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In the 18th Century the Founding Fathers were worried about tyrants. They were worried about government officials abusing the powers of their office and the fate of the nation if there were no check on their power. In the 21st Century those concerns have hardly faded. Today we have a presidential administration that, if nothing else, has publicly (and privately) attempted to turn the ship of state against multiple political opponents, and with such an audacious expectation of impunity that it leaves no basis to believe it would not do the same to anyone else who stands against it.It now it demands more tools to perpetuate these attacks. At a time when the survival of our democracy most critically depends on the people's ability to push back against these sorts of abuses of governmental power, the government seeks to hobble the public's ability to do it –- this time by destroying the ability to keep their communications secret. Because that's what encryption "backdoors" do: completely and utterly obliterate any technical ability to maintain the secrecy in one's data. You can't just backdoor them a little bit -– either communications are secure from all prying eyes, or none of them. And this administration is insisting that it should get to see them all.This administration is not, of course, the first to have demanded the ability to get access to people's data. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have made similar demands (and even helped themselves to it). Each time they have articulated policy arguments for why the government should have the power to read people's private communications, and sometimes these arguments have even been compelling. But none have ever outweighed the critical liberty interest that depends on being able to prevent government access to all of everyone's private communications, and today we see exactly why.The Constitution guarantees the personal freedom necessary to stand against a tyrannical state actor prone to misusing its power. We have been sloppy over the years in preserving that liberty legally, thanks to the implicit assumption that the government is inherently one of the Good Guys and the people seeking to keep their data private presumably are the Bad Guys. It is a view that has infected our understanding of the Fourth Amendment and allowed the government to invade people's privacy in ways the text of the Constitution never allowed. But today we see with painful clarity how it was also a view predicated on wholly unsound assumptions.Today we regularly see our President, Chief Executive, and most senior official charged with enforcing our laws not only routinely flout these very same laws but also routinely threaten those whose sole "crime" is standing against him with vindictive, and meritless, ruinous prosecution. These are not the actions of a benevolent government eager to protect the public from wrongdoing. They are the actions of an autocrat all too happy to victimize people as willingly as the most hardened criminal.Which leaves the public on its own to protect itself, and already significantly hampered. It is bad enough that Trump makes it so treacherous to speak out against him publicly. But when we can no longer speak publicly it becomes all the more important that we be able to speak privately – yet that is exactly what this administration is trying to prevent in demanding encryption backdoors. Should it get its wish, no one will be able to keep secrets from this administration, or challenge its power. It will be able to continue its abuses unchecked.This untenable state of affairs is not what the Founders had in mind, what the Constitution permits, or what our continued democracy can tolerate. It is thus vital to resist this backdoor demand.

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The NSA isn't the only agency to abuse its surveillance powers. The FBI's ability to access unminimized data harvested by the NSA has resulted in abuse after abuse, as the FBI loves to use the massive data haul to perform "backdoor searches" of its domestic targets.This concern has been raised repeatedly, most notably by Sen. Ron Wyden, who has been calling out surveillance abuses for years -- specifically calling out these backdoor searches and hinting (strongly) that they are much more prevalent than most people believed. Nothing much has been done about it, other than multiple federal agencies suggesting they too should be put on the ever-growing list of entities with access to the NSA's multiple collections.A FISA Court opinion released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) details even more abuse of the NSA's Section 702 collections by the FBI. When you give an agency the power to dig into massive amounts of data with minimal oversight, abuses will happen. But this goes further than "inadvertent" collections or erroneous access of unminimized data. This ruling [PDF] -- first reported on by the Wall Street Journal -- shows the FBI treats sensitive collections as its personal playground.

Last week we highlighted a study showing that your cable bill can be as much as 45 percent higher than the advertised price thanks to bullshit fees. Now a new study by Consumer Reports shows that up to 24 percent of your monthly cable bill is comprised of said bullshit fees. The fees are designed specifically for one purpose: to let companies falsely advertise one rate, then charge you significantly more money. It's effectively false advertising, but efforts to rein in the practice are fleeting to nonexistent, because creatively fleecing American consumers is just so hot right now.Consumer Reports examined 787 consumer cable bills from 13 top cable providers and found that while the average user paid around $156.71 per month for cable TV, users in reality paid $217.42 a month once fees were included. As such about 24 percent of your cable TV bill each month ($37.11) is made up of fees and hidden surcharges, generating about $450 per year per consumer for the industry, or about $28 billion in total.The report is quick to highlight how some of the bullshit fees (like the "regulatory recovery fee") are named in such a way to trick the consumer into blaming government. The group reached out to 74 consumer reps posing as a customer and found that support reps are pretty clearly trained to create that impression:

The government with the thinnest skin is at it again. Turkey can't handle being criticized in even the slightest way -- not after installing Recep "Gollum" Erdogan as president. A very, very long list of well-earned criticisms has led to an equally long list of retaliatory actions against the president's critics, which has included the misuse of other countries' laws to secure punishment of non-citizens and the jailing of of journalists declared to be terrorists by President Erdogan's government.The government that can't visit other nations without beating up the locals recently decided it needed to have a little one-on-one time with a US diplomat who interacted with a tweet the Turkish government didn't like.

How far would a cop go to break up an underage drinking party? Far enough to get sued in federal court. (h/t Peter Bonilla)Responding to a tip from a snitch app ("Tip411"), Mequon (WI) police officers rolled up on a house supposedly containing an underage drinking party. The officers first noticed four cars in the driveway and one parked in the street. Hardly indicative of a rager, but the officers had an anonymous tip and apparently nothing better to do.Officer Kristin Toryfter rang the doorbell but received no answer. She called the phone numbers of two of the house's residents -- John and Todd Reardon -- but was similarly rebuffed. What the officers could see from the driveway was "several young people" peeking out at them and various doors and windows closing.At some point, even more officers showed up, including shift supervisor Matthew Schossow. Schossow went around back to "secure the perimeter." Since fleeing teens are a constant threat to law enforcement, Officer Schossow decided to go traipsing across the curtilage to get a look inside the house. Peering through the blinds, Schossow saw -- and let's go to the decision [PDF] for this one...

Law enforcement agencies like to portray asset forfeiture as an important weapon in the Drug War arsenal -- one capable of toppling cartels and kingpins. Every so often, a large amount of cash and drugs is trotted out in front of reporters as evidence of this claim.The reality is much, much different. For all intents and purposes, civil asset forfeiture is a government crime of opportunity. Any search that yields cash is a win for the agencies that profit from the seizure, even when there's no evidence the cash taken has any link to criminal activity. Pretextual traffic stops, knock-and-talks, stop-and frisk programs… all of these have the potential to turn everyday police work into something profitable.WFPL's examination of the Louisville (KY) Metro PD's asset forfeiture paperwork shows the agency isn't really targeting drug traffickers and criminal organizations with its seizures. It's just lifting money from whoever it can, like people who've done nothing more than produced an offensive odor. (You are not misreading that sentence.)

As we hope you know by now, last week we released Working Futures, an anthology of short stories about the future of work in our world of rapidly advancing technology, inspired by settings we developed with a specially-designed scenario planning exercise (pick up your copy from Amazon in ebook or paperback format!) For this week's special episode of the podcast, we've brought in three of the authors whose stories are featured in the book— Katharine Dow, Christopher Hooton, and James Yu — to talk about the process of developing future scenarios and, of course, about their stories.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.

We've talked quite a bit lately about how the Blurred Lines decision, saying that having a similar "feel" in a song can be copyright infringement even if it's not a direct copy, has truly messed up the recording industry. Artists are afraid to even mention inspirations for fear of it leading to a lawsuit. New lawsuits are freaking out musicians and even have the RIAA complaining that maybe copyright protection has gone too far.It appears we've got another such lawsuit, this time against Lil Nas X, who had the undisputed "song of the summer" with "Old Town Road." Lil Nas X released his 7 EP earlier this summer, which included a couple versions of "Old Town Road," but also a collaboration with Cardi B called "Rodeo."And now they (and everyone else) have been sued over the song claiming that it infringes on a beat called "gwenXdonelee4-142" (catchy name that) that was incorporated into a song you probably haven't heard of: "Broad Day" by PuretoReefa and Sakrite Duexe.Now, what's important here is that complaint does not claim that Rodeo sampled Broad Day or even that it directly copied the original beat. It literally notes that they just have a "substantially similar" sound.

The situation at our borders is getting worse for some American citizens. I mean, all American citizens are likely dealing with more questions, more screening, and more general hassle now that the President has declared immigrants and asylum seekers to be a "national emergency."The Presidential narrative that people at border crossings are inherently dangerous has undoubtedly had an effect on the mindset of border agency personnel. But there's an added wrinkle, thanks to President Trump's rhetoric portraying journalists as liars and -- in multiple instances -- "enemies of the people." This, too, is having an effect on border personnel attitudes.Defense One News Editor Ben Watson ran into this when he was returning from an assignment in Denmark:

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As we've detailed a lot over the last week, the DOJ has decided that after years of failing to get backdoors mandated by warning about the "terrorism" bogeyman, it's decided to pick up the FOSTA playbook, and instead start focusing on child porn -- or what "serious people" now refer to as Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). It did this last week with an assist from the NY Times, who published an article with (legitimately) scary stories, but somehow blaming the internet companies... because they actually report it when they find such content on their networks. I've seen more than a few people, even those who generally have been strong voices on the encryption debate and against backdoors, waver a bit on this particular subject, and note that maybe there shouldn't be encryption on social media networks, because it might (as the narrative says) help awful people hide their child porn.Except... that's confusing a few different things. Mainly, it's mixing up the content moderation debate with the "lawful access" or "backdoors" debate. Yes, encryption makes it harder for the police to get in and see certain things, but that's by design. We live in a country with the 4th Amendment, in which we believe that it should be difficult for law enforcement to snoop deeply into our lives -- and that's always meant that some people will do and plot bad stuff out of the sight and hearing of law enforcement. Yet, if you were to look at law enforcement over the past 100 years, you can bet that they have many times more access to information about people today than they have in the past. The claim of "going dark" is laughable when you compare the information that law enforcement can get today even to what it could get 15 or 30 years ago.But, importantly, bringing CSAM into the debate muddies the water by pretending -- incorrectly -- that in an end-to-end encrypted world you can't do any content moderation, and there's simply no way for platforms to block or report certain kinds of content. Yet, as Princeton professor Jonathan Mayer highlights in a new paper, content moderation is not impossible in an encrypted system. It may be different than it is today, but it's still very much possible:

Obama's first FCC boss Julius Genachowski was a bit of a wishy washy mess, supporting any number of conflicting ideas at any given time depending on the audience he was talking to. And while his second term pick, Tom Wheeler, initially raised eyebrows given his history of lobbying for early-era telecom companies, he wound up being one of the better FCC bosses in agency history. Granted telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast might disagree, since he was one of the only FCC bosses in recent history actually willing to stand up to them in any meaningful way.Last week, a court (mostly) sided with the FCC in its repeal of Wheeler-era net neutrality rules. That said, the court also blocked FCC attempts to ban states from passing their own net neutrality rules, meaning the fight has simply shifted to the state level. In an overlooked piece over at the NY Times, Wheeler (who has been relatively quiet post tenure as his efforts are slowly demolished one by one in the Trump era) notes how ISPs will likely try to behave so long as the threat of state action remains:

The New York Times has published a lengthy report on ICE's surveillance network it uses to hunt down undocumented immigrants all over the country. The report is based on the results of public records requests, which show ICE's ability to utilize social media networks, dozens of law enforcement databases, and a bunch of private sector options to find the people they're looking for.This public records investigation mainly focuses on ICE's operations in the Pacific Northwest. The documentation used to compile it includes recordings of phone calls to local law enforcement agencies and interviews with detainees. Together, the hundreds of documents show ICE's breathtaking reach.

Techdirt has just written about how advanced digital technology can be used for less-than-benign purposes, simply because it is a tool that can be applied in both good and bad ways. A fascinating analysis by Jane Macfarlane in IEEE Spectrum explores something similar: how new technology being used as designed, and with only the best intentions, can nonetheless give rise to potentially serious problems. The article is about how the increasingly-popular navigation apps like Waze, Apple Maps, and Google Maps are "causing chaos
":

Last year, a federal court offered its sympathies -- but only limited recourse -- to a photographer who suffered a bogus "stop photographing us" arrest at the hands of a Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) cop.Avi Adelman, a freelance journalist, was photographing EMS personnel responding to an apparent overdose. DART officer Stephanie Branch decided this just wouldn't do. She approached Adelman and got between him and the scene he was photographing. The officer then started laying down bullshit about "establishing a perimeter" and how his documentation was violating the HIPAA rights of person being attended to.(If this crap about "HIPAA violations" sounds familiar, it's because law enforcement officers either don't understand how HIPAA works or they hope the person whose Constitutional rights they're violating doesn't understand how HIPAA works. This was the same excuse used by a Denver cop to detain a journalist who was recording the apparent arrest of a naked mentally-ill person in the middle of a public street. Just in case there are any cops lurking here, HIPAA violations occur when someone releases private medical info to unauthorized parties. It never happens when someone is suffering a medical emergency in a public area.)Back to the DART case: despite Officer Branch including twenty-three false or inaccurate statements in her account of the arrest, she managed to dodge being directly held responsible for her violation of Adelman's First Amendment rights. Since the Fifth Circuit didn't clearly establish a right to record public servants until 2017, Adelman's 2016 arrest happened too soon for him to use that precedent to pierce Branch's qualified immunity. But Officer Branch was still on the hook for the Fourth Amendment violation. She appealed, but going up a level hasn't changed anything for the officer.On appeal, the Fifth Circuit has upheld the lower court's decision, preventing Branch from eluding responsibility for violating Adelman's Fourth Amendment rights. Branch claimed she was unaware of the photography policy DART had put in place in 2014, which expressly permitted the actions Adelman was engaged in when Branch decided to arrest him.But Officer Branch's actions were so obviously unreasonable, another officer and an EMT had this conversation while Branch was hassling the journalist. From the decision [PDF]:

Last week, we wrote about the confusion of both the US's Solicitor General and Oracle's lead litigator, Annette Hurst, in insisting that APIs are no different than software (and even that they're executable, which they are not). But, what's kind of incredible in this case is that, even as Oracle is so obsessively focused on bringing down Google, if it actually wanted to help bring it down, it should want to lose this case.That may sound backwards, but let me explain. I've been talking a lot lately about the concept of protocols over platforms as a way to limit the dominance of giant platforms -- indeed, it's the only reasonable way I can see of leading to real competition in a world of network effects. Any traditional "break up" plan doesn't work, because you can't "break up" a global network in the same way you could break up many historical companies. But, what you can do is get them to open up their APIs or to make it easier to get data out of their systems in a way that is interoperable with other platforms.But that's much, much harder if APIs are locked down with copyright, as Oracle is pushing for. To be fair, Google itself has always been much more open than lots of other companies in similar situations, but if we want true adversarial interoperability, as Cory Doctorow has highlighted, one way to help that along is to make sure that APIs can't be locked down, and that reverse engineering compatibility is free for anyone. That's how you build true competition -- and Oracle's case might shut down that important avenue.

The DOJ's anti-encryption summit went off without a hitch. And why wouldn't it? No one who had anything good to say about encryption was invited. The only speaker without a history of criticizing encryption was John Walsh of "America's Most Wanted," who detailed the kidnapping of his son -- an event that took place long before encryption was viewed as an impediment to law enforcement.Using a bit of the FOSTA playbook, but skewing it younger to facilitate appeals to emotion, the "summit" attempted to discuss the "creation" of "lawless spaces" resulting from end-to-end encryption. Facebook was front and center as the recent recipient of a letter from Attorney General William Barr, asking it to ditch its plans to encrypt Messenger communications.Barr (who's already made his feelings about encryption clear) was joined by Deputy AG Jeffrey Rosen, FBI Director Chris Wray, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, and Australia's Minister of Home Affairs Peter Dutton. No one representing the tech industry was included. Nor were any encryption experts. This was a preach-to-the-converted type of event and the speakers all made the most of it.FBI Director Chris Wray offered his unsurprising take on encrypted communications: he's against it. Not that his opinion should be considered in any way an "expert" opinion. He runs an agency that can't even correctly count the number of encrypted devices it has in its possession. And it's the same agency where officials did everything they could to avoid unlocking a seized phone in a mass shooting case in hopes of securing favorable court precedent. Wray frequently presents the hardest skew on the issue (at least at the federal level), and his comments at the summit were no exception.

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This was wholly predictable, of course. Back in 2015, we released a detailed analytical report showing that the absolute easiest and most effective way to reduce piracy was to to enable more and better licensed services that actually gave users what they were seeking for reasonable prices and fewer restrictions. The data in that report showed that focusing on greater legal enforcement had no long term effects on piracy, but more and better authorized services did the trick every time. Then, earlier this year, we released another report showing that the music industry is in the midst of a massive upswing thanks almost entirely to the rapidly increasing success of licensed music streaming platforms. It was incredibly dramatic to look at the numbers.Put two and two together, and you'd full expect to see a corresponding dramatic drop in piracy. And, indeed, it appears that's exactly what happened, but the recording industry doesn't want you to realize that. In IFPI's latest release, they play up the idea that piracy is still this huge existential problem.Sounds bad, right? Later in the report it insists that:

The federal government's anti-encryption push is starting to turn into a really weird movement. Yanking pages from the FOSTA playbook, Attorney General William Barr threw an anti-encryption party featuring him, FBI Director Chris Wray, Deputy AG Jeffrey Rosen, and some overseas critics of secure communications.It was full of loaded language, beginning with the conference's name:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Matthew Cline, responding to two parts of a comment from a defender of a proposed ag-gag law in Australia:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, while Roca Labs was going off the rails in a case that kept getting more and more bizarre, we saw a mixed bag of court decisions: Warner Bros. was ordered to reveal its automated DMCA takedown notice process, a judge adjusted the MP3Tunes ruling while blasting both sides for their approach, and the music labels unsurprisingly won their suit against Grooveshark — with the silver lining that the ruling didn't screw up DMCA safe harbors like it could have.Meanwhile, Eric Holder was employing some disgusting FUD in his fight against phone encryption (and wasn't alone), as it became clear just how little he cared about digital rights.Ten Years AgoLast week, the Lily Allen saga flared up, got weird, then mostly concluded. But there was still one development remaining, and the only truly positive thing to come out of the whole affair — this week in 2009, Dan Bull namedropped Mike in his excellent song Dear Lily in what would become a brief trend of such "open letters" from the UK musician and spark an ongoing friendship with Techdirt:Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, because nothing in this realm ever changes but the digit, folks were talking about the need to chill out on the 5G 4G 3G hype, and quite possibly the mobile TV hype too. A growing number of doctors were calling for an end to mobile phone bans in hospitals, while the New York Times, in typical fashion, was finally realizing that schools had gotten rid of such bans and dutifully bringing us this amazing breaking news. And a lot of newspapers were starting to get nervous about Google News, leading some to rightly suspect that they'd sue if Google monetized it. Meanwhile, we saw a surprisingly good call from the Patent Office when it rejected Microsoft's patent on the FAT file system (though unsurprisingly they would manage to get it approved two years later, eventually enabling their infamous lawsuit against TomTom).

Perhaps because the stories we routinely do on Nintendo doing the Nintendo come out at a clip somewhat spread out, and perhaps because the ultimate reality is that Nintendo's Nintendo-ing is legally something it is allowed to do, I believe the wider world really doesn't understand just how much cool stuff the public is deprived of. If you don't know what I'm talking about, some percentage of Nintendo's rabid fanbase likes to try to do cool stuff with Nintendo properties as an expression of their fandom. This means creating interesting new games, or trying to get Nintendo classics to work on laughably aged hardware just for funsies. Or celebrating Nintendo game soundtracks. The point is that fans do fan things, right up until Nintendo's lawyers come calling and shut it all down as copyright infringement.Again, just so we're absolutely clear: Nintendo can do this. But it doesn't have to. Plenty of other gaming companies have carved out space and methods by which they can still protect their intellectual property but allow fans to make fan creations. Nintendo refuses to do this and the result is that we lose the opportunity to see and have cool stuff. One example of this was a group in Australia's attempt to get the original Donkey Kong game working using only some recent tools Facebook provided.

Qualified immunity has been stretched to cover a wide variety of rights violations, law enforcement misconduct, and excessive force deployments. Every so often, a federal court will refuse to extend this courtesy to sued officers, but these decisions are relative rarities.Every so often, officers engage in such egregious violations that no court is willing to give them a pass on their bad behavior. This case [PDF], handled by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, is one of those. It details a case where officers went out to put someone in protective custody and ended up killing some random person's dog. In between, officers went to the wrong address and entered a house without a warrant. Here's how it started:

By now you're likely aware that Donald Trump tweets. Like, a lot. An unfortunate amount, actually. And he also often takes a break from tweeting his own authored... I don't know, let's call them thoughts... to instead simply retweet any sycophanitic content he can find out there. Sometimes, in fact, he retweets things that may be infringing upon copyright.And sometimes what he retweets is more innocent, at least in the context of intellectual property.

What the fuck is up with the NY Times when it comes to reporting on important laws about the internet? While they did, thankfully, publish Sarah Jeong's piece mocking everyone for failing to read Section 230 and totally misrepresenting it, they have since published three separate stories that completely get Section 230 wrong -- often in embarrassing ways. First there was the laughable piece by Daisuke Wakabayashi that claimed that Section 230 is what made hate speech legal online -- leading to the NY Times having to run a hilarious correction saying "oops, we actually meant the 1st Amendment." Then the NY Times opinion section let internet-hater Jonathan Taplin publish an anti-internet screed. Taplin has a history of misguided histrionics about copyright law, and it appears that he must have had an anti-DMCA safe harbor screed ready to go... but since everyone was hating on Section 230 (which is very different than DMCA 512) they just tried to swap it in... in a way that made no sense at all.So you might think that the NY Times and especially its Opinion section editors would be a bit more careful any time Section 230 came up, but... nope. Instead, the NY Times has a ridiculously dumb new article by Andrew Marantz who (coincidentally, I'm sure) has a brand new internet-hating book coming out. The title of the piece is Free Speech Is Killing Us, so you just know it's going to be good (and by good I mean, really, really, really, bad). It delivers.

Order your copy of Working Futures today »On Wednesday we officially launched our Working Futures anthology, which is available at Amazon as both an ebook (for $2.99) or a paperback for ($9.99) or both together ($10.99). I really recommend the paperback, because it looks great. So far, we've been blow away with the support we've received and the excitement over the collection. The book has shot up the various best seller lists on Amazon, reaching in the teens for science fiction anthologies, and reaching #12 in the "new releases" category.In the launch post earlier this week, I profiled the first three stories, so today I want to explore the next three -- which has some names that Techdirt readers will recognize... starting with me:The Nole Edge Economy: I've been talking a lot about protocols over platforms lately, and wanted to explore such a world in a fictional context -- and combined two other elements: the incredible wealth of DIY info found totally free online such as on YouTube (I was inspired to write this after learning how to rebuild a carboretor via YouTube videos) and also the odd dependencies created by shareable, reusable code. Also, there'a little nod towards SLAPP suits as well. In short, this is a story that hits on a lot of regular Techdirt points.eMotion: by our very own Timothy Geigner. He kept telling me he was too busy to write something, and then at the last minute delivered this wonderful story exploring what the world might look like when artificial intelligence is granted its own rights -- and starts to require what probably can't be called "human" resources any more when dealing with job changes and transitions. But, in such a world, certainly the line begins to blur between who gets to make decisions for whom. And, I mean, how do you let a military artificial intelligence know that its services are no longer needed...Genetic Changelings: by Keyan Bowes was one of the few stories we received that didn't focus on artificial intelligence, but rather started exploring a world where genetic engineering has taken off to fairly spectacular levels. It's a world that will seem quite familiar to today's... but with a few potentially startling differences. I mean, when a story starts out in its first line discussing a child's tail, you know it's going to be a bit different.We'll continue describing more stories next week, and we'll have some fun other stuff, including some of the authors on our podcast. I also wrote a short guest post at Boing Boing about the project, and wanted to highlight one point I made over there. These stories don't paint a dystopian or a utopian future -- but mostly somewhere in between. Indeed, some of the stories are being interpreted in very different ways, with one author letting me know that he thought his story was really optimistic, but someone who read it reacted the opposite way. As I wrote for Boing Boing:

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Yes, it's time for this week's edition of "how is the EU fucking up the internet." Over the summer we wrote about an important case in front of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), warning that the Advocate General's recommendations would lead to mass filtering and censorship of the internet, seemingly going against existing law and precedent that supports freedom of expression and which says that automated filtering violates human rights. Welp. So much for that.

We've long discussed how the Pai FCC's net neutrality repeal was plagued with millions of fraudulent comments, many of which were submitted by a bot pulling names from a hacked database of some kind. Millions of ordinary folks (like myself) had their identities used to support Pai's unpopular plan, as did several Senators. Numerous journalists like Jason Prechtel have submitted FOIA requests for more data (server logs, IP addresses, API data, anything) that might indicate who was behind the fraudulent comments, who may have bankrolled them, and what the Pai FCC knew about it.Those efforts have slowly been paying off. Back in January, Gizmodo linked some of the fake comments to Trump associates and some DC lobbying shops like CQ Roll Call. This week, Buzzfeed went even further, drawing a direct line between the fake comments and the broadband industry:

The DOJ seems to be handling its anti-encryption (a.k.a. "going dark") grief badly. I doubt it will ever reach "acceptance," but it is accelerating through the rest of the stages with alarming speed.It went through shock first, personified by former FBI director Jim Comey, who insisted tech companies were offering encryption to:A. Give the feds the middle finger

Copyright statute of limitations cases are relatively rare, but we have written about a few such cases at times. Still, here's a new ruling that tosses out a case based on the statute of limitations, involving a guy suing Jerry Seinfeld claiming infringement over the latter's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee series. Though, it seems like the case could have been defeated other ways as well, even if it had been filed within the statute of limitations.

The thing California cops never thought would happen happened. On January 1, 2019, a new law took effect that opened up police misconduct and use of force records to the public for the first time in ever. Needless to say, cops were not pleased.Multiple lawsuits were filed in an attempt to block the law from taking effect -- or at least prevent the public from accessing records created prior to January 2019. Multiple lawsuits and legal challenges were rejected by California courts, which read the law as being retroactive.As those efforts failed, the state's district attorney, Xavier Becerra, decided to go against the courts and the law's author to claim it was not retroactive. Of course, he was no more correct about this than the law enforcement unions being handed losses by the state's courts.The "smart" law enforcement agencies read the writing on the wall, took the wall down, and ran it through the shredder before the law took effect. There were a few cooperative standouts following the law's enactment, but most law enforcement agencies decided to comply with the new law as antagonistically and slowly as possible.The Long Beach Police Department is the latest to flip the bird to the public over public records. As Tony Saavedra of the Orange County Register reports, the PD is preemptively buying time. Or, more accurately, it's hoping to steal it. What the PD wants is nearly a week's-worth of heads up if the city plans to release officers' misconduct and use of force records.

A one-man copyright trolling empire has just crashed into a federal court iceberg. Richard Bell, photographer and [checks filing] attorney, has gone after anyone and everyone who has possibly used "his" photograph of the Indianapolis skyline for anything ever.Unlike 99.9% of copyright trolling cases, this one actually gave Richard Bell the jury trial he no doubt demanded in his complaint. Unfortunately for Bell, the jury didn't give him what he wanted. Even worse for Bell (but better for the defendants in his still-unresolved lawsuits), the jury said Bell failed to prove he owned the copyright to the photo he's sued hundreds for using. This report comes from Dave Stafford of Indianapolis Business Journal who, unlike countless others picking up the AP feed, a.) included the document and b.) spoke to the defendant's lawyer. (Kudos on both, Dave!)

For years now, the various DOJ folks pushing to break encryption have whined and complained that the tech industry won't even consider having an adult conversation about encryption. This, of course, has never been true. Indeed, in just the past few weeks we've highlighted two separate examples of attempts to bring together law enforcement folks and technology/cryptography experts to see if there are legitimate ways to move the conversation forward. That first one came up with an interesting and useful framework for judging any conversation about "lawful access" to encrypted communications, while the second demonstrated just how much various tech companies have been doing over the years -- in particular in helping law enforcement deal with the issue of child abuse.And what do they get for all that? First, a horrific article in the NY Times that accurately highlights the awfulness of child sexual abuse online... but oddly frames the efforts that various tech companies have put into helping law enforcement as... evidence of not caring about the problem. And, of course, suggests that encryption is part of the problem:

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Senator Mark Warner was supposed to be the "tech savvy" Senator. He's not really showing that. He's been leading the charge to regulate various parts of the internet, which might be fine if he knew what the fuck he was talking about. But, as is made clear in his latest interview with Newsweek, he's extremely confused about the legal underpinnings of the internet. Specifically, he is repeating Senator Ted Cruz's myth that Section 230 was designed to only apply to "neutral" platforms that don't moderate.

Day in and day out, it's becoming increasingly clear that the smart home revolution simply isn't all that smart.Security analysts like Bruce Schneier have been sounding the alarm bells for years now about the lax to nonexistent security and privacy standards inherent in the internet of broken things space. From refrigerators that leak your Gmail credentials to Barbie dolls that can be easily hacked to spy on kids, it's increasingly clear that dumber technology is often the smarter solution. Not only do many of these devices actually make us less secure, their lack of real security has resulted in their use in historically large DDoS attacks.As if the point hadn't been made clear enough, a new joint study between Northeastern University and Imperial College London took a closer look at 81 popular smart door bells, dongles, TVs, and other gear, and came away notably unimpressed. The study, the biggest ever of its kind, found that the lion's share of such devices routinely share an ocean of data (your IP address, MAC address, location info, viewing preferences) with a massive array of third parties. Worse, many of these transfers were not properly secured, meaning they could be intercepted by another party:

TikTok is the new Vine. (I apologize if this sentence is incomprehensible. If I wasn't raising teens, it would be pretty much incomprehensible to me too.) The social media platform that allows users to upload short video and encourages remixing via duets or reaction videos has roped in a billion users in a surprisingly short amount of time.It's fun for (almost) all ages. The younger you skew, the more popular it is. Fun for all ages, but not all sexualities apparently. The app was created by Chinese company ByteDance, so it's more than receptive than most to calls to censor content based on countries' desire to mute those who aren't heterosexual. (h/t K'Tetch)The Guardian has been reporting on ByteDance's censorial efforts on behalf of governments around the world. Unsurprisingly, censorship begins at home.

Ag-gag laws usually claim to be about protecting farmers from animal activists. But trespass laws already do that quite effectively. In reality, ag-gag laws are mostly about preventing activists from gathering photographic evidence of the poor conditions in which animals are kept on some farms. Techdirt has written a number of stories about ag-gag laws in the US, and how they are being ruled unconstitutional. Now it seems that Australia is intent on bringing in ag-gag laws in response to an upsurge in animal rights activism in the country. Australian politicians have been getting vocal on the topic for a while. Back in April, Australia's Prime Minister called the activists "green collared criminals". In May, Western Australia's attorney general told journalists:

Locast, a New York based nonprofit that offers viewers access to over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts via the internet, has accused the big four broadcast networks of colluding to restrict consumer access to those broadcasts. As we noted recently, Locast was custom built to test the copyright legal minefiled created in the wake of the Aereo ruling, which made made numerous dubious assumptions and provided zero guidance for companies that wanted to enter the space but comply with the law. Enter former FCC lawyer and media executive David Goodfriend, who effectively created Locast specifically in the hopes the industry would sue.Last month Goodfriend got his wish, with ABC, CBS, Comcast/NBC, and Fox all filing suit, claiming the video nonprofit (which currently offers the service in 13 markets) is "illegally using broadcaster content." Locast in turn has now responded in a court filing (pdf), alleging that the broadcast networks have unfairly colluded to restrict public access to OTA broadcasts:

I'm not sure how copyright troll rep Richard Liebowitz is still finding work. The prolific filer of questionable lawsuits has been dinged by court after court, and yet somehow rights holders still think he's worth hiring to go after anyone found in reverse image search results.Here's how things have gone for Liebowitz recently:2017: Liebowitz manages to put his client on the hook for everyone's legal fees. That would be the legal fees of the eight prominent news agencies his client sued for broadcasting a small clip from a video he uploaded to Facebook. Here's what the judge said about Liebowitz:

Open access to court documents is something we still don't have, thanks to PACER. The creation of PACER was supposed to increase public access, but the government erected a paywall between the public and the documents. To make things worse, the PACER's front end is an antiquated nightmare. The system isn't consolidated, so people seeking documents need to know exactly where it was filed before they can even start paying $0.10/page for unhelpful search results.No one who uses PACER likes it. But it's the government's monopoly, so everyone who uses PACER has to use PACER because there is no alternative. The US Court system rakes in $150-200 million a year in fees, but hardly any of that money is being put towards fixing a system that only barely works and does so in the most begrudging way possible. Lawsuits have been filed and legislation proposed that would give the public free access to court documents, but so far, nothing has changed. PACER is still expensive. And it still sucks.The sad state of PACER was discussed during a recent Congressional hearing. And it was defended in the worst way possible by the Judicial Conference's speaker.

Devin Nunes is on quite a roll with stifling free speech. The Congressman, who once co-sponsored a bill discouraging frivolous lawsuits and also voted for a House Amendment saying that free speech should be protected, has been filing a whole bunch of lawsuits that appear to serve no purpose other than to stifle free speech -- mainly free speech that criticizes Devin Nunes. Back when he filed the first of these suits (against satirical Twitter accounts, among others), we noted that he seemed particularly mad about an article by Ryan Lizza in Esquire trying to track down details about the Nunes' family's dairy farm, which is not in California where Nunes' Congressional district is, but in Iowa. Lizza noticed that Nunes appeared to go to great lengths to not have the public realize that his family's dairy farm (which is a big part of his bio) up and left California. The article is entitled Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret and it is absolutely worth reading, in part because Devin Nunes really doesn't want you to read it. But also, in part, because it had paragraphs like this:

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Order your copy of Working Futures today »Last week, I gave you a heads up and a preview of our latest project from our think tank, the Copia Institute: our brand new anthology of speculative fiction about the future of work, called Working Futures. The book is now available in both ebook and paperback format at Amazon (initially, we'll be publishing it exclusively through Amazon, though we plan to offer other options down the road). You can purchase the ebook for $2.99, the paperpack for $9.99, or both combined for $10.99 (or, if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, you can read it for free). The book has 14 wonderful stories and comes in at over 200 pages. You can also purchase the special custom deck of cards we used to help us create the scenarios that were given to the authors as "prompts" to inspire the various stories. And you can download the PDF of the prompts as well, if you'd like to see them.Last week, I wrote about the process by which this project came together -- how we built the custom deck of cards, what we did with them, and how we got sci-fi writers to make use of them. This week, with the actual launch of the book, I wanted to zoom in a bit on the actual stories in the book. Over the next few days, I'll talk a bit about some of the stories in the book, and what made them stand out when we were choosing the stories for the book:The Machine Starts by Liam Hogan is a quick fun story that envisions the role of humans in a world in which computer AI is pretty much all pervasive, and an entity known as "The Machine", whose powers are so great that it resulted in the demise of the today's generation of internet giants. But with something so powerful and all knowing, why would it need to hire people? Well, as this story demonstrates, there are always situations in which human perception will be able to do things that artificial intelligence cannot.The Chaperone by Andrew Dana Hudson is, in some ways, a flipside to the story by Hogan that precedes it. In that story we learn about how a human can assist an AI, whereas in the Chaperone, we learn about how AI's might assist humans. For better and for worse. Hudson described his story in a pretty straightforward tweet: "My #solarpunk novellete, "The Chaperone," is for everyone who watched Her (2013) and thought, "cool future, but this doesn't seem like *our* future—where's the late stage capitalism, political upheaval and climate change??"The Funeral Company by Katharine Dow might conceivably take place in a similar world to the one in Hudson's novellette above, though on the other side of the country. It describes a very different kind of job that might crop up in a world of pervasive information and data about everyone -- and also how some people might respond to not wanting to live in such a world.That's it for today. I'll have more later in the week about some of the other stories in the book. If any of the three snippets above intrigue you, or you can't wait to hear about the other stories... feel free to go ahead and pick up the book.

For several years the telecom sector has been quietly trying to spur additional regulation of Silicon Valley. Why? As giants like AT&T and Comcast increasingly push into the online advertising arena, they're keen on having competitors saddled with regulation, while they successfully eliminate oversight of their own problematic monopolies. Given the FCC (now headed by a former Verizon lawyer) just effectively neutered itself at telecom lobbyist behest while the DOJ (now headed by a former Verizon lawyer) goes the extra mile to vilify Facebook, you'd have to consider the gambit fairly successful so far.To be clear, there are plenty of problems with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other Silicon Valley giants that require attention and intelligent solutions by objective experts. And while a huge chunk of the animosity toward Silicon Valley giants is entirely genuine and well deserved, a lot of the "big tech" hyperventilation among lawmakers like (longtime AT&T ally) Marsha Blackburn is largely theatrical in nature and being driven by the telecom sector. Ferreting out which is which isn't easy, but looking at campaign contributions can certainly help.The mainstream press, for its part, has been oddly unaware of how much of the animosity against "big tech" has been co-opted and amplified by telecom for what should be obviously selfish reasons. For example, telecom (hand in hand with Rupert Murdoch) has been making the rounds trying to suggest that Google's support of encrypted DNS somehow runs afoul of antitrust guidelines (it doesn't). And Reuters, for example, ran a story this week suggesting that Comcast had suddenly emerged as a "new antitrust foe" for Google, levying criticism at the company's ad business for the "first time":

Adding to the body of evidence showing that the use of traffic cameras is purely about revenue generation is this report from The Newspaper, which points out (yet again) how these systems are designed to eliminate due process and hasten the collection of fines and fees.In this case, part of the designed due process elimination was already in place before the red light cameras went up. Certain citations are designed to be unable to be challenged, and this one -- a red light infraction pinned on the wrong person -- is one of them.

Over the past couple of months, we have been discussing Liverpool FC, of the Premier League, attempting to get a trademark for "Liverpool" in a few soccer-related market designations. Despite the narrow scope of the application, the whole thing was still silly, given that "Liverpool" is purely geographic in nature, not to mention that there are several other independent Liverpool-area soccer clubs that would suddenly be infringing on Liverpool FC's trademark if granted. Interestingly, there was also a rather severe backlash from the public, including from Liverpool fans themselves, who organized a protest against the club.And now it turns out that all of that pain was for naught, as Liverpool FC has had its trademark application denied by the IPO.