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Jeff Sessions did everything the president wanted him to do: roll back civil rights investigations, get tough on immigration, amp up the War on Drugs, blame everyone but law enforcement for spikes in crime. It didn't matter. The president shitcanned Sessions because he recused himself from the DOJ's investigation of Trump's Russia-related activities.His replacement, William Barr, is undergoing the formality of a confirmation hearing. It's assumed there's no way he can blow it. But he's trying.Barr would be no improvement over the departed Sessions. Barr thinks marijuana should be illegal everywhere. He's a fan of expanding executive power. As attorney general under George Bush Sr., he ordered phone companies to comply with DEA demands for millions of call records originating in the United States, laying the groundwork for the NSA's Section 215 collections.He also doesn't seem to care much for the First Amendment. As attorney general, he pushed for a Constitutional amendment banning the burning of American flags in the wake of a Supreme Court decision offering First Amendment protection for this form of expression.Thirty years later, Barr seems just as reluctant to respect the First Amendment. During the confirmation hearing, Sen. Amy Klobuchar lobbed what should have been a softball to the AG nominee. Moving on from the appalling murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by members of the Saudi government, Klobuchar asked if the Justice Department would jail journalists for doing their jobs.Instead of a quick "No," or a quickly-qualified "Yes, but only under the most extreme circumstances," Barr responded with a disturbingly long "ummm" and an uncomfortable silence. When Barr finally broke his silence, his answer was worse than his silence.

The FCC is requesting a delay in the opening arguments in the looming lawsuit over the agency's repeal of net neutrality rules, citing the government shutdown as justification. Oral arguments are slated to begin February 1 in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, beginning what should be a fairly insightful battle over the Ajit Pai FCC's historically unpopular move, and some of the dubious behavior it engaged in to try and downplay public opposition.The court noted this week on its website that the trial is likely to proceed regardless of the government shutdown. The FCC quickly balked, filing a motion (pdf) requesting a delay in the trial. In the filing, the FCC cites guidance from the Department of Justice in requesting a delay out of what it suggests would be a wise "abundance of caution" as it attempts to prepare for the legal battle:

I'm not quite sure why everyone is so obsessed about the "problem" of Netflix password sharing, even though Netflix itself is fine with it. For a few years now, we've noted that Charter Spectrum's CEO Tom Rutledge never misses an opportunity to scream about how awful it is that HBO and Netflix have to deal with people sharing passwords, even though the CEOs of both companies have made it clear that they're fine with it as it tends to act as free promotion to get people to sign up for their own accounts over time. Here's HBO CEO Richard Plepler from a few years ago:

Truth is no defense against allegations of defamation -- not in Turkey where criminal defamation law is just one of the government's many weapons deployed against critics. Journalist Pelin Ãœnker has been sentenced to more than a year in jail by a Turkish court for publishing undeniable facts.

We've talked at length about how the telecom industry has spent the last few years pushing phony, loophole-filled net neutrality legislation.Why would the telecom sector do that? They know their successful lobbying assault on net neutrality rules rests on shaky ground. Next month's court battle could easily reverse the FCC repeal, highlighting how the agency engaged in all manner of dubious behavior to kowtow to the telecom sector. They also know that thanks to the shifting winds in Congress and rising public anger, there could soon be growing support for a net neutrality law. Therefore, they want to pass their own, shitty, loophole-filled law to pre-empt tougher, better, state or federal protections.The same thing is happening on the privacy front. Like the successful lobbyist attack on net neutrality, the cross-industry assault on the FCC's fairly modest broadband privacy rules back in 2017 pissed off those who were actually paying attention to it. Especially because those rules could have helped mitigate the growing roster of location data scandals by giving consumers greater control over how their location data is collected and sold.As a result, we're starting to see a flood of cross-industry-backed legislation that pretends to fix the nation's lack of meaningful privacy guard rails, but whose real goal is to pre-empt any real state or federal efforts on that front. Case in point: the Google, Facebook, and Amazon-backed Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has been circulating a proposal it has been calling a "grand bargain." Said bargain proposes some fairly basic guidelines, but again the main goal appears to be to pre-empt some of the tougher laws already on the state and federal books, something COPPA backers like Senator Ed Markey aren't particularly impressed by:

While much of the focus concerning the EU's Copyright Directive have been about Article 13 and the censorship and mandatory filters it will require, an equally troubling part is Article 11, which will create a "snippet" tax on anyone who aggregates news and sends traffic back to the original sites (for free) without paying those news sites. This is dumb for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that this plan has been tried in both Germany and Spain, and failed miserably in both places. Indeed, studies in Spain showed that this law actually did tremendous harm to smaller news sites (which the EU insists this law is designed to help). The latest version we've seen in the EU Copyright Directive is even worse than the laws in Germany and Spain in that it is so vague and so unclear that it is possible to read them to say that using more than a single word will make the aggregator liable for the tax.In Spain, as you may recall, when that law was passed, Google responded by turning off Google News in Spain entirely, saying that it was impossible to remain in the country under that law. As they noted (and which everyone pushing for these laws always ignores), Google actually doesn't put any advertisements on Google News. It's not monetizing it (despite lies from supporters of these laws that Google is "profiting" off of their work, when Google is actually sending traffic for free). So there were some questions about what Google would do with Google News in Europe if Article 11 becomes law.The company has now hinted at its plans by leaking a beta test of what Google News would look like under Article 11. The answer? It would look almost entirely empty:

Gaming Like It's 1923: The Newly Public Domain Game JamAs we mentioned earlier this month, in celebration of the fact that the US finally has allowed older works to enter the public domain again, after a very long hiatus, we're hosing a public domain game jam, encouraging people to create games (video games, tabletop games, LARPs, storytelling games, whatever) using newly public domain material. What good is a public domain if people aren't using it and building amazing new works with it? We've already seen some copyright maximalists -- who worked hard for years to prevent such works from entering the public domain -- mocking the excitement many of us have for finally seeing works entering the public domain (one of whom wondered why anyone would still care about works from 1923, which is infuriating, given their role in keeping those works away from the public domain). So, let's prove them wrong and build some amazing new works.We're halfway through the month of January, and we already have five amazing entries, all building on newly public domain material. We were expecting people to most likely wait towards the end of the month to submit, so already having so many entries is a great sign. But, it also means that there's plenty of time for you to come up with a game as well. On the game jam page we have some pointers/guidelines and links to many of the newly public domain materials.We also have an all-star panel of judges, from both the gaming and the copyright law worlds, and we're offering copies of our (public domain) CIA: Collect It All card game (or some of our copyright-themed t-shirts) as prizes for the best games in a variety of different categories. Even if you've never designed a game, now's your chance. Part of the idea behind a short-term "game jam" like this is that it encourages people to make something quick and get it out there for testing and improvement. We're excited about the submissions that have already come in, but just as excited to find out what else you guys can come up with over the rest of the month.

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Nearly 13 years after the FBI managed to turn a California cherry picker into a international terrorist, one of its self-created terrorists is about to be turned back into regular California resident, albeit one missing more than a decade from his life.Hayat went to Pakistan in 2003 to visit his mother and get married. The FBI and prosecutors insisted he went there to train to be a terrorist. When he returned to the US, he was arrested and indicted. Prosecutors tacked on some lying to federal agents charges because of course they did, pushing Hayat's sentence to 24 years.This conviction was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals but Hayat's motion to vacate his sentence has found some sympathy from a federal magistrate judge.

So last week yet another location data scandal emerged for the wireless industry, highlighting once again how carriers are collecting your location data, then selling it to a universe of sometimes shady partners with little to no oversight or accountability. Like the Securus and LocationSmart scandals before it, last week's Motherboard report highlighted how all manner of dubious dudebros (and law enforcement officers) have been abusing this data for years, and the Ajit Pai FCC has yet to so much as mention the problem, much less spend a single calorie addressing it in any meaningful way.Shortly after the scandal broke last week, Frank Pallone, the Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, asked Pai (pdf) to brief Congress on the steps the agency was taking to address the wireless sector's long-standing failure to adequately address location data abuse. Pai's response? Yeah, no thanks.In a statement issued by Pallone, he says Pai's office claimed that since the location data scandal wasn't putting lives at risk, Pai could not attend such a briefing during the government shutdown:

You can count me among those who don't see the value in those Amazon Dash buttons that got plenty of attention a few years back, allowing those who had the little single-button devices to re-order some consumable product with the push of a single button. Even if lots of people made fun of them at launch, Amazon has expanded them to many more brands. So, even if I don't see the value, it appears plenty of people do. Except, in Germany, they're now illegal, because apparently some people are upset that they make things too easy to order.

Take 2 Interactive is no stranger to fighting bogus complaints about "infringement" concerning how it represents characters in its various games. Most of these fights have been over its flagship franchise, the Grand Theft Auto series, where the developer often enjoys poking fun at pop culture and society through settings and characters that are an amalgam of several stereotyped individuals. This has resulted in entitled celebrities and property owners attempting to sue over trademark and publicity rights in the past, with Take 2 typically coming out victorious by pointing out that its work is that of parody and covered by fair use.This is now happening with a different game but the basic story remains the same. In this case we have the added insanity of a rather infamous company trying to profit off of its infamous history. Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations sent a cease and desist notice to Take 2 after Red Dead Redemption 2 was released due to the game including characters who were a part of the company during ye olde olden times. In response, Take 2 filed suit.

Craig Brittain's $1 billion lawsuit against Twitter is still rolling slowly towards its inevitable dismissal. Bringing with him his usual legal expertise -- which includes badly misreading the Knight Institute v. Trump decision and asking for some weird hybrid judgment/injunction/perma-unbanning -- Brittain has so far forced Twitter to… move his case to another venue. (via Eric Goldman)Twitter invoked the forum selection clause of its terms of service -- terms Brittain agreed to time and time again as he created new accounts only to have them permanently suspended later. The terms say Twitter can move your lawsuit to its preferred venue (California federal court) and if you don't like it, well… you can just not use Twitter and/or sue Twitter.Brittain's attempt to avoid having his Arizona lawsuit moved to California contains some rather novel legal arguments. First, he claimed Twitter's terms of service were invalid because [checks filing] it doesn't contain the mandatory "option" of arbitration. Here's the court's take [PDF]:

The latest in the EU's string of internet regulatory efforts has a new target: terrorist propaganda. Just as with past regulations, the proposed rules seem onerous and insane, creating huge liability for internet platforms that fail to do the impossible. This week, we're joined by returning guests Daphne Keller from Stanford's Center For Internet And Society and Emma Llansó from the Center for Democracy and Technology to discuss this most recent danger to online free speech in the EU.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.

If you've shopped for a TV recently, you may have noticed that it's largely impossible to just buy a "dumb" TV set without all of the "smart" internals. More specifically, most TV vendors don't want to sell you a bare-bones set because they want you to use their streaming services. Even more specifically, they want you to buy their sets with their specific streaming functionality because they want to spy on you. Poorly.That's always been fairly obvious to most folks, but it was nice to see Vizio CTO Bill Baxter acknowledge that the reason you pay a discount is because your viewing habits are being collected and sold to the highest bidder:

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: