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Okay, let's start with this. Can we all agree -- no matter what your party, ideological, or candidate preference -- that in any election where you are up for one of the offices, that you shouldn't be the one in charge of safeguarding the integrity of the election? This seems like a fairly basic point concerning democracy, that if you're a candidate for office, you should recuse yourself from anything involving election integrity. However, that's not the way things work around here, apparently. In at least three key elections this year, current secretaries of state, who are in charge of election integrity, are running for higher office while being in charge of counting their own votes. It just so happens that this year all three of those cases involve Republicans (and all three of those Republicans have a long and fairly detailed history of voter suppression tactics), but the issue applies equally to Democrats who might be in the same position. No one who is in charge of election integrity should ever be in the position of running for office at the same time.But let's focus in on just one of the three individuals in that situation this year: Republican Brian Kemp, Georgia's Secretary of State, who is in a very heated campaign to be Governor of Georgia, campaigning against Democrat Stacey Abrams. As you may know, our stated policy on Techdirt is that we tend not to name the party affiliation of any politician, unless it truly matters to the story. That's because in this age of red team/blue team insanity, many people determine what they agree or disagree with depending on the color of the uniform. However, in this story, the party affiliations matter, not for which one is which (we could have posted an identical story with the party's changed), but because the dispute here clearly involves partisan politics.As you may have heard, on Sunday, just two days before the election, Kemp (who's been getting hit with a bunch of bad headlines around his failed attempts at voter suppression in that state) announced that he had opened an investigation into an alleged "failed attempt to hack the state's voter registration system" by the Democratic Party of Georgia. Most of the headlines about this correctly noted that Kemp's office provided basically zero details to support this claim. Indeed, the entire announcement was two very short paragraphs long:

For years now, streaming video providers like HBO and Netflix have taken a relatively-lax approach to password sharing. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has gone so far as to say he "loves" password sharing, and sees it as little more than free advertising. Execs at HBO (at least before the AT&T acquisition), have similarly viewed password sharing in such a fashion, arguing that young users in particular that share their parents password get hooked on a particular product via password sharing, then become full subscribers down the road once they actually have disposable income.On the other side of the equation sits Charter CEO Tom Rutledge, one of the highest paid execs in media. He, in contrast, has long complained that he views password sharing as "piracy", and has consistently promised to crack down on the practice. Rutledge and his fellow executives gave a particularly rousing "get off my lawn" lecture at a media event last year:

This flow of especially pointless lawsuits doesn't appear be drying up -- fed mainly from the (revenue) streams maintained by 1-800-LAW-FIRM and Excolo Law. Neither does the flow of courtroom losses. These two firms are responsible for most of the lawsuits we've covered that attempt to hold social media companies responsible for international acts of terrorism.The legal theory behind the suits is weak. Attempting to avoid Section 230 immunity, the suits posit that the presence of terrorists on social media platforms is a violation of various federal laws targeting terrorist organizations. Section 230 defenses have been raised by Twitter, Facebook, et al, but these usually aren't addressed by the courts because there's not enough in the terrorism law-related arguments to keep the suits alive.According to Eric Goldman -- who has snagged the latest dismissal [PDF] -- this is the seventh time a federal court has tossed one of these suits. If you're familiar with the other cases we've covered, you know what's coming. The California federal court's decision quotes Ninth Circuit precedent from a similar lawsuit that said plaintiffs have to show a direct relationship between social media services' action and the act of terrorism prompting the lawsuit. In this case, the complaint fails to do so.

Five Years AgoThe ongoing fallout of the Edward Snowden leaks heated up again this week, so we're taking another break from the five/ten/fifteen-year retrospective to dig into what happened this week in 2013.The feds had waited until late the previous Friday to quietly release details of a criminal case that used information from NSA surveillance, but this news was quickly overshadowed by new leaks showing the NSA had collected millions of phone records in Italy and Spain, in addition to the previous revelations about France, and of course about spying on world leaders. Speaking of which, Obama was denying that he knew anything about the NSA spying on Angela Merkel's phone, and was apparently quietly telling the NSA to quit spying so much on the UN (or perhaps just quit getting caught). The Merkel scandal was threatening to scuttle the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, while the NSA was apparently pretty furious at the administration for denying knowledge — and Mike Rogers was insisting Congress knew about it to, and attacking (with video!) the lawmakers who said that wasn't the case. As for the European bulk collection targets, Mike Rogers was saying they should be thrilled that the US is helping to keep them safe, though it later turned out that those countries' own intelligence agencies were heavily involved. This was one of many conflicting messages though, with the NSA constantly revising its own exact position.Congress, however, was trying to push back, with a bill that would stop the worst of the NSA's excesses. They had no ally in Dianne Feinstein though — she started preparing another bill that would largely codify current practices, then later decided she had changed her mind and agreed the NSA had gone too far, leading NSA officials to admit they were screwed... except then she released her bill anyway and, as expected, it looked like it might even make it easier for the NSA to spy on people.Of course, there was still more to learn about the NSA this week. James Clapper begrudgingly declassified documents that showed the NSA believed it could spy on everyone's location data based on existing approvals (something they had previously denied they do at all). And then the latest realization from the Snowden docs: the NSA had infiltrated Yahoo and Google servers without the companies knowing. Keith Alexander was on stage at an event while the story broke, and quickly cooked up a misleading response that was later formalized with an official non-denial from the agency. While people tried to figure out how the NSA pulled it off, we figured there was one small silver lining: some tech companies were finally starting to realize they should oppose the NSA.Believe it or not, that's not even every NSA post from this week in 2013, but it's the important news. As a final note, the creator of a parody NSA t-shirt also sued the agency over the legal threats it was sending to him.

Earlier this year, we wrote a bunch of posts on the Copyright Office's request for comment on changes needed to the DMCA's anti-circumvention exemption list. There were lots of interesting submissions, but one that caught my attention was a whole bunch of film association groups, most of them for documentarians, advocating that the anti-circumvention they enjoyed to be able to use clips from other films and content be expanded to include filmmakers generally. This would address the copyright industries' cynical attempt to route around Fair Use usage by filmmakers by simply locking up their content behind all kinds of DRM that, unless you're a documentarian, you can't circumvent. The MPAA, as you would expect, said that allowing for this would kick off "widespread hacking" of all the DVDs on the planet, while all it was really concerned about was the licensing agreements it was able to secure by filmmakers who didn't want to violate the DMCA to get the Fair Use clips they wanted.Well, the Copyright Office made its decision and the exemption will now be offered to filmmakers en masse.

Crushing drug dealers and criminal cartels: that's the asset forfeiture narrative. The reality is something completely different. It's the government taking property from people with a minimum of due process, urged on by a set of perverse incentives. Law enforcement agencies directly profit from the stuff they take from people, so there's really no reason not to.When the general public hears forfeiture is being used to target criminal cartels, they tend to think of piles of cash, luxury vehicles, sprawling mansions, and the occasional aircraft. In reality, it's whatever cash cops can find laying around (usually less than $1,000) and vehicles a couple of decades old that are someone's barely-reliable ride.Whatever statistics can be obtained -- and it isn't much, given the secrecy cloaking these state-ordained seizures -- always tell the same story: 99% of civil asset forfeiture is penny ante bullshit. It's this way for several reasons. First, smaller forfeitures aren't worth fighting in court, so small ball seizures are almost guaranteed to end up in the hands of law enforcement. Second, it all adds up over the year. A bunch of small seizures turns into real money eventually. Third, cops aren't willing to let drug lords walk. But they'll take stuff from anyone they can imagine might be part of a cartel, even when it's someone busted carrying nothing more than a personal stash.And that's if they even find contraband at all. The absence of criminal evidence seldom deters seizures, and forfeitures have been expanded to cover vehicles driven by impaired or uninsured drivers.Wayne County, Michigan is no exception to this particularly depressing set of rules. As the Michigan Capitol Confidential reports, local law enforcement has seized millions of dollars worth of property, but a closer examination of the data shows its forfeiture programs prey on the poor and/or drug users who have nothing to do with the supply side of the Drug War.

Over the summer we wrote about the increase in employees at big tech companies leading internal protests against business decisions made by those companies -- mostly around providing tools to the government or military that might be used in ways that many people find to be immoral. It was interesting to see this play out (and stay tuned for next week's podcast, where this will be discussed). More recently, there have been similar protests from within Google over its plans to reenter the Chinese market with a government-approved version of its search engine.Yesterday, thousands of Google employees took this to another level. Following a recent (horrific) NY Times piece on massive failures by Google management in dealing with sexual misconduct at the company, Google employees all over the world participated in a walkout protest over management's activity. They also put together what appears to be a fairly modest list of demands, including an end to forced arbitration over harassment and discrimination claims, further commitments to fight pay and opportunity inequality at the company, transparency on sexual harassment at the company, a better way for reporting sexual misconduct, an elevated role for a "Chief Diversity Officer," and adding an "Employee Representative" to the Board of Directors.I have a bunch of thoughts on this -- some of which I may explore more deeply in future posts, but at a first pass, I think this kind of activism by employees is a very good thing. Remember, Silicon Valley has long promoted the idea that its workforce is much more closely aligned with management than traditional companies, in part because of the free flowing nature of stock options and grants. As someone who spent years studying traditional labor/management malfunctions, the more mutually aligned approach that Silicon Valley claimed to have had in the past was a huge part of its strength and a key reason why the industry as a whole has been so innovative. Unfortunately, in the past few years, it does seem that this alignment has diverged, and in too many cases, management has been pursuing growth and opportunities in ways that go against the interests and beliefs of the employees. There may be reasons for this, but they're not good ones.While Silicon Valley has long had an antagonistic view towards traditional labor organizing and unions (which I think is the right call for a whole host of structural reasons), it's fascinating to watch employees at these companies gravitate toward these kinds of protest behaviors to make their voices heard.As we've discussed for many years, the power of innovation in Silicon Valley is driven by its employees and their ability to continue to innovate and create wonderful new things -- and to take their brainpower and move to other companies. Perhaps it's no surprise that, as we've had a few companies become bigger and bigger over the past few years, there's a center of gravity that has allowed management and an employee base to lose the alignment of interests. It's an unfortunate trend and one that hopefully these actions can help correct.On a related note, the idea of an employee representative on the board is a fascinating one. Other countries (most notably Germany) have done this under law (and we discussed a proposed law to do this in the US just a few months ago on our podcast). I think companies would be much better served in doing so, if only (again) to better align the incentives of the employees and the overall company, which should lead to better long term results.My one quibble with the list of demands is with the focus on the "Chief Diversity Officer." It is not that I'm opposed to companies focusing on diversity as a goal -- I think that's actually especially valuable in a company that seeks to serve nearly the entire globe with services. But, it reminds me of the rush a decade ago for companies to create Chief Digital Officers. As I said back then, a Chief Digital Officer made it look like you treated "thinking digitally" as just another silo, rather than something the entire company had to understand at a gut level. The same is true of diversity. Having it be a "role" in the company perhaps might make sense as a forcing function to make sure that someone is making sure that the company is moving in the right direction, but to achieve true diversity within a company, you need everyone to understand, deeply, the value of diversity in helping to push companies forward, to build truly innovative products, and to understand how those products and services could potentially impact millions or billions of people (in both good and bad ways). So nothing against placing an emphasis on diversity, but creating a Chief Diversity Officer feels a bit too limiting, and creates a situation where it's too easy for people to pass the buck and assume that diversity is an issue for that role to focus on, rather than for everyone to focus on.

As I've pointed out repeatedly, we're really really bad at regulating "privacy" in large part because most people don't understand privacy -- and it means different things to different people. And, so far, most attempts at regulating privacy have created massive negative consequences, while doing very little to actually protect privacy. The ones most making the news are the GDPR in the EU (though reaching well outside of the EU), which is a total mess and California's unmitigated disaster of a privacy bill that was passed in an insane rush to stop an even worse privacy law from being on the ballot. And, of course, all of this comes against the backdrop of various companies doing a horrifically bad job of protecting the public's private information.Given all of that, it is inevitable that Congress will, at some point, attempt to pass some sort of privacy bill. And, it seems likely that it will be a disaster. In the last year or so, Senator Ron Wyden, who historically has been seen (unfairly and inaccurately) as an "ally" of Silicon Valley companies is now the first to throw his hat into the ring, releasing a discussion draft of the bill (you can also see a one pager about the bill and a section by section breakdown -- all also embedded below).Above, I mentioned that it's been unfair to argue that Wyden was a booster of Silicon Valley companies. If you look at his history, he has always been focused mainly on being an ally of the users of the internet. Many times, those two things align, but when they do not, Wyden has repeatedly taken the side of the users, not the companies. And that is the case here, for the most part. Over the last year, Wyden has been on a bit of a rampage in basically telling the companies that they've had decades to do the right thing in regards to protecting their own users, and they have failed to do so.Reading the new bill in that context puts things into perspective. The key parts of the bill, as described in the one-pager are as follows:

The DOJ is still waiting for accused Vault 7 leaker Joshua Shulte's trial to begin, but that's not stopping it from adding to the long list of charges he already faces. The former NSA/CIA operative's house was raided last year by the feds who were looking for evidence of Shulte's leak of CIA hacking tools to Wikileaks. It found some of that, but also found 10,000 child porn images in the 5+ terabytes of data seized.The child porn alone will likely see Shulte put away for a long time if the prosecution can secure a conviction. Leaking top secret tools isn't likely to be greeted with a wrist slap -- not with the forever War on Leakers still in progress. For some reason, the government felt compelled to add copyright infringement to the list of charges after discovering a few pieces of pirated content on Shulte's personal server.Shulte -- who is locked up in a New York detention facility until he goes to trial -- must figure he has nothing to lose. That's one conclusion that can be drawn from the latest set of charges being brought by the DOJ. (via Slashdot)According to new court documents filed late Wednesday, October 31, US prosecutors plan to file three new charges against Joshua Schulte for allegedly leaking more classified data while in detention at the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC).The filing [PDF] is quite the read. According to the allegations, Shulte had access to multiple smuggled cellphones and was using them to disseminate classified info to "third parties" outside the prison walls. It appears the info Shulte smuggled out of the prison came from classified documents released to him as part of his pre-trial discovery. The DOJ has now stripped him of access to classified documents, restricting him to unclassified info released by the FBI.A flurry of paperwork and a search of Shulte's housing unit turned up a number of things, including a new form of encryption.

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I have to admit that before yesterday, I'd never even heard of US Representative Jeff Fortenberry from Nebraska's 1st Congressional District (even though I visited his district while he was in office). However, boy am I hearing an awful lot about Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, and the one thing I will now always associate with Rep. Jeff Fortenberry is that he and his staff are so offended that anyone might call him "Fartenberry" that they'll ignore the 1st Amendment of the Constitution and threaten a professor for the grievous offense of liking a Facebook post with an image of a defaced campaign sign changing his name.No, really.This story has a bit of everything. It starts with this, however. A Nebraska blog, Seeing Red Nebraska, posted the following to its Facebook page a couple weeks ago:If, somehow, you cannot see that, it's a campaign sign for Rep. Jeff Fortenberry that has been somewhat crudely "altered" such that Fortenberry's face now has two giant googly eyes, his name has been changed to "Fartenberry" by adding a line to the "o" in his last name, and whatever the third item in the following list really is, was changed to: "Strong Families; Strong Communities; Strong ODOR."A bit sophomoric, but, hey it happens.What happened next, however... You see, University of Nebraska-Lincoln political science professor Ari Kohen "liked" that post on Facebook. And, apparently, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry's staff decided to scan through all the likes on that post, and decided that Kohen couldn't possibly get away with liking such a thing. So, Fortenberry's Chief of Staff, Dr. William "Reyn" Reynolds Archer III decided to call Kohen and chew him out and threaten him over the "like." Archer left a voicemail for Kohen, who was away at a conference. When Kohen didn't call him back quickly enough, Archer then emailed Kohen's department supervisor, Kohen's dean, and the chancellor of the university to complain about Kohen liking the image.Again, let's just be clear what'a happening here (and it's going to get crazier). Someone else made some additions to the sign. Someone else took a photo. Someone else posted it to Facebook. The sole thing that Kohen did was click the "like" button because he found it amusing. And Fortenberry's chief of staff emailed Kohen's boss, Kohen's boss's boss and Kohen's boss's boss's boss to complain.Kohen then called Archer back, and they ended up talking for 53 whole minutes, though the key 7 minutes gives you a good taste of what went down.Amusingly, if you listen to the full call, it starts out with Archer specifically saying: "Look, I want to just be really clear that we support First Amendment." Then, he follows that up by saying this nonsense: "I think the thing that we're concerned about is liking vandalism which is against the law." The call goes on and just gets more and more insane (yes, dear readers, I listened to the whole 53 minutes for you). At one point, Archer tries to point to Jerry Seinfeld's comments on college students as evidence that... um... something.

You might recall that AT&T recently defeated the DOJ's challenge to their $86 billion merger with Time Warner thanks to a comically narrow reading of the markets by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon. At no point in his 172-page ruling (which approved the deal without a single condition) did Leon show the faintest understanding that AT&T intends to use vertical integration synergistically with the death of net neutrality to dominate smaller competitors and squeeze more money from consumers in an ocean of creative new ways.Throughout the case the DOJ tried to demonstrate (poorly) that a bigger AT&T has every incentive to behave badly. Admittedly those efforts were pretty feeble since the multi-decade steady lobbyist erosion of antitrust law left them trying to make the case within very narrow confines of legally-acceptable economic theory. The DOJ also shot itself in the foot by refusing to even mention AT&T's attacks on net neutrality, likely because it didn't want to highlight the fact that another arm of the government (the FCC) was actively harming the same consumers the DOJ claimed it was trying to protect.Regardless, with the merger still less than 5 months old, AT&T has been quick to show why people were concerned. The company has already quickly jacked up rates on most of its subscribers and imposed all manner of bizarre new fees as it tries to recoup the massive debt it incurred from both the DirecTV and Time Warner mergers. And this week, AT&T blacked out (previously Time Warner-owned) HBO content for Dish Network customers during contract negotiations, the first time that has happened in the history of HBO:

As the EU continues to march towards wrecking the internet with a variety of dangerous proposals in the EU Copyright Directive, many are desperately trying to explain to policymakers there just how much damage they are going to do and asking them to take simple steps to prevent the worst possible outcomes. While most of the attention has been on the awful Article 13 upload filters, the Article 11 link/snippet tax is almost as bad.Of course, to hear EU supporters of Article 11 explain things, such a brand new "publisher's right" is necessary to help save media organizations who have been undermined by the basic business model of the internet. This is already insanity (and, as we've pointed out, when both Germany and Spain passed similar laws, it harmed media sites, and did nothing to increase their revenue), but if that were the case, you'd expect most media organizations to be totally on board with the plan. That is not the case. A few of the very largest media sites are totally on board (with German publisher Axel Springer being the leading voice in support). But midsize and small publications recognize just how damaging this will be and they've now sent a letter to policymakers, who are working to finalize the Directive, calling out how the existing language puts them (the very entities policymakers claim this law will support) at great risk:

Well, that didn't take long. We had just discussed Canadian ISPs petitioning the government to amend copyright law such that they would no longer be forced to pass along copyright settlement threat letters to their customers from copyright trolls such as Rightscorp. The opportunity for this comes as part of Canada amending its copyright law as a result of Donald Trump's NAFTA replacement, the USMCA. Well, it seems like there are those in the Canadian government who were listening, as a new bill has been introduced that will effectively outlaw such settlement letters.

Spying on people engaged in First Amendment-protected activity is a time-honored government tradition. The FBI, NSA, and CIA pioneered unconstitutional surveillance in the 1960s, leading eventually to the Church Committee's smackdown and a series of reforms aimed at preventing the casual abuse of surveillance powers.It worked. A little. The DHS has picked up where the other agencies left off, portraying its surveillance of protesters as part of its national security purview. The NYPD has also done this regularly, violating both the Constitution and agreements it made following civil rights lawsuits.The Memphis Police Department is another law enforcement agency that can't keep its nose out of the public's First Amendment business. A decision handed down by a Tennessee federal court will hopefully put an end to the Memphis PD's long-running violation of a 40-year-old consent decree.The ACLU of Tennessee -- the other partner in the 1978 consent decree -- sued the City of Memphis over unconstitutional police activity. The decision [PDF] summarizes the numerous violations engaged in by Memphis law enforcement.

Watching porn at work is a federal government tradition. Federal employees from agencies like the EPA, SEC, and FCC have been caught watching porn enough times, a Congressional rep actually thought a new law was needed to stop it. The bill was redundant. All federal agencies forbid the use of work computers to watch porn but that hasn't stopped these stories from surfacing with disturbing frequency.At a certain point, porn-watching at work endangers a person's job. At other points before that, it endangers the employer itself. Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch dug up a Dept. of the Interior Inspector General's report [PDF] indicating a porn-watching employee inadvertently tried to the take the agency down from the inside.

If you'll recall, FCC boss Ajit Pai has spent the better part of the last few years insisting that giving the telecom industry whatever it wants will somehow magically boost sector investment, jobs, and competition. Of course if you've paid attention to history you'll probably notice that in telecom, it never actually works that way. Former FCC boss Mike Powell (now the top lobbyist for the cable industry) engaged in much of the same behavior in the early aughts, promising that if you obliterate consumer protections and regulatory oversight of ISPs, telecom Uptopia magically springs forth from the sidewalk. Instead, we got Comcast.It's a cycle of dysfunction Americans just can't seem to learn anything from.Since the start of his tenure, Ajit Pai and the GOP have taken a flamethrower to numerous, basic consumer protections ranging from basic privacy rules governing the sale and collection of your private data, to net neutrality rules that protect consumers and competitors from being nickel-and-dimed by lumbering telecom monopolies. He's also attacked efforts to bring competition to cable boxes, has slowly dismantled broadband programs for the poor, attacked states rights' to protect consumers or build their own networks, and basically neutered the FCC's ability to protect you from monopoly power.More recently, you'll recall the massive tax cuts were supposed to spur investment, the telecom sector included. As was Ajit Pai's recent policy order neutering local authority over cellular tower placement. Both, like net neutrality, were supposed to result in a dramatic spike in next-gen "5G" network deployment, and a big boost in sector investment overall. This week, Verizon made it clear that none of those things would actually be happening, despite the $2 billion in savings Pai's 5G "reform" alone provided Verizon:

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As you have likely heard by now, a few days ago, IBM announced that it was purchasing Red Hat for $34 billion. I've seen a fair bit of hand-wringing over this buyout, but don't really feel that strongly one way or the other about it. It was nice having a giant company like Red Hat to point to in explaining how of course open source software could be a big business, but... that still exists within the confines of IBM.There could be some concerns on the patent side, as Red Hat at least has long positioned itself as a fighter against patent trolls, though in practice the company has sometimes been a bit wishy washy on that, and some have accused the company of selling out its vision on patents in the past. Of course, since Red Hat is a founding member of the License On Transfer (LOT) network, that at least should prevent any of its existing patents from getting out to patent trolling entities. Still, IBM has, for decades, had the reputation of being a very aggressive patent litigator, and has at least some history of trolling and bad practices. But, IBM has long embraced open source, and its announcement pledges to uphold Red Hat's various other commitments towards open source and against patent trolling: "IBM and Red Hat will remain committed to the continued freedom of open source, via such efforts as Patent Promise, GPL Cooperation Commitment, the Open Invention Network and the LOT Network."However, what struck me most about the deal was't so much the deal itself, but some of the coverage of it. I'll use Wired as the unfortunate example of the kind of coverage I find bizarre (especially for a publication like Wired). Here's how it opens:

Over the last five years AT&T and Verizon have been desperately trying to pivot from stodgy, protectionist old telcos -- to sexy new Millennial media juggernauts. And while this pivot effort has been notably expensive, the net result has been somewhat underwhelming. Verizon, for example, spent billions to gobble up AOL and Yahoo, but its lack of savvy in the space has so far culminated in a privacy scandal, a major hacking scandal, a quickly shuttered website where reporters couldn't write about controversial subjects, and a fairly shitty Millennial streaming service that even Verizon's own media partners have called a "dud."Verizon's new CEO Hans Vestberg appears to have gotten the message (that stodgy old telcos kind of suck at disruption and innovation) and has been shifting Verizon back toward its core competency: running networks.AT&T's efforts have been notably more expensive than Verizon's, but just as underwhelming. The company first decided to shell out $70 billion for a satellite TV provider (DirecTV) on the eve of the cord cutting revolution. And, after a lengthy DOJ lawsuit, shelled out another $89 billion for Time Warner in a quest to gain broader media and advertising relevance. That was paired with the launch of a new streaming service, DirecTV Now, which the company hoped would help it beat back the tide of cord cutting.Despite hundreds of billions in acquisition costs and debt, it's not working. The company saw a another net loss of 297,000 TV customers last quarter as the company's traditional TV services (DirecTV and AT&T's IPTV service) lost 346,000 subscribers, and the company's shiny new DirecTV Now service only added 49,000 subscribers during the third quarter. To be fair, AT&T actually is more forward thinking than a lot of other cable operators in that it's embracing cheaper streaming alternatives fully. But the company still couldn't help itself when it came to quickly pushing price hikes, the primary reason for last quarter's dip:

Across the state of Georgia (and in other places around the nation), idiots in power are scoring points with the idiots in the electorate by engaging in "for the children" bullshit targeting sex offenders. The Sheriff of Butts County (not a typo) decided to plant signs in the yards of all registered sex offenders, which should ensure only pleasant things happen to parolees following the terms of their release.

One of the nation's most prolific patent trolls is finally dead. After more than a decade of litigation and more than 500 patent suits, Shipping & Transit LLC (formerly known as Arrivalstar) has filed for bankruptcy. As part of its bankruptcy filing [PDF], Shipping & Transit was required to state how much its portfolio of 34 U.S. patents is worth. Its answer: $1.We are recognizing Shipping & Transit's entire U.S. portfolio as our latest stupid patent of the month. We agree that these patents are worthless. Indeed, they have always been worthless, except as litigation weapons. In the hands of their unscrupulous owners, they caused enormous damage, costing productive companies more than $15 million in licensing fees and untold legal expenses. That's tens of millions of dollars that won't be used to invest in new products, reward shareholders, or give raises to workers.Dozens of worthless patentsAll patent troll stories start with Patent Office. You can't be a patent troll without patents. And you can't have patents unless with Patent Office grants them. We have found many occasions to write about problems with patent examination. The Patent Office spends only a few hours per application and regularly issues software patents without considering any real-world software at all. This helps explain how an entity like Shipping & Transit could end up with dozens of valueless patents.Shipping & Transit claims to be "one of the pioneers of determining when something is arriving and being able to message that out." Its patent portfolio mostly relates to tracking vehicles and packages. Of course, Shipping & Transit did not invent GPS tracking or any protocols for wireless communication. Rather, its patents claim mundane methods of using existing technology.Consider U.S. Patent No. 6,415,207. This patent claims a "system for monitoring and reporting status of vehicles." It describes using computer and software components to store status information associated with a vehicle, and communicate that information when requested. In other words: vehicle tracking, but with a computer. It doesn't disclose any remotely new software or computer technology. Rather, the patent claims the use of computer and software components to perform routine database and communications operations. There is nothing inventive about it.Given that it was aggressively filing lawsuits as recently as 2016, it is striking to see Shipping & Transit now admit that its patent portfolio is worthless. While many of its patents have expired, that is not true of all of them. For example, U.S. Patent No. 6,415,207 does not expire until 2020. Also, the statute of limitations for patent infringement is six years. An expired patent can be asserted against past infringement so long as the infringement occurred before the patent expired and within the last six years. Many of the patents Shipping & Transit have asserted in court expired less than six years before its bankruptcy filing. Yet Shipping & Transit valued all of its U.S. patents at $1.A decade of patent trollingWhen it was known as Arrivalstar, Shipping & Transit sued a number of cities and public transit agencies claiming that transit apps infringed its patents. (While the exact legal relationship between Arrivalstar S.A. and Shipping & Transit LLC is unclear, Shipping & Transit has itself said that it was "formerly known as Arrivalstar.") Its litigation had all the hallmarks of classic patent trolling. When transit agencies banded together to defend themselves on the merits, it quickly abandoned its claims.Shipping & Transit's campaign continued for years against a variety of targets. In 2016, it was the top patent litigator in the entire country, mostly targeting small businesses. One judge described its tactics as "exploitative litigation." The court explained:

A cop couldn't handle someone diverting his revenue stream. So he decided to do something about it. That "something" was getting sued for civil rights violations. How this will improve revenue generation remains to be seen, but for now one officer of the Stamford, Connecticut police department will need to lawyer up. (via Courthouse News Service)The plaintiff, Michael Friend, happened to notice a bunch of police officers issuing tickets to drivers for distracted driving. One officer, Richard Gasparino, was hiding behind a telephone pole on the other side of the street looking for drivers using their cellphones and relaying his suspicions to officers further down the road.Friend moved south of the Stamford PD sting operation and held up a handwritten sign reading "Cops Ahead." This didn't sit well with Officer Gasparino, who swiftly decided he'd like to be sued by Friend and his representation. He began his tour of culpability with the following hilarious assertion. From the lawsuit [PDF]:

Almost exactly three years ago, we wrote about the launch of an ambitious project by Harvard Law School to scan all federal and state court cases and get them online (for free) in a machine readable format (not just PDFs!), with open APIs for anyone to use. And, earlier this week, case.law officially launched, with 6.4 million cases, some going back as far as 1658. There are still some limitations -- some placed on the project by its funding partner, Ravel, which was acquired by LexisNexis last year (though, the structure of the deal will mean some of these restrictions will likely decrease over time).Also, the focus right now is really on providing this setup as a tool for others to build on, rather than as a straight up interface for anyone to use. As it stands, you can either access data via the site's API, or by doing bulk downloads. Of course, the bulk downloads are, unfortunately, part of what's limited by the Ravel/LexisNexis data. Bulk downloads are available for cases in Illinois and Arkansas, but that's only because both of those states already make cases available online. Still, even with the Ravel/LexisNexis limitation, individual users can download up to 500 cases per day.The real question is what will others build with the API. The site has launched with four sample applications that are all pretty cool.

Because nearly everyone carries a tracking device on their person these days, it's become a whole lot easier for the government to find out where everybody's been. It's TinEye but for people, and it appears to be a new go-to tool for law enforcement. What used to be officers canvassing the area where a crime took place is now a warrant sent to Google to obtain location data and identifying info for all people and devices in the area.These so-called "reverse warrants" first started coming to light earlier this year. The Raleigh Police Department (NC) was serving warrants to Google in hopes of figuring out who to suspect of committing crimes, rather than having a suspect in mind and working forward from there. The warrants were of the "general" variety, guaranteed to give the RPD location/identifying info of hundreds of non-suspects who just happened to be in the area. There's some evidence Google has pushed back against these warrants, but it hasn't been enough to deter law enforcement from continuing to use Google as one-stop shopping to bulk location/identifying info.This practice isn't limited to the local boys. Thomas Brewster of Forbes has obtained a warrant [PDF] showing the FBI is doing the same thing.

There are many routes law enforcement can take to end up in the promised land of Probable Cause. But the point of departure matters. While a routine (read: pretextual) stop can develop into a situation where a search is justified, the same can't be said about the search at the center of this recent Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision. While it's true probable cause may take time to develop, it needs to be an organic process starting with reasonable suspicion, not a series of guesses being explored until one of them pays off.No arrest was effected during this extended/distended process, but officers still keep appellant Fausto Lopez quasi-detained until they could find something to arrest him for. It all started with a questionable tip. From the decision [PDF]:

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Once again, it appears that comedian John Oliver is doing much more to dig into actual political problems than much of the rest of the news. The latest was his show this past Sunday about the weird and wacky world of state Attorneys' General. If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth a watch:Oliver's piece focuses on state AGs (of both parties) filing partisan lawsuits against the federal government (of the opposing party). But the real "scandal" is in how various corporations have recognized the power of state AGs to effectively create policy (mainly by causing trouble for competitors). We've discussed this aspect multiple times in the past, mainly around Mississippi's Attorney General Jim Hood going after Google at the request of the MPAA. And, of course, it wasn't just "at their behest," it was literally Hood more or less rubber stamping a demand letter written by the MPAA's lawyers and sending it on as his own. The emails from the Sony hack revealed that the plan was literally to have the MPAA lawyers do all the investigative work and prepare many of the documents, and hand them off to "friendly" state AGs to shake down and threaten companies such as Google.And they didn't come up with this idea out of nowhere. It came in response to a 2014 NY Times article detailing how corporate lobbyists were "pursuing" state AGs directly in plans to cause trouble for competitors (or to get themselves out of investigations).

Last year, you'll recall that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed what at the time was treated as a revolutionary deal: the state promised Taiwan-based Foxconn a $3 billion state subsidy if the company invested $10 billion in a Wisconsin plant that created 13,000 jobs. Walker hoped that the deal would finally help cement job growth that he had promised his supporters for years, and the press was quick to hype the plan without really giving it too much thought. Quietly, Wisconsin’s non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau was busy pointing out that it would take until 2043 for taxpayers to recoup the subsidy, though that obviously took second fiddle to the hype of bringing American jobs back from overseas to focus on cool new tech.But as the details of the plan solidified by late last year, the $3 billion subsidy quickly ballooned to $4.1 billion, and some folks quietly began to notice that the math really didn't make much sense:

It doesn't appear the Supreme Court will have to resolve a circuit split on the FBI's malware warrant used in its Playpen child porn investigation. The same day the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court found in favor of the FBI, the Seventh Circuit reached the same conclusion [PDF], bringing the FBI's "good faith" total to five appellate wins versus zero losses.The Seventh's reasoning echoes that of the other circuits: the warrant may have been invalid (seeing as its jurisdiction limits were immediately violated by the FBI's malware deployment), but the FBI was correct to rely on the magistrate's screwup.

The calls for internet platforms to actively censor content one group or another doesn't like has slowly risen to a cacaphony as of late. Even the most well-meaning arguments calling for internet platforms to be more heavy-handed in moderating the sources of content are invariably stupid, showing little understanding of just how hard it is to do this without creating all kinds of collateral damage, how hard it is to properly define for a large subset of humanity what sources are acceptable and what sources aren't, and a near complete misunderstanding of just how much human error goes into this overall. We have helpfully cited several exmaples of platforms sticking their feet in crap as they try to attempt this.But the case studies in how badly this always goes keep rolling in. You may recall that we recently discussed how Comcast's protected browsing options managed to disallow access to TorrentFreak, a news site. Well, Comcast doesn't exactly have a reputation for being hands-off when it comes to managing its network. Unlike, say, Valve's Steam platform, which just made a bunch of news with a new games policy championing its hands-off approach. How Steam handles links shared on its platform are obviously in a different timezone compared with the games its allows, but it's still a bit odd to see that Steam is apparently very much hands on when it comes to blocking TorrentFreak as well.

The Memphis PD is facing quite a bit of scrutiny right now. In addition to just having lost a lawsuit over unconstitutional surveillance of protesters and activists, and being told to stop creating fake Facebook accounts (by Facebook itself), it's dealing with the heat of a recent shooting of a Memphis resident by police officers -- one that left the victim in critical condition. Body cameras were available but not in use by all officers on the scene. In addition, it appears at least two officers deliberately deactivated their cameras during the pursuit of the suspect, Martavious Banks.

As artificial intelligence technology marches onwards, it's raising a lot of complicated questions about free speech, privacy, and important rights. One person who's been thinking a lot about these questions is David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, who recently published a thorough report [pdf] on the subject. This week, David joins us on the podcast to discuss artificial intelligence and its implications for human rights.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.

The Florida State Appeals Court is bucking the trend on compelled decryption. While most courts have held forcing someone to relinquish the password to a locked device does not raise Fifth Amendment issues, this court has decided that act is testimonial in and of itself. This makes the state's demand unconstitutional and sends it up the ladder to the state's highest court. (via FourthAmendment.com)The facts of the case may play a role in future deliberations. It involves a drunk driving accident. Phones belonging to the driver and passenger were were taken from the crashed car. The search of the driver's phone didn't go far, thanks to it being locked with a password. Prosecutors sought an order compelling password production but were met with arguments from the driver's lawyer claiming this would violate his Fifth Amendment rights. The appellate court agrees. From the decision [PDF]:

It happens basically every election cycle: at a political event or rally a politician that a musician dislikes uses one of that musician's songs to get the crowd excited. The musician gets upset and speaks out about it, and maybe even sends a legal threat letter. We've written about this many, many times before going back many years. And in most cases, the complaints are bullshit. Most event venues and and most competent campaigns have the appropriate blanket performance licenses from BMI and/or ASCAP, and that allows them to play whatever they want at the events, and the musicians really can't do much about it (other than complain publicly, which makes lots of news -- and which is why we're still amazed that campaigns don't first check to make sure they play music of musicians who support them).But... there are some rare exceptions to this general rule, and not only have we found one, but it involves quite an impressive legal threat. It appears that on Saturday evening, just hours after 11 people were murdered in Pittsburgh, President Donald Trump decided to still hold a political rally, because when the choice is put in front of Trump between "appropriate silence" and "pointless spectacle that makes Trump feel worshiped" he will always choose the latter*. But at this highly inappropriate rally, Trump apparently played Pharrell Williams' incredibly upbeat earworm of a pop song "Happy."* Hey, I get that some of you are going to be upset about this line, and will come up with all sorts of bullshit rationalizing and excuses for why the rally was appropriate, and all I will say to you is: make better life choices, and maybe, take a serious look at yourself in the mirror and ask "what the fuck happened to me?"And, yes, such a song on such a day at such a stupid rally certainly feels inappropriate to anyone with even the slightest sense of decorum or empathy. But, for Williams, it went a bit further. Because, as reporter Eriq Gardner notes, unlike most popular musicians, Pharrell ditched ASCAP four years ago and moved all his music to Irving Azoff's "Global Music Rights" organization (GMR). GMR is kind of sketchy, and feels like a giant shakedown play for internet sites, but, ignoring that, what is known is that neither the venue nor the campaign have a license from GMR.And that enabled Pharrell's lawyers to send quite the letter to President Trump. It doesn't just talk about the infringement, but the sheer insanity of playing such a song on such a day.

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A brief review of the many, many stories we've posted on porn filters should leave you with two undeniable conclusions: porn filters are generally terrible at actually keeping dedicated pornography viewers from watching porn and porn filters are generally fantastic at turning the attempt to block porn into an orgy of collateral damage, typically to do with educational sites. This hasn't stopped many organizations and governments from trying to save all the children and the dignity of all the women by putting these filters in place, of course, but it needs to be repeatedly noted that these attempts are routinely futile.Rare, however, is the group that demands the porn filter to stop themselves from seeing sex acts. Rarer still is the group that does so in as insulting and sanctimonious a way possible. To see that kind of rare gemstone of silly, you apparently have to travel to Notre Dame, where "the men of Notre Dame" have demanded a porn filter from the school.Read the whole post, if you can stomach it, but the writer kicks the whole thing off with back to back paragraphs that make it clear it's themselves they want to handcuff here.

Absent any hard data to support their claims, you may have noted that the Trump FCC often just makes up some shit.Like that time FCC boss Ajit Pai tried to claim that net neutrality somehow aids dictators. Or that time Pai's office just made up a DDOS attack to try and downplay massive public backlash to his historically unpopular policies. There's often no real-world data that can defend blindly kissing the rings of widely-loathed telecom monopolies, so bullshit tends to be the weapon of choice when Pai's FCC embraces whatever handout to Comcast and friends is on the menu this week.The latest case in point: during a speech at the ISP-backed and scientifically-sounding Media Institute, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly took a moment to broadly declare that community owned and operated broadband providers are an "ominous" threat to free speech:

The EFF is taking the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department to court. The dispute centers on Stingray warrants possessed by the agency. The Sheriff's Department likely holds more of these records than any other agency in the state. According to the Desert Sun's investigation -- based on state law-mandated reporting on electronic searches, San Bernardino residents were 20 times more likely to be subjected to an electronic search than residents elsewhere in state.Even more troubling, a lot of these searches -- including Stingray deployments -- were performed by the department when it had no idea who it was looking for or whose devices it was searching.

We've been talking for several months now about the amendments to Australian copyright law currently under consideration by the government there. As a refresher, Australia put a site-blocking policy in place several years ago. That policy has been praised by both government and rightsholders as effective, even as those same interests insist that it doesn't do enough to stop piracy down under. As a result, the government is currently considering amendments to Australian copyright law that would make it easier for extra-judicial blocks of "piracy sites" and their mirrors, and includes demands that search engines like Google participate in this censorship as well, despite the fact that blocking search returns relevant to a user request is the opposite of what Google does. Predictably, the amendments to the law have wide support across political parties in Australia, and pretty much everyone is sure it's going to pass as is.A key aspect of this is that all of the focus is on piracy and how to stop or minimize it, regardless of whatever negative effects that might have on ISPs and a free and open internet. There has been zero focus thus far on whether these legal mechanisms are really the optimal route to addressing this problem. This week, however, one Australian MP decided to grab a microphone and finally take rightsholders to task.

The nation's courts don't have a problem with pretextual traffic stops. Any traffic violation -- real or imagined -- can trigger an investigatory stop. There are limits, of course. The Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision says officers can't extend stops past the objective of the stop if reasonable suspicion of additional criminal activity fails to materialize.It's perfectly legal to pull someone over for crossing a fog line when all you really want to do is search their vehicle for contraband. But you have to stick to the pretext… at least for the most part. A host of excuses and exceptions (good faith, plain view, "I smelled marijuana," etc.) salvage most stops-turned-searches but if a defendant can show the stop itself was bogus, all bets are off.This short federal court decision [PDF] ordered the suppression of evidence obtained during a pretextual stop, and calls out a sheriff's deputy for lying about the reason for the stop, one that resulted in the discovery of drugs and weapons. (via The Newspaper)According to the police narrative, a stop was performed on Cedric Gordon's vehicle because his rear license plate wasn't properly illuminated.

California has agreed to pause the state's shiny new net neutrality law pending the outcome of a looming federal lawsuit against the FCC. After some early gamesmanship courtesy of AT&T, California passed one of the toughest net neutrality laws in the nation (which isn't saying much) back in September. The law effectively mirrors the discarded 2015 FCC net neutrality rules, though the law goes a little further to ensure that ISPs can't abuse things like zero rating (exempting a partner or an ISP's own content but not others) and usage caps.In a not entirely-unexpected move, the state late last week struck a deal with government and industry lawyers, agreeing to delay its implementation until a lawsuit against the FCC can be settled. That federal lawsuit, filed by Mozilla and 23 State Attorneys General, isn't expected to hear opening arguments until February. If the FCC and industry lose, the 2015 rules would be restored. If the FCC and industry win, the legal fight shifts to whether states will be allowed to implement their own rules, potentially, eventually, coming down to new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.Given the looming federal lawsuit, the decision to pause California's effort is largely just about legal efficiency. But Ajit Pai being Ajit Pai, the FCC boss, in a statement, was quick to declare the agreement as a one-sided victory; namely his:

In a move that will anger law enforcement (but really isn't about law enforcement), Apple has succeeded in killing an exploit that allowed a third-party vendor to crack iPhones for investigators. A few months ago, Apple announced it was fixing the flaw that allowed products like GrayKey to bypass built-in security features to engage in brute force password guessing. Thomas Brewster of Forbes confirms the fix is finally in.

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You may recall that, back in June, I wrote about a bizarre situation in which an election simulation game, that I helped co-design, called "Machine Learning President," somehow had some of the rules sheets leaked to Rebekah Mercer, from which they were leaked once again to Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, who wrote up an article there, not knowing the provenance of the game. This caused many, many people to assume that the Mercers had somehow made up this game to "relive" the success of the 2016 election. This resulted in a ton of angry headlines and tweets -- including the host of NPR's comedic news-based "game show" Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Peter Sagal, who alerted his friend, Cards Against Humanity designer, Max Temkin, who tweeted angrily about the game.The next day, when I wrote up my post explaining what the game really was about -- we had a lot of people reach out to ask if they, too, could play the game. Unfortunately, it's a ton of work to put on, and the crew who designed the game -- lead by Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath from Scout.ai and Guardians.ai, who initially conceived of the game, along with Randy Lubin (who is our partner in our CIA game project), and science fiction writer, Eliot Peper -- are all super busy. However, by far the most aggressive in getting us to play the game were Max Temkin and Peter Sagal.It finally happened two weeks ago in Chicago, and Charlie Hall at Polygon has a brilliant write-up about how the game went:

When Charter Communications (Spectrum) proposed merging with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016, the company repeatedly promised that the amazing "synergies" would lower rates, increase competition, boost employment, and improve the company's services. Of course like countless telecom megamergers before it, that never actually happened. Instead, the company quickly set about raising rates to manage the huge debt load. And its service has been so aggressively terrible, the company recently almost got kicked out of New York State, something I've never seen in 20 years of covering telecom.Cities like Lexington, Kentucky continue to explore their legal options in efforts to hold Charter accountable (something it's clear the Trump FCC won't do). Charter, meanwhile, has informed many of these users that they'll be seeing yet another rate hike in November across the company's entire, 41-state territory. All told, users will pay at least $100 more for the same service annually, thanks in part to increases in several of the sneaky fees Charter routinely tacks on to user bills to jack up the advertised price post sale:

For all the talk about election interference from nation-states, there's been not nearly as much concern about devices themselves threatening the integrity of the voting system. E-voting machines have long been an insecure mess. On top of that, they're prone to introducing errors -- either through flaws in the devices themselves or by users who aren't familiar with how they work.The latter seems to be the issue in Texas, where voters have been complaining about their votes being switched. What sounds like just another crazy conspiracy theory may be nothing more than software not behaving the way people think it should behave.

This week, both our top comments on the insightful side come in response to the latest evidence that FOSTA has failed. First up, it's Paul making a simple pitch that a lot of you seemed to agree with:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, the latest NSA leak showed that the agency grabbed data on 70 million French phone calls in less than 30 days, leading James Clapper to play word games in issuing a denial, while the White House was trying to assuage Angela Merkel with a dodgy promise that they are not and will not monitor her phone calls (no word on the past, though). Government officials were continuing their long history of calling journalists traitors for reporting on the leaks, while Keith Alexander said the government needs to find a way to stop them. And Dianne Feinstein was trying to paint metadata gathering as not true surveillance, garnering a direct rebuttal from Ed Snowden. Also, we learned the Senate was sitting on a devastating report about CIA torture...Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, while the EFF and ACLU were asking news networks to stop sending DMCA notices over political ads, we were wondering whether this experience would prompt either McCain or Obama to support DMCA reform. The RIAA was establishing "vexatious" as its new favorite word to lob at its critics and opponents, and a really dumb ISP takedown of a record label showed why ISPs shouldn't be copyright cops.Meanwhile, we had a big failure at Techdirt that wiped out half a day's worth of comments, but were saved by archives from the comment search engine BackType (which would go on to be acquired by Twitter in 2011).Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2003, critics were rebelling against the MPAA's ban on screener DVDs, leading the association to finally back down a bit — though not on Jack Valenti's crowing about the moral obligation to stop piracy, or the association's new program to brainwash school children with its copyright maximalism which finally launched this week. Two different writers in the same newspaper reached opposite conclusions about the same study on file sharing, while others debated whether iTunes would put a dent in it, and we wondered if the entertainment industry's many copyright initiatives were a way of starting so many fights about complex policy that their opponents appear to be crying wolf.