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I have avoided writing posts every time Denuvo's DRM, once thought un-crackable, ends up being very, very crackable. At some point, everyone basically agrees that the dragon has been slayed and we all ought to stop poking it with pointy sticks. The most recent story involving Denuvo, however, deserves to be highlighted, if only to recognize that the neutering of this once-vaunted antipiracy tool has reached a stage that requires a different time measurement. Let me explain.As Denuvo's technology unraveled, both the company and its defenders retreated to a position of claiming that even if Denuvo could protect a game for mere weeks, or even days, then it was still worth it. A huge chunk of a game's total sales, goes the theory, occur in the initial release window, so protecting that timeline is vital. As Denuvo began to be cracked more quickly, that useful time for protection went from months to weeks to days. As a result, I began updating you all here with posts detailing the dwindling timeline for major game titles' protected status. It became a useful unit of measurement right up until a game was cracked before its public release.But perhaps we have a new unit of measurement we can start using: the length of time before a game publisher decides to strip out Denuvo itself. We don't appear to have much time to use this new measurement unit, however, as that timeline already appears to be in the category of days.

The raid of stringer Bryan Carmody's home by the SFPD has detonated directly in the face of the department. After someone in the department leaked a police report in an effort to smear a prominent public defender following his unexpected death, an internal investigation was opened to determine which SFPD employee was the source of the leak.This internal investigation quickly went external. Bryan Carmody had shopped copies of the police report to a few news stations, which resulted in the SFPD raiding his home and seizing $10,000 of his equipment, including phones, laptops, and storage devices.After a brief round of "this is all by the book" by a number of SF officials, it soon became apparent this was not at all by the book. In addition to Carmody's First Amendment protections, the stringer was also likely shielded by state law, which forbids searching and seizing journalists' property for the sole purpose of trying to identify a source.The mayor walked back her statement defending the SFPD for its actions. So did a couple of council members. The District Attorney delivered the harshest criticism of the police force, saying he couldn't imagine a situation where this search would have been appropriate.At long last, the department itself is coming around to how much it fucked this whole thing up. A qualified apology has been delivered, as Evan Sernoffsky reports for SF Gate.

Once upon a time, there was something called the Office of Technology Assessment, charged with the critical if unenviable task of educating members of congress about issues related to technology. Since that seems like a pretty good thing to have, recently some people have been pushing to re-establish the office. This week, we're joined by two of those people — Daniel Schuman from Demand Progress and returning guest Zach Graves from the Lincoln Network — for a discussion about bringing back the OTA.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.

Social media's war on conservatives continues, this time taking out accounts linked to... the so-called #Resistance?

The DOJ spent several years toying with the idea of prosecuting Julian Assange for the publication of leaked documents. It finally pulled the trigger earlier this year, utilizing UK police to pick up the ousted Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy. There was only a single charge related to cracking passwords protecting classified documents. It wasn't much of an indictment, but it initially appeared the DOJ might steer clear of the First Amendment… well, at least as well as it's capable of doing.That all changed last week. The DOJ brought a new indictment, loaded with charges and First Amendment implications. It was no longer limited to some password-cracking attempts that went further than receiving sensitive files from a source. The new indictment basically turns journalism into treason. Things journalists do every day, like cultivating sources, seeking out leakers/whistleblowers, and publishing the results of these efforts are all treated as Espionage Act violations.The charges are so broad, they cover more than the day-to-day business of journalism. If all it takes is asking someone to hand over sensitive documents, it's likely Donald Trump himself violated the Espionage Act while still on the campaign trail when he informally asked Russia to dig up 30,000 emails from then-State Department head Hillary Clinton's servers.This prosecution has the potential to do so much damage to First Amendment press protections, even the DOJ wasn't of a single mind when it came to pushing the new indictment.

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You would be hard pressed to think what the world needs is more copyright lawsuits. As we've discussed for years now, the US is already inundated with copyright lawsuits, many (perhaps most) of them filed by so-called "copyright trolls" who are seeking to shakedown recipients with "settlement" demands. A competent Congress would respond by looking at this abuse of the court system for extortionate purposes and maybe make it less inclined to abuse.But not this Congress.Instead, it has decided to bring back a truly awful idea: a special copyright trolling court, which it likes to say is the equivalent of a "small claims court" for copyright. The latest version of the CASE (Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Act of 2019) in the House and the Senate was introduced recently, and is getting lots of love from all the usual sources.We should note, that the House bill is sponsored by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, along with Jerry Nadler. You may recall that those two Congressman were recently seen hosting a giant $5k per ticket fundraiser at the Recording Industry's biggest party of the year, the Grammys. And, right afterwards, they suddenly introduce a bill that will help enable more copyright trolling? Welcome to the world of soft corruption.As we explained last year when this monstrosity was introduced as well, the bill is written in a manner totally disconnected from reality. Supporters insist it is "too difficult" to sue over copyright, yet provide no evidence that this is true. But, more importantly, the entire framing of the bill is based on the idea that those who sue for copyright infringement only do so when they have valid claims. Indeed, anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention to copyright lawsuits over the last decade would know this is laughable.The entire bill is disconnected from reality and would only serve to make copyright trolling become an even bigger problem, and would enable an even more significant level of the copyright shakedown game, in which dubious claims of infringement are tossed around in hopes of extracting settlement fees. At a time when we should be looking to stop such extortionate acts, these bills move in the other direction. It's a joke.

For all of the traditional recording industry's claims of how important copyright is for "supporting artists," the most egregious examples of legacy industry folks screwing artists over tend to involve copyright -- and especially cases involving sampling. The law around sampling is particularly stupid, and has been for decades. Musicians can pay a compulsory license to cover a song, but if you just want to sample a bit, that's a whole different story. And even if you try to do it right... well, copyright will fuck you over. Perhaps the most egregious example is what happened with the Verve's hit song Bittersweet Symphony. Unless you've lived under a rock for the past two decades, you've heard this song. And you may have heard variations on the story of how it used a sample from the Rolling Stones, who were then credited as co-songwriters, giving them a cut of the publishing (which has become a common practice these days when songs are sampled). At least that was the story I initially heard years back. But the full story is truly despicable, and it's back in the news now because, more than two decades later (also, two decades too late), the Rolling Stones have given back the rights. We'll get to that in a second. Because the background here is worth understanding.There are a few different versions of the story floating around -- and not all of the details match. But at the very least, the Verve's Richard Ashcroft wrote the song Bittersweet Symphony, and the recording used a barely noticeable sample of a recording by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra. That recording was an orchestral cover of the Rolling Stones' song The Last Time. Andrew Oldham had been an early manager of the Stones, and the Andrew Oldham Orchestra was a side project (that sometimes involved the Stones themselves). The sample that the Verve wanted for Bittersweet Symphony wasn't even the same as the Rolling Stones song. It was part of the original arrangement for the Oldham Orchestra, apparently done by composer David Whitaker, who is credited in none of this. Also, the opening violin solo that is so iconic and so identified with Bittersweet Symphony is not actually from that sample. It was done by the Verve themselves, designed to flow right into it the part with the sample.Oh, and here's the real kicker: the Rolling Stones totally copied the song "The Last Time" in the first place -- from a 1955 gospel track by the Staple Singers, called This May Be The Last Time, which itself was based on some traditional gospel songs. The Rolling Stones nowadays totally admit they copied the Staple Singers song. Keith Richards said:

A few years ago, the European Union passed some fairly decent net neutrality rules that went notably further than the FCC's 2015 rules we just discarded here in the States. They not only prohibited ISPs from unjustly blocking, throttling, or restricting access to services the ISP may compete with, they imposed some basic protections governing zero rating -- a practice ISPs here in the US have increasingly been using anti-competitively.The problem for the EU is that after the European Union's Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC) crafted the guidelines, it was up to individual countries to interpret and enforce them, something that apparently hasn't been going all that well. According to a new coalition of 45 academics, nonprofits, and private companies, European ISPs are routinely tap dancing around the restrictions. Under the current rules, European ISPs are allowed to inspect and shape traffic using "deep packet inspection" (DPI) tech, but only if it's to optimize the network. They can't utilize DPI to track user activity for money making purposes. But the group says in a letter to European authorities they're doing so anyway in violation of the rules:

This week, both our top winners on the insightful side come in response to a comment on our post about Price Harry using the GDPR to go after a photographer, asserting that it's a good thing because the target was a paparazzi, not a journalist. Stephen T. Stone won first place by asking a simple question:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, we watched as the proposed NSA reform bill — the USA Freedom Act — got watered down by the House to the point that every civil liberties organization pulled its support for the law, and it started to look like Reps. Rogers and Ruppersberger had pulled a fast one on us all. The House inevitably passed the now-useless bill (even without the votes of half of its original co-sponsors), so attention had to turn to the Senate and other ways of fighting back against the NSA, like a small victory in freeing the NIST from collaborating with the agency on encryption standards.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, various Attorneys General were still on the warpath against Craigslist (even those who had successfully busted criminals on the site) after it gave in to pressure the previous week. While some tried to draw odd conclusions from Craigslist's cooperation, the company was also fighting back and suing for declaratory relief against one AG. And we had to wonder as they did: why Craigslist, not newspapers or other websites?Meanwhile, Perfect 10 was shot down yet again in an attempt to hold search engines liable for image thumbnails, while Joel Tenenbaum's lawyer was gearing up for a likely defeat with plans to defend downloading as fair use. And we read one pro-copyright book that surprised us by relying heavily on... Techdirt comments to make its case about how bad the pirates are.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, Jack Valenti was feuding with Quentin Tarantino over the latter's failure to condemn movie piracy, Italy was getting ready to put people in jail for file sharing, and California was considering doing the same. Google was making waves on two fronts: then-brand-new Gmail's unprecedented offering of 1GB of storage was spurring the competition to at least pretend to do the same (while a typo on Gmail itself led some people to think they might be getting a terabyte), and the Google IPO was leading absolutely everyone to try to find a way to benefit from the hype (not least the list of underwriters, which was basically all of Wall Street). But, the guy who had been selling fake "pre-IPO shares" to Wall Street insiders was one of two scammers facing jailtime, too.

Tomorrow will represent a full year since the GDPR went into effect. In the run-up to the GDPR, we called out many of the problems with the regulation which, while well-intended, did not seem to deal well with the nature of the internet, speech, or what privacy actually means. In the year since, we've posted numerous stories highlighting the negative consequences of this poorly considered law.Whenever we do that, however, many of the law's defenders insist that these unintended consequences are a small price to pay for either protecting our privacy or reining in the internet giants. So, it does seem worth investigating whether or not the GDPR has done either of those things. And, so far, the evidence is sorely lacking. Indeed, on the question of dominance, we pointed out late last year that the early returns suggested that the GDPR had only made Google more dominant, which hardly seems like a way to punish the company.And now that we have more results, it seems more and more people are realizing that the GDPR has been an utter failure. As CNBC notes in its evaluation of the law, it's hard to see how the GDPR has resulted in any benefits to the public. Instead, it's just created a big mess:

We've had many long discussions here, and have replicated those discussions through more official channels, as to how there are severe problems with the DMCA when it comes to its collision with free speech. One of the core issues is the way the DMCA sets up a system in which service providers feel forced to proactively take down the speech of others based on accusation in the form of a DMCA notice, rather than this working the way it does in nearly every other aspect of American law in which an accusation does not result in a penalty. And penalty truly is the right word, as the American system recognizes that speech is among the most fundamental of freedoms. And, yet, when service providers like Twitter get sent DMCA notices over copyright claims, they are heavily incentivized to take down the content and take action against the account holder -- or face potentially massive liability.Such as the Twitter account for the Houston Rockets, which found itself suspended over a series of DMCA notices for old tweets that apparently contained some unlicensed music. The Rockets also weren't alone.

I thought I had read the worst defense of civil asset forfeiture when I read a former Michigan police chief's argument against a conviction requirement being instituted in his state. Former Police Chief Robert Stevenson's argument was basically this: a conviction requirement makes it too hard for cops to take property from people without proof.

Yesterday, I wrote about the new, superseding indictment of Julian Assange and noted how the theories behind it were absolutely insane and a blatant attack on the 1st Amendment. The Obama administration went after leakers using the Espionage Act, which already was really terrible (the law itself should be deemed unconstitutional, but to use it against whistleblowers, rather than actual espionage was horrific). Here, the Trump administration has taken it up a notch by trying to use it against a publisher. I've seen a lot of people defending this move by arguing that either (a) Julian Assange is a terrible human being, or (b) that Wikileaks is not a "real" or "legitimate" news organization.Neither of those things matter. And if you think they should you are missing the point in an incredibly dangerous way.The activities described in the indictment are things that many journalists do all the time. For example, in the first count, the government calls the following an offense against the United States under the Espionage Act:

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I was tempted to start this post with just a series of head-smashing-into-desk emojis, but I thought that might come off as a bit weird. Remember Craig Wright? He's the somewhat controversial guy who has claimed to have really been Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of people who do not believe Craig Wright, and have highlighted how Wright has failed to provide any of the fairly straightforward methods the original Satoshi could use to prove who he was, and instead used complicated methods that suggest gamesmanship, rather than actual proof.As we've highlighted in our posts, Wright seems most focused on patenting everything he can with regards to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency -- which, at the very least, seems to go against the open, sharing nature that was a key part of the early cryptocurrency community that Satoshi Nakamoto supported.And now comes the somewhat hilarious report that Wright has tried to register the copyright on the original Bitcoin whitepaper that Satoshi Nakamoto published. This is basically a troll move. Registering the copyright is meaningless. The Copyright Office does not review carefully if you are the actual creator. It's mostly a rubber stamp process -- and it's rarely an issue because in most cases if someone tried to fraudulently register someone else's copyright, that would come out pretty quickly and it would not take long to sort out what's real. But in this case, when you have an anonymous secret author, it gets a little more complicated.As CoinCenter's Jerry Brito notes this is sort of a bug of the system, but he also notes that someone else could also register the copyright and see if Wright would actually sue over it (in which case, he'd have to establish to a court that he actually held the copyright):

Back in March we discussed the unveiling of the Save The Internet Act, a three page bill that would do one thing: restore the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules stripped away by Ajit Pai, as well as restore the FCC's authority over broadband providers. As we've long noted, the net neutrality repeal didn't just kill net neutrality, it gutted FCC authority over natural broadband monopolies, shoveling any remaining authority to an FTC experts have repeatedly warned lacks the authority or resources to adequately police giants like Comcast (the entire, often missed point of the telecom industry's lobbying gambit).In April, the House passed the bill, though Senator Mitch McConnell stated the bill would be "dead on arrival" once it reached the Senate. McConnell was happy to ignore the fact that net neutrality protections have the bipartisan support of a majority of Americans, reiterating how so many tech policy decisions are inaccurately framed as partisan. Why? It helps encourage division and stall progress on any measures that challenge the revenues of the nation's biggest (and least liked) companies (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter Spectrum).Realizing that the chance of Senate passage is dwindling thanks to McConnell, numerous House Democrats have no started to slowly walk away from the Save The Internet Act, instead saying they want the creation of a "net neutrality working group" (read: try to create an entirely new bill that actually will pass):

As numerous Techdirt stories attest, the Turkish authorities -- and the country's notoriously thin-skinned President, Recep Erdogan -- are unwilling to accept even the slightest criticism of their actions, from any quarter. That has led to huge numbers of Turkish citizens being thrown in prison on the flimsiest pretexts, as well as many Internet sites being blocked in a similarly arbitrary way. Perhaps the most significant digital victim of Turkey's paranoia is Wikipedia. In April 2017, every language version of the site was blocked under a law that allows the authorities to ban access to Web sites deemed "obscene or a threat to national security". According to The Atlantic, Wikipedia was blocked because it refused to take down an article that claimed Turkey was "aligned with various terrorist organizations".For the last two years, all Wikipedia sites have remained blocked in Turkey. Now, the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, has had enough:

While stories about the Streisand Effect here are legion, the most frustrating aspect of them for me is typically how pointless and petty the victims of it are. There are so many of life's problems that can be best taken on by being completely ignored and the simple fact is that many famous folk and large companies have a much larger capacity and ability to ignore petty shit than the average person. I mean, come on people, you have lawyers and PR teams.The Portland Trailblazers certainly do. And, yet, they appear to have decided to Streisand a mildly trafficked big dumb stupid local publication into the national spotlight just by failing to ignore it. The setup here is a playoffs game 3 loss and Tim Brown, an editor of the Oregonian, doing the laziest of "articles."

As we noted when Julian Assange was arrested in the UK last month, it was notable how... lacking the charges were. The whole thing revolved around an apparently failed attempt to help Chelsea Manning crack a CIA password. We still had significant concerns about the way the CFAA was being used, and the fact that the description of the "conspiracy" involved actions that tons of journalists do every day -- but the original indictment didn't have what was most feared: use of the Espionage Act against the actions of a news organization. At the time, some knowledgeable observers pointed out that it was likely a superseding indictment would come, and it wouldn't surprise them if it had Espionage Act charges. And they were right.On Thursday the DOJ unsealed the new indictment against Assange and it should absolutely terrify anyone who believes in a free press and the 1st Amendment. It takes a whole variety of things that journalists at major publications do every single day -- finding and cultivating sources, getting information and publishing that information -- as evidence of Espionage Act violations. We've always had issues with the Espionage Act, which we believe is almost certainly unconstitutional. In the past, we've highlighted how it's been used in ridiculous ways against many whistleblowers, and it doesn't even allow for a defendant to give a reason for why they leaked documents (i.e., they can't say they did it to blow the whistle on government malfeasance -- it's just automatically treated as espionage, which is nonsensical).However, this indictment goes much further. It's not going after an actual leaker, it's going after a publisher. It's so bad that even Obama-era officials (who used the Espionage Act against leakers more times than any other President in history combined) seem horrified. This is from the former DOJ spokesperson in the Obama admin:

For many years, we've highlighted how patents are monopolies and they provide monopolistic power. Indeed, the founders of the US recognized this. James Madison was quite skeptical:

There's just something about terrible customer service, high prices, and sketchy quality product that consumers oddly don't like. American consumers' dislike of traditional cable TV providers was once again made clear this week in a study by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which, as its name implies, tracks US consumer approval of companies on a 100 point scale. As has long been the case, the full report shows most traditional cable TV, satellite, or IPTV providers languishing somewhere in the mid 60s -- scores that are bested by a long line of industries and government agencies (including the IRS).Not too surprisingly, the report shows that American consumers far prefer streaming video alternatives, which provide them with lower costs and greater package flexibility. According to the ACSI, streaming services scored significantly higher than traditional TV, phone, broadband, video on demand, and wireless providers:

Earlier today, we sued ICE for its failure to provide relevant documents in response to a FOIA request.There's a pretty long backstory here, so let's go back about a decade. In the summer of 2010, we found it somewhat disturbing that ICE had "seized" a bunch of websites and was announcing this from Disney's headquarters. It raised all sorts of questions, starting with the big First Amendment questions. There are a whole bunch of cases making it clear that prior restraint is not allowed under the First Amendment. In Fort Wayne Books v. Indiana, the Supreme Court made it quite clear that you couldn't "seize" an entire bookstore in response to one possibly illegal (in that case, obscene) book:

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We've had our issues with politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren whose plans to "break up" big internet companies don't seem to make much sense, but it appears that Senator Josh Hawley has decided to take things to another level of insanity altogether. In an op-ed for USA Today, Hawley makes the argument that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter should all die. And while there are plenty of people who appear to support a dead Facebook in response to that company's long history of sketchy practices, that's not really the reason Hawley wants them dead.He wants them dead because they're too popular. Hawley cherry picks some evidence to suggest that using social media is bad for our health.

So we've talked a bit about how the FCC has done absolutely nothing to seriously address the rise of wireless industry location data scandals. That's despite story after story showing how wireless carriers were selling this data to an endless line of companies and organizations. Those organizations, in turn, failed utterly to protect this data from being misused by everybody from law enforcement to bail bondsman and even random stalkers posing as law enforcement. Despite this being on scale with the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, the silence from the Pai FCC has been deafening.Last week during a Congressional FCC oversight hearing, several lawmakers criticized Pai for failing to hold carriers accountable or even publicly mentioning the scandal. And while the FCC has supposedly been conducting an investigation for the better part of the last year, Pai's fellow commissioners say they've been stonewalled when they've asked about the progress of the inquiry. When Representative Anna Eshoo pressed Pai on whether he was withholding information from his fellow commissioners, he refused to answer the question:

When the San Francisco Police Department decided to externalize its internal investigation of a leaked document, things got unlawful and unconstitutional in a hurry. Deciding the best way to sniff out the leaker of a police report detailing the death of prominent public defender Jeff Adachi was through the front door of a local journalist, the SFPD now has a lot of explaining to do.The SFPD raided journalist Bryan Carmody's home supposedly to find information that would lead them to one of its own officers. Carmody is a stringer and had shopped around a copy of the police report someone inside the SFPD leaked to him. None of this is criminal. Nothing about Carmody's information-gathering fell outside of the law. If anyone broke the law, it was the officer or PD employee who gave him the report.That fact notwithstanding, officers showed up at Carmody's house and -- after waging a losing battle with an impressive front gate -- handcuffed him for six hours while confiscating $10,000-worth of electronic devices and computers. It's safe to assume these items contained plenty of information Carmody had gathered from other sources, as well as information about those sources. Again, this search and seizure violated the state's journalist shield law, if not the US Constitution itself.Carmody has released security footage of the SFPD's arrival. One can only assume his front gate will be facing obstruction of justice charges.This case has numerous disturbing aspects, starting with the leak itself. Jeff Adachi was an elected public defender and a fierce critic of local law enforcement. This likely motivated the leak of the police report, which alleged Adachi had died of a possible cocaine overdose while enjoying the company of a woman who wasn't his wife. A chance to smear a vocal opponent of law enforcement abuses was too good to pass up.When the news first broke, city officials claimed law enforcement did nothing wrong. These were knee-jerk assertions but that doesn't excuse officials for responding this badly when confronted with unexpected (and unexpectedly bad) news.Now that everyone's given it a bit more thought, the SFPD is on its own, bereft of high-level defenders.

As we've talked about before, it seems an era of gaming platform wars is upon us. While Valve's Steam platform mostly only had to contend with less-used storefronts like GOG and Origin, a recent front was opened up by the Epic Games Store, which has promised better cuts to publishers to get exclusive games and has attempted to wage a PR battle to make people mad at Steam. It's all quite involved, with opinions varying across the internet as to who the good and bad guys in this story are.Less complicated is the point of having an Epic Games Store at all. The idea would be -- wait for it -- to sell games. This is something that might not be fully understood by Epic itself, it seems, given that the platform has been busily suspending accounts for the crime of buying too many games.

Earlier this month, the San Francisco city council passed the first ban on facial recognition tech use by city agencies in the US. While other cities have scaled back government use of surveillance tech by introducing measures requiring public input periods and approval by city legislators, San Francisco is the only one to ban the tech outright. And it did so prior to any deployment by local agencies, managing to be one of the few governments to have ever have closed a barn door while horses were still in the barn.Elsewhere in the nation, not much is happening. In one of the most-surveilled cities in the United States -- New York City -- bills attempting to rein in the NYPD's enthusiasm for surveillance tech are going nowhere. This is from the New York Times Editorial Board:

While the FCC announced this week it would unsurprisingly be a rubber stamp for Sprint and T-Mobile's proposed $26 billion merger, the DOJ still isn't buying the companies' claims that further consolidation of the wireless sector will be wonderful for competition and American consumers. Reports this week surfaced that DOJ staffers were still recommending that the agency block the $26 billion merger, based on fears that the deal would reduce market competition and likely result in higher prices overall:

As you may have seen, last week we settled the lawsuit that Shiva Ayyadurai filed against us in early 2017. No money exchanged hands, but we did agree to post a link at the top of the 14 articles that he sued over. The text of that link says, "Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's Response to this Article and Statement on the Invention of Email." You can read his link, and you can read our articles. As I've said in the past, I urge you to read both and make up your own mind.Click Here to Support TechdirtNothing in our settlement stops us from continuing to report on Shiva Ayyadurai's claims to have invented email, and given that Ayyadurai has now fashioned himself a First Amendment freedom fighter, I am hopeful that he will be supportive of our use of our free expression rights to respond to his "response." Among the many statements that response page includes is the following:

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We've pointed out for many years that content moderation at scale isn't just hard, it's impossible to do well. At the scale of giant platforms, there needs to be some level of moderation or the platforms and users will get overwhelmed with spam or abuse. But at that scale, there will be a ton of mistakes -- both type I and type II errors (blocking content that shouldn't be blocked and failing to block content that probably should be blocked). Some -- frankly dishonest -- people have used a few examples of certain content moderation choices to falsely claim that there is "anti-conservative bias" in content moderation choices. We've pointed out time and time again why the evidence doesn't support this, though many people insist it's true (and I'll predict they'll say so again in the comments, but when asked for evidence, they will fail to present any).That's not to say that the big platforms and their content moderation practices are done well. As we noted at the very beginning, that's an impossible request. And it's important to document the mistakes. First, it helps get those mistakes corrected. Second, while it will still be impossible for the platforms to moderate well, they can still get better and make fewer errors. Third, it can help people understand that errors are not because someone hates you or has animus towards a political group or political belief, but because they fuck up the moderation choices all the time. Fourth, it can actually help to find what actual patterns there are in these mistakes, rather than relying on moral panics. To that end, it's cool to see that the EFF has launched a new site, creatively dubbed TOSsed Out to help track stories of bad content moderation practices.Just looking through the stories already there should show you that bad content moderation choices certainly aren't limited to "conservatives," but certainly do seem to end up impacting actually marginalized groups:

For the last year, Sprint and T-Mobile have been pushing a large number of bogus claims justifying their $26 billion competition and job-eroding megamerger. One, that the deal will create jobs (false). Two, that the deal is necessary to deploy fifth-gen (5G) wireless (false). Three, that reducing the number of major wireless competitors from four to three will somehow create more competition (false, just ask Canadians or the Irish how that works out in practice).There's really no debate over whether such significant consolidation is bad for the market, consumers, and employees. You need only look to 30 years of US telecom history to discover that such growth for growth's sake uniformly results in less competition, in turn resulting in higher prices, fewer jobs, and worse customer support. It's a major reason everybody hates Comcast. It's also easy to find a long, long list of companies that made all manner of pie in the sky promises pre-merger, only to fail utterly to adhere to any of them.It's a major reason why similar deals--both AT&T's attempted acquisition of T-Mobile in 2011 and Sprint's attempted merger in 2014--were blocked by regulators, something that helped drive more competition to market.Given Ajit Pai has become a sort of poster child for regulatory capture of late, he's not particularly keen on learning from telecom history. His agency this week unsurprisingly announced it would be approving the merger after T-Mobile made several concessions. Among them, T-Mobile promised to deploy 5G wireless broadband to 97% of the US population within three years of the closing of the merger and 99% of Americans within six years. That convinced Pai that the deal would be in the best interests of the American public:

The FBI uses National Security Letters like regular people use copy paper. It issues thousands of these every year. It works out great for the FBI because it gets to bypass judicial review. If it wants some identifying info, it just writes out its own subpoena, signs it itself, and slaps on an indefinite gag order preventing the company receiving the NSL from informing the targeted users, much less the rest of its customers that the FBI is poking around in its innards.The passage of the USA Freedom Act made things a bit more difficult for the FBI. It now has to review its gag orders periodically to make sure they're still necessary. Of course, the FBI more often than not decides they are and recipients must ask a court to make the final determination.When this happens, the FBI likes to rely on its national security arguments. These arguments also tend to bypass judicial review as many courts are willing to grant the agency deference on these issues, assuming the FBI knows more about the national security implications of lifting a gag order than the courts do.But it doesn't always work. Some courts are probably just tired of the FBI shouting "National security!" every time someone wants to talk about its NSLs. The federal court in the northern district of California is one of these courts. It likely sees far more challenges than any other court in the land, thanks to its coverage of the Silicon Valley. As Nicholas Iovino reports for Courthouse News Service, this FBI request for indefinite silence has been shot down.

A case out of Missouri is highlighting yet again the stupidity and vindictiveness that defines civil asset forfeiture. In January 2017, law enforcement seized $626,000 from two men as they passed through the state on their way to California. According to the state highway patrol, the men presented contradictory stories about their origin, destination, and the plans for the money found during the traffic stop.The complaint filed against the money made a lot of claims about the government's suspicions this was money destined for drug purchases. Supposedly evidence was recovered from seized phones suggested the two men were involved in drug trafficking, utilizing a third person's money. Despite all of this evidence, prosecutors never went after the men. They only went after the money.

While we've been busily pointing out that the practice of copyright trolling is a plague across the globe, it seems there is something of a backlash beginning to build. For far too long, copyright trolls have bent the court system to their business model, with discovery requests and subpoenas allowing them to unmask internet service account holders on the basis of IP addresses, and then using that information to send settlement/threat letters to avoid trials altogether. Put simply, that is the business model of the copyright troll. The backlash against it has been multi-pronged. Canada has begun restricting what types of threat letters trolls can force ISPs to send to their customers, for instance. Elsewhere, Swedish ISPs have have led something of a legislative crusade against copyright trolls. In the US, some courts are finally realizing how bad IP addresses are as evidence, pushing trolls to get something better.But the key to ending the plague of copyright trolling has probably been best outlined in a recent decision by a US Magistrate Judge against Strike 3 Holdings, in which the judge argues using Strike 3's own statistical analysis that it is abusing the court system to the detriment of innocent people.

The topic of what (if anything) to do with Facebook was hardly fading from public discourse anyway, but it received a bump when co-founder Chris Hughes called for the company to be broken up. This week, we've got two returning guests on the podcast with plenty to say on the subject — UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression David Kaye, and famed internet lawyer Mike Godwin — to discuss the many sides of the Facebook question.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.

Well, here we go again. One of the common themes here over the past few years is how in the digitization of everything, the very meaning of "ownership" and "property" has changed -- and not necessarily in good ways. The latest example: last week Google more or less announced the end of its "Works with Nest" program, as it migrates Nest from a separate entity into the Google mothership, and trying to move other "internet-of-things" devices into the Google Assistant ecosystem instead. As the Verge notes, this will upset a bunch of systems that used to work one way, and no longer will going forward.

The repeated answer to the question, "How does the GDPR work?" is: "Not well." The privacy law enacted by the European Union is a regulatory omnishambles that was first greeted by non-European websites telling Europeans their business was no longer welcome.From there, the convoluted law the EU Commission itself can't even comply with properly has been used to vanish everything from documents on US court dockets to trash cans inside an Ireland post office. When it's not providing new attack vectors to cybercriminals, it's being co-opted by the powerful to control what the public gets to see and hear about them.The latest repurposing of the GDPR into an offensive weapon occurred in the pre-Brexit UK, which may give the royal family a reason for remaining united with the rest of Europe. Britain's literal ruling class has never shied away from dragging publications and paparazzi into court, but this latest case -- involving photos of house being rented by Prince Harry -- has a new GDPR twist.

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Among the many narratives making the rounds these days about how terrible the internet and social media apparently are, one popular trope is the idea that using social media makes people depressed. Just last year there was a study purporting to show that limiting your social media use could limit depression. But that study was conducted by an undergrad at UPenn, based on just 143 other UPenn students. Not exactly the most rigorous of studies. A much more thorough, careful, and methodologically sound study was just released finding little impact on "adolescent life satisfaction" from using social media. The study was conducted by three researchers at Oxford's well-respected Internet Institute, including Professor Andrew Przybylski, who has a history of very thoughtful work in this space. The conclusions suggest that there's perhaps more of a moral panic among some about social media than any actual evidence:

So we've noted several times now how the US efforts to blacklist Huawei from global telecom markets haven't much in the way of, oh, supporting evidence. The Trump administration and FCC have taken all manner of actions to try and blackball the company, from pressuring U.S. carriers to drop plans to sell Huawei phones to the FCC's decision to ban companies from using Huawei gear if they want to receive federal subsidies.The underlying justification for these moves has centered on the idea that Huawei operates as a surveillance extension of the Chinese government, something that still hasn't been proven despite a decade's worth of claims to this effect, and an eighteen month investigation by the White House.That's not to say the Chinese government is an innocent little daisy. Nor is it meant to suggest that it's impossible that Huawei spies on Americans. But the lack of any actual public evidence of spying remains troubling all the same, given that if the shoe were on the other foot, there'd be no shortage of face-fanning consternation on the part of American politicians and industry.Enter Google, which this week decided that it'd be joining the evidence-optional festivities by announcing it would be severing Huawei's Android license. The move forces Huawei to rely on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), cutting it off from critical Google apps and services. The move, as Reuters notes, could prove devastating for one of the nation's biggest smartphone manufacturers:

Kazakhstan police unintentionally helped a protester prove his point. To protest the lack of free speech protections in the country, Aslan Sagutdinov engaged in a physical representation of a thought experiment.

Brexit, as most of you will know, is still a full on mess. And, frankly, it's been a mess since the historic vote was taken and the British public rode a wave of nationalism draped in false promises to decide to economically scuttle their own country. In the nearly three years since, the British government has managed to put on an impressive performance piece on dysfunctional government, managing to refuse to agree on how to actually implement the will of their own people.At the same time that all of this has been going on, some opportunistic folks have been attempting to cash in on the Brexit story by trademarking the term, without even having a plan for how to use those marks. As we've pointed out in past posts, this sort of attempt to cash in is fully annoying, but not illegal. Which makes it sort of strange to watch the EU throw everything against the wall just to see what's sticky enough to deny a UK brewer his trademark for Brexit Beer.Upon first reviewing the application, the EU's IPO denied it on the insane grounds that the term "Brexit" is offensive.

As consecutive heads of the FBI have whined about the general public's increasing ability to keep their devices and personal data secure with encryption, a number of companies have offered tools that make this a moot point. Grayshift -- the manufacturer of phone-cracking tool GrayKey -- has been selling hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of devices to other federal agencies not so insistent the only solution is backdoored encryption.ICE is one of these agencies. It led all federal agencies in phone-cracking expenditures in 2018. It spent $384,000 on these tools last year. It wasn't just ICE. Other agencies like the DEA and [checks notes] the Food and Drug Administration have also purchased these devices. But ICE led the pack, most likely because ICE -- along with DHS counterpart CBP -- are engaging in more suspicionless, warrantless device searches than ever.When you don't have a warrant or consent, a third-party tool that can undermine device encryption is the next best thing. ICE must have a lot of phones to search -- or plans on amping up its search count -- because it's more than doubled its spending on GrayKey devices alone. Thomas Brewster of Forbes has more details.

In another judicial rarity, a magistrate judge has rejected a warrant request by the federal government to compel a criminal suspect to unlock a phone found during the search of his residence. It won't set precedent but it does present some arguments suspects will find useful when faced with orders for compelled production of passcodes or passwords.Earlier this year, a California magistrate came to the same conclusion, finding that compelled production of fingerprints or faces to unlock phones violated the Fifth Amendment rights of the suspects targeted by the warrant. Equating biometric security features with passwords, the judge denied the warrant request, stating that if it's a Fifth Amendment violation to compel password production, it's a Fifth Amendment violation to force someone to apply their fingerprints to a locked device.The device in this case is apparently secured by a swipe pattern. This would require more input from the suspect than simply applying a finger to the device. The court finds [PDF] that this act would be testimonial -- covered by Fifth Amendment protections against self-implication. But it goes further, finding that attempting to violate Fifth Amendment rights causes violations of Fourth Amendment rights.

Like we said, Intuit apparently wants to keep digging this hole for itself. After our initial coverage of ProPublica's excellent posts on how Intuit was going to crazy lengths to keep anyone from finding its free to file tax prep site, we followed up with reports of how many Intuit reps were lying to keep from giving people refunds. Those lies included claims that Intuit and TurboTax don't even run the free to file program and that it was instead operated by the IRS itself with TurboTax branding. Another lie was that ProPublica's reporting was all wrong and that the news organization was about to run a retraction. Spoiler alert: no they are not.But it seems that the Intuit brass aren't content only to lie to the public. Intuit's CEO managed to cobble together an internal video -- which of course leaked -- so that he could lie to his own staff as well.

It appears Intuit has decided to make things worse rather than better. Just after tax season, we discussed ProPublica's excellent research article on the extreme lengths Intuit had gone to keep its Free File service an unknown to the public. This service is the result of an agreement the top tax prep companies out there reached with the IRS. Essentially, by promising to allow members of the public that earn under a certain amount of money to use their services to file their taxes for free, the IRS in turn has agreed not to pursue its own free to file service. It's an extremely dumb deal for any number of reasons, one of which being how much more efficient it would be for the IRS to carry the weight here, given that it already has all the information most taxpayers need to file.The other reason, as it turns out, is because Intuit has decided to behave pretty much as cynically as it possibly can. As we detailed in our previous post, the company engaged in a strategy coupling the buying of ads for Google searches and hiding the free to file via the robot.txt file. As a result, something like 3% of eligible taxpayers file for free using the system, while Intuit set up a layer of websites and landing pages all designed to direct the public to paid services, without ever telling them they qualified for free to file tax prep.As a result of the ProPublica post, many who paid for these services called up Intuit and asked for refunds. If you thought that this public light on shady behavior would lead to an attitude adjustment for Intuit, you're sadly mistaken.