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When Attorney General William Barr speaks, he represents the DOJ and all the agencies it oversees. The problem is that Bill Barr's recent anti-encryption agitating doesn't reflect the views of the people he oversees. While Barr is trying to turn the public against Apple by suggesting it protects terrorists and murderers, FBI employees are worried his words and actions will harm them more than help them.The Wall Street Journal spoke to people in the FBI and DOJ who aren't convinced Barr's doing the right thing by taking a hardline stance on encryption. [Non-paywalled version here.]

For the better part of the decade, even Wall Street stock jocks have acknowledged that the current pay TV ecosystem simply isn't sustainable. Broadcasters continue to demand higher and higher rates for the same programming, driving up costs for consumers. Those consumers are then fleeing to the exits in record numbers; either migrating to new streaming video alternatives or over the air antennas. Many executives' response to the problem? Mindlessly double down on most of the behaviors that brought them here, namely, mindless consolidation and price hikes.Most cable and broadcast executives seem to believe they can just nurse this dying cash cow until retirement, at which point it's somebody else's problem. But the problem itself remains, and analysts like Doug Dawson quite correctly note that 2020 may be the year the entire fracas finally starts to unravel and the real "death spiral" truly begins:

Last month, Mike wrote about France's awful proposals for implementing the EU Copyright Directive's upload filter (originally known as Article 13, but Article 17 in the final version). Just as France was the most vocal proponent of this dangerous development, so Germany was the main driving force behind the ancillary copyright requirement, also known as the snippet or link tax. And like France, Germany has managed to make its proposed national implementation (original in German) of what was Article 11, now Article 15, even worse than the general framework handed down by the EU. The former Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda has a Twitter thread (in German) that picks out the main bad ideas. Under the German proposals, in general only "single words or very short extracts" of a press article can be quoted without a license. Specifically, free quotation is limited to:

For those of us of a certain age, where you're the right age to have grown up with video games as a staple of your youth entertainment experience while your parents basically grew up without them, the generational divide when it comes to gaming could not possibly be more stark. It is my belief that a great deal of the ongoing debate about whether there are harmful effects from playing video games is probably about to simply disappear as that parental generation begins to shove off this mortal experience. Gaming, after all, has been blamed for all sorts of things, even as research is starting to trickle in which suggests that video gaming in particular may have health benefits and is otherwise part of a healthy staple of entertainment experiences.That research will only get better and more prevalent as both video games become a larger staple of entertainment consumption in our culture and as a younger generation of researchers with an interest in the topic come of age. One example of that can be seen in the work done by NYU professor Jan Plass, who's team didn't even both trying to tackle whether video games are good or bad for people, but instead took a scientific approach to simply create games that are designed to benefit cognitive behavior.

Former Houston PD officer Gerald Goines is going to face murder charges. At least he's alive to face them. The victims of Goines' botched no-knock raid -- Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas -- don't have the luxury of watching justice be done. The residents of the house were killed by police officers performing a raid targeting heroin that never existed, utilizing a warrant filled with lies based on statements made by a confidential informant who didn't exist, and drugs pulled from a cop car console.Goines is facing both state and federal charges. And the charges are still coming in. Multiple investigations are still ongoing. Nearly 14,000 cases linked to the now-disbanded Squad 15 (of the Narcotics Division) are under review by the District Attorney's office and dozens of pending cases have already been dismissed.The charges brought against Goines late last year are now officially backed by an indictment, as Jacob Sullum reports for Reason.

When Julian Assange was arrested in the UK and taken out of the Ecuadorian embassy, many of us raised concerns that the charges against him appeared to be things that every investigative reporter does in finding sources. The superseding indictment of Assange made it clear that the DOJ's case against Assange was a direct attack on a free press. Indeed, even some federal prosecutors worried about the charges going way too far.Yet, we got tremendous pushback on this, as people kept insisting that it was different, that Julian Assange had gone further than normal reporters, and that because there have been claims that he was associated with the Russians, that this somehow made the charges against him okay. Yet, with the recent news of Brazil charging Glenn Greenwald with crimes for reporting on leaked documents, we noted that the case seemed to parallel the US's case against Assange. Mathew Ingram, over at the Columbia Journalism Review, has now written a more in-depth piece on how the two cases mirror each other:

The DEA doesn't really want to stop the flow of drugs into the country. Let's not kid ourselves. Better yet, let's not allow the DEA to kid us it's in the drug enforcement business. It's in the cash business. It wants to seize cash. It is so cash-focused it hires TSA agents to alert the DEA whenever they see cash in people's luggage. It also regularly peruses airplane and railway passenger manifests to find targets it feels might be carrying cash.Forfeiture laws make this easy. They make seizing cash so easy hundreds of law enforcement agencies engage in the same fishing trips for cash, ignoring drugs and seizing money from drivers traveling out of the states they're supposed to be defending against incoming drugs.It's not illegal to travel while carrying large amounts of cash. But it may as well be. The Institute for Justice is representing a 79-year-old man who had his life savings seized by the DEA at an airport -- a seizure that has not been followed up with any official accusations (charges, indictments) of wrongdoing.

Things sure are getting even more bizarre in the world of the rich, famous, and powerful. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (usually called "MBS") is now being accused of personally being involved in the hacking of Jeff Bezos' phone to get data that was eventually used against him by the National Enquirer. This is a soap opera-level story that involves a bit of background.You may recall that, approximately a year ago, Jeff Bezos put out quite a Medium post, entitled: No thank you, Mr. Pecker, in which he exposed an attempt by David Pecker's National Enquirer to engage in what sure looks like a blackmail effort to silence Washington Post (which Bezos owns) reporting efforts. The post came about a month after the National Enquirer had released evidence of an affair that Bezos was having, including releasing personal text messages (the National Enqurier release came hours after Bezos himself announced he was getting a divorce from his wife). According to Bezos' blog post, the Enquirer had also threatened to release personal photos of Bezos if he did not call off an investigation he had launched into how the National Enquirer had obtained those text messages.A little over a month and a half later, the investigator that Bezos had hired, Gavin de Becker, announced that he believed Saudi Arabia was involved in obtaining Bezos's personal data, adding a bit of international intrigue to the whole thing. de Becker argued that the evidence pointed to the Saudis much more than Michael Sanchez, the brother of the woman with whom Bezos was having the affair, who had claimed that he had given the data to the National Enquirer. As de Becker noted, Sanchez seemed to be a fall guy to distract from the possible Saudi connection:

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The FBI has asked Apple to break the encryption on devices owned by the Pensacola Naval Base shooter. It hasn't made this request officially -- there's no court order being sought to compel Apple's assistance -- but it's asking nonetheless.Attorney General Bill Barr put a little more muscle behind the FBI's informal request. His statement insinuated that Apple was making the country less safe by refusing to break encryption. He also stated that time was of the essence in cases like this and Apple's general unhelpfulness wasn't acceptable.Apple fired back by again stating it would not break phone encryption for the US government. It also pointed out the FBI did not inform of it a second locked device until a month after the shooting. If the government was concerned about time slipping away, it did not act with alacrity during this latest investigation.Donald Trump followed Bill Barr's lead, attacking Apple via Twitter with a particularly stupid tweet that suggests the president is still all about quid pro quo.

We've long explored how the nation's phone companies don't really even want to be in the residential broadband business. They routinely refuse to upgrade their networks despite millions in taxpayer subsidies, yet often lobby to ensure nobody else can deliver broadband in these neglected footprints either. US telcos have a bizarre disdain for their paying customers, delivering the bare minimum (slow DSL) at the highest rates they can possibly charge without a full-scale consumer revolt. It's not surprising, then, that many telco DSL customers are fleeing to cable, assuming they even have a second broadband option.This dynamic often results in some absurd dysfunction. Like in West Virginia, where incumbent telco Frontier has repeatedly been busted in a series of scandals involving substandard service and the misuse of taxpayer money. The graft and corruption in the state is so severe, state leaders have buried reports, and, until recently, a Frontier executive did double duty as a state representative without anybody in the state thinking that was a conflict of interest. The company has since been under investigations from New York to Minnesota for failing to upgrade or even repair its aging network.Not too surprisingly, this combination of apathy, incompetence, and corruption is not particularly sustainable. Last week, Frontier announced it would be exploring a bankruptcy sometime in March. That's thanks in no small part to $16.3 billion in debt it accumulated from buying Verizon's unwanted DSL networks in numerous states as part of a "growth for growth's sake" mindset that involved rampant expansion, and then neglecting the acquired territories. Shockingly, angry customers then fled to the exits, only compounding Frontier's problems:

More than two years ago, the Turkish government blocked all of Wikipedia under the dubious legal theory it was a "threat to national security." A single offending article that linked the Turkish government to various terrorist organizations was the "threat" Turkey felt it couldn't withstand.Wikipedia challenged this blanket ban -- which covered all of its domains, not just the Turkish version. It appealed the decision in Turkey and petitioned the European Court of Human Rights to declare the government's ban a violation of free speech rights.The ECHR seemed inclined to give Wikipedia what it asked for. But securing a win wouldn't be enough to lift the ban. Turkey has routinely blown off ECHR verdicts, choosing to keep its human rights violations in place in exchange for periodic fines.Unfortunately, for Recep Erdogan and his government, another decision was handed down that wasn't so easily ignored. In late December of last year, the country's top court ruled the ban was a violation of freedom of expression rights. It took a few weeks for the government to comply with the order, but the Wikimedia Foundation reports the ban has finally been lifted.

As most of you will know, a year or so ago saw Nintendo suddenly flip a litigious switch and begin going after all the ROM sites that had existed for a decade or more. The timing suggests that the company may have made this move out of a misguided attempt to support its release of several retro consoles that contained many of the games that the public could also simply get for free on these ROM sites. I say misguided because it's not as though Nintendo's aggression suddenly made free online ROMs unavailable. They are all still very much there through various means, but Nintendo's retro consoles sold like gangbusters anyway, because half the appeal in the product is the ease of use and the other half is in having the cool looking retro console next to the television.Most sites simply folded up and caved. RomUniverse, run by Matthew Storman, was one of the few that attempted to fight back. Despite the site making not just Nintendo Roms available, but also all kinds of other copyrighted media, Storman tried to crowdfund his legal defense before pivoting to representing himself in court. We're still in the early stages of the litigation. Storman sought a dismissal of the case by arguing that First Sale doctrine meant Nintendo had no claim to the Roms being offered on his site coupled with claiming to be a neutral service provider protected by DMCA safe harbors. We said at the time that the move was unlikely to work.And we were right. The court has now ruled for Nintendo against the motion to dismiss, stating that at best the claims that Storman makes are not properly made at this stage of the litigation, along with some comments that the claims probably aren't going to get Storman where he wants to go anyway.

California's ban on use of facial recognition tech by law enforcement showed the state's government is willing to get out ahead of potential privacy issues. The tech is as popular as it is unproven. Law enforcement agencies strongly believe facial recognition will help it apprehend criminals more efficiently, but the available data simply doesn't back up this belief.The tech is still pretty lousy at recognizing faces, kicking out false positives at an alarming rate. This also means it's not recognizing faces it should be recognizing -- the criminals and terrorists government agencies are convinced it will catch. They're also prone to bias, more likely to misidentify minorities, which results in increased targeting of demographics already heavily over-represented in most law enforcement agencies' paperwork.California's new ban affects mobile tech used by state agencies. This includes body cameras, smartphones, and tablets. That was enough to kill the San Diego's multiple facial recognition programs. The San Diego PD used 1,300 cameras to build a database of 65,000 images over the course of seven years. These images were matched against a much larger database run by the San Diego Sheriff's DepartmentThe program went into effect without the public being informed.

Once again, it's time for the CES post-mortem! Unlike past years, Mike didn't make it to the 2020 show, but our regular guest and unrivaled CES veteran Rob Pegoraro is back with all the important details from the ground. Listen in to find out what new consumer tech, both expected and unexpected, the industry is pushing this year.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

As Attorney General William Barr and other law enforcement officials continue to insist (falsely) that Apple refuses to cooperate with them in undermining encryption and security on all iPhones, plenty of people have been pointing out for years that the reality is that most iPhone encryption is effectively meaningless, because if a user has iCloud backups on, Apple retains the key to that data and can (and does!) open it up for legitimate law enforcement requests. In other words, it's extremely rare that full device encryption actually keeps law enforcement out (and that leaves aside the fact that technological solutions exist for law enforcement to hack into most iPhones anyway). Indeed. as you might recall, during the FBI's last big fight about encryption with Apple, over San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook's iPhone, it was revealed that the FBI's own incompetence resulted in Farook's backups being wiped out before the FBI had a chance to access them.For quite some time now, EFF and others have urged Apple to close this loophole and allow for truly encrypted iCloud backups, such that even Apple can't get in. Apple has toyed with the idea, but as Tim Cook has said a few times, the company chose not to do it this way after weighing the pros and cons from a user's perspective. The key issue: if something is fully encrypted and Apple doesn't have the key, if you lose your password, the data is effectively gone. There is no "password reset" if Apple doesn't retain the key:

I don't always agree with Glenn Greenwald, and over the last few years have grown increasingly frustrated with either his confusing and contradictory positions or his bizarre stubbornness in being purposefully obtuse in his explanations of his positions. However, his general commitment to freedom of the press is hard to question. Over the last few years, Greenwald has been particularly focused on reporting about the federal government of Jair Bolsonaro in his adopted home of Brazil. Given that Bolsonaro has a reputation for attacking the press, many people wondered how long it would take for the Brazilian government to go after Greenwald.And, indeed, today it was announced that Greenwald has been charged with "cybercrimes" for his reporting on leaked documents regarding the current Justice Minister, Sergio Moro, who was the federal judge who oversaw the trial of former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Many in Brazil, including Greenwald, have argued that the corruption trial and jailing of Lula was a corrupt show trial designed to get Lula out of office and prevent his re-election in 2018 (when Bolsonaro was elected). The leaked documents showed that Moro, while presiding over the trial, worked closely with prosecutors and helped them strategize.Since then, there has been speculation that the government was trying to build a case against Greenwald. In July, Greenwald was called before a Congressional committee in which he was directly told he should be jailed. Back in August, the Brazilian Supreme Court actually put a stop to an attempt to investigate Greenwald, after Bolsonaro himself called for Greenwald to be jailed.However, that appears not to have actually stopped the government's attempts to find some reason to throw Greenwald in jail. The charges against Greenwald argue that he wasn't just reporting on the leaked documents, but that he was part of a "criminal organization" and worked with people to hack into the phones of officials in order to access the documents:

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Last week we noted that the latest person that Rep. Devin Nunes was threatening to sue (a constantly growing list) was a fellow Congressional Representative, Ted Lieu. Nunes was particularly mad that Lieu had said Nunes "conspired" with Lev Parnas, the now indicted Rudy Giuliani aide who has been dribbling out a bunch of fascinating info lately. We, and many others, had asked Lieu to release the letter from Nunes' lawyer, and he finally released the first page as well as his own response letter. And the timing is interesting, because it comes just as the House released new evidence of a connection between Parnas and Nunes.First, though, let's look at the letter Nunes' regular SLAPP-happy lawyer, Steven Biss, sent to Lieu:

We've noted for some time now how Verizon desperately wants to pivot from dull old broadband provider to sexy, Millennial-focused, video advertising juggernaut. To accomplish this task, Verizon acquired both Yahoo and AOL, smushed them together, then hoped this would be enough to compete with the likes of Google and Facebook. The effort distracted the company from upgrading or repairing much of its fixed-line broadband footprint, since investing in networks isn't profitable enough, quickly enough, for many on Wall Street.But Verizon's pivot hasn't been going so well. The company's Go90 video platform, which was supposed to be the cornerstone of the company's effort, recently fell flat on its face after Verizon spent $1.2 billion on the effort. And the company's Oath ad network, the combination of AOL and Yahoo, hasn't been doing much better.Undaunted, Verizon's back again with a new effort nobody asked for. The company this week launched a new privacy-centric browser it's calling OneSearch. According to a Verizon press release, this is all just part of Verizon's "commitment to transparency and privacy," and a reflection of the way the company has led the industry on privacy "for decades":

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a quick response from Joe Cool to California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez's comment that "in a perfect world" all workers would be unionized:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, New York's top prosecutor was jumping into the war on smartphone encryption alongside UK Prime Minister David Cameron who appeared to express a desire to undermine all encryption, while President Obama announced a broad plan for "securing cyberpsace" that looked an awful lot like a law enforcement wish-list — all despite the fact that a leaked internal intelligence community document revealed recommendations for stronger and more encryption. And the NSA was apologizing for backdooring encryption, but in a "sorry we got caught" kind of way.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, we highlighted an excellent open letter to rock stars telling them to stop pretending they are fighting for up-and-coming artists with their copyright demands and anti-internet rhetoric. Marvel was trying to downplay Josh Kirby's work as part of the copyright termination fight, one school was trying to claim copyright over lesson plans while another was considering an anti-piracy campaign inspired by anti-drug campaigns, Grooveshark was sued yet again so negotiation-by-lawsuit could continue, and France's three strikes agency was caught pirating a font. But one big surprise was that the administrator of the OiNK torrent tracker, after explaining why he believed his system was legal, was found not guilty by the jury in a rare win sensible copyright.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, in a similar nice surprise, a file sharing network in South Korea was left alone by the courts. And who would think it was the head of Blockbuster Video in the UK who would be getting the right idea about how Hollywood needs to innovate if it wants to fight piracy. A new spam tactic was causing problems for the DNS system, company IT departments were struggling with what to do about personal devices, and paid search keywords were becoming a major public relations battleground. This was also the week that Apple released the first Mac Mini and the iPod Shuffle.

Let's talk about nuisance abatement laws. These are laws cities can use to shut down businesses that appear to draw more than their fair share of the criminal element.If you're a fan of asset forfeiture, you'll love nuisance laws. By abdicating their law enforcement responsibilities, cities can have their lower cost cake and eat your property too. It's win-win for cities, who love to use laws like this to effectively seize property from citizens who have the misfortune to operate legitimate businesses in high crime areas.Here's how it works in Dallas, Texas. The city says business owners must pay for their own security devices and personnel to keep their businesses free of criminals. No business will be compensated for these additional costs. All cops need to do is throw a couple of placards at the business and the city takes it from there. Criminal activity in the area is now the responsibility of businesses in the area. Can't get criminals to get off your property? Too bad. It's the city's property now.

Let's talk about nuisance abatement laws. These are laws cities can use to shut down businesses that appear to draw more than their fair share of the criminal element.If you're a fan of asset forfeiture, you'll love nuisance laws. By abdicating their law enforcement responsibilities, cities can have their lower cost cake and eat your property too. It's win-win for cities, who love to use laws like this to effectively seize property from citizens who have the misfortune to operate legitimate businesses in high crime areas.Here's how it works in Dallas, Texas. The city says business owners must pay for their own security devices and personnel to keep their businesses free of criminals. No business will be compensated for these additional costs. All cops need to do is throw a couple of placards at the business and the city takes it from there. Criminal activity in the area is now the responsibility of businesses in the area. Can't get criminals to get off your property? Too bad. It's the city's property now.

You may recall that last summer we wrote about how American aviation legend Chuck Yeager decided to sue Airbus when the company mentioned the fact that Yeager broke the sound barrier in marketing material. Yeager's lawyer is Lincoln Bandlow, who has spent much of the past few years as a copyright troll after a formerly respectable career in which he once touted himself a free-speech fighter. His complaint, however, served mostly as comedic material. There were claims of trademark infringement and violation of Yeager's publicity rights. Neither made much sense, as repeating a historical fact, even in marketing material, does not constitute either violation and is clearly protected speech. It was only a matter of time before Airbus responded and now we have that response.Airbus is apparently seeking dismissal by the court on two grounds. The first, and least interesting, is on jurisdictional grounds, as you can read in the filing (which other news sites seem not to have included for reasons beyond me).

Attorney General William Barr and his DOJ and FBI have really ramped up their bullshit campaign against the public being able to use encryption. President Trump himself weighed in himself with some ignorant statements, suggesting that Apple owes him some sort of quid pro quo, because his policies may have helped them on trade:

Michael Leidig, the owner of Central European News, wasn't thrilled BuzzFeed called him the "King of Bullshit News" in a 2015 article. The BuzzFeed investigation dug into CEN's publishing business and found the company did nothing more than generate a steady stream of salacious and rarely plausible "news" stories, which were then picked up by other "news" agencies (Mirror, Sun, etc.) less concerned with accurate reporting than with racking up page views.

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Joe Biden is the latest Democratic candidate for President interviewed by the NY Times editorial board, and if you're interested in tech policy, well, it's a doozy. Biden seems confused, misinformed, or simply wrong about a lot of issues from free speech to Section 230 to copyright to video games. It's really bad. We already knew he was on an anti 230 kick when he gave a confused quote on it late last year, but for the NY Times he goes even further:

Remember cord cutting? The trend that cable and broadcast execs and countless sector analysts spent years claiming either wasn't real, didn't matter, or would most certainly end once Millennials started procreating? It set records in 2019, and despite some wishful thinking among cable TV executives, there's no real sign that the trend is going anywhere thanks to the continued rise of new streaming services.While many cable companies have simply doubled down on the behavior that brought them to this point (price hikes and comically terrible customer service), there are some indications that other companies are finally starting to listen. Like Verizon, which last week introduced a number of new internet and cable TV packages that eliminate the long-term contract entirely, and at least make a fleeting effort to cut down on hidden fees:

Six years ago, when Techdirt first started writing about the investor-state dispute system (ISDS) -- or corporate sovereignty as we prefer to call it -- it was largely unknown outside specialist circles. Since then, more people have woken up to the power of this apparently obscure element of international trade and investment deals. It essentially gives a foreign company the ability to threaten to sue a nation for millions -- even billions -- of dollars if the latter brings in new laws or regulations that might adversely affect an investment. The majority of corporate sovereignty cases have been brought by the extractive industries -- mining and oil. That's not least because many of the laws and regulations they object to concern environmental and health issues, which have come to the fore in recent years. New legislation designed to protect local communities might mean lower profits for investors, who then often threaten to use ISDS if they are not offered compensation for this "loss".Big tech companies, for all their real or supposed faults, have not turned to corporate sovereignty as a way of bullying small countries -- until now. En24 News reports that Uber is threatening to invoke corporate sovereignty in a dispute with Colombia. According to Uber:

It's been a while since we last wrote about the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), but in the past, it's always been for incredibly stupid reasons. There was the time it claimed it owned the facts of its schedule and went after someone who created a better scheduling app. There was the time it claimed that its "unlimited rides" card really meant no more than 90 rides. We didn't write about this other one, but a few years back, the MTA actually sued a bagel place for calling itself "F Line Bagels." And now we have it filing an incredibly questionable copyright takedown notice over someone making a nicer subway map.The NYC Subway map is fairly iconic, but that has never stopped people from making their own variations. Indeed, making new subway maps of NYC and many other metropolitan train systems is something many people do (there's even a -- somewhat addictive and amazingly fun -- subway map design simulation game called Mini Metro). Jake Berman is one of many people who redesigned the NYC subway map, after getting upset with the official MTA subway map. His map is consider so useful compared to the official one, that the Wikipedia page for the NYC subway map shows his directly next to the official map:That's Berman's map on the left there. And he has it in a few places, including Etsy. And for unclear reasons, the MTA sent a copyright infringement takedown notice over the map. The Vice article, linked above, includes one of the best quotes ever about this kind of thing from copyright lawyer Thomas Kjellberg:

Stupid, needless trademark oppositions achieve a whole lot of things that make me angry. It allows Monster Energy to trot around the globe pretending it has trademark rights that it absolutely does not. It allows people to try to make trouble for businesses just to be pains in the ass. And it allows large, global brands to bully smaller entities under the guise that they must police trademarks or risk losing them.Still, those that know me best will know that I will not countenance anyone or anything getting in the way of something clever and funny. And that's now what one trademark opposition may do, as a Cleveland Indians pitcher with a famous last name has had his attempt to trademark the term "Not Justin" opposed.

It really wasn't that long ago that Rep. Devin Nunes was a co-sponsor of the Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act. Of course, since then, he's been filing a whole bunch of frivolous lawsuits against news organizations, journalists, political operatives, critics, and, most famously, a satirical internet cow.At times he's admitted that these lawsuits are about fishing for journalist's sources, but it certainly seems pretty clear that this is all an intimidation campaign, by a silly little man who is an elected representative in Congress and simply can't handle criticism. Of course, as more evidence comes out that, at the very least, suggests that Nunes is somehow tied up with all of the mess around impeachment -- including reports revealing that the indicted Lev Parnas spoke by phone with Nunes -- he seems to be getting more and more upset with anyone calling him out.The latest is that fellow California Representative Ted Lieu noted on Twitter that Nunes' lawyer sent him a letter threatening to sue Lieu for saying "that Nunes conspired with Parnas."

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We all know various ideas for "protecting privacy online" are floating around Congress, but must all of them be so incredibly bad? Nearly all of them assume a world that doesn't exist. Nearly all of them assume an understanding of "privacy" that is not accurate. The latest dumb idea is to expand COPPA -- the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act -- that was put in place two decades ago and has been a complete joke. COPPA's sole success is in getting everyone to think that anyone under the age of 13 isn't supposed to be online. COPPA's backers have admitted that they used no data in creating and have done no research into the effectiveness of the law. Indeed, actual studies have shown that COPPA's real impact is in having parents teach their kids its okay to lie about their age online in order to access the kinds of useful services they want to use.The "age of consent" within COPPA is 13 -- and that's why a bunch of sites claim you shouldn't use their site if you're under that age. Because if a site is targeting people under that age, then it has to go through extensive COPPA compliance, which most sites don't want to do. The end result: sites say "don't sign up if you're under 13" and then lots of parents (and kids) lie about ages in order to let kids access those sites. It doesn't actually protect anyone's privacy.So... along comes Congress and they decide the way to better protect privacy online is to raise that "age of consent" to 16.

We all know various ideas for "protecting privacy online" are floating around Congress, but must all of them be so incredibly bad? Nearly all of them assume a world that doesn't exist. Nearly all of them assume an understanding of "privacy" that is not accurate. The latest dumb idea is to expand COPPA -- the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act -- that was put in place two decades ago and has been a complete joke. COPPA's sole success is in getting everyone to think that anyone under the age of 13 isn't supposed to be online. COPPA's backers have admitted that they used no data in creating and have done no research into the effectiveness of the law. Indeed, actual studies have shown that COPPA's real impact is in having parents teach their kids its okay to lie about their age online in order to access the kinds of useful services they want to use.The "age of consent" within COPPA is 13 -- and that's why a bunch of sites claim you shouldn't use their site if you're under that age. Because if a site is targeting people under that age, then it has to go through extensive COPPA compliance, which most sites don't want to do. The end result: sites say "don't sign up if you're under 13" and then lots of parents (and kids) lie about ages in order to let kids access those sites. It doesn't actually protect anyone's privacy.So... along comes Congress and they decide the way to better protect privacy online is to raise that "age of consent" to 16.

U.S. Wireless carriers are coming under heavy fire for failing to protect their users from the practice of SIM hijacking. The practice usually involves conning or bribing a wireless employee to port a victim's cell phone number right out from underneath them, letting the attacker then pose as the customer to potentially devastating effect. Carriers are facing numerous lawsuits from victims who say attackers used the trick to first steal their identity, then millions in cryptocurrency, or even popular social media accounts.Last week, six lawmakers, including Ron Wyden, wrote to the FCC to complain the agency isn't doing enough (read: anything) to pressure carriers into shoring up their flimsy security. This week, a group of Princeton researchers released a study showcasing how both traditional and prepaid wireless carriers remain incredibly vulnerable to such attacks despite several years worth of headlines. In the full study (pdf, hat tip ZDNet), the researchers showed how it was relatively easy to trick wireless company support employees into turning over far more private data than they should, helping to facilitate the illicit SIM swap:

The Chicago Police Department is one of the worst in the nation. There's simply no denying this.The Chicago PD ran its own black site for years, subjecting to arrestees to interrogations without access to legal counsel or notification of their families. Citizens effectively disappeared until the Chicago PD felt they had something worth booking them for. Only then would the paper trail begin and arrestees given access to their rights.Police officers spent years screwing with recording equipment to ensure anything they didn't want recorded wasn't recorded. This resulted in only a couple of silent films being produced during the controversial shooting of Laquan McDonald. The surviving footage -- the stuff that didn't disappear because of a supposed "disk error" -- contradicted the official narrative, even without the mysteriously-missing audio.There's more. Documents obtained through records requests shows thousands of misconduct investigations but very few punishments. The department used asset forfeiture funds to buy Stingray devices so it could bypass city government scrutiny of its surveillance tech purchases. Its gang database is a travesty even by gang database standards, filled with inaccuracies, sloppy paperwork, and a wholehearted lack of concern about the collateral damage it causes. And since it's so great at handling present crime, the PD has decided to take on future crime with its predictive policing program -- one that will allow cops to more proactively violate rights.In the near future, we'll get to learn even more details about the department's awfulness. A FOIA lawsuit filed by a former inmate has resulted in a win for the general public.

As we've talked about for some time, one of the long-tail effects of the increased use of intellectual property in American culture has been the supercharging effect it's had on fomenting a permission culture in general. This effect is compounding, as permission culture breeds IP protectionism, which breeds permission culture. The overall effect this has is to cause far too many people to believe that everything that exists can be owned and controlled.You can see the effect in action in the uptick of trademark registrations and claims of infringement in a recent survey result from Compumark.

We've talked in the past how efforts solely focused on "protecting privacy" without looking at the wider tech ecosystem and the challenges its facing may result in unintended consequences, and now we've got another example. Google has announced that it's beginning a process to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Looking at this solely through the lens of privacy, many privacy advocates are celebrating this move, saying that it will better protect user privacy. But... if you viewed it from a more competitive standpoint, it also does much to give Google significantly more power over the ad market and could harm many other companies. Former Facebook CSO, Alex Stamos' take is pretty dead on here:

Sure, gang databases seem like a good idea. Intel on known criminals is important and can help law enforcement keep tabs on the most problematic people in their patrol areas.Like many things that are great in theory, gang databases are awful in practice. The criteria for being "nominated" is vague and the people doing the nominating -- police officers -- aren't detail-oriented or too worried about tossing innocent people into the virtual clink.In Chicago, this has led to 15,000 people being (permanently!) listed in the PD's gang database despite there being no gang affiliation named and no reason given for the person's addition to the database. In Boston, wearing certain clothing items (like Nike shoes) or being assaulted by a gang member is enough to get a person added to the PD's gang database.The databases are so ridiculously inclusive cops have found themselves listed as gang members. One cop became a "gang member" simply because his family car was spotted on the same street as two motorcyclists wearing supposed gang t-shirts.Given this history of lousy gang databases run by people who display an almost-sociopathic desire to punish innocent people, it comes as no surprise the database the LAPD uses sucks just as hard.

We're back! It's been a lull over the holidays and we've gone a while without new podcast episodes, but now we've got several lined up for the coming weeks — and today we kick things off with a very interesting discussion. Many of you probably know about the controversy and concern over the Internet Society's sale of the .ORG domain registry to a private equity firm, but one prominent defender of the deal is ISOC trustee Mike Godwin, and today he joins us to explain his reasoning and try to convince Mike that the sale is a good idea.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Thanks to a FOIA request by Open the Government policy analyst Freddy Martinez, we now know someone's trying to sell cops cameras they can hide in… gravestones?

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You've heard me say it over and over again now: Masnick's Impossibility Theorem is that it is literally impossible to do content moderation at scale well. There will always be dumb mistakes. The latest example? Rogue archivist Carl Malamud had posted filmmaker Frank Capra's classic Prelude to War on YouTube. If you're unfamiliar with Prelude to War, it's got quite a backstory. During World War II, the US government decided that, in order to build up public support for the war, it would fund Hollywood to create blatant American propaganda. They had Frank Capra, perhaps Hollywood's most influential director during the 1930s, produce a bunch of films under the banner "Why We Fight." The very first of these was "Prelude to War."The film, which gives a US government-approved history of the lead up to World War II includes a bunch of footage of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Obviously, it wasn't done to glorify them. The idea is literally the opposite. However, as you may recall, last summer when everyone was getting mad (again) at YouTube for hosting "Nazi" content, YouTube updated its policies to ban "videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology." We already covered how this was shutting down accounts of history professors. And, now, it's apparently leading them to take US propaganda offline as well.Malamud received a notice saying the version of "Prelude to War" that he had uploaded had been taken down for violating community guidelines. He appealed and YouTube has rejected his appeal, apparently standing by its decision that an anti-Nazi US propaganda film financed by the US government and made by famed director Frank Capra... is against the site's community guidelines.

We've long talked about the problems with the FCC's Lifeline program, which was created by Reagan and expanded by Bush Junior (yet somehow earned the nickname "Obamaphone"). The $2 billion program doles out a measly $9.25 per month subsidy that low-income homes can use to help pay a tiny fraction of their wireless, phone, or broadband bills (enrolled participants have to choose one). But for years, the FCC has struggled to police fraud within the program, with big and small carriers alike frequently caught "accidentally" getting millions in taxpayer dollars they didn't deserve.Late last week another issue popped up with the government program, albeit of a different variety. Researchers over at MalwareBytes discovered that one-such government-subsidized low income wireless carrier, Assurance Wireless by Virgin Mobile, has been selling devices to low-income customers that are riddled with malware. One of the questionable apps pre-loaded on the device is dubbed "wireless update," and opens the door to malicious apps being installed without user awareness or consent:

In late October of last year, Facebook and WhatsApp sued Israeli surveillance tech provider NSO Group for using WhatsApp to deliver device-compromising malware. The lawsuit sought to use the CFAA to stop NSO from using WhatsApp as an attack vector.The lawsuit is dangerous. It asks the court to read the CFAA to cover attacks targeting users' accounts, rather than attacks on the service provider itself. The CFAA is already problematic enough without this sort of expansion. WhatsApp users certainly appreciate the efforts the developers make to protect them from malware, but asking a court to reinterpret an easily-abused law just so Facebook can go after NSO isn't an acceptable solution.NSO has been the target of non-stop criticism due to its willingness to sell malware and surveillance tech to countries with long histories of human rights violations. Its malware has also been observed targeting activists, dissidents, journalists, and critics of the governments that have deployed NSO malware.Facebook's lawsuit is going nowhere fast. While it's not uncommon for there to be a delay between the filing of a complaint and the defendant's response, NSO hasn't filed anything -- not even a notice of appearance from its corporate counsel -- since the filing of the suit.Facebook wants the court to take notice of this no-show. It's asking for the upcoming case management to be postponed indefinitely since it has heard nothing at all from NSO. But the administrative motion [PDF] is not just there to deal with a logistical problem. It's there to let the court know NSO isn't cooperating with the litigation.

Piracy is bad, full stop. That's the message repeated far too often by far too many in the content industries. Nothing as complicated as how copyright infringement impacts a content maker could be that simple, of course. Instead, piracy effects different content makers and companies in different ways. And, as we've seen in the past, when rightsholders actually try to connect with pirates and make good use of piracy, they often encounter beneficial results. When this occurs, detractors typically begin claiming all sorts of reasons for why those cases are unique: it only works for big companies that can absorb the sales losses, it only works for small companies that aren't generating much in sales anyway, it only works for some genres of video games and not others, etc.This reasoning is pointless. The fact is that smart use of the internet and piracy have too many success stories at this point to be written off in this way. And those success stories keep slamming into the stonewall shouts that piracy is always bad, such as a recent example where an indie developer put his own game up torrent sites, only to find a significant boost in sales as a result.