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Earlier today, we had a post detailing the completely ridiculous "defense" of Articles 11 and 13 in the EU Copyright Directive that the EU Parliament's JURI Committee released. It was so full of misleading statements, outright lies, and contradictory arguments that it would have been hilarious, if it wasn't trying to justify changing the entire internet for the worse. However, those of us who think that the EU should drop Article 13 (and Article 11) entirely now have a very unlikely ally: the legacy entertainment industries, who were the ones lobbying heavily for Article 13 in the first place.Really.As we had noted last month, as the negotiations moved forward on Article 13, the TV, sports and film industries -- calling themselves the "creative sectors" -- have been suddenly freaking out and asking the negotiators to hit the brakes, or at least carve them out of Article 13. They were doing this for all the wrong reasons of course. Specifically, negotiators had begun to consider a very, very limited (and ridiculously weak) safe harbor for internet platforms, that if they followed a few key steps, they'd be able to avoid having massive liability foist upon them if they let any users sneak through an upload of infringing content (they'd still have to pull it down quickly after it was uploaded, but they wouldn't be facing billions in fines).And, now with Article 13 just about finalized and it looking absolutely terrible in almost every single way... Hollywood is going for broke and now calling for negotiations on Article 13 to be suspended entirely. Again, they're doing this for totally the wrong reasons, but considering that absolutely no one wants Article 13 at this point, shouldn't EU negotiators just drop it?

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The advent of biometric "passcodes" -- fingerprints and facial recognition -- appear to be leaving those who choose these methods with fewer Fifth Amendment protections. A handful of courts have ruled fingerprints and faces aren't "testimony." Much as officers can collect fingerprints and mugshots without a warrant following an arrest, they can also apply fingers and faces to locked phones to get to the data inside.But it's not as simple as some court decisions make it appear. Even passwords can be considered testimonial, as they may indicate ownership of a locked device or compel production of evidence to be used against the device's owner. The passcode argument has gone both ways in court, which usually comes down to the individual judge's definition of "foregone conclusion." Does the foregone conclusion refer to the device's ownership or the evidence contained in it? The latter is harder to prove, and raising the burden of proof to this level tends to result in courts finding the compelled production of passwords to be a Fifth Amendment violation.Via Thomas Brewster at Forbes, there's finally some good news on the biometric security front. A federal judge in California has ruled forcing people to unlock phones using biometric measures is a Fifth Amendment violation.

So earlier this month, we noted how AT&T had pissed off competitors and consumers alike by pretending its existing fourth generation wireless network (4G) was actually 5G. More specifically, AT&T has been changing the "4G" icon on its customers phones to say "5G E," despite the fact that actual 5G service at scale is still probably several years away. Technically, AT&T simply took some of the improvements it recently added to its 4G networks (like better MIMO antennas and more efficient 256 QAM technologies), and decided to call this "5G Evolution" in a bid to pretend it was the first to launch actual 5G.Competitors and consumers noticed.Competitors like T-Mobile have been having fun making fun of AT&T's head fake on Twitter:

The Legislative Affairs Committee (JURI) in the EU Parliament, who are in charge of pushing through the EU Copyright Directive put out a "Q and A" page about the Copyright Directive in the lead up to the next round of trilogue negotiations between the Parliament, the EU Council and the EU Commission. As you may recall, when we left things, everything was at a standstill with no one willing to agree on anything. Some are suggesting even worse proposals than have been seen before. The record labels and movie studios are threatening to drop their support of the bill if the EU actually gives incredibly minor "safe harbors" for internet platforms. The whole thing is a mess, and the easiest thing to do would be to just drop Articles 11 and 13 and focus on cleaning up the rest of the Directive. But that's not what's happening.Negotiations have continued in the background, and where things stand now, the EU is going to fundamentally change how the internet works and not in a good way. They have basically agreed that internet companies will be liable for what users post -- in direct contradiction of current EU law found in the E-Commerce Directive. This will mean filters will become effectively mandatory (in a bit of hilarious theater, the agreement says it does not require filters... but there is literally no way to comply with the law without filters). Very, very, very, very limited safe harbors are still being negotiated over, and are "at risk" of being dropped altogether. Ditto a provision that will make the rules not apply to smaller platforms. Also, still on the table is a "notice and staydown" proposal that says if something does get through, platforms can never let it through again (how this will handle situations where one copy is infringing and another is non-infringing is ignored entirely).So, as the push moves into the final rounds, JURI has decided that if it can't win this argument on facts, it's just going to flat out lie to the public. Let's dive in:

Late last year, after Australia proposed amending its copyright laws, which included some subtle language changes, the country approved the amendments and we immediately warned that this would be abused, feature-creeped, and otherwise utilized by the content industries to restrict access to the internet in favor of their own bottom lines. One of the subtle language changes mentioned above consisted of going from allowing site-blocking of sites where their "primary purpose" was infringing activity to allowing blocking of sites where their "primary effect" was infringing activity. This change was an important one, because it puts the onus for whether a site can be blocked on how users use the tool, rather than how it was intended to be used. And, of course, there is simply more subjectivity in "primary effect" than there is in "primary purpose", leading us to warn that this would be abused.And, a mere few months later, the music industry is in court citing the new law to get approval to have ISPs block stream-ripping sites.

The seventh Appeals Court to weigh in [PDF] on the FBI's Network Investigative Technique deployed in the Playpen child porn investigation has weighed in. Unfortunately, it makes the Sixth Circuit the seventh appeals court to find the FBI's warrant problematic, but willing to apply the "good faith" band-aid.The problem with the application of the "good faith exception" is it assumes good faith on behalf of the FBI. There's no reason to believe the FBI acted in good faith, though. While it was in the process of obtaining a single warrant allowing it to search computers all over the world, it was well aware Rule 41 limited searches to the jurisdiction where the warrant was obtained. It knew this because the DOJ was in the process of asking the Supreme Court and Congress to change Rule 41 to remove the jurisdiction limits while it was pursuing this investigation.The Appeals Court grants good faith anyway, despite this background. It does do us (and the appellant) the favor of discussing good faith in light of the DOJ's simultaneous attempt to codify searches it was already performing, but just because the discussion is expanded a bit doesn't mean it makes much sense. Here's the opening of the Sixth Circuit's federal forgiveness pitch:

With all the news about the ongoing government shutdown and the big messes it has caused, it's creating lots of little messes with potentially big impact as well. For example, scammers and robocallers have upped their game during the shutdown, knowing that (1) there's no one investigating these scams right now, and (2) as I discovered when I tried to report one, the FTC has literally shut down the web portal where you used to be able to submit complaints.Another one, however, pointed out last week by Netcraft, is the fact that government website security certificates are expiring... and there's no one around to renew them:

As farms have found themselves scrutinized for their practices, there's been a legislative desire to cover questionable actions under the protective garb of opacity. Ag lobbyists have successfully pushed for laws criminalizing the exposure of facts. As a bonus, they've also secured legislation labeling animal rights activists and others concerned about farm animal well-being as "terrorists."The victories have been short-lived. Anyone not completely consumed by self-interest would recognize the laws violate the First Amendment by preventing fact-gathering or dissemination of observations by those who've bluffed their way onto farms precisely to uncover abusive practices. Courts are overturning these laws, but that's not stopping anyone from writing new ones just as unconstitutionally sound. Fortunately, a recent federal court decision [PDF] adds to the ammo opponents of these laws can use to bring them down. (via Courthouse News Service)Iowa's "ag gag" law was a direct response to criticism of farm practices -- criticism driven by undercover investigations by journalists and activists posing as farm employees. State legislators had a host of bad reasons for the law -- all of them dancing around the actual reason: to prevent criticism of farm practices.

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While it's understandable (these days especially) that some are concerned about what they refer to as "hate speech," it's worth reminding people (as we've done for years) that laws against hate speech are almost universally used by governments to punish people they don't like, rather than to protect those who most people normally consider the targets of hate speech.Take this latest example, highlighted by FIRE, concerning an attempt by Pakistan to censor an online petition for academic freedom, claiming that it was hate speech.

For years we've explored how the nation's phone companies don't really even want to be in the broadband business. They routinely refuse to upgrade their networks, yet often lobby to ensure nobody else can deliver broadband in these neglected footprints either. Telcos in particular have a bizarre disdain for their paying customers, delivering the bare minimum (slow DSL) at the highest rates they can possibly charge without a full-scale consumer revolt. It's not surprising then that many telco DSL customers are fleeing to cable, assuming they even have a second option for broadband.This dynamic often results in some absurd dysfunction. Like in West Virginia, where incumbent telco Frontier has repeatedly been busted in a series of scandals involving substandard service and the misuse of taxpayer money. The graft and corruption in the state is so severe, state leaders have buried reports, and, until recently, a Frontier executive did double duty as a state representative without anybody in the state thinking that was a conflict of interest.Things aren't going any better for Frontier in Minnesota, where the state AG just issued a scathing 133 page report accusing the company of all manner of dubious behavior, including letting outages go on for months on end without repairs. The report doesn't pull punches in accusing Frontier of violating at least 35 state laws and state guidelines, and routinely neglecting paying customers, putting some customers with medical conditions at risk:

Our first place winner on the insightful side this week is Gary with a comment about Georgia's ongoing attempt to lock up its laws with copyright:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, the NSA more or less admitted to spying on congress, garnering a stunning response from Rep. Peter King who apparently felt that they absolutely should be, and also that Rand Paul was a fearmonger for calling for James Clapper to be prosecuted. Meanwhile, as Obama's planned surveillance reform started looking more and more cosmetic and Dianne Feinstein let slip that her reform bill is mostly about protecting existing surveillance programs, we learned that congress hadn't requested a GAO report on the NSA in years. And the House Intelligence Committee was spreading its own FUD about the impact of Snowden's revelations, while Chuck Schumer was completely incorrectly claiming that Snowden could make his whistleblower case at trial.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, Apple announced its big change to the iTunes store: no more DRM, but only in exchange for giving variable MP3 pricing options to record labels. Though a good move overall, there were disappointing aspects, like the 30-cents per song fee to remove DRM from already-purchased tracks, or the fact that Apple was (and remains) still a big fan of DRM in lots of other places. Veoh won another DMCA safe harbor case, this time against Universal Music, while MP3Tunes was continuing its fight with EMI. The RIAA was dumping its anti-piracy monitoring partner, but only in order to hire a different one — and folks were struggling to actually find any ISPs that had agreed to the agency's three-strikes plan.This was also the week that we saw the beginning of the end for Google China, with the Chinese government calling out search engines for failing to block content.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, fresh off the passage of the CAN-SPAM act, the new anti-spam law's impact was essentially nonexistent, nearly all spam was non-compliant even when from legitimate companies, and overall it seemed like the law was mostly designed to make Congress look good.File sharing was on the decline, though not as much as payphones, while wi-fi was beginning its meteoric rise. While it looked like "DVD Jon" was off the hook for DeCSS, even in Norway, the RIAA was hiring ex-LEOs to bust down doors and scare unauthorized CD vendors, and a Belgian consumer group was suing the industry over CD DRM.Meanwhile, the world was getting ready for the hotly anticipated Google IPO, and just about every bank wanted in on the action.

Lots of trademark disputes are stupid. Lots of trademark disputes portray a great deal of hand-wringing that is laughable at best. And lots of trademark disputes end up being settled despite not being even remotely valid. But very few trademark disputes have to do with the naming and promoting of commercial developments when the geography that separates them is over 1,700 miles.But that's the case in the recent news that the City of Naperville in Illinois has dropped the name of its Water Street District development due to a complaint by the city of Henderson in Nevada.

Of all the stupid things a lawyer can do, it's difficult to think of many more stupid than to send a totally and completely bogus copyright infringement claim, arguing (incorrectly) a violation of DMCA section 1201 (the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA) to Cory Doctorow. Among many other things, Cory is one of the leading voices about the problems of 1201 and has fought for years to dismantle it. And thus a case that actually challenged 1201 might be interesting, but in this case, there's no valid 1201 case at all.As explained in an EFF blog post, Bird, one of the bigger app-based scooter rental services out there, sent a completely bullshit "Notice of Claimed Infringement" to Doctorow and the parent company of Boing Boing, Happy Mutants. Over what? Over a BoingBoing post from last month that reports on how people are offering $30 conversion kits to turn a former Bird scooter into one that you yourself can use. Specifically, the article talked about how many Bird scooters were being impounded, and could potentially be sold off at some point to people who might want to convert one on the cheap into a personal electric scooter.The letter--sent by Bird's "Sr. Corporate Counsel", Linda Kwak (whose experience appears to be focused on employment law, not copyright law)--makes a number of ludicrous claims. Thankfully, Doctorow and BoingBoing have EFF to back them up and respond forcefully to this kind of threat, with a response written by EFF senior staff attorney Kit Walsh. Here's a snippet:

The censorship arm of the Vietnamese government is at it again, complaining that it's not getting enough censorship accomplished. The target of its complaints is, oddly enough, a former enabler of its dissent-stifling efforts, Facebook.To help it snuff out criticism and dissent, the government granted itself expansive new powers with a cybersecurity law that went into effect at the beginning of this year. When a law is clearly written to target government critics, it appears that it can be applied a lot more broadly, especially when the definition of "cybersecurity" includes all of this:

There's a lot of talk about border security recently. Rather strangely, it involves CBP officers going without paychecks for an indefinite amount of time as government funding is held hostage in exchange for border wall/fence money.Not that the CBP needs to remain near the wall/fence. It's able to hassle people within 100 miles of the border, which also includes international airports and has the capability to sweep up most of America's population. And that's just CBP officers. The CBP's drones are being lent out to anyone who wants to use one as far inland as they want to use it.The CBP performs a whole lot of searches. Over the past couple of years, the CBP has vastly increased the number of electronic searches it performs, needing little more than "because it's there" to perform at least a surface scan of a device's contents. Deeper digging requires extra paperwork, but a staggering amount of exceptions to the Fourth Amendment apply at the borders which, as we noted earlier, covers far more than points of entry.The ACLU's FOIA lawsuit has resulted in the production of a couple of lengthy documents from the CBP. These documents detail search procedures and the CBP's long list of justifications for performing these searches. There are 1,200 pages in the newly-released stash. 1,100 of them are the CBP's "Enforcement Law Course" [PDF]. The other 100 are a Powerpoint [PDF] containing "legal update training."The CBP has studied every Fourth Amendment-related legal decision to compile a long list of things officers can use to predicate a warrantless search. This multi-jurisdictional paper chase results in the expected internal contradictions, resulting in the CBP being able to argue both sides of a flipped coin can give them permission to perform a search. Here's a quick summation of some of the documents' contents by Max Rivlin-Nadler of The Intercept.

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Late last spring, a federal court in New York made it clear Trump's blocking of Twitter users violated those users' First Amendment rights. As the court reasoned then, Twitter may be a private company, but the use of it by government official to engage with the public makes it a limited public forum -- limited to Trump's account and Twitter users' interaction with it. Twitter remains free to moderate as it pleases. The ruling did not say Twitter itself was a public forum, just government officials' use of the platform via official accounts.When Trump's account blocked people he didn't like, he violated the First Amendment.

We've talked a lot about how while fifth-generation wireless is a good thing (in that faster, more reliable networks are always good), it's been comically over-hyped by cellular carriers and network hardware vendors. It has also been accompanied by what appears to be a race between cellular carriers to broadly misrepresent what 5G is capable of, and where and when it will actually be available. AT&T, for example, began changing the 4G icons on user phones to "5GE," despite the fact actual 5G isn't even out of the oven yet.Hoping to apparently cash in on AT&T's well-mocked decision while at CES, Verizon subsequently penned this blog post trying to proclaim itself as the more measured of the wired carriers when it comes to 5G:

The social networks of the world aren't doing much to make the world a better place. Facilitating communications across borders is great -- a definite net gain for the world's citizens. But these platforms insist on distributing globally while thinking locally, making their operations subject to censorial governments in the countries where they do business.Facebook's refusal to stand up to various authoritarian governments arguably made it an accessory to the fact in genocide. Twitter tends to sit back and let Turkey's government vanish away criticism of President Erdogan and his actions. Google appears to be one of the few companies responsive to the Chinese government's demands for content deletion, which is probably due to its ability to get past the country's Great Firewall as well as its temporarily suspended construction of a Chinese government-controlled search engine.One social network rarely appears in these discussions, most likely because few people actually see it as a social network. LinkedIn -- the de facto adult in the world of social networking -- is also giving China what it wants when it wants it.

It is hard to imagine life without Wikipedia. That's especially the case if you have school-age children, who now turn to it by default for information when working on homework. Less well-known is the importance of Wikipedia for scientists, who often use its pages for reliable explanations of basic concepts:

In all of our coverage about cord-cutting, we have mostly focused on how the public is in large swaths ditching cable for over the air and internet alternatives. Aside from that, we've also commented on stories where the networks are looking for new ways to measure viewership of their content given all the cord-cutting that has already occurred. The common theme, however, is that cord-cutting is not some fad and is a full on thing among the public.And also, it turns out, among some relevant companies as well. I've made the point for a long time that professional sports are the last thread to which cable is clinging. Once the larger leagues out there realize that they can just stream games on their own "networks", cable is over. But perhaps it won't necessarily go at the league level. At least in the case of Major League Soccer, one team has decided to cut the cord themselves and go full streaming.

Back in October, we wrote about how Google had declared -- with no details -- that an earlier post we had done was "dangerous or derogatory" and that it would no longer allow AdSense ads on that page. The real irony? The original post (which contains nothing dangerous or derogatory) was about the "impossible choices" platforms have to make when moderating speech on their platforms. So, what better example than "moderating" an article about how internet platforms will always be bad at content moderation.We had requested a "review" of the designation when we first got it, and Google initially rescinded the decision, before reinstating it a few weeks later. We appealed again... and were rejected. That's when I wrote the article. Soon afterwards, some people from Google reached out to discuss what happened. As I've said all along -- and as I said directly to people at Google -- the company has every right to make these calls however they want. I certainly understand how it's impossible to craft reasonable rules that can be applied at scale without making "mistakes" (and I still maintain this is a mistake). My one request was that the company be a bit more forthcoming about why we were dinged, so that, at the very least, if there was a real issue, we could make a determination on our own about whether or not we agreed and if there was anything worth changing. I didn't get a response to that specific request and I can guess why: given how much content needs to be moderated, it would likely add significant overhead that probably isn't worth it for any "edge cases."Either way, we left things alone. If Google doesn't want to put AdSense on that page, fine. Adsense pays next to nothing anyway. But, what's weird is that over this past weekend, Google decided to complain to us again about the same damn page. I had simply assumed that once we left things as is that page was on some sort of permanent "bad" list. But, for whatever reason, the company decided that it was urgent to alert us that the page they already (stupidly) called "dangerous and derogatory" was now being declared "dangerous and derogatory" once again. Because we got a new notification, I clicked the appeal button once again, and on Monday morning the company rejected our appeal. Again, that's Google prerogative, though it looks kinda silly. Why even bother us to tell us that this page you already decided (incorrectly) is a problem is still a problem? We're not changing anything, so just don't put ads on it and stop bugging us about it.One other note on all of this: while the folks at Google (understandably) couldn't tell us why the story was dinged in the first place, they did note that it might be because of user comments -- and pointed me to this post about "managing the risk of user comments." What struck me as somewhat astounding about that article is that it is Google more or less taking the exact opposite stance it normally takes on intermediary liability. While Google (correctly) fights for intermediary liability protections in government policy around the globe, here it says that if you have any kind of user generated content on your site -- such as comments -- then you are responsible for that content.

The "Right to Be Forgotten" -- a European construct that allows people to erase their internet history at the drop of a takedown request -- should only apply in countries affected by the law. That would seem to be obvious but, so far, it hasn't played out that way. There has been insistence by a few judges and governments that delisting orders should cover anywhere Google's search engine can be used, rather than just in the originating country.The abusable system has led to questionable delisting requests, which almost always results in the person making the dubious request generating even more URLs to target with the next round of takedowns. That's the nature of the internet, and that's why some judges think content delisted in one country should be made unavailable everywhere in the world.For a while, it appeared the EU was inclined to agree with French regulators who believed they should be able to control the distribution of content worldwide from an office in Paris. Fortunately, it doesn't appear these regulators will get to control the internet. Reuters reports the EU court is probably going to end up siding with Google in this dispute.

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The Chinese government doesn't have much interest in utilizing social media companies' online portals to target content it doesn't like. And there's plenty of content the government doesn't like. Between the Great Firewall and its obsessive tracking of citizens through pervasive surveillance tech and "Citizen Scores," there's really not much left for American social media companies to do.The data contained in social media company transparency reports appears to indicate the Chinese government is capable of censoring content without outside assistance. Only Google's shows a significant amount of requests from the Chinese government. Facebook hasn't seen anything in years. And Twitter's report sports a gaudy "N/A" when it comes to content takedown requests from the Chinese government.If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

Telecom monopolies have a pretty good racket going. They'll consistently demand all manner of tax cuts, subsidies, and other government perks in exchange for A: jobs that never actually materialize, or B: broadband network expansions that somehow never actually arrive. The nation's telcos in particular have received countless billions in taxpayer subsidies to expand their broadband networks, yet time and time again we've shown how they've wiggled out of these obligations, leaving huge swaths of America left outside of the reach of fast, inexpensive, competitive broadband (that's particularly true in poor urban and rural areas).Yet somehow, we here in America never quite learn the lesson. Case in point: you might recall that in late 2017 AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told anybody who'd listen that the Trump era tax cuts (which granted AT&T a $20 billion one-time windfall and $3 billion in extra cash every year thereafter) would create upwards of 7,000 new high-paying jobs paying $70-$80k. The CEO also tried to claim that as a direct result of the tax cuts it would be doling out $1000 bonuses to roughly 200,000 employees.Funny story, but those promised jobs never arrived. AT&T did technically add some jobs, but they were of the dirt cheap, off-shored labor variety. In reality, union data suggests the company cut 10,700 US jobs in the year since Stephenson made his statement. This was on the heels of the 44 call centers and 16,000 jobs AT&T had already cut since 2011. And those bonuses? While employees did receive them, it was later revealed they had already been arranged as part of union negotiations, and had nothing to do with the Trump tax cuts. Even then, they accounted for about 7% of just one year of AT&T's new tax benefits.Fast forward to this week, when insiders at AT&T informed me that the company is planning yet another round of significant layoffs at the company as it attempts to pivot from grumpy old telco to sexy new Millennial advertising company:

The Obama Administration was never a fan of leakers and whistleblowers. The Trump Administration isn't either. And it's continuing to ramp up investigations in response to a steady stream of leaks that tend to arrive moments after executive proclamations in order to undermine or contradict whatever has just been proclaimed.Fired company man Jeff Sessions thought the best plan to tackle leaks was prosecuting the recipients: journalists. Not really the best plan of action in a country with enshrined speech rights, but that's the way things are being done in the nation's capital. True to form, the DOJ has gone after leakers with a vengeance, threatening to rewrite all of Obama's personal prosecution records.The FBI is getting in on the action, according to a document obtained by Ken Klippenstein of The Young Turks. The word "espionage" is tossed around, but most of what the Trump Administration has dealt with has been embarrassing, rather than a concerted effort to hand secret documents over to our country's enemies. Nonetheless, hunting leakers is official FBI business.

It should be well understood at this point that attempts by internet platforms to automagically do away with sexualized content on their sites via algorithms are... imperfect, if we want to be kind. The more accurate description is to say that these filters are so laughably horrible at actually filtering out objectionable content that they seem farcical. When, for instance, Tumblr can't tell the difference between porn and pictures of Super Mario villains, and when Facebook can't do likewise between porn and bronze statues or educational breast cancer images consisting of stick figures...well, it's easy to see that there's a problem.Notably, some of the examples above, and many others, are years old. You might have thought that in the intervening years, the most prominent sites would have gotten their shit together. You would be decidedly wrong, as evidenced by Facebook's refusal to allow Devolver Digital, the publishers of the forthcoming video game GRIS, to publish this launch trailer for the game, due to its sexual content.Did you spot the sexual content? I know you probably think you did. Or, you at least you think you know what confused the filters, and you probably think it had something to do with the close up on the female character's face.Well, ha ha, jokes on all of us, because it was this image for...reasons?

The US Department of the Interior wants to do all it can to comply with recent changes to FOIA law. It wants transparency and accountability just as much as US citizens want it. In the comments preceding its proposed changes [PDF] to FOIA response procedures, it has this to say:

Senator Chuck Grassley is leaving his post as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, firing some parting shots at the US Marshals Service on his way out the door. His 20-page memo [PDF] detailing years of USMS misconduct comes with over 400 pages of exhibits -- source documents, email chains, and other evidence backing up the disturbing narrative.The USMS wasted taxpayer dollars, misused asset forfeiture funds, engaged in routine retaliation against whistleblowers, and -- for an entire decade -- forged a judge's signature on more than 800 subpoenas.

Every year Mark Zuckerberg sets a "challenge" for himself for that year, which as many people have noted, Facebook has turned into a big PR vehicle for the company. We usually don't even bother to write about it, because why bother? However, I'm intrigued by this year's "challenge" for a few reasons. The plan sounds fairly simple (and perhaps simplistic): he wants to host a series of public discussions about technology and society -- and about Facebook's role in it going forward:

We've noted a few times now that while Facebook gets a lot of justified heat for its privacy scandals, the stuff going on in the cellular data and app market in regards to location data makes many of Facebook's privacy issues seem like a grade-school picnic. That's something that was pretty well highlighted by the recent Securus and LocationSmart scandals, which showcased perfectly how cellular carriers and location data brokers routinely buy and sell your daily travel habits with only a fleeting effort to ensure all of the subsequent buyers and sellers of that data adhere to basic privacy and security standards.This week, Joseph Cox at Motherboard dropped yet another bombshell report on this subject, noting how he was easily able to pay a bounty hunter $300 to obtain the (supposedly) private location data collected by his cellular provider (T-Mobile). Much like the Securus scandal, the problem once again is the countless location data brokers and third party vendors which are being sold this data, then doing pretty much whatever they'd like with it. In this instance, his data was collected by T-Mobile, shared with brokers and aggregators like Microbilt and Zumingo, then in turn shared with bail bond outfits and private investigators:

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The DOJ doesn't care if it lies to the American people. This isn't exactly a shocking accusation. The DOJ isn't anyone's idea of honest, no matter what its name implies. The DOJ has encouraged and supported parallel construction, entrapment (ATF stash house stings, almost every FBI terrorism bust), and shown itself to be a willing extension of every administration it's attached to. If a narrative needs bolstering, the DOJ will comply.When the Trump administration wanted to push its narrative about the southern border crawling with dangerous terrorists and criminals, the DOJ leapt in to help. It had to, since the agency charged with immigration enforcement (ICE) couldn't actually find very many dangerous criminals to detain and deport, even as the President continued to make daily assertions about the national security threat directly across the border.The DOJ and DHS presented its "findings" to Congress and the American public -- a bunch of paper masquerading as a set of facts that contained very little factual information. It claimed a "vast majority" of terrorist acts were perpetrated by foreigners illegally in the United States. This was not simply wrong, but an apparently deliberate attempt to inflate numbers into a national security threat-sized problem. To do this, the DOJ and DHS added in foreign citizens who had been extradited to the US to face trial for terrorism-related charges. Subtracting these, the actual percentage was closer to 20% -- not anywhere near the "majority" the agencies claimed.This was only part of the report's misrepresentations. Another assertion claimed immigrants were convicted of almost 70,000 sex offenses from 2003 to 2009. Again, the facts did not back this claim up.

We've repeatedly noted how while fifth-generation (5G) wireless should someday deliver faster, more efficient wireless networks, the technology itself has been embarrassingly over-hyped, largely thanks to network vendor and cellular carrier marketing departments. It's going to take years before users actually see a healthy selection of actual 5G devices in the wild (Apple's 5G iPhone won't launch until 2020 or later). And despite carrier promises, deploying these upgrades to traditionally ignored rural and less affluent urban markets will take years. 5G also won't magically fix the vast dysfunction in the telecom sector.With 5G hype running amok, the cable industry thought it might be a good idea to inject another entire layer of confusion into the proceedings. At CES, cable operators have started marketing something they're calling 10G, despite the fact that 10G isn't actually a thing. The cable industry's top lobbying and policy organization, the NCTA, announced the not-really-a-thing advancement over at their website, where former FCC boss turned cable lobbyist Mike Powell proclaimed that the cable industry's 10G network plans would somehow be a game changer:

Sri Lanka roads might be getting a little safer. Maybe. Along with raising fines for speeding, police agencies are also deploying fake cops. Cardboard cutouts of officers have been placed alongside roads as a deterrent.These cardboard replicants may be these agencies' only honest cops. The State Department's report on Sri Lanka says police in the country routinely engage in arbitrary arrests and "harass civilians with impunity." This harassment often takes the form of soliciting bribes. Combine the two and you have officers wandering around with iron fists and open palms. Another report says the bribery is a two-way street, with officers sometimes paying off citizens to purchase their silence about other illegal police activities.The problem with solicited bribes is large enough the government has set up a portal for citizens to file complaints about bribes solicited/paid. Fortunately, anonymity is an option. Unfortunately, the government runs the website so collected data may help pinpoint where the complaints are originating from.So, it naturally follows that Sri Lankans -- a third of which believe the nation's police are corrupt -- are toying with the cardboard cops. In a less corrupt society, this would have led to nothing but some fun had by all. Since Sri Lanka is notoriously corrupt, it has led to this instead:

Over the past several years, we've covered the increasingly trendy practice of professional athletes rushing to the trademark office to register their nicknames and/or catchphrases. From Anthony Davis' unibrow, to Bryce Harper's flippant remarks, to Ryan Lochte channeling his inner bro-ness, up to and including Jeremy Lin's claim on his portmanteau nickname, we've raised our eyebrows at this sort of theory of ownership and protectionism that often times looks to make exclusive money over the coined phrases created by others. This sort of locking up of language was never really the point of trademark law, as we've pointed out, and we've suggested that athletes engaging in this sort of thing probably isn't the best thing for the public, the supposed beneficiary of trademark law.But perhaps we should introduce a caveat in our stance: if you play for the Dallas Mavericks, maybe you should rush to the trademark office. It seems that Luka Doncic, the rookie star of Mark Cuban's team, has had the trademark rug pulled out from underneath him by his employer.

There have been some pretty garbage responses to California's amendment of its open records laws, which rolls back the extreme level of opacity shielding police misconduct records. The City of Inglewood gave its police force a zero-accountability parting gift by granting it permission to destroy hundreds of officer-involved shooting files just prior to the new law taking effect.Over in San Bernardino County, law enforcement -- or at least their union reps -- responded to the new law by petitioning the state Supreme Court for an injunction. The Sheriff's Employees' Benefit Association wanted the law blocked until it could be determined whether or not the law was retroactive. The union claimed making pre-2019 records available to the public would "violate [its] members' rights."This ran contrary to the assessment of the actual Sheriff and the county's legal counsel, both of whom felt the law applied to old misconduct files.

Today, Mike is at the opening of the Consumer Technology Association's CES 2019 show — which means we'll have one of our CES post-mortem podcasts coming up soon! But before that, for this first episode of 2019, we've got a discussion with CTA CEO Gary Shapiro, whose new book Ninja Future takes a look at how people and businesses are dealing with innovation and rapid technological change.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.

For a subject we've been collectively discussing ad nauseum for the better part of two decades, it's kind of astounding how many people still don't really understand how net neutrality works.Case in point: last week, BitTorrent (or what's left of it under new owner TRON) announced yet another business model revision, stating it would be integrating cryptocurrency into their BitTorrent platform. One of the goals of this "Project Atlas" is to develop a system that would financially-reward folks who seed files. TRON put the project plan this way:

Apparently the producers of the movie "Where Hands Touch," which is being widely panned as terrible (NY Times calls it a "gut-wrenching misfire" and notes "by the end of the movie, my jaw felt unhinged from dropping so often."), aren't responding well to the criticism. While some of the criticism is about the "plodding" storyline, much of it is about the main plot, which is about a black woman in Nazi Germany -- who appears to support the Nazi cause -- falling in love with a Hitler Youth.The film got little attention in its theatrical release, but became available online recently, and apparently the producers decided that people tweeting negative things about it deserve to be hit with DMCA takedowns. It seems to have started with Haaniyah Angus who live tweeted watching the film. Reading the entire thread is a treat (seriously, go read it), here are just a couple of clips from her live tweeting:

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Oregon resident Matt Jarlstrom didn't agree with the state's traffic safety assessment, spurred on by his wife receiving a ticket from a red light camera. Using his background in engineering and his real-world experience with automatic cameras, he did some math and tried to present it to government officials. The government didn't respond well. It fined Jarlstrom $500 for practicing engineering without a license. In the state of Oregon, certification is needed to call yourself an engineer, even if you're not actually performing any engineering work. At least, that's the way the state read the law when it chose to punish Jarlstrom for questioning its timing of yellow lights.Naturally, this stupid decision resulted in a lawsuit. Pointing out the unconstitutionality of using a licensing law to suppress protected speech, Jarlstrom sued the state in April 2017. A couple of months later, the state licensing board graciously agreed to temporarily stop violating Jarlstrom's First Amendment rights.Six months later, the state board finally conceded defeat. It agreed it had misused the statute to punish Jarlstrom for engaging in protected speech and said he could call himself an "engineer" even without the state's prize piece of paper as it was clear he wasn't soliciting engineering work when offering up his critique of traffic light timing patterns.Thanks to a federal court, the licensing board's admission of wrongdoing has been transformed into First Amendment precedent. As it points out in its opinion [PDF], it's nice the state licensing board has offered an apology, but that's no guarantee it won't enforce the law this way in the future and harm the free speech rights of Jarlstrom or someone else found equally irritating by state officials.

We've noted for years how when the cable and broadcast industry is faced with new challenges, its very first reaction is almost always to double down on dumb ideas. When consumers began complaining about the volume of ads during prime time, the industry's first response was to try and edit down or speed up programs so they could shovel more ads into every viewing hour. When consumers began using new DVR ad-skipping tech, the industry's first reaction was to sue companies offering such advancements.In a healthy market, companies respond to the rise in new competition by competing on service quality and price. Not the cable industry. Despite a soaring variety of new, cheaper streaming options, every year the industry's first impulse has been to raise cable TV prices, in turn driving more users than ever to "cut the cord" and embrace these streaming options instead. As a new year rolls in, its a phenomenon that's once again repeating itself as Comcast, Dish, AT&T, and most other pay TV providers once again raise rates for 2019:

Either Julian Assange is the least self-aware person in the British Isles (currently), or Wikileaks is playing some sort of weird joke on the press. The organization, whose entire reason for being is publishing documents whose authors don't wish them to be published has bizarrely sent a list of 140 things reporters are not supposed to say about Assange (if this is a troll by Assange, you have to wonder if the 140 -- Twitter's original character limit -- is somehow on purpose). We'll get to the list in a moment, but first, the list included this hilarious statement:

Surveillance using facial recognition is sweeping the world. That's partly for the usual reason that the underlying digital technology continues to become cheaper, more powerful and thus more cost-effective. But it's also because facial recognition can happen unobtrusively, at a distance, without people being aware of its deployment. In any case, many users of modern smartphones have been conditioned to accept it unthinkingly, because it's a quick and easy way to unlock their device. This normalization of facial recognition is potentially bad news for privacy and freedom, as this story in the South China Morning Post indicates:

All one needs to do to get a sense of how Louis Vuitton, famed maker of bags, views trademark law is do a short review of past stories it's been involved in on this site. What you will come away with is the clear sense of the company as laughably litigious, insanely aggressive in bullying others, and as being entirely devoid of having anything resembling a sense of humor or respect for parody.And that last bit appears to be resulting in yet another dispute, this time between Louis Vuitton and MGA Entertainment Inc., which makes the Pooey Puitton toy handbag. And, yes, that toy handbag is literally shaped like a piece of poop. Apparently, Louis Vuitton has been making comments to some of MGA's commercial clients that the toy handbag infringes its trademarks, leading to MGA filing suit against LV asking for a declaratory judgement that its parody bag is not in fact infringing.