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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For years, journalists have highlighted how ad blocking companies have slowly but surely been compromising their ethics -- and products -- to make an extra buck. Several years ago you'll recall that numerous ad blocking companies were busted letting some companies' ads through their filters if they were willing to pay extra. Others collect and monetize "anonymized" data that's gleaned from what ads you're receiving and which ones you're blocking (recall that studies repeatedly have shown that anonymized data is not at all anonymous).Enter Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, who, this week, sent a letter to the FTC (pdf, hat tip The Verge) urging some greater scrutiny of the sector:

Given the NSA's track record with vulnerability disclosures, it's somewhat of an anomaly when it actually decides the security of millions of innocent computer users is more important than its exploitation of a security flaw. Ellen Nakishima has the details for the Washington Post:

Last week, the DOJ's counsel sent a letter to Apple asking for its assistance cracking open two phones recovered from the shooter at the Pensacola Naval Air Base. Apple replied it had already provided assistance by giving the FBI everything it could recover from the shooter's Apple accounts. The company also made it clear it would not attempt to break the encryption on the phones.This sounded like a warning shot from the DOJ -- one issued before the commencement of litigation. No formal request for assistance has been made in court yet, but the head of the DOJ has decided to apply additional pressure. Attorney General William Barr's view appears to be that if the FBI has a warrant, Apple has to let it come in. Otherwise, bad things will happen. He also accused Apple of not being helpful enough.

Anyone who reads Techdirt knows that I've been heavily influenced by Larry Lessig, and have learned a lot from him. There still are many areas where I have and continue to disagree with him, but on the whole, when he comes up with a project, or writes about something, I am compelled to listen to him. I often appreciate his willingness to effectively take on big, crazy, impossible challenges -- ones almost certainly destined to fail -- in support of a principle or an idea. In recent years, this has included his ill-suited campaign for President, his flopped attempt to create an anti-SuperPAC SuperPAC, his plan to change the way the Electoral College works, his attempt to call for a Second Constitutional Convention (to route around Congress to amend the Constitution), and, even (tragically) his attempts to use the courts to end copyright term extensions. Even when I thought the ideas were a bit silly, the very least you could say about Lessig was that he was willing to take crazy chances to make changes in the world that he thought would improve the world. You could say that he was the living embodiment of the idea that, rather than complaining about the system, you need to make a real effort to change the system, no matter how quixotic that effort might be.And, even when I disagreed with him or thought his projects to be misguided or silly, I still supported his willingness to put his best ideas out there and try to come up with clever ways to make them a reality. Indeed, I found much of it to be admirable and principled.However, I cannot and will not support his latest crusade, which is a dangerous attack on free speech, and frankly goes against everything that I thought Lessig stood for. Indeed, to me this move undermines much of Lessig's legacy, and forces me to rethink my past support for him and his projects. The short version is that Lessig has filed a defamation lawsuit against the NY Times, its executive Editor Dean Baquet, its Business Editor Ellen Pollock, and reporter Nellie Bowles. Lessig is upset about the way some blog posts he made were portrayed by the NY Times. And you can, perhaps, understand why. The NY Times' framing of Lessig's positions, regarding Jeffrey Epstein and his funding of MIT's Media Lab, was, at the very least, shaded in a manner that did not portray the nuance that Lessig hoped to convey in his Medium posts on the matter. But not fully portraying the nuance is not defamation.Furthermore, Lessig appears to be using this to kick off much more of a campaign against free speech and a free press, by saying this is his attack on what he calls "clickbait defamation." This is, unfortunately, the same sort of framing that lots of people have been using to go after journalists of late, when they don't like the framing or how they're portrayed in the media. In short, Larry Lessig appears to have filed a SLAPP suit. And that's tremendously disappointing.Let's take a step back. Lessig was tangentially associated with the mess last fall regarding Jeffrey Epstein's donations to the MIT Media Lab, which was run by Joi Ito. Reports detailed how Ito cultivated a relationship with Epstein, and then later sought to hide it from various people -- including those associated with the Lab. Ito has long been considered one of the "good" people in the tech world, and this situation upset many people who were shocked to find Ito's involvement, and his ethically dubious decisions. Ito, after immense public pressure, resigned from the Lab.Lessig, who has known Ito for many years, had signed a petition in support of Ito prior to all of the details coming out and prior to his resignation. This raised some eyebrows among those who felt that Ito's decisions had clearly crossed a line. After Ito resigned, Lessig -- as he's been known to do -- took to Medium to effectively work through his thoughts on the matter. He revealed that Ito had sought his advice before taking the Epstein investment. Lessig, who has publicly discussed how he was sexually abused as a child, had acted as something of a sounding board for Ito on whether or not it was inappropriate to take money from someone accused of similar crimes. It was clear that Lessig had extremely mixed feelings about the whole thing and was trying to "write through" his thoughts. While I can see -- and sometimes support -- the idea of writing out ideas where you're unsure of where to eventually land, doing so almost always risks people taking some of the statements (especially "on the one hand, on the other hand" or "here's how I thought about it back then..." statements) completely out of context.Without getting into the full text of Lessig's piece (though I recommend reading it), many, many people (including many supporters of Lessig) reacted very, very negatively to it. For what it's worth, my own reaction was that, in it, Lessig appeared somewhat tone deaf to the actual concerns with accepting the donations, and made a bunch of assumptions that weren't necessarily accurate -- but again, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I found it interesting that he was really clearly trying to struggle through the conflicting feelings he had about the whole mess. In particular, I actually appreciated that Lessig did what few people are willing to do: to try to break down exactly his mindset in making a decision that -- in hindsight -- he now recognized was a mistake. And thus, part of his essay could be read as a "defense" of the original decision to support Epstein's donation to MIT's Media Lab.And that quite reasonably upset people, though, for sometimes different reasons. Some were upset that they believe he was rationalizing his support for Ito taking Epstein's money. Some were upset that they read this (perhaps inaccurately) as a defense of Ito taking the money. And some were upset that his attempt to put himself back in that original mindset suggested that, even at the time, his thinking on this was... not great. Particularly troublesome (to me, at least) was his assumption of why he felt that Epstein wanted to donate to MIT (Lessig suggested it was an attempt to rehabilitate his image) and why, at the time of the initial donation, he thought it might be okay for MIT to take it: if they did it in a way that did not allow him to burnish his reputation.Specifically, Lessig suggested that Epstein was what he referred to as a "Type 3" donor, who he described as:

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The DOJ has asked somewhat politely for Apple to break the encryption on some iPhones. Last time, the request wasn't so polite. It involved a legal battle that only ended when a third-party cracked the San Bernardino's iPhone for the FBI. Nothing of interest was recovered from that phone.Another shooting and another dead shooter has brought Apple and the DOJ together again. The DOJ's counsel sent a letter to Apple asking it to break into two phones recovered from the shooter. Apple stated it had already given the DOJ all the information it could recover without actually cracking the devices. This isn't good enough for the DOJ, which believes the possession of a warrant should trump any concerns about creating encryption backdoors.There's been no demand made in court… yet. But Attorney General Bill Barr -- whose antipathy towards encryption has been stated multiple times -- is trying to apply a little more extrajudicial pressure.

As we've been discussing, India's government has blacked out internet access in Kashmir since around August, setting records for one of the longest government-mandated internet blackouts in history. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has tried to argue that the blackout is a necessary security precaution in the face of growing unrest in the region stemming from its loss of autonomy earlier this year. Granted like most government internet censorship efforts, the move has a lot more to do with cowardice and fear of an informed public than any genuine concern about public welfare.Fast forward to this week, and India's Supreme Court has warned that the blackout is clearly illegal:

Looks like everyone roaming across the board is going to become a source of info for the US government. The DHS has already rolled out facial recognition at international airports and additional biometric collections elsewhere. The Fourth Amendment's near-nonexistence at the border has led to a steadily-increasing number of invasive device searches. Visa applicants and other long-term visitors are being forced to turn over social media information (including passwords) during the application process.Now, the DHS is hoping to collect DNA from nearly every immigrant it has in custody. The DHS first pitched this idea back in October, hoping to strike the lone exemption keeping it from collecting samples from the hundreds of thousands of people crossing southern borders every year.The previous administration said it simply wasn't feasible to collect DNA from every detainee, especially those rounded up near southern borders. This administration says it's no longer a logistical problem, so it should be allowed to collect it from everyone detained by ICE or the CBP.

Academic publishing hardly covers itself in glory, as Techdirt has reported over the years. It takes advantage of researchers' belief that they need to publish in so-called "high impact" titles for the sake of their careers, in order to pay nothing for the material they provide. Since articles are reviewed by other academics -- for free -- profit margins are extremely good: around 30-40%. In order to retain these unusually high levels, the industry does everything in its power to undermine and subvert cheaper alternatives like open access, and often takes a heavy-handed approach to the enforcement of "its" copyright -- even against the original author. Given this dismal industry background, it will come as no surprise to learn from Science magazine that Russian academic publishing has its own problems, fueled by the bad behavior of authors:

An arrest stemming from the most specious "investigation" has resulted in the denial of qualified immunity for one officer. But just barely. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals was almost able to talk itself out of denying qualified immunity to any of the four officers involved. The one officer who will now have to face a jury is was the ringleader of the investigatory debacle, but he was far from the only one guilty of rights violations.Three men searching for a store selling space heaters late at night finished their shopping trip surrounded by cops, who arrested one of them -- Christopher Bey -- for having an expired permit for the weapon he was carrying. All three men were black. Every officer involved in the stop and arrest was white. This matters, but not to the majority writing the opinion [PDF].Three of the cops were members of the Livonia PD's Special Operations Unit (SOU). They were on the lookout for "retail crimes" in response to a rash of break-ins at cellphone stores. Sergeant Andrew McKinley -- the only officer who's still facing Bey's lawsuit -- spotted the van driven by the men and decided to start following them.THINGS THAT ARE SUSPICIOUS TO A POLICE OFFICER: Driving in an old vehicle.

Harassment statutes tend to be broadly written and often undergo legislative surgery after they've been challenged in court. This isn't one of those cases. The statute stands. But the conviction does not.A New Jersey man was arrested and charged with harassment after his handwritten criticism of the Secaucus mayor was discovered and brought to the attention of the mayor, who then had to ask his daughter what the note meant.Here's a brief summary of the alleged crime from Keldy Ortiz of NorthJersey.com.

We've written a few times now about California's AB5 law that has more or less made it difficult to impossible for many freelancers/contractors to still work in California. Even though the stated intentions of the bill's author, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, and its supporters was to "protect" workers, the reality is anything but that. It's yet another case of politicians who have no clue how the world actually works, insisting that what they're doing must work fine because their intentions are good. Many people who have been impacted by this have found that Gonzalez has been dismissive of their concerns -- and at times directly rude to people on Twitter highlighting these issues. We had thought that perhaps Gonzalez had realized there might be a more constructive way at the end of last year when she asked for thoughts on a possible small tweak to the law. That change would have been wildly insufficient, but it was, at least, a step in the right direction.However, with the new year, we apparently have the same old Lorena Gonzalez. She was interviewed on local San Diego TV station KUSI, and was obnoxiously dismissive of the idea that people have actually been harmed by her law. The newscasters highlighted actual people who were losing work because of the law, and Gonzalez's response was that she doesn't believe the people. In one case, they showed an interview with a freelance translator -- who actually had worked for the state and even for Gonazlez herself, and had voted for her -- who said she can't get work any more because of AB5, and Gonzalez appears to dismiss her as not telling the truth.

Tennessee is home to an overabundance of BS defamation lawsuits. It must be something in the air area. (See also: Virginia, and Kentucky) Now that the state has a decent anti-SLAPP law, things should start changing. And it may start with Dr. Kaveer Nandigam of Nandigam Neurology in Murfeesboro, Tennessee.Dr. Nandigam decided to test drive the new law by doing one of those things that always works out well: suing a patient over a negative review. Kelly Beavers was his target. She had visited his office with her father, who was being seen for early signs of dementia. Beavers recorded the appointment on her phone, as she always does, to make sure she had all the information she needed to care for her father.Nandigam did not like being recorded. He told her to stop recording and demanded she hand over her phone. He also told her to delete the recording, which she did. Beavers -- understandably angered by Nandigam's treatment of her -- complained about his actions on Yelp.

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Almost five years ago, we warned that years of copyright maximalists brainwashing the public about ever expansive copyright and the need for everything to be "owned" had resulted in the crazy Blurred Lines decision that said that merely being inspired by another artist to make a song that has a similar feel, even if it doesn't copy any actual part of the music, was infringing. We warned that this would lead to bad things -- and it has.Over the last few years, we've been detailing story after story of similar cases being filed. It's become so common that we don't even bother to write about most of the cases. As we've said, though, this really is the industry reaping what they've sowed. It's gotten so crazy that even the RIAA (yes, that RIAA) has felt the need to tell courts that maybe their interpretation of copyright has gone too far in the direction of over-protecting copyright holders.It's now become such a fact of life that the NY Times has a giant article on how copyright is basically eating pop music these days. It describes a bunch of these cases, and notes that merely "being influenced" makes you liable for copyright infringement, and how that's causing problems for the very concept of pop music: