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It has become abundantly clear that Devin Nunes, who once co-sponsored the "Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act," has decided that the best strategy to all of his critics and any reporting that calls him out is to file completely bullshit SLAPP suits against those critics. It started with the lawsuit against a satirical cow and has continued with more lawsuits against reporters, political researchers, newspapers and political strategists. Given that he's gone on all in with that strategy, it's no surprise that he says he's going to sue CNN and the Daily Beast this week, both of whom reported on stories about Nunes that look pretty bad for him.Because it seems clear that Nunes really doesn't want you to read these stories, you should probably know that the Daily Beast story quotes indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas's lawyer Ed MacMahon saying that Parnas "helped arrange meetings and calls in Europe" for Nunes when he visited there last year, while CNN quoted a different Parnas lawyer saying that, among the meetings set up, was one between Nunes and disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor Victor Shokin. Let's be clear, if these reports are false, then it's possible Nunes would have a claim against Parnas (or potentially Parnas' lawyers,), but not the news orgs reporting what he said. And it seems telling that when asked whether or not the story was true, Nunes did not deny it:

Over the last few decades, companies like Securus have managed to obtain a pretty cozy, government-supported monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services. Like any monopoly, this has pretty traditionally resulted in not only sky high rates upwards of $14 per minute for phone calls, but comically poor service as well. Because these folks are in prison, and as we all know everybody in prison is always guilty, drumming up enough sympathy to convert into political momentum has long proven difficult. Recent efforts to do something about it were scuttled by FCC boss Ajit Pai, whose former clients included Securus.Apparently we're now taking the predatory idiocy that has been a cornerstone of prison phone service and applying it to... ebooks. Reason recently had a great write up on how the West Virginia Division of Corrections struck a deal in February with GTL (formerly Global Tel*Link), one of several government-pampered prison telecom monopolies. As part of that deal, prisoners would be given access to restricted tablets to access books and some internet content. The results are just as stupid as you might imagine:

I'm not sure when or if this has happened before: this week we've got cross-category winners in both the first and second place spots, both in response to the latest example of a SLAPP suit filed by a supposed free speech supporter. Norahc won first place for both insightful and funny by putting a name to this increasingly common hypocritical phenomenon:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, the war on encryption continued with the NSA Director fearmongering about a pending cyberattack, backed up by a misinformed WSJ op-ed, as we looked at how encryption back doors could harm intelligence gathering and military operations. The net neutrality attacks were also coming strong, with a misleading poll propping up the partisan divide, CenturyLink defending its lobbying for protectionist state laws, and Mark Cuban jumping on the bandwagon despite apparently not understanding what net neutrality is. Meanwhile, Nielsen finally caught up to reality and started trying to track streaming viewers after years of denying the existence of cord-cutting.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, while the heads of major movie studios were claiming that they just wanted to help indie filmmakers with their anti-piracy demands, others were seeing that movie piracy is largely the studios' fault (inasmuch as it's a problem at all) and new research was continuing to show how copying and imitation is good for society. Senators were beginning to question the secrecy of the ACTA negotiations, and we were noticing the inconsistency between companies' support for ACTA and support for a treaty providing more access to content for the visually impaired.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, we were wondering (with some perhaps-undue optimism...) whether the entertainment industry was losing its political power. BT was trying to get in on the extremely crowded music download store market, Radiohead was disappointingly charging fees for quoting its music even in clear cases of fair use, and one judge was thankfully telling the MPAA to slow down with the John Doe lawsuits. Meanwhile, UK drivers were ignoring driving-while-yakking laws just like everyone else, people were twisting the results of a study showing the educational benefits of computers to their phone ringing, and the problem of patent hoarding was getting enough attention to even show up in USA Today.

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Get the Kindle edition of Working Futures for just 99¢ »It's now been a month since we released Working Futures, our anthology of 14 speculative fiction stories about the future of work. And since 'tis now the season for sales, we're dropping the price on the Kindle ebook to just 99¢ until Monday, down from the regular price of $2.99. So if you haven't yet gotten your copy, now's the time!And for those of you doing some holiday shopping, remember that a paperback edition is also available and there's still time to get a copy before Christmas. And to learn more about the anthology and the process behind it, check out the episodes of our podcast in which we're joined by some of the authors.One more thing — if you've read the book or even just a few of the stories, please leave us a rating and a review on Amazon!The ebook sale only lasts until Monday, so get your copy before it's too late!

We've written many times about the right to repair and how various companies have basically destroyed the concept of ownership by putting all sorts of post-purchase restrictions on what you can do with the products you supposedly "bought." This began with copyright, but has morphed into other areas as well, including abusive and illegal claims about "warranty void if removed." I still believe that excessive copyright law is to blame for all of this, as physical goods manufacturers looked at the post-sale restrictions enabled by copyright law and immediately began to think of ways to use that on physical items.This lack of a "right to repair" is showing up in more and more places including, somewhat incredibly, the US military. The NY Times recently ran an op-ed from Capt. Elle Ekman, a logistics officer in the US Marine Corps., expressing her dismay at how the lack of right to repair laws is actually making it difficult to impossible for the US military to repair its own equipment. The whole thing is really stunning.

The botched drug raid in Houston that left two homeowners dead and one cop paralyzed from the waist down has resulted in additional criminal charges… against the cops.Officer Gerald Goines -- already facing felony murder charges for the raid that left Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle dead -- claimed an informant purchased heroin from Tuttle and saw guns in the house. One no-knock raid later, Nicholas and Tuttle were dead, killed by cops whose actions were set in motion by a warrant affidavit full of lies.The heroin supposedly sold to Goines' informant? Pulled from the console of Goines' cruiser. The controlled buy didn't happen either. No one has been able to locate the informant Goines claimed saw heroin and guns in the Tuttle residence. As a result, more than 1,400 cases Goines had a hand in have been placed under review. Two dozen have already been dismissed. The DA's office and the FBI have also opened their own investigations.The raid produced nothing the cops were looking for. There was no heroin. There were a couple of guns, but the gun Tuttle supposedly used to shoot at officers wasn't in the search inventory. All the officers found was personal use amounts of cocaine and marijuana. An independent forensic examination of the scene came to the conclusion that either the state's forensic unit sucks at what it does or that it was attempting to make the evidence fit the false narrative crafted by the officers who participated in the raid.Charges are being added to existing charges Officer Goines faces as the fallout from the raid continues, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Google's Stadia product, the company's bid to get gamers to give up their consoles and PC rigs and instead partake in Gaming as a Service, has had a rocky rollout to say the least. The service was already up against America's pathetic broadband coverage and usage caps. Add to that the quite muted applause that came from press and public reviews, not to mention the Obamacare-like rollout of the product, and you have to wonder if this is the kind of hit to a product's reputation that is at all recoverable. It's nearly as though Google developed a list of things that are important to gamers specifically and went out of its way to ensure it would get failing grades on each item.The latest issue is no different. To combat concerns about how streaming games would behave in terms of quality, Google made claims that the service would stream games in 4k resolution and at 60 frames per second. Reality, it would seem, doesn't line up with those claims.

Singapore's new "fake news" law has been deployed for the first time. The law the government is using to expand domestic surveillance and minimize dissent is definitely doing the latter. Bhavan Jaipragas reports the initial recipient of a "fake news" citation is none other than opposition leader Brad Bowyer.The supposedly "fake" news Bowyer posted to Facebook has been subjected to government scrutiny. The government's official rebuttal website -- unbelievably named "Factually" -- performs a point-by-point debunking of Bowyer's claims using its own set of facts. This should have been enough. The Singaporean government wields a great deal of power. This site proves the government doesn't need a fake news law, and yet it has one anyway, presumably because it provides so many side benefits.Bowyer alleged the Singapore government controls or directs investment companies Temasek and GIC's investment decisions. While it's impossible to say for sure, there certainly is room for conjecture without sliding into "fake news." Both are owned entirely by the Singapore government. Temasek officials have stated publicly the government is not consulted on "day-to-day business" but other companies have complained the government engages in opaque bidding processes that favor government-owned corporations and has displayed other forms of favoritism.So, Bowyer's implication could have been greeted by this response from the government and pointers to company statements to the contrary. Instead, it chose to invoke the law and issue a rebuttal -- one aimed at political opposition that has not held any significant amount of power in more than 50 years.Other things Bowyer implied were similarly uncontroversial. He suggested some bad investments had been made by the government. This seems like a normal thing for opposition government officials to do. But the Singapore government isn't willing to be criticized without putting the force of law behind its response.Fortunately, all the government ordered Bowyer to do is post a correction note on top of his original post with a link to the government's site. It's still government interference in political speech, but he wasn't fined, forced to issue a retraction, or otherwise told to stop talking about government-linked corporations.But that doesn't make the law innocuous. The government has its own mouthpiece -- the "Factually" section of the government's website -- to issue rebuttals and corrections. This makes the law extraneous. But the government likes the law because it allows the party in power -- the one in power for decades -- to more easily control the narrative. And it allows the government to control what's seen online by turning service providers into extensions of its domestic surveillance programs.This initial salvo may have been delivered with a light touch, but when things heat up around elections and the discussion of controversial legislation, expect the government's blows to land with a little more force.

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Copyright troll Mathew Higbee and lawyer Paul Levy, described as "the web bully's worst enemy", have been battling back and forth ever since Paul wrote up a thorough trashing of Higbee's trollish behavior nearly a year ago. Levy recently noted that more and more Higbee victims are coming to him, and that Higbee has actually told Levy that he "enjoys" that Levy is flooded with requests from Higbee's victims. Levy also notes that, in some cases, there is actual infringement happening, and then the question comes down to what is a reasonable amount to pay, and what will Higbee accept.One of the key things that Levy has called Higbee out on is his demand for attorney's fees, even in cases where that's not allowed under the law. This is often true in cases where the photographer failed to register their copyright, and they may only obtain "actual damages," rather than statutory damages. Attorney's fees cannot be counted in actual damages, but Higbee seems to hope that no one notices that. Levy has. In his latest post on all of this, hehighlights how Higbee tries to just ignore Levy when called on this point.

At no point has the cable industry or its executives been particularly keyed in to the "cord cutting" threat. As streaming video has chipped away at their subscriber bases, most cable giants like Spectrum and Comcast have responded by raising prices. And when confronted by growing evidence that cord cutting (defined as cutting the TV cord but keeping broadband) was a growing trend, most of these same executives spent years first denying cord cutting was happening, then trying to claim the only people doing so were lame man-children living in their moms' basements.Charter CEO Tom Rutledge was a key part of this cable executive myopia, both failing to see the trend coming, then failing utterly to respond to it in any meaningful way. The result: Charter has been losing subscribers for years, last quarter losing 75,000 cable TV customers. That's not as bad as the 1.36 million pay TV customers lost by AT&T in the same period, but it's not what you'd advertise as "good," either.Having no meaningful reputation on this subject to stand on, Rutledge last week tried to insist that the threat of users cancelling bloated, costly pay TV bundles and moving to streaming was a phenomenon that would soon slow down:

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Germany is Angela Merkel's party. She led it for 18 years before resigning last year as leader, but remaining as Chancellor of Germany until 2021. It is a party that has often held the reins of power in Germany, but has seen a steady decline in membership over the last 30 years. From a peak of nearly 800,000 in 1990, it is now down to around half that. According to figures on Wikipedia, in 2012, the members' average age was 59 years, and 6% of the Christian Democrats were under 30 years old. In other words, it is German's party of old fuddy-duddies. Against that historical background, the following passage from its "Digital Charter", agreed during its recent party conference, is noteworthy (original in German pdf):

We've been on this for some time now, but the explosion in the craft brewing industry has led to a likewise explosion in trademarks for individual brews and breweries. It's a problem very specific to the craft brewing industry for a number of reasons. First, this trademarking practice deviates from the tradition in the industry, which was one in which craft breweries were largely amicable and permissive with their cleverly named beers. Second, the explosive growth is quickly running into a roadblock of language, in which only so many words can be combined to name brews, even as the number of those brews on offer continues its exponential growth. Third, and perhaps most importantly, craft brewing is now big business, such that many macro-breweries are now gobbling up craft breweries, and those macros tend to be more litigious and more often engage in trademark bullying.It's why, for several years now, we've talked about the coming trademark disaster for the industry, including highlighting legal experts for that industry trying to sound the alarm bells. None of this has slowed down the problem however, with the latest being that, to nobody's surprise, 2018 was a record year for beer trademarks being granted in the UK.

A few weeks ago we wrote about a privacy bill in the House that seemed unlikely to go anywhere, and now we have the same thing from the Senate: a new privacy bill from Senator Maria Cantwell, called COPRA for "Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act." For months it had been said that Cantwell was working on a bipartisan effort to create a federal privacy law, so the fact that this bill only has Democratic co-sponsors (Senators Schatz, Klobuchar and Markey) doesn't bode well for its likelihood of success.The basic features of the bill are to give more power and resources to the FTC to enforce "digital privacy" and also allowing state Attorneys General to enforce the law. And... as with the House bill it includes a private right of action. This is something that many privacy organizations do favor, but still seems likely to be a disaster in practice. Letting anyone sue for privacy violations when no one actually agrees what "privacy means" is a recipe for a ton of nuisance lawsuits. If this bill actually had a chance, it could lead to the rise of "privacy trolls." Even in the most well meaning sense of trying to protect privacy, the fact that so many people disagree over what should actually be private and what privacy means, would create quite a legal clusterfuck.One thing this bill does that the House bill would not, is to pre-empt "directly conflicting state laws." That's important for any federal bill, as otherwise companies will have to figure out how to comply with many different (and sometimes conflicting) standards and rules from multiple different states. At least this bill would prevent that. As Consumer Reports notes in its write-up of the bill, it is good to have more alternatives out there, and the bill does have some useful ideas in terms of protecting privacy:

Earlier this year leaked data revealed that the Department of Motor Vehicles in numerous states has spent years selling citizen data to a laundry list of third parties, often without making such financial relationships or data transfers clear to patrons. Some of the data wound up being sold to the usual suspects (auto insurance and credit reporting companies being the most obvious), but much of it is routinely sold to more dubious third-party outfits and private investigators, which fairly obviously poses a risk to folks dealing with stalkers and psychotic exes.A new report this week revealed that the California DMV alone is making $50 million annually selling this data to a laundry list of companies and third parties:

Earlier this month, within the domain name world, there were significant concerns raised upon the news that Internet Society (ISOC), the (perhaps formerly?) well-respected nonprofit that helps "provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education, access, and policy" had agreed to sell off the Public Interest Registry, which is the registry that manages all .org top level domain (TLD) names, to a private equity company called Ethos Capital. Just having a public interest nonprofit selling off a part of its operations to a private equity group would be trouble enough, but the details make the story look much, much worse.Just a few months ago, ICANN, a different non-profit that is in charge of coordinating and managing the various top level domain namespaces, and figuring out who gets to manage the associated registries (and, which has been subject to years of controversy regarding poor accountability and transparency, along with accusations of self-dealing), had announced that it was eliminating the price caps on the .org TLD. For most of the past decade, the ICANN agreement regarding the .org TLD space had held that .org domains had a maximum top price of $8.25 per year per domain.ICANN claimed that it was making changes to the .org contract to "better conform" with the base registry agreement that ICANN had with other TLDs, tons of which have come on the market over the past few years. However, seeing as the .org TLD is one of the oldest ones on the web, and which has generally been considered (though, not exclusively) to be used for things like non-profits and community organizations, many people were reasonably concerned about the lifting of the price cap. Indeed, in response to ICANN's request for comment, the comments went overwhelmingly against the removal of the price cap.But ICANN did it anyway.And, then, just a few months later, the Internet Society sells off the registry to a private equity firm.And it gets worse. Remember how I mentioned earlier the years-long concerns about ICANN and self-dealing?

Australia's government is planning to revamp its defamation law. Good. Because it's all kinds of fucked up. The law that's in place has encouraged all sorts of litigation from people who would prefer to sue service providers and social media platforms, rather than the people who actually said defamatory things.But it's unclear what sort of reform the government actually has in mind. Australia's Attorney General Christian Porter says the country's defamation law is "unfair." It's certainly not a good law, but Porter thinks it doesn't strike a "perfect balance" between protecting journalists from being hit with bogus lawsuits and protecting individuals from being defamed.He's right. The law doesn't strike the right balance. But he's wrong about how to fix it. Very wrong.

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We've spent many years pointing out that the freak out over Huawei equipment possibly being compromised by the Chinese government still remains without evidence to back it up. This does not mean that it's not there. But we've just noted that many (especially in the US) keep stating it as if it's factual, despite a Congressional investigation that turned up nothing (not to mention competitor Cisco fanning the flames of the attacks on Huawei, and the fact that the NSA is already known to compromise telco equipment for the US government). The usual response to pointing this out is to highlight that most large and successful Chinese companies have close relationships with the Chinese government (because they need to) and that Huawei's founder, Ren Zhengfei, was an engineer in the Chinese military. This is enough for many people to assume that the company would actively sabotage its own equipment to help the Chinese government.As we've noted, there still is no actual evidence to prove this, though it's understandable why some might be cautious or concerned about it. Huawei insists that it has not backdoored its own equipment. No matter what you think about trusting Huawei equipment, hopefully everyone can agree that the company's decision to sue critics in France for pointing out the company's close relationship with the Chinese government, is an obnoxious SLAPP effort that should never have happened.

While the DOJ and FCC have rubber stamped T-Mobile's controversial $26 billion merger with Sprint, the megadeal still faces stiff opposition from more than a dozen state AGs. What began as a coalition of ten states had been slowly expanding over the last few months to include states like Texas. Collectively, state AGs have made it very clear that every meaningful economic metric indicates the deal will erode competition, raise rates, and result in thousands of layoffs as redundant employees are inevitably eliminated.In response, T-Mobile lobbyists have been working overtime trying to convince some states to back off their opposition in exchange for promises history suggests there's little chance they'll actually adhere to. Case in point: Texas AG Ken Paxton announced Monday morning he'd be quitting the lawsuit coalition after T-Mobile promised more jobs and better broadband coverage. But the promises themselves were kept vague, and there was, you'll note, zero mention of what happens should T-Mobile not meet them:

The Fifth Amendment prevents compelled production of passwords, the top court in Pennsylvania has ruled. (h/t ACLU) It joins a handful of other state courts finding passwords to be testimonial, including Indiana, Illinois, and Florida. Unfortunately, there's no SCOTUS opinion uniting the states, so Fifth Amendment coverage remains spotty.Securing rights remains the job of unsympathetic defendants. The state's child porn prosecution is likely to stall out with its main supply of potential evidence inaccessible. Despite the defendant basically admitting the computer law enforcement seized contained other child porn images ("we both know what's on there") and that he alone used the computer and could decrypt it, the court says [PDF] the state's foregone conclusion assertions aren't enough to render the Fifth Amendment useless.That was the state's argument: the seized computer likely has child porn on it, based on the defendant's admissions and the investigative work that tracked porn downloads/uploads to his address. The state's Superior Court found the government's arguments persuasive, but only by drastically narrowing the scope of its focus.

If it generates records -- especially third-party records -- the government is going to come asking for them.Not only is Uber's ride-hailing service subject to a bizarre and inconsistent set of state-level regulations, it's also a storage facility containing plenty of data about people's travels. Taking an Uber may keep a rider's license plate off the ALPR radar, but the government can still track people's movements by asking Uber for customer data, which presumably includes where they traveled and when.Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch says government agencies are taking more of an interest in Uber's data collection, according to the company's latest transparency report:

Hot damn. A proper application of the Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision. (via FourthAmendment.com)The Rodriguez decision -- while ultimately not helpful to Dennys Rodriguez -- put a small damper on pretextual traffic stops. This isn't to say cops cannot engage in pretextual stops. They can. They can imagine almost any violation of traffic laws to initiate a stop and then angle for a consensual vehicle search after that.The Supreme Court's ruling said a traffic stop ends when the objective ends. If someone is speeding, the issuance of a warning or citation ends the stop. No waiting around for a drug dog. No endless pestering of the driver in hopes of getting a peek in the trunk. It also made it clear a Fourth Amendment violation is a Fourth Amendment violation, no matter how short the interval between the end of the stop and the arrival of a drug dog or the permission to perform a search.Cops have tried to cut it close by making stops short but having a K-9 unit nearby to do a sniff while paperwork is completed. Sometimes it works. Sometimes there's enough stuff going on cops can talk courts into believing reasonable suspicion to extend the stop existed.But more and more, this stuff that cops have been doing for years doesn't work. In this case, the existence of a body camera recording puts the court on the side of the defendant. Score one for civilians and accountability. Without this footage, this decision might have gone the other way.Deputy Cody O'Hare started following a car because he thought it was driving too slow in the fast lane. The rental car was only doing 60 mph in a 70-mph speed zone, which is a violation of Iowa state law. Driving slower than the speed limit is permissible, but a failure to move into an unimpeded right-hand lane isn't.The traffic stop was initiated but it soon became clear Deputy O'Hare could not have cared less about the perceived infraction. From the decision [PDF]:

Copyright troll Richard Liebowitz (who once got so offended that he was called a copyright troll that he asked a judge to "redact" the phrase, only to have the judge double down on calling him a troll)... He's been sanctioned for lying to the court, he's been sanctioned for failing to comply with court orders, and is currently facing some serious penalties for lying about the death of his grandfather to a judge (which resulted in the most ridiculous letter he had a family friend send to the court, chalking such mistakes up to inexperience). But Liebowitz has a ton of experience in getting the law wrong. Hell, it was over two years ago that we wrote about him getting a judicial smackdown so bad that the judge began it by stating:

Even more alarming news has surfaced about Amazon's Ring doorbell/camera and the company's ultra-cozy relationship with police departments.Since its introduction, Ring has been steadily increasing its market share -- both with homeowners and their public servants. At the beginning of August, this partnership included 200 law enforcement agencies. Three months later, that number has increased to 630.What do police departments get in exchange for agreeing to be Ring lapdogs? Well, they get a portal that allows them to seek footage from Ring owners, hopefully without a warrant. They also get a built-in PR network that promotes law enforcement wins aided by Ring footage, provided the agencies are willing to let Ring write their press releases for them.They also get instructions on how to bypass warrant requirements to obtain camera footage from private citizens. Some of this is just a nudge -- an unstated quid pro quo attached to the free cameras cops hand out to homeowners. Some of this is actual instructions on how to word requests so recipients are less likely to wonder about their Fourth Amendment rights. And some of this is Ring itself, which stores footage uploaded by users for law enforcement perusal.If it seems like a warrant might slow things down -- or law enforcement lacks probable cause to demand footage -- Ring is more than happy to help out. Footage remains a subpoena away at Ring HQ. And, more disturbingly, anything turned over to police departments comes with no strings attached.Statements given to Sen. Edward Markey by Amazon indicate footage turned over to cops is a gift that keeps on giving.

What is it with people who pretend to be free speech "warriors" only to rush to sue someone for stating an opinion about them? And why are so many of them Canadian?!? We've already covered folks like Jordan Peterson suing a university because some professors said mean things about him in a private meeting, and Gavin McInnes suing SPLC for calling the group he founded a "hate group." And now we have Sheila Gunn Reid, who works for The Rebel Media, which is sort of the Canadian equivalent of Breitbart. Sheila pretends to be a free speech supporter in dozens upon dozens of tweets. Here are just a few:

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As a recent post underlines, law enforcement agencies around the world are still trying to argue that things are "going dark", and that strong encryption is bad and should be made illegal. Techdirt and many others have pointed out what an extremely stupid idea this would be. Here's a further reason why the US shouldn't ban strong encryption: it might lead to the EU making data transfers across the Atlantic much harder. The possibility has emerged thanks to some formal questions to the European Commission (pdf) submitted by a Member of the European Parliament, Moritz Körner. They include the following:

Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but unpopular reality: the technology is being over-hyped to spike lagging cell phone and network gear sales, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that faster 5G networks won't be a good thing when they arrive at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings to the point where, at least in tech policy circles, 5G has become a sort of magic pixie dust, capable of fixing anything.AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available. And both companies have worked overtime to suggest 5G will revolutionize things like brain surgery, when a closer look past the press release usually reveals such claims to be little more than silly bunk.Whereas normally it would be journalism's role to point these falsehoods out and deflate marketing hype, apparently major papers have decided to join the fun. The Washington Post and AT&T this week announced a new partnership that both sides claim in press materials will somehow revolutionize journalism. Says AT&T of the new effort:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a reminder that cliches exist for a reason, with Stephen T. Stone offering up the simplest apt response to the claim that "stronger copyright law will help, not harm, revenue":

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, the incoming head of the House Intelligence Committee was... Devin Nunes, talking about how surveillance reform is unnecessary — though former CIA/NSA Director Michael Hayden was saying that only ISIS would benefit from the proposed USA Freedom Act, and a defense official was telling the intelligence community to grow up and stop blaming Ed Snowden, and a former NSA executive was claiming he challenged bulk phone records collection but was rebuffed. The USA Freedom Act did fail to pass the Senate this week, but for stupid reasons.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, old-school journalists were busy getting mad about the internet, while clinging to things like optimistic studies where people say they'd pay for online news. The MPAA and Sony Pictures were backing down after shutting down a town's wifi over a single movie download the previous week, but the MPAA was still waging war on DVRs and being joined by the cable industry, while Sony Pictures announced its best box office year ever only a month after the CEO was moaning about piracy killing the movie business. Really, what holds back online entertainment business models was mainly legacy entertainment companies making it impossible for them to survive. But the copyright maximalists were pleased about how things were going in the UK, with Peter Mandelson proposing sweeping powers in the much-anticipated Digital Economy Bill aka copyright industry wish-list.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy emerged as an early example of a musician who understood the internet, and we took a bigger look at why user generated content should change how we view copyright. The MPAA officially moved ahead with its plan to follow in the RIAA's footsteps by suing a bunch of John Doe file-sharers, and Hollywood was just getting started on the anti-DVR war that would continue for years by trying to have commercial skipping deemed illegal (and of all people, it was John McCain who recognized just how ridiculous this was). Meanwhile, Steve Ballmer made some FUD waves with his claim that anyone who uses Linux will be sued for patent infringement — which was quickly rebuffed by the author of the study he said the idea was based on.

In our ongoing discussions about the new platform wars going on between Steam and the Epic Store, perhaps we've been unfair to another participant in those wars: EA's Origin. Except that no we haven't, since Origin is strictly used for EA published games, and now EA is pushing out games on Steam as well. All of which is to say that Origin, somehow, is still a thing.Enough of a thing, actually, for EA to have tried to do something beneficial around Cybersecurity Month. For Origin users that enabled two-factor authentication on the platform, EA promised to reward those users with a free month of Origin Access Basic. That free month would give those that had enabled better security on their accounts access to discounts on new games and downloads of old games. Cool, right?Well, sure, except that the method by which EA decided to make good on its promise basically scared the shit out of a whole bunch of people.

It's a small win for the plaintiff -- probably less than $100 in total -- but it's a bigger win for the residents of Portland, Oregon. The Multnomah County Court says the city has been routinely overcharging public records requesters for fulfilling routine public records requests. (via Merrick Law, LLC)The brief ruling [PDF] contains enough detail to show how city employees inflated costs they passed on to requesters who were made to pay up front before document searches would commence. In this case, the requester (Alan Kessler) sought metadata from four government email accounts. The city first gave him an estimate of $205.61, based on an estimated two hours of search and prep time with a 39% markup for "overhead costs."As the court notes, the city admitted the overhead costs collected rarely went to cover employee overhead. On top of that, the hourly rate used was calculated using the hourly wages of the employees performing the search. This sounds reasonable, but it actually isn't. In this case, the search was performed by two of the city's higher-paid employees, both of whom appear to be overqualified for the work they'd been tasked to do.

For years, I've argued that since patents and copyrights are government granted monopolies, it seems pretty straightforward to me that abusing those laws to stifle speech, innovation, or competition should be viewed as an antitrust violation. It's taken a while, but earlier this decade, the Supreme Court actually agreed with regards to patents (it's not there yet on copyright...).So for all the talk about using antitrust laws against the tech giants, perhaps there's a much better use of antitrust law in taking down abusive patent trolling operations. At least that's the theory in a new lawsuit filed by Intel and Apple against patent troll Fortress Investment Group LLC. As the lawsuit notes, Fortress was a struggling company that was acquired by SoftBank in 2017 for $3.3 billion dollars, and then turned into a massive patent troll.The complaint is a really good read on how patent trolls could violate antitrust laws. It even starts out by explaining how trolls violate the patent clause of the Constitution by not "promoting the progress."

Techdirt has written a number of stories about museums and art galleries claiming copyright on images of public domain works. That's really not on for institutions that are supposedly dedicated to spreading appreciation of the masterpieces they hold. The latest example of this unfortunate habit is a complex and fascinating tale involving the famous bust of Nefertiti, found a century ago, currently displayed in Berlin's Staatliche Museen.A rather improbable story that people had managed surreptitiously to scan the bust at high resolution piqued the interest of the artist Cosmo Wenman. It seemed likely that the 3D scan files involved had been produced by the museum itself, so Wenman decided to use German freedom of information laws to request them officially. As his long and fascinating post on the 3D Nefertiti saga explains, the German museum was singularly unhelpful:

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I honestly did not think I'd ever be writing about Sacha Baron Cohen's thoughts on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, but this is 2019 and nothing makes sense any more. And because nothing makes sense any more, I'm going to start out discussing Sacha Baron Cohen's views on CDA 230 by actually talking about magician Penn Jillette. Jillette has a podcast called Penn's Sunday School that is often really, really good. And he actually talked about Sacha Baron Cohen in the latest episode -- which, bizarrely, is not on the page I linked to, because it appears that Penn and his team stopped updating their podcast webpage last month.This was the second time in recent episodes that Jillette talked about Cohen, and he made a really great point, noting that Sacha Baron Cohen and many of his supporters believe that what Cohen is doing is showing the "true nature" of how awful people are, by getting them to do awful things. But, Jillette argues, in a fairly compelling way, the opposite may actually be true. His belief is that Cohen is actually demonstrating how nice most people are, in that when they're approached by someone asking them to say or do something, they want to be nice and accommodate the person who's asking. The argument, which Penn explains in much more detail, is that if someone is talking to you in person, you want them to like you and you want to be nice to them, and thus if they ask you do something silly or crazy, you might just do it out of kindness or, in some cases, just "playing along." And thus, his argument is that Sacha Baron Cohen totally misunderstands his own comedy and what it shows about human nature and how people "really are."He made the argument more fully last week, in the November 11th episode (if you can find that), where he said:

For years now, streaming video providers like HBO and Netflix have taken a relatively lax approach to password sharing. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has gone so far as to say he "loves" password sharing, and sees it as little more than free advertising. Execs at HBO have similarly viewed password sharing in such a fashion, saying it doesn't hurt their business. If anything, it results in folks signing up for their own accounts after they get hooked on your product, something you'll often see with kids who leave home, or leave college and college friends behind.But some recent shifts in the sector suggest that may soon be changing. HBO was bought by AT&T, which tends to have a more...monopolist-esque mindset when it comes to making consumers happy. And as Netflix has grown larger and more powerful, many of its more consumer friendly positions (like oh, supporting a healthy open internet) have fallen by the wayside. And there's a growing coalition--spearheaded by Charter CEO Tom Rutledge--that is intent on portraying a fairly limited password sharing problem as "insane" and "piracy."Rutledge, whose "get off my lawn" rants on this subject have been going on for years, has spearheaded the rise of the "Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment," an organization Charter, AT&T, and Netflix all belong to. As that coalition has made cracking down on password sharing a core priority, Netflix executive rhetoric on this subject has started to shift, with Co-Founder and former CEO Marc Randolph dropping some strong hints to Yahoo that a password sharing crackdown may be coming:

Confidential informants are only as trustworthy as their law enforcement handlers. The FBI isn't the only agency to have problems with handling confidential human sources (CHSs), but it's one of the more notorious, thanks to its botched handling of James "Whitey" Bulger.This questionable legacy lives on, as the FBI's Inspector General reports. "Whitey" Bulger is name-checked early on in the report [PDF], setting an appropriately cautionary tone for the rest of the document.The FBI loves its CHSs. Without them, it can't radicalize random people into arrestable would-be terrorists. Without the assistance of criminals, it apparently can't go after other criminals. While a certain amount of criminal activity is necessary to maintain cover, the FBI doesn't appear to be keeping close tabs on its informants, which isn't going to minimize collateral criminal damage during investigations.The FBI spends $42 million a year paying CHSs but doesn't seem to care whether that money is being wisely spent. The actual number of informants the FBI employs is redacted, but the IG notes that 20% of these are "long-term," having been used by the FBI for at least five years.The longevity of CHSs is a concern that the FBI doesn't seem to be concerned about. The longer the FBI uses the same informants, the greater the risk they'll be exposed. But beyond that, there's the problem of familiarity. Every five years, CHSs are supposed to be assigned new handlers in order to prevent agents from becoming too close to their charges. The FBI isn't doing this. In fact, the FBI doesn't appear to track length of service with any accuracy, which means the agency potentially has more "Whitey" Bulgers on its hands: criminals whose close relationship with a single handler allows them to engage in far more criminal activity than guidelines (and human decency) would allow.According to this report, the FBI's inability to properly track CHSs has led to a backlog of required "enhanced reviews" -- the validation process put in place to ensure proper handling of long-term informants. To make matters worse, the FBI unilaterally decided to remove "long-term" as a potential risk factor for CHSs, allowing these problematic informant-handler relationships to fly under the radar.The few people performing CHS validations are further restricted by FBI policy. It's almost as though the FBI has decided that what it doesn't know can't hurt it. The limitations prevent reviewers from accessing anything more than one year of files, denies them access to other helpful FBI databases, and discourages them from providing recommendations or drawing conclusions from the limited info they can actually access.The FBI also has problems with automation. The system does not automatically flag CHSs when they hit the five-year mark. This has to be done manually by the informant's handler. Without this feature, handlers and reviewers are left in the dark about CHS longevity, which further hinders the review process and adds to the backlog the FBI will never catch up to at its current review pace.The FBI knows this is a problem but continues not to care.

Karl Bode had a nice write up earlier this week about the ongoing issues with Stadia, Google's play to get gamers to give up their home consoles and GaaS (Game as a Service). As Karl noted, Stadia faces inherent challenges in these United States, given the laughably substandard broadband resulting from full regulatory capture at the hands of a few telecom players. In addition, Google, with all of its resources, seems fully committed to punishing early adopters with a big price tag for what is essentially a public beta alongside some reports of failed hardware deliveries. So big price tag, maybe you get what you bought in order to use the streaming service, and maybe that streaming service works with your broadband connection. Cool.Well, it looks as though Google is going for some kind of failure trifecta here, as reports are now surfacing that there was a SNAFU with how access to the streaming site itself is being granted, with pre-payers being promised admittance in order of purchase, while in reality access to the service is being granted without any sense of order.

Time to start sending out some customer satisfaction surveys to New York City residents. After all, they're the ones paying for this. (via Boing Boing)

SLAPP suits and SLAPP threats are flying back and forth these days. The latest is that Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, who is a key player in the impeachment hearings, is threatening a highly questionable defamation lawsuit against Fox News and Laura Ingraham, because she had on a guest who suggested Vindman was guilty of espionage (he's not). The threat letter was sent by David Pressman, a lawyer who works for Boies Schiller Flexner, a law firm which has a history of sending around bogus threat letters to the media for doing reporting.Even if you think that Fox News is terrible (it is), that Ingraham is not to be trusted (she's not), and that her guests are fools (they are), this threat is still completely bogus and silly.

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Steven Biss is the lawyer who filed Devin Nunes' SLAPP suit against a satirical cow on Twitter (and against Twitter and political consultant Liz Mair), as well as Nunes' various other lawsuits against a variety of journalists and critics.It appears that a former Nunes aide is now using Biss for similar purposes. Earlier this week, Biss, representing White House staffer and former Nunes' aide, Kashyap "Kash" Patel, sued Politico and reporter Natasha Bertrand, along with Politico publisher Robert Allbritton, in yet another SLAPP suit in Virginia (hey, Virginia, time to improve your anti-SLAPP laws, please). The lawsuit is silly and performative, rather than serious. It is filed about a Politico article by Bertrand, that reports Fiona Hill, the former senior advisor on the National Security Council, testified during the impeachment hearings that Patel passed questionable information about Ukraine on to Trump, and a later article that Trump (incorrectly) may have believed that Patel was the NSC's expert on Ukraine. The article is carefully reported.The defamation complaint is... not. To understand just how silly and performative it is, you only need to read the opening paragraph. This is not how you file a lawsuit if you wish to convince a judge. It's how you file a lawsuit if you wish to get cheered on by the Trump-supporting media:

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People keep suing the Southern Poverty Law Center and they just keep losing. More specifically, certain types of people keep suing the SPLC and losing. The type suing most frequently are individuals with bigoted beliefs who aren't too thrilled the SPLC considers them to be bigots.The key word is "considers." The "Hate Map" the SPLC compiles lists individuals and entities the Center considers to be spreaders of hate. It includes litigants like Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and Truth In Action Ministries, the latter of which has made it clear it hates both the sinner and the sin when it comes to anyone veering from the sexual straight and narrow.The latest lawsuit trying to turn protected opinion into defamation involves a Baltimore city lawyer who claimed it was defamatory for the SPLC to say he had links to white supremacist groups when he had links to white supremacists groups.

For a couple of years now, AT&T has been trampling net neutrality without much of anybody giving a damn. Like many ISPs eager to take full advantage of limited US broadband competition, AT&T imposes arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees on its broadband lines. If you're an AT&T broadband customer who uses more than 150 GB (DSL) to 1 terabyte (fiber) monthly, you'll suddenly face having to pay $10 per each additional 50 gigabytes consumed. Again to be clear: there's no technical reason for these limits to exist outside of nickel-and-diming captive customers.While these caps have been in place for a while, a few years ago AT&T began eliminating these restrictions for its broadband customers if you use AT&T's own streaming platforms. Use Netflix instead, and you'll face a significantly higher broadband bill. This is by any measure a net neutrality violation because it allows AT&T to use its power as network operator to try and stake out a distinct advantage.Speaking at Recode's Code Media conference this week, AT&T President John Stankey was asked a bit about the potential for AT&T to abuse its power as newfound owner of both the content and the conduit. His response was fairly stunning:

Laura Loomer, professional troll, these days seems most well known for all the internet platforms that have banned her: