out of allowing law enforcement to access their DNA data. Users were allowed to opt in if they were comfortable with the government digging through their information. This somewhat solved the problem. But law enforcement has been known to create faux profiles to search DNA data, so opting out isn't guaranteed to stop cops from accessing this info.Unfortunately, something recently went very wrong with GEDmatch's database.

In the past few years, as the craft brewing industry exploded, it became something of a regular thing for us to write about one craft beer trademark dispute or another. The idea is that as the industry has grown, it's become corporatized. The once congenial atmosphere of the industry, one which saw breweries heavily borrow from one another, or skirt the line of potential confusion, devolved into suited lawyers arguing about beer brands. And if that doesn't make you sad, you simply have no soul.Stone Brewing was once one of the smaller craft breweries out there and built a reputation for itself for taking on "big beer." That stance morphed in 2018 into a lawsuit against MillerCoors over the latter's rebranding of Keystone beer into "Stone" on its can labels.

Summary: Wikipedia was founded in 2001 and the open encyclopedia that anyone could edit grew much faster than most people (including its founders) expected. In 2005, one of the first big controversies concerning disinformation on Wikipedia arose, when journalist and political figure John Seigenthaler wrote an article in USA Today calling out claims on Wikipedia that, among other things, he was involved in the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy (for whom he worked for a time).The entry in question read:

We're not partisan here at Techdirt. We have our personal preferences, certainly, but technology policy tends to transcend normal political divisions. We have been just as likely to see good policy proposals from Democrats as Republicans, and bad ones just the same. What we care about here is ensuring that the founding principles of liberty articulated by the Constitution can be meaningfully applied in a modern, technology driven world. That value is not a partisan one. We don't care who is the hero who makes sure we do not spiral into dystopia; we just want to make sure we don't. And our job is to point out how we may already be.For the first years of the Trump Administration I took to writing annual summaries of how things might shake out on the tech policy front given the current make-up of government. And then I stopped. By then we had children in cages, and suddenly trying to read the political tea leaves seemed like a remarkably pointless exercise. Also unhelpful, glib, and potentially even harmful. There is no point in acting as though everything is politics as usual when the situation has become anything but. A horrific line had been crossed, and it wasn't even the first. But unless everyone recognized how dangerously abnormal politics had become, it would certainly not be the last.And yet it sadly appears that politics has chugged on as usual. And as a result more uncrossable lines have, indeed, been crossed. As was inevitable, yesterday's rounding up of immigrants became today's rounding up of American citizens.So if we're going to talk about tech policy in the time of Trump, we need to be worried about what will happen tomorrow. Our paramount concern therefore needs to be ensuring that tech policy enables us to check further misuse of power. It certainly must not help further entrench it.So let's dig in and see where we are. In my original posts I distilled my comments into four general policy areas that now seem trivially pedestrian. The breakdown implies that we can simply focus on a particular area and its localized political skirmishes and leave the others for another day. Which is silly; when the whole house is on fire focusing on how an individual room may be decorated is not going to be an effective way of addressing the actual crisis at hand. But for the sake of uniformity, I might as well continue with the same organization.Free speech/copyright. President Trump is infamous for lying. But there's one thing he said that has been true: that he was going to "open up" our libel laws to make it even easier to sue someone for their expression. In fact he's gone even further than that, undermining every expressive right the First Amendment guarantees, including the right to protest, which he has now co-opted federal forces to physically attack.But as for making it easier to sue people for their speech, he has done that by example, as he and his confederates have launched specious lawsuit after specious lawsuit against speakers, platforms, and traditional press and publishers to challenge their critical (and generally completely lawful) contributions to needed public discourse. On more than one occasion he didn't even wait for them to make the speech before suing to shut them down. It turns out he didn't need to change a single law to effectively obviate the right to free speech; he just had to drown out the voices speaking against him with a flood of litigation in order to silence them.The running theme throughout this commentary is that lawmakers should not waste time with the traditional horse-trading that fills the corridors of our capitols as policy normally gets set. We do not have the luxury, here in 2020, of developing policy that would optimize life in America; at the moment our only task is to save it. And that requires recognizing the urgency of the moment, because if you don't vote against totalitarianism when you have the chance, you may never have the chance again. So while there are plenty of areas where ordinarily lawmakers should act to articulate good policy in law, including on the tech policy front, right now there is no policy value more important for lawmakers to express in law than preserving the right to expression.In particular, they should waste no time getting effective anti-SLAPP laws on the books. Every state needs one (looking at you, Virginia…). As does the entire federal legal system, so that we can ensure that federal courts can no longer be the refuge of the censor eager to chill the speech of their critics. Do not pass go; drop almost everything else to get this done. Because if we cannot ensure the public's right to speak out against oppression, then we all but guarantee that oppression to prevail.Which brings us to copyright, the deck chairs on this sinking Titanic. Could copyright policy be better attuned to the economics of producing and consuming expression in the 21st century? Perhaps. But at the moment that policy challenge is largely irrelevant. The very ability to create and consume expression is itself under fire, and our sole goal needs to be to preserve it. Copyright law inherently is about controlling expression, and that's the last thing we need to be empowering anyone to do.Mass surveillance/encryption. We have been warning for years against giving the police the unchecked power to invade people's privacy. The ability people need to have to keep their personal affairs free from the prying eyes of the government is no less essential to preserve now, in the 21st Century, than it ever was in the 18th. If anything it is even more important to hold fast to the constitutional barriers that prevent the government from readily invading our private lives now that so much of those lives – personal choices, associations, ideas, etc. – are so casually captured in digital records so easy for the government to track.We also challenged the excuses law enforcement gave for why they needed this exceptional ability to bypass the basic constitutional tenets normally prohibiting them from helping themselves to this data. They were nearly all predicated on the assumption that the state authority was the good guy and that it needed to save the public from the bad guys hiding among us. We challenged these arguments because these assumptions were inherently unsound – as the news lately has been daily proving.It is proving us right on a local level – see all the examples of violent police behavior that have inspired weeks and weeks of protest – and increasingly on the federal level, as President Trump unleashes federal forces against those who speak against him. These are not the acts of benevolent protectors we can safely entrust with the awesome power of the state, unchecked. These are the acts of the sorts of bad actors that our civil liberties were designed to protect us from. But when we bless digital surveillance programs that ignore our constitutional protections, and undermine the encryption technology that allows us to make the protections meaningful on a practical level, we make ourselves vulnerable to abuses of power by eliminating our defenses against them. No policymaker committed to the enduring idea of American democracy can possibly advocate in good faith or with intellectual coherence for any policy agenda that continues down such a destructive path. When a powerful state actor has already abused his power against the public, it makes no sense to give him more power to continue that abuse, and it is beyond naïve to believe it wouldn't be so abused. Not when we can already see in painful clarity how much it already has.Net neutrality/intermediary liability. The political corruption of antitrust enforcement has poisoned this entire policy area. Net neutrality stands for the principle of non-discrimination on the part of service providers enabling the public's online expression. For Internet services where there is no meaningful competition, regulation committed to maintaining that principle is important. It is not, however, useful to enforce that principle in areas where there is competition. In fact, it presents its own harm to expressive liberty when these service providers are denied the freedom to discriminate. Having some sort of principled, meaningful, and consistent way of identifying which service providers are which is therefore crucial. Yet that is not what we've got. Instead we have angry, reactionary, inconsistent, unrealistic, unwise, and often unconstitutional policy demands from both sides of the aisle.The upshot is that people's ability to speak freely online is at risk. The only way we can protect that ability is by protecting and promoting the existence of the service providers that enable it. Which means not only encouraging the competitive market needed to ensure there are enough avenues for basic Internet access, but also ensuring that there are no barriers limiting our supply of other platforms. Unfortunately, we are currently doing the complete opposite on both fronts, and in the process directly preventing needed lawful discourse.In some cases it's because people can't get online at all. Either they don't have any service due to a failure of broadband competition policy, or, worse, because we have forced service providers to deny their expression. In those cases sometimes we've used copyright as the rationale to bludgeon service providers into removing speech or even kick off users from their services entirely (and regardless of whether they had actually violated any law). But it's also not the only way we have scared providers into pre-emptively kicking off users or their expression with the plausible fear of being held liable for that expression. The inscrutable FOSTA has already directly chilled platforms and the lawful expression they facilitate, and now lawmakers are threatening even more cumbersome regulation to do even more to terrify platforms into removing user expression, if not cease to exist entirely.When the United States of America is teetering towards autocracy, it is not the time to impose any policy that would inhibit the public's ability to use the Internet to speak out against it. But that's what most of the proposals being put forth that target service providers threaten to do, from undermining their Section 230 immunity, to further conditioning their DMCA safe harbor, to even encumbering them excessively with ill-tailored regulations on the privacy and security front. Any policy that will have the effect of reducing the supply of online outlets or constraining their ability to enable protected speech – as all these policy proposals do – will only invite disaster when it erodes our ability to use the Internet to speak out against abuses of power, including state power. They all are a mistake.Internet governance. In his tenure President Trump has accomplished two things: (1) eroding international cooperation and the US's commitment to the public international law that supports it, and (2) empowering autocrats. In the previous posts I lamented how Trump has also undermined the organs enabling international cooperation, but maybe it's just as well. Internationalism inherently wrangles input from around the globe, and that input increasingly includes hostility to freedom. The United States should be standing against this trend. Our tradition of liberty should be our chief export. But so long as all we are busy modeling is our indifference to freedom, if not also our abject surrender of it, then there may be no point in engaging with other national governments who would hasten its demise for everyone by giving them the institutional foothold from which to do it.

Last month we wrote about the ultimate benchslap against noted copyright troll Richard Liebowitz. Judge Jesse Furman in the Southern District of NY published a 61 page opinion that goes into massive detail on Liebowitz's longstanding pattern and practice of lying to courts over and over and over again. Beyond going into the cringe-worthy details of many lies told in this specific case -- Arthur Usherson v. Bandshell Artist Management -- it includes an appendix with 40 examples of Liebowitz lying, misrepresenting, and/or being sanctioned in other cases. It's pretty stunning. The order dumped over $100k in sanctions on Liebowitz, but much more damning, it referred Liebowitz to the Court's Grievance Committee, required Liebowitz to give a copy of the order to all of his clients, and said that it needed to be filed along with any new lawsuits he filed -- which is notable, since Liebowitz seems to file new lawsuits every other day or so.After that ruling, though, Liebowitz's breakneck pace of filing dried up. And so of course he's fighting back. He's hired some real lawyers to represent himself, and is appealing the ruling. He's also asking the court to get rid of all of those non-monetary sanctions regarding informing his clients and other courts. The filing explaining why the court should remove those sanctions is quite a read, and despite being filed by lawyers that Liebowitz has hired, I'd argue they're not particularly flattering to Liebowitz. First, he complains that these sanctions "will cause severe economic and reputational damage to Mr. Liebowitz," and, yeah, duh. Except it's not the sanctions that are the cause of that: it's Liebowitz's own behavior.

The DHS doesn't mind engaging in domestic surveillance. After all, it's the Department of Homeland Security, so its purview is the homeland and everyone in it. The problem is the American public has rights and that is always something to consider, however briefly, when doing things like flying drones over American cities or, more questionably, placing people engaged in First Amendment expression under surveillance.The DHS is now directly engaged in policing free speech. Demonstrations triggered by a Minnesota police officer's killing of an unarmed Black man are occurring on a daily basis. In some cities, the protests have never stopped. Federal agents -- including (inexplicably) a task force from the DEA -- have stepped in to investigate suspected federal crimes. However noble and correct the goal, the physical manifestation of this effort has been unidentified federal officers -- clad head-to-toe in war gear -- dragging people off the street and into unmarked vehicles.Those who've experienced this say they were questioned aggressively by officers who refused to identify themselves and released with zero paperwork documenting their seemingly unconstitutional detainment or what criminal acts they were suspected of committing.The DHS is prepared to take its Gestapo act nationwide with the blessing of the president. Any city with a crime problem, or a protest problem… or a "liberal" mayor can expect a swarm of DHS components to step in and start intimidating the protesting populace.As is the case with any mission involving surveillance, you need to be prepared for the creep. No, this creep belongs to the mission supported by your average DHS foot soldier -- one dressed like he's in Fallujah and believes he has seen the enemy. And it is you. (By "you," I mean your average American standing within rental-car-driving distance of any federal property.)The DHS is expanding its mission. This fortuitous move accompanies the extension of its leash by President Trump, who seems to feel people expressing their displeasure with law enforcement violence and racism should be intimidated into silence. Lawfare -- generally known as the home of pro-surveillance commentators -- has obtained a document showing the DHS is expanding its enforcement and surveillance efforts to cover other federal property: namely, the statues and monuments protesters have been vandalizing or destroying.

ChronoWatch has all the features you need. It has 16 main functions including activity tracking, sleep monitor, message and call notification, alarm, and more. It's waterproof so you can go all out with your workout routines. It comes with a 1.4" colorful display and full capacitive touch supporting taps and swipes. Simply download the Da Fit app on your phone and pair it via Bluetooth. With 3 hours of charge, this watch lasts up to 7 days of use. It's on sale for $37.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 few months we've seen President Trump and his supporters repeatedly attack social media in general -- and Twitter specifically -- for apparently "arbitrary" moderation decisions. Yet, as we've pointed out repeatedly, it seems that the only times that Twitter has actually taken down content from Trump's Twitter account, it's been because they were effectively required to in response to DMCA takedown requests. It happened in early June, and then it happened to a Trump supporter, and last week it once again happened to Trump himself, when the band Linkin Park issued a takedown after Trump used their song in a video he posted to Twitter:

Given the seemingly endless privacy scandals that now engulf the tech and telecom sectors on a near-daily basis, many consumers have flocked to virtual private networks (VPN) to protect and encrypt their data. One study found that VPN use quadrupled between 2016 and 2018 as consumers rushed to protect data in the wake of scandals, breaches, and hacks.Usually, consumers are flocking to VPNs under the mistaken impression that such tools are a near-mystical panacea, acting as a sort of bullet-proof shield that protects them from any potential privacy violations on the internet. Not only is that not true (ISPs, for example, have a universe of ways to track you anyway), many VPN providers are even less ethical than privacy-scandal-plagued companies or ISPs.The latest case in point: a number of VPN providers who claim to offer "zero logging" protection were found to have not only been tracking a laundry list of user behaviors online, but doing a piss poor job securing said data. Kicking it off, Comparitech's Bob Diachenko recently discovered 894 GB worth of of user data in an unsecured Elasticsearch cluster belonging to UFO VPN, a provider whose privacy policy informs users that they aren't tracked as they travel around the internet. That wound up being, you know, not even remotely true:

The tactics seen recently in Portland, Oregon -- unidentified federal officers grabbing demonstrators off the street and hauling them away in unmarked vans -- are apparently going to be deployed in other cities. The federal government's response to ongoing demonstrations provoked by a Minnesota police officer's killing of an unarmed Black man has been escalating in recent days. In cities like Portland -- where protests have been a continuous fixture since early May -- a blend of CBP, ICE, US Marshals Service, and Bureau of Prisons personnel have been brought in to, supposedly, protect federal property and investigate federal crimes.But the tactics are disturbing. Dragging people off the street into unmarked cars and taking them to unknown destinations for questioning isn't how America is supposed to work. There doesn't appear to be much probable cause involved (simply being near federal property while protesting isn't indicative of any criminal act) and the lack of identifying info on fatigue-clad officers just makes it that much easier for them to get away with rights violations. Detainees are being released without any paperwork, suggesting a lot of this federal intervention is off-the-books: undocumented and unsupervised.The DHS likes its new Gestapo-esque tactics so much it's taking them to other cities.

As we continue navigating this new world full of COVID-19, mostly alone due to the laughably inept response from our national leadership, there's a certain humor to the ongoing push for a "return to normalcy." What makes it so funny is how completely clear it is that "normalcy" is going to be anything but normal. Go back to work, but wear a mask and stay the fuck away from your coworkers. Get your kids back to school, but maybe not, also masks, and remote learning, and they have to eat their lunch in their classrooms. Restaurants are open, but only outside, with less people, and there will be temperature checks.And then there are the sports. Collegiate sports are shutting down with the quickness, but the professional sports leagues are opening. The NBA is back, but only in Orlando, which is basically coronavirus ground zero. The NHL is coming back, except a ton of players are testing positive.And then there's baseball. Yes, Major League Baseball is back, but masks make an appearance and, most importantly, there are no crowds. If you aren't a baseball fan, I'll forgive you for not understanding this, but crowds are a huge deal for baseball. Part of the ambiance of the game, be it in person or on television, is that low level din of crowd noise, vendors yelling out, and the like. Not to mention the roar or boos of crowds during peak excitement. With no crowds, the soundtrack of the summer is just the lead singer with no instruments backing him or her up.MLB's solution to this was to pipe in crowd music. With audio files at least in part from Sony's MLB The Show video game series, teams were encouraged to add their own flavors to the audio files and then pipe them into stadiums. This helped, of course, but how was the crowd noise supposed to artificially change based on what occurs on the field?Turns out that MLB actually has a solution for that. And it's awesome.

We've covered incidents involving Ripoff Report for several years here at Techdirt. In most of the cases that we've covered, Ripoff Report has been the target of bogus DMCA takedowns and libel lawsuits from entities who would do pretty much anything to see negative reviews disappear.Ripoff Report has plenty of critics. The company refuses to take any review down, even if the reviewer is the one asking for it to be removed. People have accused Ripoff Report of engaging in extortionate behavior by encouraging third parties to flood complaining companies (and individuals) with negative reviews. And the site's hardline stance of review removal (it simply never happens) hasn't earned it much sympathy in other countries where Section 230 immunity and other free speech-friendly laws aren't in effect.But the latest news involving Ripoff Report is some of the weirdest. And it comes from an unusual source: the Department of Justice. A Cyprus national with links to a California reputation management company has been extradited to the US to face criminal charges related to the malicious hacking of Ripoff Report.

So, this is interesting. Last month we wrote about how Trump had appointed Michael Pack (a protege of Steve Bannon) to head up the US Agency for Global Media, which controls the various independent US overseas broadcasting operations: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting. USAGM also oversees the Open Technology Fund, which is basically a government agency funding a ton of really important open source tools for getting around internet censorship and surveillance. OTF may sound like a misfit compared to the broadcasting operations, but it was spun out of Radio Free Asia, so its connection to USAGM is sort of a legacy one.The story making the rounds was that Pack wished to turn all of the broadcasting operations into a sort of state-sponsored Breitbart, basically destroying their reputations. His first order of business was to essentially fire the heads of all of those organizations. Meanwhile, the backstory on the OTF side is that a bunch of wealthy Republican donors are pushing for OTF money to go towards a pair of sketchy closed source VPN products that actual security experts say are highly questionable.In response to this, OTF folks sued Pack and now the DC Circuit appeals court has issued an injunction telling Pack he can't fire folks at OTF and that those who were in their roles prior to Pack's moves to fire them should remain in their roles for now:

Having just criticized the Second Circuit for getting Section 230 (among other things) very wrong, it's worth pointing out an occasion where it got it very right. The decision in Force v. Facebook came out last year, but the Supreme Court recently denied any further review, so it's still ripe to talk about how this case could, and should, bear on future Section 230 litigation.It is a notable decision, not just in terms of its result upholding Section 230 but in how it cut through much of the confusion that tends to plague discussion regarding Section 230. It brought the focus back to the essential question at the heart of the statute: who imbued the content at issue with its allegedly wrongful quality? That question is really is the only thing that matters when it comes to figuring out whether Section 230 applies.This case was one of the many seeking to hold social media platforms liable for terrorists using them. None of them have succeeded, although for varying reasons. For instance, in Fields v. Twitter, in which we wrote an amicus brief, the claims failed but not for Section 230 reasons. In this case, however, the dismissal of the complaint was upheld on Section 230 grounds.The plaintiffs put forth several theories about why Facebook should not have been protected by Section 230. Most of them tried to construe Facebook as the information content provider of the terrorists' content, and thus not entitled to the immunity. But the Second Circuit rejected them all.Ultimately the statute is simple: whoever created the wrongful content is responsible for it, not the party who simply enabled its expression. The only question is who created the wrongful content, and per the court, "[A] defendant will not be considered to have developed third-party content unless the defendant directly and 'materially' contributed to what made the content itself 'unlawful.'" [p. 68].Section 230 really isn't any more complicated than that. And the Second Circuit clearly rejected some of the ways people often try to make it more complicated.For one thing, it does not matter that the platform exercised editorial judgment over which user content it displayed. After all, even the very decision to host third-party content at all is an editorial one, and Section 230 has obviously always applied in the shadow of that sort of decision.

Say goodbye to running a host of monthly apps that you can’t keep up with. Averox Solutions gives you Averox Business Management — a full suite of integrated applications to help your business grow rapidly. Get Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Bookkeeping & Accounting, eSigning, Sales Campaigns, Contact Management, Document Sharing, Chat, and so much more in one comprehensive dashboard. Averox is right for a variety of businesses, industries, sizes, and scopes. It's on sale for $79.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.

Back in May, I wondered why the US was trying to hide vaccine data from the Chinese. In fact, it was bizarre that the US government seemed concerned about Chinese hackers trying to access vaccine data, because why would anyone keep such data secret in the first place. This is a global pandemic and the way you solve a global pandemic is with a global solution, and the way to get there faster (and better) is with the open sharing of information. Hoarding and locking up information regarding a potential vaccine makes no sense at all. And yet, this morning, the DOJ made a big showing of how it had indicted Chinese hackers for trying to hack COVID-19 related research.

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 giants monopolize the sector, dictate most US telecom policy in exchange for campaign contributions, and literally write state and federal law 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.While this has been true for 30 years or so, the pandemic has finally started shining a brighter light on the problem. After all, an estimated 42 million Americans can't get access to any broadband whatsoever despite endless billions in subsidies and mammoth industry tax breaks. Millions more can't afford service thanks to monopolization and a lack of competition. A new report by the Open Technology Institute revealed last week once again that Americans pay some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world:

When the Fourth Amendment limits your surveillance plans, just go private. That seems to be the standard operating procedure for law enforcement agencies.When cops aren't willing to canvas neighborhoods to find crime suspects, they just head to Google and ask for info on everyone who happened to be in the area. When they want more data on suspects they're tracking, they don't run subpoenas by judges. They just tap into collections of data harvested from breaches and malicious hacking, all compiled and collated by private companies for easy searchability. And when the CBP decides its own ALPR database just doesn't have enough plate photos in it, it taps into Vigilant's stash of 9 billion plates even as it admits it may not have the legal authority to do so.The FBI does the same thing. Thomas Brewster reports for Forbes that the FBI has taken an expansive view of the Third Party Doctrine to grab records from a private company that complies records related to several different businesses. The company is Sabre, a publicly-traded entity that compiles travel bookings. First formed in 1964, the company, which began as a division of American Airlines, now handles bookings for nearly every major airline, hoovering up data on a third of world's air travelers.Sabre gained a lot of traction as an investigative tool following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. But it continues to be used as a convenient compilation of travel records, sparing the FBI (and others) from approaching several different companies with subpoenas.Brewster has dug up some recent documents detailing Sabre's relationship with the FBI.

Earlier this year, Louisville (KY) police officers killed an unarmed woman during a no-knock drug raid. Breonna Taylor was killed after her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, opened fire on SWAT officers Walker believed were criminals entering their home. The officers claimed they had announced their presence before entering. A 911 call placed by Walker -- a licensed gun owner -- indicated no warning had been given.

As one of, if not the, largest player in the streaming platform wars, Netflix is oft the target of copyright infringement threats and lawsuits. These actions against it have by and large been found to be absolutely baseless. Whether it's estates of long-dead authors, private prisons, or the brother of dead drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, there are plenty of folks out there who see a wealthy company on the rise and try to get a piece of that cash for themselves by making dubious intellectual property claims.But if Netflix is the biggest player in streaming, then certainly its hit show Stranger Things is its most notable contribution. And, so, it's no surprise that the show has faced copyright challenges in the past and is being sued once again by someone claiming the idea for the show was his first.

Outside of the agencies desiring to participate in a cyberwar, cyberwars are generally considered to be a bad idea. At some point, the cyber is going to turn physical and we'll just be stuck in a regular war that actually kills people. And since accurate attribution still remains elusive, the potential for picking the wrong fight remains.There was some talk of going to cyberwar with Russia after the DNC server hacking. The CIA, in particular, was all too willing to send its keyboard warriors out to do battle. This desire to draw virtual blood found some backing in the press when NBC acted as the agency's PR office, talking up the new bright, shiny warfare and asking viewers if they'd like to know more.As long as officials have been claiming we're on the cusp of a "cyber Pearl Harbor," the CIA has been wanting to go on the offensive. The CIA already participates in plenty of cyber-attacks, but it's mostly of the one-to-one variety, targeting individuals the agency has placed under surveillance. But the agency does know how to disrupt elections, participate in coups, and otherwise wreak havoc in "enemy" lands.Now it can do it at the cyber level. And, as Yahoo News was the first to report, it's been doing it for a few years now thanks to the new kid in town.

Everyone is still sorting out exactly what happened last week with the big hack of Twitter in which a number of prominent accounts -- including those of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Apple, and Uber -- all tweeted out a Bitcoin scam, promising to double people's money if they sent Bitcoin to a specific wallet (which appeared to receive a little over $100k). However, from what has been reported so far, it appears we actually got fairly lucky and that it was mainly a bunch of SIM swapping social engineers who historically have focused on getting popular short usernames. If you're not familiar with all of this, the Reply All podcast had a fascinating episode about the scam last year.Meanwhile, Vice has a post describing how the hackers involved convinced a Twitter employee, who had access to a Twitter control panel, to make changes for them. The guy who controls the (formerly Adrian Lamo's) Twitter account @6, provided some details on how the hack got around two factor authentication controls: within the control panel a new email address was added to the account, and then, from the control panel, the two factor authentication would be disabled. An alert would be emailed out about this -- but to the new email address. Brian Krebs provided some details about who he thought was behind all of this (and the connection to the SIM swapped hack of Jack Dorsey's account from last year). Finally, the NY Times scored an interview with the hackers themselves -- again, showing that it was just a crew of SIM swapping kids, mostly doing this for the lulz (and also suggesting that the person Krebs fingered was only peripherally involved, in that he'd made use of the same access to pick up Lamo's old @6 account, but didn't take part in the Bitcoin scheme).

Busuu is the world’s largest community for language learning, providing courses in 12 different languages on web and mobile to more than 100 million learners worldwide. It provides you with over 1,000 lessons created by linguists and features personalized study plans and speech recognition. You'll also get to practice your language skills directly with native speakers worldwide. With the Premium Plus membership, Busuu offers you further features including advanced grammar lessons, Offline Mode, and adaptive Vocabulary Trainer. It's on sale for $90.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.

Looks like we finally have some secret police to call our own. Ongoing protests stemming from a Minnesota police officer's brutal killing of an unarmed Black man have provoked a federal response. In some cases, the National Guard has been called in to quell the more violent and destructive aspects of some demonstrations. Others -- like the 50+ days of continuous protests in Portland, Oregon -- have been greeted with something far more frightening.Jonathan Levinson and Conrad Wilson of Oregon Public Broadcasting were the first to break the news of unidentified federal officers yanking people off the street into unmarked vehicles and disappearing them for a few hours of interrogation.

Like countless other American business sectors, U.S. cable and broadband providers have been using hidden fees to covertly jack up their advertised rates for much of the last decade. These fees, which utilize a rotating crop of bullshit names, help these companies falsely advertise one rate, then sock the consumer with a significantly higher rate post sale (often when locked into a long-term contract). They also let them falsely try and claim that prices haven't increased, when they pretty clearly have.Back in 2014, Comcast introduced a new $1.50 per month surcharge on cable bills it called its "Broadcast TV Fee." Said fee was really just a portion of the cost of doing business for Comcast (programming costs), busted out of the full bill and hidden below the line -- again to help the company falsely advertise a lower price. Fast forward to 2020 and the fee is now $15 per month, per user, and growing -- despite a number of lawsuits (correctly) alleging that the fees are misleading and predatory.And it's not just Comcast. Charter (Spectrum) has also heavily embraced such a fee, its own "broadcast TV surcharge" getting jacked from $13.50 to $16.45 a month starting in August:

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to the woman who hopes to sue for half of the GoFundMe proceeds for a Starbucks barista she fought with after refusing to wear a mask. In first place, it's Grey bringing some perspective to her claim that she can't wear masks due to a disability:

Get your Techdirt Logo Gear in our store on Threadless »Lots of people have been buying our newly-launched face masks on Threadless, so we figured it was time to make the classic Techdirt logo gear available on the platform. You can now get face masks in both our logo gear styles — the standard logo and the big logo — with two different kinds of masks available, as well as youth sizes.Plus, as with all our designs, there's a wide variety of gear available: t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters and other apparel — plus cool accessories and home items including buttons, phone cases (for many iPhone and Galaxy models), mugs, tote bags, and stylish notebooks and journals. And you can still get all our other popular designs:As always, all the profits from gear sales help us keep Techdirt going and continue our reporting through this challenging pandemic situation and beyond. You can also check out our list of all the different ways to support Techdirt with a bunch of options for readers to help us out and get something cool or useful in return!

The Houston PD decided to take a look at itself after a botched drug raid ended with two people killed by officers. The raid was predicated on pure bullshit. Officer Gerald Goines turned two Houston residents into dangerous drug traffickers by using a nonexistent confidential informant, drugs Goines had stashed in his squad car, and a narrative unsupported by any actual facts. Claims of heroin trafficking by a violent drug dealer were undercut by the raid itself, which turned up no heroin or the gun the (fake) informant claimed he saw.Officer Goines is now former officer Goines. He's facing multiple state and federal charges, including two counts of felony murder. This sort of thing doesn't just happen. It's not an anomaly formed in a pristine environment. The almost-nonexistent oversight of the Houston PD's drug warriors led directly to Goines' deadly concoctions. An internal review of the drug unit by the Houston PD shows officers operated with indifference, carelessness, and negligence. Officer Goines may have been the worst of the 175 officers, but he was far from the only one abusing the system to engage in unsupervised drug warrior freelancing. (via Grits For Breakfast)

This series of case studies is published in partnership with the Trust & Safety Foundation to examine the difficult choices and tradeoffs involved in content moderation. Learn more »Summary: In early 2020, with the world trying to figure out how to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the big questions faced by internet platforms was how to combat mis- or disinformation regarding the pandemic. This was especially complex, given that everyone -- including global health experts were trying to figure out what was accurate themselves, and as more information has come in, the understanding of the disease, how it spread, how to treat it, the level of risk, and much, much, has kept changing.Given the fact that no one fully understood what was going on, plenty of people rushed in to try to fill the void with information. Most social media firms put in place policies to try to limit or take down misinformation or disinformation using a variety of policies and tactics. But determining what is misinformation as opposed to legitimate truth-seeking can be very tricky in the midst of a pandemic.In late March, as the pandemic was hitting full swing, an article appeared on the website Medium by Aaron Ginn, a self-described Silicon Valley “growth hacker,” arguing that the response to COVID-19 was overblown and driven by “hysteria.” The piece included many citations of credible data and reports, but also included a few quotes significantly downplaying the risk of COVID-19, including saying that its “transmission rates are very similar to seasonal flu.”The story started to spread widely, mainly after a number of Fox News hosts started tweeting it. As the story got more and more attention, Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, decided to critique Ginn’s article in great detail via an extended Twitter thread. Bergstrom makes a fairly compelling case that Ginn’s lack of expertise in epidemiology led him to making a number of mistakes in his analysis, in particular, not understanding how viruses spread, and how that information is tracked. He also argued that Ginn cherry-picked certain data to support a thesis. Bergstrom and others started arguing that Ginn’s Medium piece was (perhaps not intentionally) misinformation.Decisions to be made by Medium:

A decade ago, one of the most ridiculous copyright trolling outfits was CEG TEK (which stood for "Copyright Enforcement Group... um... TEK"). It would shake down people like any other copyright troll, but it also had a "CTO", named Jon Nicolini, who CEG TEK would trot out as a questionable forensic expert in various trolling cases.It appears that Nicolini has since set out on his own, creating a more modern form of a copyright trolling operation called "Okularity." We've talked recently about how some folks have, instead of using the courts, simply been using social media takedowns via bogus copyright claims as a form of extortion, and that's become quite popular. However, so far, it seems that this has mostly been done by stupid kids looking to make a quick buck.Nicolini and Okularity appear to have professionalized the extortion racket.And they may have picked on the wrong person. In a recently filed lawsuit by Enttech Media Group, the parent company of the famous (and excellent) Paper Magazine, lawyer Richard Tauler lays out in great detail the kind of scam shakedown that Nicolini runs via Okularity:

In early 2019, after Spotify announced the purchase of podcast studio Gimlet Media, we worried that it signaled an end to the open world of podcasting. Part of what made podcasting so special is that, like the early parts of the internet, it was wide open. Anyone could make their own podcast, and just host it somewhere with an RSS feed and then anyone could listen to it via any podcast app or service they wanted. But Spotify is a mostly closed platform.Our fears solidified a lot two months ago when Joe Rogan moved to Spotify (under a rumored $200 million deal), such that his insanely popular podcast will only be heard via Spotify going forward. As we said then, the world loses a lot when podcasts go into private silos (even if the podcasts are available for free). We start moving away from an open system that anyone can use, and which democratizes the creation and distribution of content, to much more of a traditional gatekeeper-run broadcast model. And that's unfortunate, even if it's understandable.And now we have Michelle Obama announcing "The Michelle Obama Podcast," which is exclusive to Spotify. Frankly, we should not call it a podcast any more when it's not actually available for anyone to listen to on their own podcast apps. This is Spotify exclusive audio. That's not a podcast.I understand why we got here and why everyone involved did this. For Spotify, it will boost usage (as will the Rogan deal) of their app and once people start using it to listen to those exclusive podcasts, a lot of people will probably shift over and do all their podcast listening via Spotify as well. And I'm sure that, as with Rogan, Spotify is paying a lot to Michelle Obama to do this. And, of course, I'm sure the production value will be great.But, still, it's worth noting that this move to silo'd, locked up content is disappointing and a shame, as it's yet another nail in the coffin for the promise of the truly open internet.Open systems allow for more participation, more inclusiveness. Closed systems, by their very nature, create gatekeepers and exclusivity. That may be good in the short term for certain business interests, but it's bad in the long term for the public and speech interests. Spotify may very well be successful with this strategy, but the least we can do is stop confusing the closed, exclusive, gatekeepered system with the open, inclusive ecosystem.

In early 2019, after Spotify announced the purchase of podcast studio Gimlet Media, we worried that it signaled an end to the open world of podcasting. Part of what made podcasting so special is that, like the early parts of the internet, it was wide open. Anyone could make their own podcast, and just host it somewhere with an RSS feed and then anyone could listen to it via any podcast app or service they wanted. But Spotify is a mostly closed platform.Our fears solidified a lot two months ago when Joe Rogan moved to Spotify (under a rumored $200 million deal), such that his insanely popular podcast will only be heard via Spotify going forward. As we said then, the world loses a lot when podcasts go into private silos (even if the podcasts are available for free). We start moving away from an open system that anyone can use, and which democratizes the creation and distribution of content, to much more of a traditional gatekeeper-run broadcast model. And that's unfortunate, even if it's understandable.And now we have Michelle Obama announcing "The Michelle Obama Podcast," which is exclusive to Spotify. Frankly, we should not call it a podcast any more when it's not actually available for anyone to listen to on their own podcast apps. This is Spotify exclusive audio. That's not a podcast.I understand why we got here and why everyone involved did this. For Spotify, it will boost usage (as will the Rogan deal) of their app and once people start using it to listen to those exclusive podcasts, a lot of people will probably shift over and do all their podcast listening via Spotify as well. And I'm sure that, as with Rogan, Spotify is paying a lot to Michelle Obama to do this. And, of course, I'm sure the production value will be great.But, still, it's worth noting that this move to silo'd, locked up content is disappointing and a shame, as it's yet another nail in the coffin for the promise of the truly open internet.Open systems allow for more participation, more inclusiveness. Closed systems, by their very nature, create gatekeepers and exclusivity. That may be good in the short term for certain business interests, but it's bad in the long term for the public and speech interests. Spotify may very well be successful with this strategy, but the least we can do is stop confusing the closed, exclusive, gatekeepered system with the open, inclusive ecosystem.

So we had an incredible post recently about infamous (as in called out for lying in court multiple times) copyright troll Richard Liebowitz running into more potential trouble when his own client, photographer Glen Craig, sending a letter directly to the judge saying that he had no idea about cases filed in his name.Liebowitz has now responded with more detail than I expected, given his past infamy, suggesting at the very least that Craig was aware of the original lawsuit against PopMatters. That does not mean it will help Liebowitz. And it may get him in more trouble.First, let's discuss the big problem: Liebowitz is still representing Craig in this case. And here he is now acting against his client's own interests, basically telling the judge "don't make me pay the attorney's fees in this case, make my client pay." That's the very definition of acting in favor of his own interests and against his clients. And that's not even getting into the decision to reveal privileged correspondence between himself and his client. There are cases where this makes sense, but you're certainly supposed to withdraw as the client's lawyer first, since you can no longer represent the client. That's not what has happened here.So, even if it proves that Craig did know about the case, doing this does not necessarily do Liebowitz any favors, and again raises (more) significant questions about how Liebowitz is still a practicing lawyer.As for the actual filings, Liebowitz submits five exhibits of email communications between himself (or his staff) and Craig which indicate to some extent Craig was aware of all of this. But I stress the "to some extent." First, there's an email reply to Liebowitz staffers, who had sent Craig a list of URLs that they claimed showed matches on a Craig photograph. Next to each URL Craig wrote "YES OK" "OK" or "NO NO GO AFTER." The implication is that "YES OK" or "OK" meant that those were licensed cases, but "NO NO GO AFTER" were unlicensed uses, and Liebowitz should "go after" them, which likely could be seen as an okay to sue (though, normally "NO NO GO AFTER" seems like a weird way to give approval for a lawsuit). But in the "NO NO GO AFTER" category is a link from PopMatters, which is the defendant in this case:Liebowitz then presents a few emails from Craig -- some in ALL CAPS and with poor spelling and grammar -- apparently showing Craig repeatedly asking Liebowitz to file suit against PopMatters (and also asking for money from Liebowitz). I will note that Craig's writing style in these emails is markedly different from his writing style in the letter he sent to the judge.

The Complete Python eBook and Video Course Bundle has 5 videos and 5 ebooks to help you master Python. You'll learn about data analysis, Convolutional Neural Networks, NumPy, SciPy, and Cython. You'll also learn about TensorFlow2, deep learning, Object-oriented programming, and more. It's on sale for $30.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

The Second Circuit just issued an ugly decision in a defamation lawsuit against Joy Reid. It not only revived the case against her, but it greased the skids for many more defamation cases to be brought in federal court, including plenty even less meritorious.The case, La Liberte v. Reid, involves two of Reid's social media posts from 2018. The first was from June 29:

Last Friday, the internet exploded with the news that Amazon was banning its employees from installing TikTok, the hugely popular social media app by Chinese company ByteDance. An entire day's news cycle was dedicated to Amazon's decision, with an ocean of press reports implying that the Chinese social networking platform was a privacy nightmare directly tethered to the Chinese government. The story came on the heels of months of allegations by the Trump administration that the app was doing things so vile and atrocious that the only solution was to ban the popular app from the United States entirely.But then, at the end of the day, something odd happened. Amazon suddenly backtracked, stating that its announcement to employees urging them to uninstall TikTok was a mistake. An entire day's news cycle, filled with allegations that TikTok was a privacy nightmare, was based on little more than an administrative brain fart.It was just the latest example of how, upon closer inspection, much of the hysteria surrounding TikTok isn't based on much of anything... substantive. There's been no limit of pearl clutching from the Trump administration and its allies about the app, but when it comes to actual supporting evidence to justify an outright ban, there's just not much of it beyond "it's from China." Case in point: Senator Ken Buck penned one of a flood of editorials over at Newsweek, declaring that TikTok was aggressively nefarious and a diabolical threat to US consumers:

The Trump Administration has all but abandoned its duty to hold the nation's law enforcement agencies accountable for wrongdoing. When Trump took office, he immediately declared his administration would "end" the "dangerous anti-police atmosphere." Being pro-accountability means being "anti-police," apparently. Trump's DOJ immediately took action to comply with the new boss, focusing on eliminating the department's Community Oriented Policing Services office and severely curtailing its investigations of law enforcement agencies.The DOJ's Civil Rights office hasn't been completely eliminated. But its focus has shifted towards "protecting" churches from COVID-related closures and dismantling Section 230 to protect the children destroy encryption.It's 2020 and the DOJ is only now delivering the results of its first "pattern and practice" investigation of a law enforcement agency. This one targets the Narcotics Bureau run by the Springfield, Massachusetts police department. This investigation was prompted by the actions of two of its members, which resulted in federal criminal charges.

For golf fans such as myself, one of the great joys over the past few weeks has been the return of live golf to the television screen. As one of the sports that is most naturally aligned with the need for social distancing and crowdless events, it was also one of the first to come back. Still, with COVID-19 running rampant throughout the world and America in particular, not every last thing is coming back. For instance, the pandemic has led organizers for the R&A's signature gold event, The Open in the U.K., to at least delay it from its July 16th start, or possibly cancel it altogether.With that being said, what do sporting event organizers in 2020 do when they cannot play their IRL sports tourneys? Well, for one, they turn to esports of course! R&A has announced it will hold an e-Open event, using TopGolf's WGT game to allow literally anyone to compete in this year's Open.

Back in February, $130 "smart" pet feeders from a company named Petnet simply stopped working. When customers reached out to the company to complain, they hit a complete and total brick wall in terms of functioning customer service. Emails and phone calls weren't returned (or wound up undeliverable), and the company simply refused to answer annoyed customer inquiries on Twitter or Facebook.These problems extended into March and April, with customers consistently complaining to outlets like Ars Technica that their "smart" feeders still didn't work, and support was nowhere to be found. By late April, the company announced it had at least partially shut down, furloughed employees, and closed its offices. The outfit attempted to largely blame COVID-19 for its misfortunes, despite the fact its problems started well before the pandemic, and the company's office had been empty and available to lease since last October.Claiming they had no other option, Petnet also began trying to charge customers a new $4 monthly fee to keep the company's lights on and customers' not-so-smart pet feeders semi-operational. Many users begrudgingly decided to pay the fee, and for some reason were shocked to discover that it hasn't really improved things in the slightest. For many, their $130 smart pet feeder sometimes works, but it can't connect to the internet or Petnet systems (the whole point). And throughout all of this, Petnet has proven incapable of providing even baseline customer support:

This one sounds boring, but stick with it because it's important. Because the US and the EU have vastly different privacy regulation regimes, there has always been some conflict over how (mainly) US internet companies handle data from the EU. For years, this was "settled" by a weird and mostly useless "EU-US data protection safe harbor" agreement, in which US companies would have to get "certified" that they kept EU-originated data protected at an "equivalent" level to how it would be protected in the EU when transferring it across the Atlantic to US-based data centers. It was a bit of a nuisance as a company (we went through the process ourselves), but in 2015 the entire safe harbor agreement was invalidated by the EU Court of Justice because of the NSA's ongoing snooping on data from those internet companies, as revealed by Ed Snowden.The EU and US freaked out, and had a frantic negotiation to come up with a new "safe harbor" agreement with the catchier name of "Privacy Shield," but as we pointed out when it was announced, the problem wasn't the text of the agreement, but rather the NSA's surveillance practices with regards to internet data. Here's what I wrote four years ago:

Law enforcement "gang databases" are a joke. And definitely not a funny one. Officers can convert innocent citizens into gang members just because they live in the same neighborhood or attend the same schools as gang members. Wearing the "wrong" clothes can get people "nominated" for extra law enforcement harassment. So can simply talking to gang members, like volunteers of outreach programs often do.This has filled gang databases with a bunch of junk data. But it's junk data that can disrupt lives, if not destroy them completely. Los Angeles cops trying to look busy (this is the best spin I can put on this) have been tossing people into CalGang with zero justification whatsoever. More than a twenty officers are under investigation for falsifying records related to the state's gang database.The investigations continue but it appears at least a few LAPD officers might be heading to jail.

Featuring a sophisticated wireless charger, a 5 USB charging hub, and an ultra-compact portable battery, the Naztech Ultimate Power Station is your all-in-one charging solution. Charge up to 6 power-hungry devices at the same time from a single AC wall outlet. With 50 watts of rapid charging power, the Ultimate is the perfect and practical solution for homes and offices with limited outlets and multiple devices that need high-speed charging. It's on sale for $50.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.

I know you've heard this before, but just so we're all clear: wear a fucking mask, people. It's truly not that big of a deal. I wear one at work any time I am not seated in my office. It's crazy easy and you can even get a little fun out of it by wearing a personalized one like our Techdirt masks.But, if you're not going to wear a mask, don't also be an insufferable jerk like Amber Gilles. Amber got really mad when a Starbucks barista named Lenin Gutierrez refused to serve her because she wasn't in a mask. She decided to take a picture of Gutierrez and post it on Facebook, complaining about it. When the internet saw the post, it did its thing.

We've talked a lot about how while fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a good thing (in that faster, more reliable networks are always good), it's been comically over-hyped by cellular carriers that have taken every opportunity to misrepresent what the technology is capable of, the kind of real world speeds users will actually see, and where the technology is actually available.If you listen to Verizon's 5G ads, you'd think the technology was already available nearly everywhere. Verizon ads routinely proclaim that "People from midtown Manhattan to downtown Denver can experience what your 5G can deliver," and usually feature thrilled consumers from Omaha to Los Angeles basked in ultra-fast wireless glory.Reality is... something different. One recent study by OpenSignal found that users in the real world are able to obtain a Verizon 5G signal about 0.4% of the time, largely because the millimeter wave spectrum Verizon is using doesn't provide very good range, and can't penetrate buildings particularly well. Even in the places that Verizon advertises as having widespread coverage -- like sports stadiums -- routinely see patchy availability.As such, after fielding complaints from AT&T (which has routinely made its own false claims about 5G), the National Advertising Division (NAD)--the investigative arm of a nonprofit dubbed the BBB National Programs--has told Verizon to stop misleading consumers as to where 5G is actually available:

The last time the CBP delivered a Privacy Impact Assessment of its automated license plate readers, it informed Americans as far as 100 miles inland that there's really no privacy being impacted by the deployment of tech capable of capturing millions of plate images every year. If you don't want to be on the CBP ALPR radar (which is shared with the DEA and other law enforcement agencies), don't drive around in a properly licensed vehicle.This impact assessment was not updated when the CBP's ALPR vendor was hacked and thousands of plate photos -- some of which contained photos of drivers and passengers -- were taken from the vendor's servers. The vendor was never supposed to be storing these locally, but it decided to do so and the end result was a lot of leakage the CBP assured everyone contained "no personal information" about the thousands of people and vehicles contained in the photos.The CBP's latest Privacy Impact Assessment [PDF] has been turned in and it's more of the same thing. Want to dodge the feds' plate readers, stay off the road. (via Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)

It's hardly news to Techdirt readers that China carries out censorship on a massive scale. What may be more surprising is that its censorship extends to even the most innocuous aspects of life. The ChinAI Newsletter, which provides translations by Jeff Ding of interesting texts from the world of Chinese AI, flags up one such case. It concerns a Chinese online TV series called "The Bad Kids". Here's how the site Sixth Tone describes it:

This series of case studies is published in partnership with the Trust & Safety Foundation to examine the difficult choices and tradeoffs involved in content moderation. Learn more &raquoSummary:Google’s biggest early innovation in search was that it used inbound links as a tool for determining the popularity of a website, and thus what its relevance to a particular search might be. That feature, however, created some side effects that raised concerns about how search results might lead to misinformation, or how the search engine might be gamed.One of the earliest examples of this was the discovery in 2004 that the first result of a search on the word “jew” pointed to a blatantly anti-semitic website, Jewwatch. It was widely theorized that the reason for this was that the singular noun “jew” was more likely to be used by those pushing anti-semitic arguments, rather than the more common adjective “jewish” or the phrase “jewish wo/man” etc. Also, the site Jewwatch had been in existence for many years, and had many inbound links from other sources.Some also believed that the people behind Jewwatch had used an early search engine optimization technique known as “Googlebombing” to purposefully game the results — deliberately linking to Jewwatch from other sites, and using the word “jew” as the link text.As this result got attention, Google came under tremendous pressure to change the search result, as people accused the company of anti-semitism or deliberately pointing to the Jewwatch site in search results. The Anti-Defamation League sent a letter to Google asking it to explore whether or not its ranking system needed to be changed (though the ADL also posted an article to its own site telling people that it was clear that the result was not intentional, or done for nefarious reasons). Some politicians, including Senator Chuck Schumer, also got involved to pressure Google to change its results.Decisions to be made by Google:

This series of case studies is published in partnership with the Trust & Safety Foundation to examine the difficult choices and tradeoffs involved in content moderation. Learn more &raquoSummary:Google’s biggest early innovation in search was that it used inbound links as a tool for determining the popularity of a website, and thus what its relevance to a particular search might be. That feature, however, created some side effects that raised concerns about how search results might lead to misinformation, or how the search engine might be gamed.One of the earliest examples of this was the discovery in 2004 that the first result of a search on the word “jew” pointed to a blatantly anti-semitic website, Jewwatch. It was widely theorized that the reason for this was that the singular noun “jew” was more likely to be used by those pushing anti-semitic arguments, rather than the more common adjective “jewish” or the phrase “jewish wo/man” etc. Also, the site Jewwatch had been in existence for many years, and had many inbound links from other sources.Some also believed that the people behind Jewwatch had used an early search engine optimization technique known as “Googlebombing” to purposefully game the results — deliberately linking to Jewwatch from other sites, and using the word “jew” as the link text.As this result got attention, Google came under tremendous pressure to change the search result, as people accused the company of anti-semitism or deliberately pointing to the Jewwatch site in search results. The Anti-Defamation League sent a letter to Google asking it to explore whether or not its ranking system needed to be changed (though the ADL also posted an article to its own site telling people that it was clear that the result was not intentional, or done for nefarious reasons). Some politicians, including Senator Chuck Schumer, also got involved to pressure Google to change its results.Decisions to be made by Google:

The inaugural edition of the Techdirt Tech Policy Greenhouse is in the books, and we'd like to thank all of our contributors and those that engaged in conversation as we tackled one of the thornier issues of the modern tech policy era. As we noted early on, our goal with the project is to bring some nuance, collaboration, and understanding to a privacy conversation frequently dominated by simplistic partisan bickering, bad faith arguments, and the kind of deep ideological ruts that routinely result in either bad policy,or, in the case of U.S. privacy, no policy at all.If you've not yet had a chance to dig through contributions for this inaugural edition, here's a brief rundown:Senator Ron Wyden argued that it's time for Congress to finally pass a meaningful privacy law for the internet era. One with an eye on transparency, end user control, and meaningful penalties for incompetent or malicious corporations.Lindsey Barrett discussed the fixation on "big tech" when talking about privacy, and how this has allowed certain actors (predominantly in the adtech and telecom sectors) to tap dance over, around, and under meaningful scrutiny for the same or worse behavior.Evan Engstrom discussed whether we can craft a meaningful privacy law in the United States without ushering forth a new breed of privacy troll.Gigi Sohn and Jeff Gary explored how telecom industry lawyers in Maine are myopically engaged in a legal assault that could have a massive and poorly understood impact on our ability to address sector-specific privacy issues.Jen Persson explored the challenges facing educators during the pandemic, and the unrelenting quest to monetize the data gleaned from a growing array of often dubious, gamified, and poorly understood algorithms and e-learning platforms.Chynna Foucek examined how inherent racial biases fused with a broken court system and Luddite government leaders creates a perfect storm of privacy dysfunction.Joey Salazar and Benjamin Moskowitz explored how one path toward greater privacy would be to encrypt the domain name system (DNS) as we attempt to rebuild something vaguely resembling consumer trust.Malkia Devich Cyril explored how existing systemic bigotry all but ensures that contact tracing technologies won't adequately protect Black and disadvantaged communities, especially without comprehensive and equitable health care reform.Kirk Nahra explored how the pandemic has created an abrupt collision between privacy welfare and health care industry interests, requiring a reconciliation during one of the most challenging periods in American history.Cory Doctorow explored the need for greater technological interoperability on the road toward shifting power from massive unaccountable conglomerates to end users. Chris Lewis also discussed the need for greater interoperability, and how our current paradigm can be particularly harmful to disadvantaged communities and content creators.Kate Tummarello explored the delicate balancing act of crafting sensible privacy policy without harming startups, innovation, and overall competition.Gaurav Laroia examined how Coronavirus surveillance is far too important and risky to be left exclusively up to the private sector.Ernesto Falcon made the case that we need clear and obvious legal liability (aka a "private right of action") for companies that repeatedly fail to respect consumer privacy and data security, resulting in some excellent panel discussion on what's proven to be one of the thornier issues in the privacy debate.Jim Harper argued that the quest for better online privacy and security can’t be solved by giving people new property rights in personal data.Joe Jerome took a deeper dive into how, in a country where privacy enforcers at the FTC are simultaneously captured and underfunded, what actual reform and a functioning and transparent U.S. privacy enforcement mechanism might look like.Crafting meaningful privacy guidelines and ensuring sensible, consistent, transparent enforcement was a steep uphill climb even during the best of times. Now the effort will share fractured attention spans and resources with an historic pandemic, recovering from the resulting economic collapse, and addressing the endless web of socioeconomic and political dysfunction that made the American COVID-19 crisis far worse than it needed to be.But as many of our contributors made clear, many of these problems are not mutually exclusive. Crafting sensible, transparent, and equitable privacy rules and standards remains just as essential as ever; preferably before the steady parade of privacy and security scandals inevitably get worse. We're hopeful the insight and conversation collected here gave policymakers and observers alike some additional food for thought as we collectively stumble in the right direction.