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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portable alcohol testing equipment (a.k.a. breathalyzers) have been called "magic black boxes" and "extremely questionable" by judges. And yet, they're still used almost everywhere by almost every law enforcement agency. They're shiny and sleek and have knobs and buttons and digital readouts, so they're not as immediately sketchy as the $2 drug-testing labs cops use to turn donut crumbs into methamphetamines. But they're almost as unreliable as field drug tests.Even when the equipment works right, it can still be wrong. But it so very rarely works right. Cops buy the equipment, then do almost nothing in terms of periodic testing or maintenance. A new report from the New York Times shows this equipment should probably never be trusted to deliver proof of someone's intoxication. And the failure begins with the agencies using them.

There have been plenty of stories that have made the rounds over the years arguing that Google/Facebook have "killed" the journalism business by sucking up all the advertising revenue. In the past, I've pointed out how silly and tiresome this argument can be, and certainly looking through the data, it simply does not support the narrative. Instead, it appears that the success of Google and Facebook is much more a scapegoat for the legacy news business' own failure to adapt to a rapidly changing marketplace -- one in which their previous competitive advantage (limited competition within a geographical region) was completely eroded.That said, even understanding that properly doesn't answer the question of how one can actually save the journalism business, which has faced a huge variety of challenges over the last couple of decades. Lydia Polgreen, writing for the Guardian, has an interesting proposal that argues that the big internet platforms can both save journalism and deal with their big misinformation problems in one single move, by throwing a huge sum of money at journalism organizations. Among other things, she compares the rise of misinformation and the collapse of journalism to the impacts of industrial pollution, and suggests that internet companies could create a parallel to how businesses have now begun focusing on sustainability programs regarding environmental impact. Except, instead of dealing with things like carbon emissions, they could help deal with the pollution of misinformation via funding journalism efforts:

Dallas residents are now going to be $345,000 lighter thanks to the actions of one Dallas Area Rapid Transit cop. (via Reason)DART officer Stephanie Branch decided the law was on her side when she demanded photographer Avi Adelman stop recording EMS personnel dealing with an apparent overdose. Officer Branch claimed Adelman's photography violated the medical privacy rights of the person being attended to, saying things about HIPAA (not at all relevant here) and "establishing a perimeter." Branch was in the wrong. She was violating DART policy by shutting Adelman down and she compounded this error by making twenty-three "false or misleading" statements in her report of the arrest.Adelman spent 20 hours in jail after being charged with criminal trespassing. That charge was dropped and DART itself apologized to him for the actions of its "rogue" officer. Officer Branch escaped being held liable for violating Adelman's First Amendment rights as the right to record public employees in public areas wasn't clearly established in the Fifth Circuit until a year after Adelman's arrest.His Fourth Amendment claim moved forward though and Officer Branch appealed the stripping of her qualified immunity on this count. Her appeal was rejected by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which found Branch's arrest of Adelman unreasonable. As the court pointed out, Branch's actions directly violated a DART policy issued two years before the 2016 incident. Branch tried to reclaim her immunity shield by claiming ignorance, but the court shot that down.

The Trump FCC has made it abundantly clear it isn't particularly keen on state, city, or local rights, especially when they interfere with AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast's ability to make a buck. The problem: when the FCC neutered its ability to police the telecom sector at lobbyist request as part of the net neutrality repeal, it may have ironically obliterated its authority to tell states or cities what they can do.The agency fiercely opposes your town and city's right to build its own broadband networks, even if nobody else will and locals have voted for it. The Pai FCC has also tried (illegally and unsuccessfully so far) to ban states from trying to protect consumers from predatory telecom monopolies in the wake of federal apathy. And a number of other FCC policy changes have attempted to hamstring your town or city's ability to stand up to wireless carriers over things like environmental reviews for cell tower placement, or the money they can collect for hosting telecom equipment in public rights of way.This week, the FCC was sued by a broad coalition of cities which say they've had enough. Dozens of states have joined forces to sue the FCC over an August ruling cities say not only limit how much money cities can collect for things like environmental impact reviews on cell tower placement, but hamstrings their ability to stand up to giants like AT&T and Verizon on pretty much any issue of substance. The FCC claimed the changes were necessary to accelerate our positioning in the "race to 5G," though cities say the changes are little more than a giant gift to the nation's biggest telecom conglomerates:

I've never seen a Presidential administration so thoroughly pissed off it's in power. Despite having his boy in the White House and a Senate majority, the DOJ's top man spent most of a memorial lecture complaining about how hard it is to be in charge.Attorney General William Barr's main complaint -- which runs for a majority of his speech to the Federalist Society -- is that the Executive Branch just doesn't have enough power. Barr believes one part of the co-equal government should be more equal than the others.The most telling moment is this: Barr believes things began to go downhill for the Executive Branch during an administration that made the best case for limiting Presidential power.

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You may have read something of late about the battle over so-called "C Band spectrum," the wireless frequencies that lie between 3.7 GHz and 4.2 GHz. This spectrum will be hugely beneficial for deploying 5G wireless, and wireless carriers and activists alike have been pressuring the FCC for years to repurpose much of it for 5G. How this should be done has been a point of contention, however. And given there's upwards of $60 billion to be made off of auctioning this spectrum, the typical alliances you'll see in telecom have been more complicated than usual.Consumer advocates want the spectrum auctioned off publicly by the FCC, allowing it to be transparently bought by folks in rural areas eager to use it for point-to-point backhaul and rural broadband expansion. Satellite providers, unified under the C-Band Alliance, have been opposed to public auction and instead want the spectrum auctioned off behind closed doors, promising they'd then kick back some of the money to the FCC (read: American taxpayers, who technically own the airwaves in question). Incumbent wireless carriers have split opinions on how to proceed, with T-Mobile backing a public auction.While this sort of stuff usually is ignored by Congress, the fact this spectrum could net upwards of $60 billion has driven some politicians, like Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, to push for public auctions where the government receives bids (and money) semi-transparently, instead of, as Kennedy has complained, this money being shoveled off privately to satellite providers in "Luxembourg." That money in turn can be used for any number of efforts; in Kennedy's case, a big impractical wall. Kennedy recently met with Trump to try and pressure the FCC, a move that appears to have worked.Pai, who had seemingly been teetering toward the idea of a private auction, came out this week in favor of a more transparent, public auction of the C Band spectrum instead:

The ACLU is one step closer to obtaining documents detailing the FBI's use of social media monitoring tools. The FBI replied to the ACLU's FOIA request with a Glomar and a denial.First, it neither confirmed nor denied it had responsive records. Then it said even if it did have some, it still wouldn't release them. According to the FBI, releasing documents about the government's well-known use of social media monitoring software would somehow allow criminals to take a peek at super-secret law enforcement tools. It made these assertions despite the fact it publicly secured contracts for social media monitoring tools.The ACLU sued. And now, it's obtained at least a partial victory. The court says it's not quite accurate to say the DOJ has already publicly acknowledged use of social media monitoring tools. Citing the ACLU's victory in an FOIA lawsuit over drone strike documents, the court points out the bar to clear first is whether it can be said the DOJ -- not the FBI -- has made it clear it's in the social media monitoring business. From the decision [PDF]:

Earlier this month, we discussed how DirectTV was one cable operator the Colarado Attorney General is investigating over how it extracts varied and confusing fees from customers and more specifically how DirectTV managed to continue charging customers for a regional sports station that had been blacked out. The overall tenor of the post was, first, that cable operators charging fees in as confusing a manner as possible is par for the course and, second, that even in that landscape continuing to charge customers for a channel it wasn't offering sure felt like a bridge too far.Well, apparently the folks over at DirectTV were listening in on our post and decided to email us with a statement. That statement said first that, by the time the story posted, the broadcaster had come to terms and was back on the air. Second came a claim that refunds had been issued... if customers specifically asked for one.

As we noted last week, there's a laundry list of potential issues plaguing Google's attempted entry into the game streaming space via Google Stadia, not least of which is the US' substandard broadband networks and arbitrary broadband caps. Stadia eliminates the physical home game console and instead moves all game processing to the cloud. And while it's clear that this is the inevitable path forward and somebody is going to eventually dominate the space, there's no solid indication yet that it's going to be Google.Initial Stadia shipments went out this week (some anyway, many orders never shipped), and so far the press response has been a large, collective, "meh." Most reviews cite a fairly pathetic launch lineup filled with titles that were first released years ago. And while the service works in ideal conditions on good broadband lines, the $120 entry fee (plus $10 subscription cost) is being derided as largely a public paid beta:

The privacy activist Max Schrems has been conducting a battle on multiple fronts against Facebook's use of personal data. Last year, Techdirt wrote about one of the skirmishes, which saw the EU's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), ruling that Schrems could use the GDPR to litigate in Austria, where he is based, rather than in Ireland, where Facebook has its international headquarters. The latter option would have been prohibitively expensive for Schrems, and would probably have meant he dropped the case.Schems has now begun his legal action in Austria, before the Vienna Regional Court. According to Schrems, Facebook admitted that it has been collecting and processing data without users' consent since the introduction of the GDPR last year. However, in an interesting move, Facebook has claimed that it is not breaking EU law for the following reason:

Dave Ramsey is a radio host/"personal finance guru" whose religious beliefs appear to be a key part of his public persona. A long and detailed story in the Daily Beast a few years back showcased another apparent part of his persona: what appears to be significant anger towards those who criticize him or his company, including former employees:

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Federal judges appear to be tiring of the government's long-running entrapment programs. One of the federal law enforcment's favorite "enforcement" efforts is creating crime in order to bust "criminals." Agencies like the ATF and DEA find someone in need of cash -- usually a minority someone -- and use undercover agents and confidential informants to convince them to raid a drug stash house for some easy money.The twist is the drug stash house is fake. There are no drugs. There are no armed guards protecting the drugs. Once the mark arrives with a weapon and a plan of attack, the ATF arrests the person for thinking about robbing a fake stash house to steal nonexistent drugs.The other twist is the prosecution. Since the drugs never existed, the ATF is free to claim the targeted stash was large enough to trigger mandatory minimum sentences.A handful of judges have already found stash house stings to be a questionable use of government resources, if not ultra-shady operations that put the government in the position of being the judge and the jury by fabricating drug amounts to ensure longer sentences are handed down.Here's what federal judge Ruben Castillo had to say about stash house stings:

We've long noted that T-Mobile's brand reputation as a feisty consumer-friendly disruptor is only really skin deep. While the T-Mobile of 2012 or so certainly added some much needed competition to the wireless sector (killing ETFs, eliminating long-term contracts, and eroding international roaming costs), more recently the company has started to look a lot like the bigger competitors (AT&T, Verizon) it pretends to be superior to. From mocking groups like the EFF to opposing net neutrality, the company isn't all that different from the companies its brash CEO John Legere likes to make fun of.The disconnect between the T-Mobile consumer friendly "uncarrier" brand and reality has proven particularly notable as T-Mobile and Sprint have kissed up to the Trump administration to gain regulatory approval for their controversial $26 billion megamerger.From hiring Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski days after he mocked a kid with Down Syndrome on TV, to trampling the Constitution's emoluments clause by ramping up patronage of Trump's DC hotel to get merger approval, it hasn't been a pretty sight. Not a week goes by where Legere, who spent years mocking other companies' "bullshit," can't be found making false promises related to the megadeal.While the deal has unsurprisingly received the DOJ (now run by former Verizon lawyer Bill Barr) and FCC (now run by former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai) blessing thanks to T-Mobile's relentless ass kissing, it still faces a looming lawsuit by a bipartisan coalition of 13 state AGs. Which makes it an interesting time for T-Mobile CEO John Legere to announce he'll be leaving the company starting next May to be replaced by current T-Mobile COO Mike Sievert. Legere likely realizes it's best to go out on top. He also likely realizes that he probably shouldn't stick around to watch his company slowly become everything he claims to despise: