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Just last week, we talked about the new Christchurch Call, and how a bunch of governments and social media companies have made some vague agreements to try to limit and take down "extremist" content. As we pointed out last week, however, there appeared to be little to no exploration by those involved in how such a program might backfire and hide content that is otherwise important.We've been making this point for many, many years, but every time people freak out about "terrorist content" on social media sites and demand that it gets deleted, what really ends up happening is that evidence of war crimes gets deleted as well. This is not an "accident" or such systems misapplied, this is the simple fact that terrorist propaganda often is important evidence of war crimes. It's things like this that make the idea of the EU's upcoming Terrorist Content Regulation so destructive. You can't demand that terrorist propaganda get taken down without also removing important historical evidence.It appears that more and more people are finally starting to come to grips with this. The Atlantic recently had an article bemoaning the fact that tech companies are deleting evidence of war crimes, highlighting how such videos have actually been really useful in tracking down terrorists, so long as people can watch them before they get deleted.

We've noted for a while how a lot of the US protectionist security hysteria surrounding Huawei isn't supported by much in the way of hard data. And while it's certainly possible that Huawei helps the Chinese government spy, the reality is that Chinese (or any other) intelligence services don't really need to rely on Huawei to spy on the American public. Why? Because people around the world keep connecting millions of internet of broken things devices to their home and business networks that lack even the most rudimentary of security and privacy protections.Week after week we've documented how these devices are being built with both privacy and security as a distant afterthought, resulting in everything from your television to your refrigerator creating both new attack vectors and wonderful new surveillance opportunities for hackers and state actors.The latest case in point: a popular Chinese GPS tracker, used to track everything from vehicles to kids and the elderly, has been found to contain a significant flaw that can trick the device into handing over GPS data using little more than a text message. The devices, which are made in China and rebranded and sold by more than a dozen companies, can also be used as remote surveillance devices, notes cybersecurity researchers:

At the heart of patents lies a quid pro quo. In return for a time-limited, government-backed intellectual monopoly, companies place their inventions in the public domain after the patent has expired. The theory is that granting patents encourages innovation, although there is plenty of evidence that it doesn't. In the world of drugs, this approach is supposed to allow other pharmaceutical companies to produce generics -- low-cost versions of drugs -- once they are off patent. People benefit because they can buy drugs at much cheaper prices than when they were still under patent.But as Techdirt has reported, for many years, Big Pharma companies around the world have been trying to renege on that deal with society. One of the main ways is through "pay for delay" schemes. A drug company holding an expired patent buys off manufacturers of generics so that it can continue to enjoy monopoly pricing. A new lawsuit brought by 44 states suggests another way Big Pharma may have been cheating the public. It alleges that top pharmaceutical companies, including Teva, Pfizer, Novartis and Mylan, conspired to inflate the prices of over 100 generic drugs by as much as 1000%:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a very simple anonymous response to a lengthy complaint about Section 230:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, we took a look at how the administration's terrible track record on transparency had made lawsuits a default part of the FOIA process, and got an example of how FOIA requests were resulting in agencies sharing less information than they would otherwise. Congress was busy pretending SOPA was actually the law even though it wasn't, the DOJ was trying to downplay its lies to the Supreme Court while also arguing that Americans have no fourth amendment protections for communication with foreigners. Meanwhile, a dangerous court ruling affirmed Europe's right to be forgotten and, predictably, opened the floodgates for abuse. We were also fresh off the Google/Oracle ruling declaring APIs to be copyrightable, which spurred Automattic to pledge that it will not claim such copyright.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, we learned that the recently-discovered fake medial journal published by Elsevier to boost Merck products was not at all an isolated incident. We also saw the beginning of an incredibly important lawsuit that would eventually invalidate the patenting of isolated genes, as the ACLU teamed up with cancer patients to sue Myriad Genetics. It was a question that should have been addressed much earlier.Meanwhile, Sony's CEO was admitting the company should have taken a more "open" approach to digital music, but they comments were pretty similar to what he'd said years earlier, and the CEO of Sony Pictures was almost simultaneously out saying he thinks no good has come from the internet, at all, period. Universal and YouTube were working on their collaboration to create Vevo, Jammie Thomas refused to settle with the RIAA, and France finally approved its three strikes system for copyright infringement — an approach with problems well illustrated by Ed Felten's modest proposal about applying it to print media as well.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, phone networks were still being stupidly hesitant about selling phones with WiFi because they viewed it as a threat instead of an opportunity, much like newspapers did with text messaging. TiVo was fighting to regain some dominance in the DVR market, IBM was making an early foray into web-based office software suites, and an enterprising scammer bilked several people who should have known better out of millions of dollars by telling gibberish lies about moneymaking opportunities tied to a Google IPO. The press was still misreporting fines for distributing music online as fines for downloading, while the creator of a Japanese file sharing system was worryingly arrested for abetting copyright infringement. And, with the school year nearing its end, we got a handful of stories about students getting in serious trouble, and even arrested, for trying to hack their grades.

If you hadn't noticed by now, Trump and Paul Ryan's once-heralded Foxconn factory deal in Wisconsin quickly devolved into farce. The state originally promised Taiwan-based Foxconn a $3 billion state subsidy if the company invested $10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. But as the subsidy grew to $4.5 billion the promised factory began to shrink further and further, to the point where nobody at this point is certain that anything meaningful is going to get built at all.Reports last fall detailed the ever-shrinking nature of the deal, highlighting how Foxconn was using nonsense to justify its failure to follow through, showing that while the company hadn't built much of anything meaningful in the state, it was still routinely promising to deploy a "AI 8K+5G ecosystem" in the state to somehow make everything better. Those empty buzzwords were accompanied by the promise of fully staffed "innovation centers" around the state.Back in March, reporters visited many of these innovation centers scattered around Wisconsin and found them to be largely empty. Apparently not liking the bad press, Foxconn executives like Alan Yeung attempted to claim that these centers were in fact not empty and that the reports contained “a lot of inaccuracies." But according to locals in the state these supposed innovation centers are, you'll perhaps be shocked to learn, still empty:

Everything about the botched no-knock raid by the Houston Police Department just keeps getting worse. Here's how everything has gone down so far:

We welcome the city of San Francisco’s decision to ban the use of AI-enabled facial recognition technology by police and other municipal agencies. Facial recognition technology is prone to misidentification and biased targeting, particularly among members of vulnerable communities. It also opens the door to intrusive surveillance -- beyond the scope of existing technology. Until the technology improves to avoid such harms, its use should be heavily restricted. And even with improvements, the public must confront tough questions about how closely governments should monitor their behavior.Regrettably, global trends are headed in a reverse direction from San Francisco’s decision. From Azerbaijan to Singapore, governments are enthusiastically embracing facial recognition technology. Led by China, such systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Facial recognition has been incorporated into smart city platforms. Cities are placing them on public lampposts and integrating them into security operations centers. While there is greater public awareness of China’s surveillance strategy – particularly its establishment of artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition repression in Xinjiang -- few realize that numerous other countries are developing facial recognition capabilities as well.This is particularly problematic in countries that lack basic rule of law protections and are already committing major human rights abuses. In countries such as Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe, facial recognition is a dangerous tool that further augments those governments’ arsenals of digital repression by giving them an enhanced capacity to deploy targeted monitoring in public places, to track and harass dissidents and opposition figures at will, and to suppress democratic political activity.But even in democracies like the United States, government use of facial recognition technology, in its current form, corrodes civil rights and civil liberties because its errors disproportionately impact vulnerable communities. Astudy published earlier this year by MIT’s Media Lab, for instance, found that Amazon’s facial recognition software, which the company has peddled to police departments and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more frequently misidentified an individual’s gender if they were female or dark-skinned.Concerned about such disparities, San Francisco’s decision prohibits municipal agencies from using facial recognition technology except at federal facilities like the airport. Taken under the Stop Secret Surveillance ordinance, municipal agencies must also seek approval for any new surveillance technology they want to acquire. The decision passed 8-1 with overwhelming public support.Even for a state like California that prides itself on trailblazing legislation (among many ‘firsts’, California led the way in requiring that corporate boards include women and enacting a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program), San Francisco’s decision is extraordinary. Most of the current commentary points out that San Francisco is the first American city to ban government use of facial recognition technology. However to our knowledge, it’s not just the first American city to do so-- it’s the first city in the world; a feat made only more remarkable by the city’s position as the seat of technological innovation -- a rare instance of Silicon Valley putting values ahead of profits.San Francisco’s decision also has important international implications. Facial recognition surveillance remains relatively nascent in most countries. While governments are interested in expanding their use of it, few states are deploying facial recognition at scale…yet. The world still has an opportunity to institute global safeguards and norms to shape how governments use facial recognition.San Francisco’s ban is receiving widespread attention. We sincerely hope that this attention will lead to technological innovations that fix facial recognition’s bias problem and, notwithstanding such improvements, a healthy public discourse about facial recognition’s repressive potential.Charlotte Stanton is a fellow in the technology and international affairs program and the director of the Silicon Valley office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Steven Feldstein is a non-resident fellow in Carnegie’s democracy, conflict, and governance program and the Frank and Bethine Church Chair of Public Affairs and Associate Professor in the School of Public Service at Boise State University.

Oh Canada. Not satisfied with a ridiculous plan to fine social media companies for ill-defined "fake news," a Canadian Parliamentary Committee has come out with one of the most laughable copyright reform papers I've ever seen. And I've seen some crazy ones. I'd post the whole report here, but the report itself warns that doing so might violate its copyright, and really, how could the Parliament be incentivized to create fantasy stories masquerading as copyright reform proposals without copyright?Michael Geist provides the bizarre background on the origination of this report:

Click Here to Support TechdirtIt's possible that some of you saw the news earlier this week that the legal dispute, in which Shiva Ayyadurai sued us for defamation over 14 posts on Techdirt, has been settled. Many people -- including lawyers I know -- had been under the impression that this case ended a long time ago, but it has actually continued for nearly two and a half years. As you may recall, back in September of 2017, the district court dismissed the case, largely on First Amendment grounds, saying that everything we wrote about Ayyadurai was protected speech. Unfortunately, the court did not accept our argument that California’s anti-SLAPP law should apply, which would have allowed us to recover our legal fees.Ayyadurai appealed this dismissal, and we cross-appealed the anti-SLAPP question. For the past 18 months, we have held ongoing negotiations to settle the case, which concluded with the announcement earlier this week. The settlement is that we agreed to add links on the articles at issue, to a statement on one of Ayyadurai's sites that he says is a response to our articles. No money exchanged hands. We found the terms of this settlement acceptable, as basically all of our posts were linking to and responding to Ayyadurai's claims in the first place, so, if he wants to repeat those claims, he is more than free to do so. We have no interest in silencing anyone. We continue to stand by everything that we wrote about those claims, and suggest that you read our posts as well.You may wonder how it could possibly take 18 months to negotiate a settlement about adding links to old articles -- and, indeed, I wonder that myself. The entire process has been quite a pain for us. I cannot and would not describe this result as a victory, because this has been nearly two and a half years of wasted time, effort, resources, attention and money just to defend our right to report on a public figure and explain to the world that we do not believe his claims to have invented email are correct, based on reams of evidence.During those 18 months, we stopped all the fundraising we had done around the lawsuit, as, for nearly all of that time, it did appear that a settlement was close, and we did not wish to mislead anyone into believing that we were raising money on the premise that our continued existence was in grave danger only to settle the case immediately after doing so. We did not, in any way, expect this process to drag out this long, and we now have significant legal and other bills that we still have to pay. We are glad the lawsuit is done, but we now need to ask for your support. If we are able to raise more than our bills, any excess will go towards our ongoing reporting. If you would prefer to support us in other ways -- including via Patreon or in exchange for t-shirts and other merch, all the various options are available to check out here.We are glad this chapter is behind us, and we have a bunch of other plans that we've been working on, which we hope we can now focus on without this major distraction.Separately, we would like to give a tremendous thank you to our legal team at Prince Lobel Tye, mainly Rob Bertsche and Jeff Pyle, who were truly wonderful partners through this harrowing experience. While I personally hope to never require their services again -- for anyone on the receiving end of this kind of lawsuit, I cannot recommend them more. I'd also like to say thank you to Chris Bavitz at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society for his help and support.Contribute to the Techdirt Survival Fund and help us recover from this legal fight »

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Oh good. Now Canada wants in on the "fake news" action.

In 2012, the Supreme Court decided that GPS tracking devices require warrants. Notably, this wasn't because the GPS data was deserving of Fourth Amendment protections but because officers had to trespass on private property (a car parked in a driveway) to attach the device.That left law enforcement with a lot a gray area in which to operate. Since there was no distinct finding that GPS data was protected, it could theoretically be harvested from third-party devices without a warrant. The Supreme Court's decision in the Carpenter case, however, appeared to extend protections to the records themselves. It declared the acquisition of cell site location info requires the use of the warrant, extending Fourth Amendment protections to third party records of people's movements. It could be argued this decision covers GPS data pulled from third party services, since it's basically the same thing: gathering records of a person's movements.In a recent federal case [PDF], both of these Supreme Court decisions are in play. It appears law enforcement thought it had found a way to route around the Jones decision. Investigating a robbery, detectives approached the dealership that had sold the vehicle spotted at the scene of the crime. The dealership had installed a tracking device to make the car easier to find in case of a repo. This was the data detectives obtained without a warrant.

The digital rights group Privacy International has won a major victory against UK government surveillance after a five-year legal battle. One of the many shocking revelations of Edward Snowden was that the UK security and intelligence services break into computers and mobile phones on a massive scale. Privacy International challenged this "bulk" surveillance at the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the "judicial body which operates independently of government to provide a right of redress for anyone who believes they have been a victim of unlawful action by a public authority using covert investigative techniques". In February 2016, the IPT dismissed Privacy International's challenge, ruling that:

It's no secret that Disney is almost solely responsible for the wild expansion of copyright law that has occurred over the course of decades. In addition to the near constant lobbying for longer copyright term lengths and a heavy-handed approach to enforcement, Disney has also found itself attempting to assert copyright in areas of broad ideas rather than literal copying. Perhaps to some, then, it was a shot of schadenfreude to watch Disney face its own lawsuit brought by screenwriters over its Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Way back in 2000, two writers and a producer pitched a script about pirate Davy Jones to Disney, which the company ultimate rejected. In 2004, Disney released the first of its own Pirates movies starring Johnny Depp.But no amount of just desserts ought to change the legal principles in copyright law, so it's still a good thing to see that the court has struck down the copyright suit on the grounds that the scripts aren't actually similar, aside from some non-protectable ideas, rather than explicit expression. We can start with the purported similarities brought by producer Tova Laiter, which should immediately stand out to you as not protected by copyright law.

"I got a recording. I got a recording of this idiot." A Scandinavian-accented voice declares over voice chat. "Can someone tell the people from [the other player's guild] what he just did?"That was the subject of a Reddit post giving a "daily reminder that Sharphealz is a ninja." Instead of shuriken-wielding shadow warriors, "ninja" is here slang for a thief of valuable in-game items. The above video was taken from a private World of Warcaft (WoW) server, emulating the 2006 iteration of the popular online game, soon to be officially re-released by Blizzard as World of Warcraft Classic. Yet, the bootleg version of the massively-multiplayer icon is a special beast beyond just game mechanics. Some of its core social dynamics serve as excellent - if accidental - microcosms of real-world phenomena.These servers are third-party clones of proprietary software, and hence are of questionable legality. Taking advantage of spotty IP protections, most are hosted overseas - in Russia, for example. They are typically organized into non-profit "projects," or amateur initiatives to create versions of the 2006 iteration of the game. Each private server project hosts at least a couple of "realms" or instances of the game world in which players can interact.Most large private servers carry thousands of people, and tend to be radically weighted towards a single primary realm in population. Players from around the world fight, banter, organize and develop a virtual social system in their free time. It is a fairly close-knit group, but only lightly moderated by volunteer Game Masters. Players themselves must play a role in this community moderation if they wish to coexist productively.The mixture of old-school WoW's original quirks, private servers' laissez-faire ethos, and their small but dense populations render them petri dishes for "natural" social experiments. At issue is how near-total strangers are able to make their own rules and institutions, and cooperate effectively and on the fly for common rewards.Servers may have their share of delinquents - okay, a large share - but the anarchy is more orderly than you'd anticipate, given the difficulty of developer-side rule enforcement. In fact, the conditions that allow for unplanned cooperation among strangers are extremely important topics among the big debates in social sciences and public policy. Political scientist Mancur Olson identified problems in the real world in which individuals' conflicting interests impede common goals as "collective action problems." Concern with such dilemmas dates back to philosophers David Hume and Thomas Hobbes.One of the largest and most consequential collective action problems is the "Player vs. Environment" (PvE) raiding scene in the game. Old-school WoW has several large "raid" dungeons pitting 20 and 40-player teams against powerful computer-controlled monsters. These encounters are typically the most difficult end-game challenges, but also the most rewarding. Not only is the loot found within among the best around, but "raid gear" confers a sort of prestige, and obviously, we all want to saunter around Ironforge with shinier stuff than the next guy.So there's huge incentive to raid, but you might have to spend often upwards of six hours in the crucible of high-end PvE with 39 other people, many of whom desperately want the same valuable stuff you do. They are also probably total strangers.That's basically what Blizzard left us with in 2004, and it sounds like a powderkeg of potential disputes over who deserves loot, or whom is at fault for getting everyone killed. Yet, players have overcome these challenges, using a variety of creative avenues.With nobody officially in charge at the outset, leaders come out of the woodwork to direct these complex operations. Some raid leaders do it for the joy of accomplishing something difficult or for the bragging rights provided by a "server first" boss kill, while some experienced players may behave entrepreneurially by putting together raids for in-game money. In a scenario of mutual efforts but uncertain, scarce rewards, one of the first things that must emerge is a rule system. This is a de facto necessity - even "first-come-first-serve" is a rule system. Since the infancy of this gaming genre, enterprising players have invented various systems of their own, with no one system being "official." It's a marketplace of institutions in which players converge on the rulesets that that benefit them most.Eventually, a few dominant systems rose from the massively-multiplayer gaming community. The iconic DKP system is a points-currency scheme, where players receive "Dragon Kill Points" for participating in raids, which they can save or spend in player-organized auctions for loot, whereas "gold-bid" systems use in-game currency (the proceeds of which often provide income for those "entrepreneurial" leaders).Most raids, especially informal pick-up-groups, tend towards "Need Before Greed" (NBG) systems. Players can roll the virtual dice against each other for items their characters genuinely need for advancement, as opposed to items that are more of a luxury. Since what constitutes real need is frequently disputable, secondary rule systems dictating priority in cases of competing claims on a given item may crop up in NBG raids as well.Sometimes new, influential raiders can introduce rule schemes. On one server, the status quo consisted mostly of Need Before Greed and auctions, but after a merge with another server, a large influx of experienced raiders became the new kids on the block. Having many successful dungeon runs under their belt, they imported the "Wishlist" system, in which each raider may reserve one item for themselves. If multiple players reserve the same item, they then roll the dice on it. The efficiency of this idea soon became obvious, and within a few weeks Wishlist (and the players that imported it) took over the raiding scene.Joining a raid group is a significant investment, in time, effort and in-game resources. Players are putting a lot on the line, and expected rewards can be highly uncertain. Given this investment risk, players have sought out means to ensure not only the use of fair loot rules, but institutional mechanisms to make sure they can complete the dungeons regularly and smoothly. Hardcore raiders' best tool for this is the game's Guild system, offering built-in organizational features such as a common chat channel and active roster of members. A competent raiding guild offers members a chance to clear dungeons in an organized manner with skilled leadership, and to win items in a loot system that is reliable and fair.Like "Sharphealz," the ninja looter in the video, there is a strong incentive to abscond with others' items, or to just coast on everyone else's efforts in the heat of battle. To hedge against this behavior, guilds offer ingredients to reduce the likelihood of cheating: longevity and reliability, accountability, as well as simple bonds of friendship. Guilds frequently expel members who violate rules or behave boorishly, and a player without a guild is one at a big disadvantage. A player can get to know and care for their guildmates' welfare, and everyday social interaction builds rapport between members. It's tough enough to be kicked from a guild, tougher still to lose your in-game friends.The accountability mechanisms within guilds rely heavily on reputation, much like within the broader game community. Since the vast majority of players are stuck on the same realm, and the community is fairly small, informal social sanctions provide punishment for rulebreaking. Sharphealz' widely shared video provides documentation of his crimes, and it cemented the player's reputation as a troublemaker for quite some time. It is not uncommon to hear public shaming in the game's chatbox, marking various players as cheaters or slackers. A person with a bad reputation doesn't get invited to groups - a big handicap in an inherently collaborative environment. Indeed, many hotly contest public accusations for this reason.There are, of course, "troll" players who thrive on infamy. The original ninja looting video was recorded by the thief himself. Indeed, a side effect of this melting pot of a server is that although players may cooperate to achieve certain gameplay goals, large strains of animosity and angry flare-ups run through the community. Many raiding guilds keep "blacklists" of prohibited players for this reason, while others collapse from their own internal strife. Some particularly frustrating raid encounters are wryly dubbed "guild-breakers" for their propensity to spark conflict.What is clear from the common problem of raid organization is that players can figure it out naturally, overcoming complex challenges of focus and coordination as a hobby. They jerry-rig institutions to provide accountability and avoid disputes, as well as to bring people together in the first place.The power of community networks, anticipation of future opportunities, and high-value payoffs influences our behavior on Earth in myriad ways, and there is no reason why it would be otherwise on Azeroth.Anne Hobson is a program manager at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Leo Plumer is an MA Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

San Francisco is getting out ahead of the tech curve. Instead of waiting until after law enforcement had already deployed a suite of surveillance tools, city legislators have passed a ban on facial recognition tech by government agencies.

Yesterday, there was a big process, called the Christchurch Call, in which a bunch of governments and big social media companies basically agreed to take a more proactive role in dealing with terrorist and violent extremist content online. To its credit, the effort did include voices from civil society/public interest groups that raised issues about how these efforts might negatively impact freedom of expression and other human rights issues around the globe. However, it's not clear that the "balance" they came to is a good one.

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After months of fact-free complaints about bias against conservatives on social media, the White House has finally decided to engage in a fact-finding mission. And by "fact-finding mission," I mean "knock together a shitty webform to collect complaints." Or build a mailing list for the 2020 election run. Who knows. But here it is in all of its "will this do" glory.It opens with this statement before it starts harvesting personal info.

Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that 5G won't be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. 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.If you looked past press releases you'd notice that Verizon's early launches required the use of $200 battery add on mod because we still haven't really figured out the battery drain issues presented by 5G's power demands. You'd also notice the growing awareness that the long-hyped millimeter wave spectrum being used for many deployments have notable distance and line of sight issues, meaning that rural and much of suburban America will not likely see the speeds you'll frequently see bandied about in marketing issues, and many of the same coverage gap issues you see with current-gen broadband are likely to persist.If you looked past the headlines you'd probably noticed that even Wall Street was concerned that 5G was being over-hyped and wasn't yet ready for prime time. Those concerns continue to be expressed largely in industry trade magazines, where you'll often find stock jocks noting that most of the purported promises of 5G remain well over the horizon:

I thought this was America, but whatever. Secrecy in all things government, despite the (often misheld) presumption that our public servants will be open and honest about issues that affect us.It's no secret voting systems and databases are not secure. These are problems that date back 15 years, but have shown little improvement since. Election interference is just another tool in the nation-state hacking kit, and the US is far from immune from these attacks.Federal agencies investigating election interference are at least speaking to officials in states affected by these efforts. But those officials are apparently not allowed to pass on this information to those affected the most: voters.

UPDATE: Alex Howard reports the DC Council has tabled this amendment so it is no longer being considered during this round of budget debates.Buried at the bottom of Washington, D.C.'s 2020 budget report [PDF] is a gift to legislators who value opacity. The so-called "Freedom of Information Clarification Amendment" would make it much more difficult for requesters to obtain the documents they're seeking.The amendment to the district's FOIA law would require requesters to know exactly what documents they're seeking when they request them. It's a nearly-impossible bar to hurdle -- one that turns FOIA requests into games of Battleship.

Buried at the bottom of Washington, D.C.'s 2020 budget report [PDF] is a gift to legislators who value opacity. The so-called "Freedom of Information Clarification Amendment" would make it much more difficult for requesters to obtain the documents they're seeking.The amendment to the district's FOIA law would require requesters to know exactly what documents they're seeking when they request them. It's a nearly-impossible bar to hurdle -- one that turns FOIA requests into games of Battleship.

Sex-trafficking victims in California are suing Salesforce, claiming the company helped the now-defunct website Backpage, a classified ads website, in enabling prostitution. Whatever your view on the harm to the plaintiffs, this suit could hurt American innovation. By holding Salesforce accountable for the actions of its customer, the suit opens the door for other innovators to be held responsible when users post illegal content – a dangerous precedent in today’s internet era.The question of who is responsible for online content is a difficult issue. Intermediary liability protection is the common-sense idea that internet platforms are not responsible for content posted by users. Enshrined in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, this law allowed American companies to be the innovators of the internet. In fact, the internet as we know it functions because of Section 230. Without Section 230, any site hosting user-generated content would have to screen every submission to avoid lawsuits.On a practical basis, doing this in real time would be impossible due to the sheer amount of content created: Twitter alone hosts 350,000 tweets per minute; 200 billion tweets per year. Similarly, YouTube would be liable for any of the content its 1.9 billion monthly users might upload. If any single user post could lead to legal action against the social media platform, that platform would shut down.Today's internet experience would be virtually impossible.And so Section 230, the cornerstone of today’s innovative internet, was considered inviolable – until 2018, when Congress was approached by groups representing victims of sex trafficking (and quietly backed by Hollywood studios, the hotel industry and others who saw the chance to weaken online competitors that were taking their customers and disrupting their businesses). While some groups advocating for sex-trafficking victims opposed it, many of these proponents pushed FOSTA/SESTA into law, which allows trial lawyers to sue social media sites that “facilitate” sex trafficking – and, although undoubtedly well-intentioned, the bill takes aim at Section 230.Though (oddly), the Salesforce lawsuit doesn't invoke FOSTA/SESTA, the law's hastily written language was so broad and vague it could potentially impose liability to any website with a comments section. And immediately, internet services began pulling down popular forums featuring consumer-generated content. Other websites eliminated sections or imposed broad filters. Congress made the internet experience less rich for users and more difficult for entrepreneurs, all while doing very little to protect actual victims of sex trafficking.For all the damage done to free speech online, FOSTA/SESTA has had little upside. Backpage was seized by the FBI before the bill was signed into law, proving that FOSTA/SESTA was not necessary to take down wrongdoers. More, FOSTA/SESTA forced sex traffickers underground, making it harder for authorities to identify and rescue victims.Fortunately, our nation knows how to choose freedom over fear and innovation over regulation. Consider the successful SOPA/PIPA protests of 2012, which pushed back against overbroad copyright laws that would have crushed the burgeoning digital economy. Thanks to the protests, websites with user-generated content continue to flourish today.Section 230 is the legal foundation of the internet – not a shield for criminal liability. But it remains an important protection to encourage entrepreneurs and innovators to start internet businesses. We can't allow misguided rulemaking and ruinous litigation to discourage that. We must keep the internet open for innovation.Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the U.S.trade association representing more than 2,200 consumer technology companies, and a NewYork Times best-selling author. He is the author of the new book, Ninja Future: Secrets toSuccess in the New World of Innovation. His views are his own.

For years we've noted how as a product of the cable and broadcast industry, Hulu spent many years going out of its way to avoid being truly disruptive. Past owners 21st Century Fox, AT&T, Disney and Comcast/NBC spent a lot of time ensuring the service wasn't too interesting -- lest it cannibalize the company's legacy cable TV cash cow. As a result, Hulu spent a good chunk of the last decade stuck in a sort of existential purgatory, with a rotating crop of execs trying to skirt the line between giving consumers what they actually want, and being a glorified ad for traditional cable television.As cable and broadcast executives slowly realized that cord cutting was a threat that wasn't going away, things began to shift. More recently, owners like 21st Century Fox and AT&T have headed to the exits to focus on their own streaming efforts. That exodus continued this week with Comcast announcing it would be giving up full operational control of Hulu to Disney effective immediately.You might recall that Comcast was banned from meddling in Hulu management as a condition of its 2011 merger with NBC/Universal, with regulators worried that the company would attempt to undermine Hulu to protect its traditional cable TV revenues. Comcast being Comcast, the company largely ignored those conditions, one of several reasons regulators balked at its attempted acquisition of Time Warner Cable years later.Under the terms of this new deal, Comcast has the option of selling its entire stake to Disney by 2024:

Back in December, we wrote about how Rep. Jerry Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which is in charge of any copyright reform proposals, was hosting a party for music industry lobbyists at the Grammy's this year (along with Chair of the Democratic Caucus, Hakeem Jeffries). To party with Nadler and Jeffries at the Grammys -- the recording industry's biggest event of the year -- you "only" had to pay $5,000 per ticket. A bargain.Whether or not you believe this is outright corruption, it certainly meets Larry Lessig's definition of "soft corruption." That is activity that may be perfectly legal, but to the vast majority of the public certainly feels corrupt, and raises questions about who's influencing our elected officials. Nadler, of course, has long been deeply in the bag for the recording industry. Years back, he pushed a bill that was little more than a bailout for the RIAA, and he's attacked the idea that if people buy something, they then own it as "an extreme digital view."But it appears that the more mainstream media is beginning to notice Nadler's conflicts. His hometown NY Daily News has a whole article that talks about Nadler's money grab at the Grammys as well as much, much more.

In sad but unsurprising news, Canada is no better than the US when it comes to ignoring its citizens' rights at the border. The Canada Border Security Agency (CBSA) has also been given the green light to perform invasive, warrantless searches of people's devices at the border. And, like its US counterpart, it seems to be using this power frequently.

Between our smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and the like, we tote around a wide variety of gadgets on the daily. And, keeping them all energized is next to impossible, unless you're willing to lug a tangled mass of chargers wherever you go. Enter SCOUT Portable Charger. Sporting a built-in wall charger, built-in cables, quick-charging USB port, and intelligent charging technology, SCOUT is hands-down a good way to juice up your entire tech collection. It even supports Qi-compatible devices. It is on sale for $40.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

The American Law Institute, among other things, publishes various "Restatements" of law, which it describes as follows:

Despite endless government initiatives and countless promises from the telecom sector, our national robocall hell continues. Robocalls from telemarketers continue to be the subject the FCC receives the most complaints about (200,000 complaints annually, making up 60% of all FCC complaints), and recent data from the Robocall Index indicates that the problem is only getting worse. Consumers continue to be hammered by mortgage interest rate scams, credit card scams, student loan scams, business loan scams, and IRS scams. 4.9 billion such calls were placed in April alone.There's plenty of blame to go around when it comes to fixing the problem. The FCC, now little more than a rubber stamp for industry under Ajit Pai, has been lax in holding carrier feet to the fire. Carriers in turn have blamed everyone but themselves for their own lax response. Similarly, many carriers have been slow to offer customers free robocall blocking tech, and even slower in adopting call authentication technology (like SHAKEN/STIR), which would go a long way toward hampering the call spoofing at the heart of the problem. This John Oliver segment is worth a watch:Enter FCC boss Ajit Pai, who has been increasingly under fire for not doing more to expedite solutions to our great, national robocall apocalypse. This week Pai proclaimed that he has "demanded" that carriers finally adopt call authentication technology this year, something that isn't much of a "demand" since most carriers have said they'd already planned to deploy the technology this year. His other solution popping up this week is being framed by media outlets fairly inaccurately as well. For example. Pai is allowed to insist via Reuters that carriers haven't deployed automatic call blocking technology because they didn't think the FCC would allow it:

Axon -- formerly Taser -- is betting big on police body cameras. It doesn't care much about the hardware. That's the just the foot in the door. The real money is subscription and storage fees. These contracts are worth far more than the hardware, which Axon is willing to give away to secure a far more profitable revenue stream.Axon not only charges for storage of recorded footage but also for access. It provides a front end for law enforcement agencies to search uploaded footage. It also makes defense lawyers do the same thing -- putting itself (and a lot of contractual language) between accused criminals and the evidence they're legally entitled to have.Emails obtained via a public records request show Axon plays hardball with municipalities who decide they'd rather use a different vendor. When a California city decided to take its business elsewhere after four years with Axon, its representatives responded by threatening to trash the city's credit rating. Beryl Lipton has the details for public records request powerhouse MuckRock.

Since 2016, when the Chicago Cubs became magically relevant in baseball again, the team has also become relevant in intellectual property discussions. The Cubs have gone to war with the street vendors that have long set up shop near Clark and Addison, and the team has been party to an ongoing battle with roughly all the uses of the letter "W" in commerce.But as the team's lawyers appear to have been invigorated by its on the field success, that isn't to say that every single trademark dispute it initiates is one in which it's the bad guy. For instance, one Iowa man decided to trademark the term "Cubnoxious", but apparently didn't have any actual plans to use it when the Cubs came calling.

Last week we wrote about how annoying it was that major media publications were misrepresenting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and suggesting -- completely without merit -- that the law was designed to keep platforms "neutral" or that they were mere "pass through" vehicles, rather than actively engaged in moderation. We pointed out that online trolls and grandstanding politicians were making this incorrect claim, but it was not an accurate statement of the law, and the media should know better. In our comments, some people called me out for not suggesting that the media was being deliberately dishonest, and in response I noted that there wasn't any evidence of deliberateness from most of them (not so much with the trolls and especially grandstanding politicians like Ted Cruz, who have been told, repeatedly, that they are misrepresenting CDA 230). I hoped that it was just a mistake that would be corrected.Perhaps surprisingly, the author of the Vox article that I called out, Jane Coaston, did exactly that. After a few others called out her article, including Harvard's Jonathan Zittrain, Coaston has now apologized and done a massive rewrite on the original article to make it more accurate:

For years we've noted repeatedly how in the modern era you no longer truly own the things you buy. From game consoles that magically lose important functionality post purchase, to digital purchases that just up and disappear, we now live in an era where a quick firmware update can erode functionality and overlong EULAs can strip away all of your rights in an instant, leaving you with a hole in your pocket and a glorified paperweight.The latest case in point: Adobe this week began warning users of its Creative Cloud software applications that they are no longer authorized to use older versions of the company's software platforms (Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere, Animate, and Media Director). In the letter, Adobe rather cryptically implied that users could risk copyright infringement claims by mysterious third parties if they continued using older versions of these platforms and refused to update them. End users, not surprisingly, were equal parts confused and annoyed:

Bloomberg has really been on a roll lately with getting security stories hellishly wrong. Last fall it was its big story claiming that there was a supply chain hack that resulted in hacked SupermMicro chips being used by Amazon and Apple. That story has been almost entirely debunked, though Bloomberg still has not retracted the original. Then, just a few weeks ago, it flubbed another story, claiming that the presence (years ago) of telnet in some Huawei equipment was a nefarious backdoor, rather than a now obsolete but previously fairly common setup for lots of equipment for remote diagnostics and access.The latest is an opinion piece, rather than reporting, but it's still really bad. Following yesterday's big revelation that a big security vulnerability was discovered in WhatsApp, opinion columnist Leonid Bersidsky declared it as evidence that end-to-end encryption is pointless. This is, to put it mildly, a really, really bad take. The whole article is a confused jumble of mostly nonsense, mixed with stuff that was already widely known and irrelevant:

If your face can be found online, chances are it's now part of a facial recognition database. These aren't the ones being utilized by law enforcement, although those are bad enough. The ones used by law enforcement are littered with millions of noncriminals, all part of a system that works worse than advertised 100% of the time.The faces aren't in those databases (yet!), but they're being used to train facial recognition AI with an eye on selling it to law enforcement and other government agencies. Another photo storage company has been caught using users' photos to fine tune facial recognition software… all without obtaining consent from those whose faces became fodder for the tech mill.

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Last week we wrote about Facebook co-founder Chris Huges' long, but remarkably uncompelling argument for why Facebook should be broken up. The post itself was quite long, but could be summed up in that Hughes listed out a variety of problems he attributed to Facebook, and then suggested breaking the company up and regulating speech on the internet in response. However, some of the problems he attributed to Facebook are not, in fact, because of Facebook, and he made no effort to show how his proposed solutions would actually solve any of those problems (indeed, there are arguments it might make some of them worse).Dare Obasanjo tweeted a quite insightful tweet in response to Hughes' piece, noting that a lot of Hughes' (and others') concerns about Facebook can be traced back to the fact that Donald Trump won the election, and a lot of people believe that Facebook helped create that result:

Wireless carriers are coming under increasing fire for failing to protect their users from the practice of SIM hijacking (aka a port scam). The practice involves posing as a wireless customer, then fooling a wireless carrier to port the victim's cell phone number right out from underneath them, letting the attacker then pose as the customer to potentially devastating effect. Last year, a customer sued T-Mobile for failing to protect his account after a hacker pretending to be him ported out his phone number then stole thousands of dollars worth of cryptocoins.Subsequent reports have shown how identity thieves use SIM hijacking to do everything from cleaning out bank accounts, to stealing valuable Instagram usernames and selling them for Bitcoin. Reports often showed how these scams were being helped with the willful help of some cellular carrier employees, something wireless carriers haven't (understandably) been particularly keen on talking about.That was confirmed again last week when the DOJ accused nine people of allegedly being part of a crime ring known as “The Community.” The organizations' specialty was SIM hijacking, which involved having three former employees at AT&T and Verizon steal user identities (and subsequently several million dollars):

The regulatory nightmare known as GDPR continues to wreak havoc. The data privacy law enacted by the European Union has possibly helped protect the data of Europeans, but the thick cloud of smoke rising from the collateral damage makes it impossible to say for sure.Regulating the internet isn't as simple as the EU Parliament thought it would be. The first reaction many US sites had to the new law was to block every user appearing to originate from a covered country. The EU Parliament couldn't even comply with GDPR properly. Its own website didn't anonymize incoming users correctly, allowing the Parliament's site to hoover up IP addresses to send through to Google Analytics. The EU Commission responded to this gaffe by exempting itself from the law.Meanwhile, European citizens were experiencing the downsides of mandated data export. The law requires all user data collected by tech companies to be available on demand to European internet users. In theory, a wonderful idea. In practice, it means if someone hacks one of your accounts, they can start requesting your data as well. Even without being hacked, your personal data can be sent to someone else because tech companies are just as prone to clerical errors as anyone else.This latest incident is more of the same. Another debacle powered by GDPR. This time, the problem created wasn't composed of 1s and 0s. This time the side effects could be felt physically.

To take you back through the entire history since Suburban Express made it onto the Techdirt radar would take more words than I care to spend, but we'll do the short version. Suburban Express runs van lines between Chicago and a couple of local universities. It also, somewhat oddly, regularly goes to war with its own customers, as well as the wider internet. The internet side is mostly well-worn assholery: bitching about review sites, bitching about Reddit, and threatening everyone in between with legal actions. Where the company blazes new trails is when owner Dennis Toeppen gets arrested for harassing critics and customers online, sends out blatantly racist advertisements, and gets itself sued by the Illinois AG for roughly all of the above.This whole saga of stupid has featured guest spots like government employees, law enforcement officers, and even Ken "Popehat" White. But, as all such sagas go, it had to eventually come to an end. And that end comes in the glorious form of Suburban Express shutting down.

On Friday, Mark Zuckerberg went to France, just in time for the French government to release a vague and broad proposal to regulate social media networks. Similar to Zuckerberg's pleas to Congress to ramp up its regulation of the company (and because he knows that any pushback on regulations will likely be slammed by the world of Facebook-haters), Zuckerberg tried to embrace the plans.

Earlier today, the Supreme Court ruled (mostly as expected, though with some caveats) in Apple v. Pepper, a case concerning whether or not iPhone users could sue Apple for antitrust concerning how it controls pricing in the iOS App Store. Most of the news on this focuses either on how this could have a big impact on Apple and other marketplaces, or on how this case (somewhat oddly) split between the two Justices appointed by President Trump, with Justice Kavanaugh writing the majority opinion (joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor) and the dissent written by Justice Gorsuch (joined by Justices Roberts, Thomas and Alito).It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but my first impression is that this case may not prove to be that big of a deal long term. It is not saying anything, really, concerning whether or not Apple's practices are an antitrust violation. It is merely letting a case go forward. And, to some extent, I think that Justice Gorsuch may be correct that all that this case will end up doing in the long run is getting Apple and other platforms to change their contracts in terms of how the money flow officially goes.The key in this case is that Apple sought to have the antitrust case tossed, saying that iPhone owners were not the "direct purchasers" from Apple, and thus had no standing to sue. An earlier case, Illinois Brick v. Illinois, said that only direct purchasers could sue for antitrust violations, rather than those further down the supply chain. Here, the majority said that Illinois Brick doesn't exclude iPhone users, because they did, in fact, make the purchase from Apple, and thus were "direct purchasers."

It seems like only yesterday that the TV sector was busy insisting that TV cord cutting was a "fiction." Once that claim was proven hollow by the data, plenty of industry folks shifted toward claiming that the trend was being over-hyped and only temporary. Many claimed the trend would reverse itself once the housing markets stabilized (didn't happen) or Millennials started to procreate (didn't happen). Often, angry users who cut the cord (usually due to high prices or terrible customer service) were brushed side by executives and analysts as being irrelevant nobodies.And while many in the TV sector now like to insist they saw the problem coming all along, it's genuinely embarrassing how many industry execs tried to wish the rise of additional competition away, believing that if they stuck their head deeply enough in terra firma, this major industry trend would just somehow go away.It's not going away. With 2019's first quarter earnings in the books, data indicates that cord cutting continues to heat up, with another 1.28 million American consumers ditching traditional cable TV in the first quarter alone.American cable giants like Comcast and Charter Spectrum were hard hit, but not quite as badly as satellite TV providers, who are losing customers in droves:

If someone at your police department has leaked a sensitive documents, how should you respond?

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What is it with plastic surgeons suing their former customers over negative reviews? We've written stories with that basic plotline over and over and over again. The latest involves Miami-based plastic surgeon Dr. Leonard Hochstein, who the article lets us know, has appeared on "The Real Housewives of Miami." Except, now he's getting attention for suing two of his former clients who left negative reviews online. Even though there's now a law, the Consumer Review Fairness Act, that bars anyone from forcing customers to sign a non-disparagement clause, Hochstein did so anyway. He insists he only recently became aware of that law. But he won't stop suing those customers.His quotes are truly a work of art.

We've noted repeatedly that if you're upset about Facebook's privacy scandals, you should be equally concerned about the wireless industry's ongoing location data scandals. Not only were the major carriers caught selling your location data to any nitwit with a checkbook, they were even found to be selling your E-911 location data, which provides even more granular detail about your data than GPS provides. This data was then found to have been widely abused from everybody from law enforcement to randos pretending to be law enforcement.Throughout all this, the Ajit Pai FCC has done absolutely nothing to seriously police the problem. Meaning that while carriers have promised to stop collecting and selling this data, nobody has bothered to force carriers to actually confirm this. Given telecom's history when it comes to consumer privacy, somebody might just want to double check their math (and ask what happened to all that data already collected and sold over the last decade).Compounding carrier problems, all four major wireless carriers last week were hit with a class action lawsuit (correctly) noting the carriers had violated Section 222 of the Federal Communications Act by selling consumer proprietary network information (CPNI) data: