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The FBI has admitted -- albeit not that publicly -- that Stingray devices disrupt phone service. Spoofing a cell tower has negative effects on innocent phone users as the device plays man-in-the-middle while trying to locate the targeted device. An unsealed document from a criminal prosecution and assertions made in warrant affidavits alleging "minimal" disruption are all we have to go on, at least in terms of official statements.Supposedly, Stingrays are supposed to allow 911 service to continue uninterrupted. But it's hard to square that with the fact every phone in the device's range is forced to connect to the Stingray first before being allowed to connect with a real cell tower. In some cases, the device might force every phone in range to drop to a 2G connection. This may still allow 911 calls to take place, but almost any other form of communication will be impossible as long as the Stingray is in use.Ron Wyden's staff technologist, Chris Soghoian (formerly of the ACLU), will be fielding answers from the DOJ and FBI about 911 service disruptions, if those answers ever arrive. Wyden's office has sent a letter [PDF] demanding to know the extent of cell service disruption when Stingrays are deployed. And he'd also like to know if these agencies are being honest about the negative side effects when agents seek warrants.

We've noted how the telecom industry been having great success in the Trump era eliminating FCC, FTC, and state authority over telecom monopolies. The underlying industry justification is that gutting consumer protections will somehow magically improve competition and spur investment by regional telecom monopolies, a decades-old claim that has never been true, and yet somehow never dies. In reality, when you kill regulatory oversight of natural monopolies (without shoring up the underlying competition issues beneath), the problem only tends to get worse. It's something you probably noticed if you've had any interactions with Comcast lately.Last week the perils in this particular course of action were laid bare when Verizon was busted first throttling and then trying to upsell first responders while they were trying to combat wildfires in California. Gigi Sohn, one of the ex-FCC staffers that helped craft the rules, did a good job pointing out how the FCC's "Restoring Internet Freedom" order didn't just kill net neutrality, it punted the FCC's ability to hold ISPs like Verizon accountable for issues just like this one:

Over in the EU Parliament, they're getting ready to vote yet again on the absolutely terrible Copyright Directive, which has serious problems for the future of the internet, including Article 13's mandatory censorship filters and Article 11's link tax. Regrading the mandatory filters, German music professor Ulrich Kaiser, has written about a a very disturbing experiment he ran on YouTube, in which he kept having public domain music he had uploaded for his students get taken down by ContentID copyright claims.After exploring ways to teach his students Beethoven's music, and putting together a collection of public domain recordings, he encountered the following thanks to YouTube's filters:

It's been a while since we last wrote about Paul Ceglia. If you don't recall, way back in 2010, Ceglia suddenly claimed that years earlier, he had hired Mark Zuckerberg to do some software development, and bizarrely (and literally unbelievably), that part of the contract for Zuck to work on Ceglia's project... was an agreement to hand over 50% of Facebook, which didn't even exist yet. Making it more ridiculous, Ceglia then claimed some weird interest amounts, and therefore was demanding ownership of 84% of Facebook. The whole thing was nonsensical, and while Zuckerberg admitted he had done some work for Ceglia prior to starting Facebook, nothing about the supposed contract made any sense at all. Beyond the bizarre nature of the contract Ceglia claimed he had with Zuckerberg, it quickly became clear that other evidence Ceglia presented, including purported emails, didn't look real.A year later, during the discovery process in the lawsuit, the actual original contract was found and it didn't mention Facebook at all, just as most people assumed. Instead, it became clear that Ceglia doctored their contract. Ceglia tried, weakly, to claim that even though the original was found on his computer during discovery, that it was actually Photoshopped and planted by Facebook. As you might imagine, literally no one believed that. It also probably didn't help that he kept some of the details of his plan in an email account called GetZuck.Finally, in 2012, Ceglia was arrested for fraud. He was set to go to trial in 2015 when he disappeared -- apparently cut off his ankle bracelet and disappeared with his family. Late last week, however, it was reported that he had been found and arrested in Ecuador and was likely to be sent back to the US shortly.I guess it's hard to just disappear in the age of Facebook. Even if you pretend to own a giant chunk of it.

Soooooooo, you've probably heard the news on Monday about how the Trump adminstration had struck a preliminary trade agreement with Mexico to replace NAFTA. Most of the attention over the deal has to do with the lack of Canada being a part of it, with Mexico making it clear it still thought that this was a new deal with both the US and Canada and President Trump repeatedly acting as if this deal was a "take it or leave it" deal for Canada, and if they left it, it would just be US and Mexico.There will, of course, be plenty of time to dig into the details of what's in the actual agreement, but on stuff that matters to us, it already looks bizarre. The USTR put out a "fact sheet" about the intellectual property part of the agreement and it's causing quite a bit of consternation. In particular, it claims that copyright will be extended to life+75 years. Literally no one has been asking for this. While the movie and recording industries have pushed to extend copyrights in the past, this time around, they more or less acknowledged that it was a bridge too far to keep extending copyrights this long, and some have even expressed a willingness to shorten copyright terms.But there's been a lot of confusion about what the "life+75 years" even means here -- and it now seems quite likely that the USTR simply misunderstood its own agreement (yes, really). Current in the US, for works made for hire or corporate works, copyright lasts 95 years, and for those made by individuals, it's life+70 years. In Mexico, it's been an upward ratchet from life+50 years, to life+75 years, to life+100 years as of 2003. There were some stories that during TPP negotiations, Mexico had pushed for life+100 years in the US as well, but that seemed like a non-starter.So why would the USTR give an okay for life+75 years when basically no one in the US is still pushing for such a thing, and in fact seem to be in general agreement that, if anything, the term should go in the other direction? Either the USTR negotiators have no idea what they're doing (possible!), don't realize why this is a big deal (also possible) or are misreporting what's actually in the agreement. It appears the last one is likely. While the USTR told reporters on a call that they absolutely mean extending copyright to life+75 years, after that, USTR representatives started claiming that this is not an extension of copyright, but was merely supposed to be setting the floor on copyright terms of 75 years, not "life plus 75 years," in which case copyright wouldn't change in either country. But, because this administration appears to be so clueless, someone at the USTR may have taken this news and mistakenly claimed it was now life plus 75, rather than a 75 year floor.This does not inspire very much confidence in this USTR.Either way, if this really is an attempt to extend copyright, at some point this would need to come back to Congress to change the law, and that might be a pretty big fight on their hands, no matter how what the administration foolishly agreed upon in this preliminary agreement.Other aspects of the IP section are also troubling, as it all seems focused on the belief that more draconian patent, copyright and trademark laws and enforcement are what's most desirable:

For years now, we have discussed Denuvo's reputation sliding from being once thought of as the potential ender of video game piracy to just another DRM corpse fit for the funeral pyre. Despite this precipitous fall, we also discussed a few months back that the company had been bought by another security company, Irdeto. While the announcement of the deal was generally bizarre, with Irdeto referring to Denuvo as the "world leader" in gaming security, we mentioned at the time that Irdeto is mostly invested in anti-cheating platforms for online gaming. It seemed likely that Irdeto thought that Denuvo's tech might somehow fit into that chief offering.And now, with an announcement from Irdeto, it indeed seems that Denuvo is pivoting to combating online cheating.

There's more than one way to skin the Fourth Amendment cat. A person who feels her rights were violated by the seizure and search of phone data at the border is sidestepping the expected civil rights lawsuit to expedite the deletion of the seized phone contents. Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica has more details:

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The narrative making the political rounds recently is that the big social media platforms are somehow "biased against conservatives" and deliberately trying to silence them (meanwhile, there are some in the liberal camp who are complaining that sites like Twitter have not killed off certain accounts, arguing -- incorrectly -- that they're now overcompensating in trying to not kick off angry ideologues). This has been a stupid narrative from the beginning, but the refrain on it has only been getting louder and louder, especially as Donald Trump has gone off on one of his ill-informed rants claming that "Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people." Let's be clear: this is all nonsense.The real issue -- as we've been trying to explain for quite some time now -- is that basic content moderation at scale is nearly impossible to do well. That doesn't mean sites can't do better, but the failures are not because of some institutional bias. Will Oremus, over at Slate, has a good article up detailing why this narrative is nonsense, and he points to the episode of Radiolab we recently wrote about, that digs deep on how Facebook moderation choices happen, where you quickly begin to get a sense of why it's impossible to do it well. I would add to that a recent piece from Motherboard, accurately titled The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People.These all highlight a few simple facts that lots of angry people (on all sides of political debates) are having trouble grasping.

Last year you'll recall that the cable and broadband industry lobbied the government to kill off broadband privacy rules at the FCC. The rules were fairly basic, requiring that ISPs and cable operators clearly disclose what data is being collected and sold, but also provide working opt out tools for users who didn't want to participate. The rules also contained restrictions requiring that consumers opt in to more sensitive data collection (financial), as well as some requirements that ISPs and cable ops adhere to standard security procedures, and quickly inform consumers when their private data was exposed by a hacker.In recent months, the cable industry has been showcasing how it's simply not very good at keeping its websites secure. Comcast, for example, has seen three privacy breaches in almost as many months, with security researcher Ryan Stevenson discovering numerous, previously-unreported vulnerabilities that potentially exposed the the partial home addresses and Social Security numbers of more than 26.5 million Comcast customers.Not to be outdone, now Buzzfeed has found that a vulnerability on the Charter Communications (Spectrum) website made it possible for just about anyone to take over customers’ accounts without a password. According to the report, this flaw was again discovered by Stevenson (who goes by the monicker Phobia), and involved tricking a Spectrum website that let subscribers create a Time Warner Cable (the company Charter just acquired) ID.If a targeted customer hadn't yet registered for such an ID, a website flaw let a hacker trick the website into creating one by replacing their own IP address with the customer’s using the “X-forwarded-for” technique, a relatively trivial affair:

A tiny unincorporated town in Michigan continues to draw national heat, thanks to the police department's apparent abuse of the Defense Department's 1033 program. This program allows law enforcement agencies to obtain military surplus -- which can include armored vehicles, aircraft, and weapons -- for next to nothing through its Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO).This program has contributed greatly to the militarization of US police forces, allowing officers to dress up like soldiers while waging the War at Home on the constituents they supposedly serve. What happened in Thetford, however, wasn't a sudden ramping up of military gear/tactics. Instead, the Thetford PD -- which boasts two officers -- simply took the 1033 program for an extended ride. Chief Robert Kenny managed to obtain 950 items through the 1033 program, valued at over $1.1 million... at least according to his own, very conservative estimate.Obviously, a two-person police force had no use for much of this equipment, much less the room to store it. So, vehicles and other items ended up on land owned by residents. After the town started asking questions, it quickly became clear the chief didn't know where all this acquired property was actually located.Things went from bad to worse to farcical in a hurry. Town residents began dumping PD equipment previously stored on their property in the city hall parking lots. Town meetings were called. Accusations (and the occasional chair) were hurled and recalls were threatened. A nearby sheriff's office was called in to investigate and the Thetford PD's building was raided for 1033 records. Along the way, an envelope stuffed with cash was discovered among the PD's many, many stashes of 1033 goods. Chief Kenny said the money it contained came from the sale of equipment for scrap metal, but otherwise couldn't explain why it was located in a pile of stuff, rather than in a bank account.Explanations will be forthcoming. The Genessee County Sheriff's Department seems to have its investigation of the Thetford PD almost wrapped up.

This week, our top comment on the insightful side comes in response to the latest story of a prison phone company recording privileged conversations and passing them o law enforcement. That One Guy was having none of their "technical error" excuse:

Five Years AgoOnce in a while, when evens really heat up in a given week, we skip the five/ten/fifteen-year retrospective and focus in on the big events — and this is one of those times, with the NSA spying debacle elevating to another level this week in 2013.Firstly, hings heated up on the other side of the Atlantic, with the UK government detaining David Miranda and seizing all his electronics and telling him he'd go to jail if he didn't turn over his passwords in a blatant act of intimidation. While the UK Home office claimed the detention was fully justified, a US official told Reuters that it was done to send a message. That admission was buried in a report about another disturbing action by the UK: forcing The Guardian to destroy hard drives with info from Snowden — an order that came directly from the Prime Minister. On top of all that, a new and questionable revelation in The Independent prompted Edward Snowden to accuse the UK government of leaking additional documents itself to make him look bad.Back in the US, we were getting a closer look at the loopholes that allowed the NSA to withhold information from Congress, and a glimpse of the agency culture that encouraged deception. Defenders threw up their hands and claimed "we didn't mean it", and got some help from the guy who wrote legal memos defending the CIA torture program. Then the agency revealed that it performs a staggering 20-million database queries per month. It seemed that if some of these more serious leaks had come out a bit earlier, a bill to defund the NSA may have stood more of a chance, while a new bill was introduced to make the agency pay for every abuse of power.And then things continued to escalate. A new leak showed that the NSA truly could spy on almost anything and set its own filters. The EFF's success in getting a key FISA court ruling declassified revealed that the NSA repeatedly lied to the court, too. Documents showed that a program continued for three years after it was declared unconstitutional, right after tech companies (who the NSA was paying for their help) got immunity in warrantless wiretapping cases. And during the 2002 Olympics, the NSA and FBI spied on every single email in Salt Lake City.Meanwhile, the US still couldn't even figure out what exactly Snowden took, but it could put together a surveillance review board packed with Washington insiders and NSA sympathizers. By the end of the week, the agency was fumbling to accuse the Wall Street Journal of misleading the public, but then finally (buried on a Friday night in the hopes of avoiding coverage) admitted that yes, there had been a lot of intentional abuses of the system (in contrast to the many denials of this idea).And the circus wasn't over yet — tune in next week...

A study has been released confirming what many have suspected: militarization of law enforcement doesn't make communities safer, has zero effect on officer safety, and is rarely deployed as advertised when agencies make pitches for the acquisition of military gear.The most frequent recipient of military tools and training are SWAT teams. Professor Jonathan Mummolo's research -- published by the National Academy of Sciences -- gained unprecedented access to SWAT deployment numbers, thanks to a public records request and a Maryland state law requiring documentation of every SWAT raid performed. (That law was allowed to expire by legislators who apparently felt it provided too much transparency and accountability.)With these numbers, Mummolo was able to compare SWAT deployments to other stats, as well as see just how often SWAT teams were deployed to handle dangerous situations like robberies, shootings, hostage-taking, etc. What he discovered was, sadly, unsurprising. Police officials talk about the necessity of SWAT teams and military gear using references to barricaded suspects, terrorist attacks, active shooters…. pretty much anything but what they actually use them for. From the paper [PDF]:

Viacom has decided to take its trademark bullying game international and possibly against the most sympathetic target it could find. Nickelodeon, owned by Viacom, has decided to oppose the trademark registration of a 12 year old girl in New Zealand, claiming its trademark on the word "slime" is too important. Katharina Weischede has managed to build up an online brand in New Zealand for producing and playing with "slime." She made a business out of it and attempted to trademark "slime princess", only to find Nickelodeon opposing it.

The long saga of the BMG v. Cox case is now over. If you don't recall, BMG had hired the copyright trolling outfit Rightscorp to bombard ISPs with shakedown letters, based on accusations of copyright infringement. Rightscorp really wanted ISPs to pass those letters on to ISP subscribers, including the part where they demand money to leave you alone. As was revealed during the case, Rightscorp would blatantly lie to those subscribers, telling them that if they were innocent they needed to first hand their computers over the police for a forensic search. Cox, after being bombarded with these shakedown letters, started ignoring the Rightscorp letters, leading BMG to sue.Cox pointed to the DMCA safe harbors to protect itself, but the judge, Liam O'Grady, made it pretty clear that he didn't care much for the internet at all, and didn't seem to mind Righscorp and BMG shaking down people for money with the threat of losing their entire internet access. Of course, it did not help at all that Cox itself had some damning emails about how they treated subscribers accused of infringement. While plenty of attention has been placed on Cox's apparent "thirteen strikes" policy for those accused (not convicted) of copyright infringement, the real problem came down to the fact that Cox didn't follow its own repeat infringer policy. So, in the end, Cox lost to BMG in the lower court and it was mostly upheld on appeal.However, the case was sent back down to the lower court because O'Grady messed up with his jury instructions, providing them with the wrong standard for contributory infringement (O'Grady's jury instructions about contributory infringement presented it as a much broader standard than it actually was). And thus, the case was supposed to go back for another trial... but that's now over as the two sides have settled and Judge O'Grady immediately signed off on the settlement.This isn't all that surprising. Cox was basically in a no-win situation, since its own failure to abide by its own repeat infringer policy had already sunk it, and spending a few hundred thousand dollars more on lawyers to argue over contributory infringement in hopes of lowering the damages award probably wasn't worth it if they could just settle the case and move on.Oh, and of course, Cox now also has a brand new fight with all the major labels that was launched a few weeks ago in response to the results of the BMG case. And Cox is right back in Judge O'Grady's unwelcome court room for that case. I wouldn't be surprised if Cox tries to settle its way out of that case as well.

Sometimes public sentiment is useful. And sometimes it's only useful in demonstrating how little the general public understands some issues. It would appear that a new survey done by the Knight Foundation about how the internet giants should handle "news" content is one of the latter ones. While there's lots of discussion about what the poll results "say," the only thing they really say is that the public has no clue about how the internet and news works -- and that should be the focus. We need much greater tech and media literacy. Unfortunately, the poll seems more likely to do the opposite.There are two "headline" findings out of the report -- and the fact that the two are almost entirely contradictory should have maybe been a warning sign:

An oddball, but interesting, decision [PDF] flowing from the Supreme Court's Carpenter ruling has been issued by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. While the Carpenter decision centered on the long term collection of historic cell site location information, the ruling could be applied to a number of situations where records created by citizens are stored and housed by other parties and accessible without a warrant.This case deals with smart meters, issued by the government (via the public electric utility) to track electric use in citizens' homes. With the old meters, readings were performed by utility employees every few weeks. The new smart meters send back info on electric use every fifteen minutes. This frequency was chosen by the City of Naperville government. It could have gone with something less intrusive, but it chose this method instead.The city was sued by citizens opposed to being snooped on by the new smart meters. The plaintiffs argued the frequent readings allowed to government to make a great deal of inferences about activities inside citizens' homes, based on the rolling delivery of energy use amounts. The district court tossed the case. So does the Appeals Court, but only after making some interesting findings. (via Orin Kerr/Volokh Conspiracy)First, the court rules that the government's use of smart meters to retrieve information about electric usage is actually a search under the Fourth Amendment. To do that, it looks to the Supreme Court's Kyllo decision, which dealt with the warrantless deployment of thermal imaging scanners by law enforcement. That decision found deployment to be a search, even if officers never physically entered the residences being scanned. Enough could be inferred about inside activity from the thermal images to be considered a search under the Fourth Amendment. The Appeals Court says the same rationale applies here.

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The opening sentence of US Attorney Bobby L. Cristine's statement on leaker Reality Winner says it all, even if it's not exactly how Cristine wants it to be read.

We've repeatedly explained how T-Mobile and Sprint's latest attempt to merge will be terrible for both jobs and competition. Despite what T-Mobile and Sprint executives have claimed, history suggests the reduction of total wireless carriers from four to three will likely result in less incentive than ever to seriously compete on price. Similarly, while T-Mobile and Sprint have told regulators that the deal will somehow create an explosion in new jobs, Wall Street analysts have predicted that the deal could kill off anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 jobs as the new company inevitably eliminates redundant positions.While some diehard T-Mobile and Sprint fans have bought into these claims, most objective observers with a firm grasp on history realize that the promised "synergies" of telecom mergers like this one almost never materialize. And the obvious impact on competition and jobs is a major reason this merger and others like it (including AT&T's attempt to acquire T-Mobile) have been scuttled by regulators. There's simply too many examples of this kind of consolidation resulting in massive monopolies with little incentive to give a damn (hi Comcast and AT&T, didn't see you standing there).T-Mobile's looming merger is so unpopular, the company was forced to quietly hire Trump ally Corey Lewandowski in an effort to seal the deal (the whole mocking a kid with Down Syndrome thing be damned). Reuters notes that the company has also started reaching out to smaller wireless carriers, urging them to not only express support to the FCC, but submit favorable editorials to major papers supporting the merger. The problem: they don't much like the deal either:

A few years back, prison communications provider Securus was caught -- via hacker-obtained data -- recording privileged calls between inmates and their legal reps. Yes, ALL CALLS ARE RECORDED, as the sign says, but certain calls shouldn't be. Securus did it en masse, hoovering up 14,000 privileged calls over an unspecified time period. The total could be much higher than that. The data obtained only covered part of Securus' massive network, with 12,000 privileged calls alone in this data dump coming from a single state.Now, another prison phone company has been caught recording privileged conversations and turning them over to law enforcement.

Back in June we discussed Valve's somewhat odd announcement that it was getting out of the games curation business, and opening its platform to what it said would be far more games. The restrictions on what type of content would now be allowed on the gaming platform was said to mostly be limited only to games that are "trolling" or "illegal." As with all things Valve, this apparent announcement aimed at transparency and making sure developers knew what expectations Valve had for games on Steam mostly achieved the exact opposite, with everyone wondering immediately what qualified as "trolling." Nobody could really agree on where exactly Valve would be drawing the lines on the types of content it would allow. That said, most people, including most of the participants of the podcast we conducted on the topic, essentially agreed that this would chiefly allow more games with sexual content onto the platform.And, yet, it seems that even that hasn't been true thus far. Kotaku has a post up discussing the many, many sexuality related games that had been disallowed from Steam, but which were gearing up to be included based on the new policy. It seems the policy hasn't opened up the platform to many of them after all.

Back in February we noted how Facebook had launched a new security tool the company promised would "help keep you and your data safe when you browse and share information on the web." The product was effectively just reconstituted version of the Onavo VPN the company acquired back in 2013. We also noted how some reports were quick to point out that instead of making Facebook users' data more private and secure, Facebook used the VPN to track users around the internet -- specifically what users were doing when they visited other platforms and services.From a report in the Wall Street Journal just about a year ago:

In a coordinated response to Trump's incessant attacks on the press, more than 300 news organizations joined together last week and published editorials about the important role of a free press.The effort is led by the Boston Globe, who called for editorial boards of publications across the country to publish their own editorials defending—in their own words—the importance of press freedom. Participating publications include outlets big and small, from the New York Times to small, local, and independent papers.Trump has called the press "enemy of the American people," and said that journalists "don't like our country." He responded to the editorials in a predictably petty manner. He has also vowed to revoke broadcast licenses over coverage he didn't like, and has threatened to sue critical news organizations and journalists. And, of course, he engages in constant Twitter diatribes about "fake news."The president's verbal attacks on the press are certainly appalling, but his rhetoric gets an outsized amount of attention, when his administration's actions against press are much worse. They deserve just as much condemnation as his tweets.Here are four actions the Trump administration has taken that are more dangerous to media and the First Amendment than anything Trump has said:1. Escalating the war on whistleblowers and spying on journalistsTrump inherited Obama's unprecedented prosecution of whistleblowers who give information to the media, and the Trump administration has escalated its investigations and prosecutions of leaks. Last year, the Daily Beast reported that leak investigations were up 800% under Trump's Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and in the first 18 months of his administration they've already brought four prosecutions. All leak investigations—whether they target whistleblowers to provided information to journalists or other entities—are a serious press freedom threat.Reality Winner became the first whistleblower prosecuted by the Trump administration for leaking information to the press. She was charged with, and eventually plead guilty to, violation of the archaic Espionage Act for making Russian hacking attempts of U.S. election infrastructure public. For her act of public service, she was sentenced to 63 months in prison—the longest sentence a leaker has received in federal court.Trump's Justice Department also secretly obtained a year's worth of phone and email records of New York Times reporter Ali Watkins as part of its investigation into her alleged source—in seeming direct violation of Justice Department guidelines. While this is the first publicly known instance of the Trump administration directly targeting a journalist with surveillance, there may be many others.And beyond whistleblowers who leak information to the press, the Trump administration has cracked down on freedom of information. Trump has forced senior White House staff to sign non-disclosure agreements, and conducted unofficial leak investigations in the White House. While the NDAs are likely unenforceable, this could chill and intimidate government employees who may have blown the whistle into silence.2. Potential prosecution of publishersThe New York Times reported in May 2017 that Trump began a conversation with then-FBI Director James Comey by "saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information." While it's unclear if he has privately kept pushing the FBI and DOJ to take such actions, there's ample evidence that they might try to do just that with WikiLeaks.Top Trump officials have vowed to prosecute WikiLeaks for publishing documents. If the Department of Justice brings charges against WikiLeaks or Julian Assange for their work, it would open any news organization that reports on or publishes classified information to prosecution, too. Attorney General Jeff Sessions even refused to rule out using the precedent of prosecuting WikiLeaks against other news organizations.With reports indicating that Assange will soon be kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, CNN has reported that "according to US officials, charges have been drawn up relating to previous WikiLeaks disclosures of classified US documents."Regardless of what one thinks of Assange, everyone who cares about the press' ability to publish leaks should loudly condemn any attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks.3. Targeting immigrant journalists with deportation threatsLast December, immigration officials arrested a Mexican journalist and his son who had sought asylum in the United States after being threatened by the Mexican military. He was detained for more than seven months. Internal ICE emails strongly suggest that Emilio Gutiérrez-Soto was targeted for arrest in retaliation for his criticism of United States immigration policy.Gutiérrez-Soto isn't the only journalist targeted by ICE for his First Amendment protected speech. Manuel Duran, a reporter for a Spanish language paper in Memphis, was arrested while covering a protest. Although all charges against him were quickly dropped, he was transferred to ICE custody, where he has remained detained without charge and could be deported at any time. Duran's attorneys say it was his critical coverage of law enforcement that led the government to target him. ICE has also been accused of targeting activists who are accused of being publicly critical of Trump's immigration policies too.Gutiérrez-Soto and Duran both came to the United States because they were threatened in their home countries. Their work, and criticism of cruel law enforcement agencies like ICE, is critical, and it's a huge press freedom threat that the United States government retaliates against their speech by detaining them.4. Threatened journalists with decades in prison for covering protestsOn Trump's Inauguration Day, over 200 people—including protesters, legal observers, medics, and journalists—were swept up in an indiscriminate arrest for being present at a protest. Among them were at least nine journalists doing their jobs. And while charges against seven were dropped quickly, Trump's Department of Justice targeted two— both independent journalists—with felony charges.Alexei Wood and Aaron Cantú faced outrageous charges that carried the possibility of approximately 60 and 10 years in prison respectively. While charges against both were eventually dropped after the Justice Department's case seemed to fall apart, their cases are not clearly victories.The J20 prosecutions will undoubtedly have chilling effects on press freedom as well as political speech and protest. Trump's Department of Justice has sent a disturbing precedent of targeting the press for reporting on a demonstration, and endangering its fundamental ability to make newsworthy political events public.Trump's rhetoric and his administration's legal actions are both abuses of power and comprise assaults on press freedom. But beyond his tweets, vague libel threats, and baseless fake news accusations, the Trump administration poses a very real threat to press freedom, and has taken steps that have made critical reporting materially more dangerous in the United States. It's never been more important for news organizations to speak up in defense of their important work.Reprinted from the Freedom of the Press Foundation

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The big topic du jour, of course, has been about content moderation on social media. But that may only be just the very beginning of where all of this heads. It didn't get that much attention, but last week Microsoft threatened to take down all of Gab.ai based on some (really awful) posts on that site. Gab, if you don't know, is the social network "alternative" that claims to be free speech supporting (even if that's a bit of an exaggeration), when it really has basically become the home to all the assholes who have been kicked off of Twitter. It's generally a cesspool of idiocy, so it's not clear what suddenly inspired Microsoft -- which hosts Gab on its Azure cloud platform -- to suddenly speak up.As we've noted many times in the past, Microsoft, like any company, has certain rights, including First Amendment rights for what speech lives on its own computers and who it associates with. But, we're talking about a different kind of ballgame when we start getting to the infrastructure level, rather than just talking about content moderation at the edge provider level. This hearkens back to the big post I did nearly a year ago when Cloudflare stopped providing service to the Daily Stormer. As I noted at the time, there were no easy answers, and the situation is incredibly complicated. Simply kicking bad services off the internet doesn't make their hatred/ignorance/stupidity go away (and sometimes allows it to fester in even darker corners, where it can't be monitored or countered).But there's an even larger issue here when its these infrastructure players making determinations on content at various edge providers -- effectively having their own terms of service substitute for the edge providers'. We discussed some of this on a recent podcast, focusing on how the legacy copyright players have been targeting infrastructure players -- CDNs, payment processors, advertising networks, domain registrars and registers, and even ICANN itself. While, again, these providers, as private companies, have every right to make their own decisions, they have much greater power than edge providers, and the tools they have are much blunter. Whereas Twitter can just take down a single Tweet, Microsoft's only remedy for bad content on Gab is to take down all of Gab.This is a big issue that deserves a lot more thoughtful discussion, so it's great that Glenn Fleishman over at Fortune has started to question how infrastructure providers are dealing with these questions (for the most part, they're trying to avoid answering these questions). I'm briefly quoted in the article, from a much longer conversation that Glenn and I had where we tried to work through a variety of different ideas.And, as I wrote in last year's post about the Cloudflare situation, I'm a lot more worried about infrastructure players suddenly deciding that they should have an editorial say as well, as that seems well beyond what role they should be playing. Yes, again, they have every right to stop working with services they dislike, but we should be discussing the potential impact of infrastructure players as censors. With edge services, one point that is regularly brought up is that if you don't like how a service is running you can just go to another one or build your own. But that gets a lot more complicated when you get to the infrastructure level where you can't just "build your own" and the number of options may be greatly limited.As Glenn notes in his piece:

By now we've well established that the FCC ignored the public, ignored the experts, and ignored all objective data when it killed net neutrality rules at the behest of telecom monopolies.While the vote to kill the rules occurred last year, the rules didn't technically die until last June 11. And one common refrain by Pai and pals (and many folks who don't understand how the broken telecom market works) is that because the internet didn't immediately collapse upon itself post-repeal in a rainbow-colored explosion, that the repeal itself must not be that big of a deal. For example, Ajit Pai tried to make that point again last week at an FCC oversight hearing that was severely lacking in the actual oversight department.In his opening statement, Pai proclaimed (pdf) that the internet still working semi-reasonably is proof positive that the threat of the repeal was over-hyped:

Reuters has a long, detailed examination of the Chinese surveillance state. China's intrusion into the lives of its citizens has never been minimal, but advances in technology have allowed the government to keep tabs on pretty much every aspect of citizens' lives.Facial recognition has been deployed at scale and it's not limited to finding criminals. It's used to identify regular citizens as they go about their daily lives. This is paired with license plate readers and a wealth of information gathered from online activity to provide the government dozens of data points for every citizen that wanders into the path of its cameras. Other biometric information is gathered and analyzed to help the security and law enforcement agencies better pin down exactly who it is they're looking at.

It is no revelation that film studios have been in a sustained freakout for years over films that leak to the internet before they hit the theaters. While the freakout is somewhat understandable (nobody wants to plan out a film release only to have the product appear in a way outside those well-laid plans), much of the reasoning in the freakouts has to do with claims that the leaks eat into the profits the company would generate at the theater. This reasoning has been debunked many times over, most notably by AAA movies that leak online still making a killing at the box office. What should be immediately apparent is that much of this is driven by emotion and outrage rather than anything resembling facts or clear-thinking.Which brings us to Our House Films, the company that produced Jean-Claude Van Damme's latest opus, Kickboxer: Retaliation. If you weren't aware that Van Damme had actually made another Kickboxer movie in the first place, you're in good company: the film grossed five-thousand whole dollars domestically. If you are aware that this film was made, perhaps you also are aware that it leaked early online. Our House Films blames its post-production partner, Tunnel Inc., for the leak and has filed a copyright lawsuit against Tunnel...for $5 million.

The promise of transparency and accountability police body cameras represent hasn't materialized. Far too often, camera footage goes missing or is withheld from the public for extended periods of time.So far, body cameras have proven most useful to prosecutors. With captured footage being evidence in criminal cases, it's imperative that footage is as secure as any other form of evidence. Unfortunately, security appears to be the last thing on body cam manufacturers' minds.

Have you ever thought about the legal issues surrounding emoji? Don't worry, most people haven't. But they are myriad and interesting, with roots nearly two decades ago following the emergence of emoticons — and two people who definitely have thought a lot about it are Eric Goldman and Gabriella Ziccarelli, who join us on this week's episode to talk about the various intersections of emoji and the law.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 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to extend qualified immunity to a former ICE attorney who forged a document submitted into evidence in a deportation hearing. (h/t Mark Stern) While still with ICE, Jonathan M. Love produced a document claiming Ignacio Lanuza had agreed to voluntary departure to Mexico, thus undermining the ten years of residency needed to avail himself of a removal order cancellation. Here's what was submitted and its effect, from the appeals court decision [PDF]:

You may have noticed that an awful lot of news broke yesterday concerning a wide variety of legal cases all touching on the President. Most of the coverage, of course, went to the two big cases: the guilty verdict against former campaign chair Paul Manafort and the guilty plea by former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen. There were some other cases with breaking news as well, including a judge in New York rejecting Trump's attempt to dump a lawsuit filed against his private security team for apparently beating up some protesters. Also, in a (frankly, very weak) defamation lawsuit filed by former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos, apparently Trump has refused to submit to discovery requests, leading Zervos' legal team to file a motion to compel him to respond.Most of those cases don't cover the kinds of things we usually talk about (the defamation case being the exception -- but at this stage, there really isn't that much worth commenting on). However, there was yet another case loosely involving the President that is something we'd talk about and which concluded late Monday (though, the news broke on Tuesday as well). And that involved a defamation case filed by three Russians against Christopher Steele, author of the so-called "Steele Dossier." Back in October of last year, three Russians, Mikhail Fridman, German Khan and Peter Aven, who are all involved with Alfa-Bank, sued Fusion GPS and its founder Glenn Simpson in federal court for defamation. That case is still waiting for a ruling on both a Motion to Dismiss and an Anti-SLAPP Motion.However, while all of that was going on, the same three Russians filed a very similar case in the DC Superior Court (the equivalent of a state court, rather than federal court). That case was filed in April of this year, and while the federal court is still dilly dallying around on it, the state court dismissed the case on anti-SLAPP grounds (which rendered a related Motion to Dismiss moot.).As we've discussed in the past, unfortunately, DC federal courts have decided that DC's (decent) anti-SLAPP statute does not apply in federal court (which suggests the anti-SLAPP motion in the federal case may fail, even if the Motion to Dismiss may succeed), but it has always applied in DC's local courts. And here, the judge, Anthony Epstein, applied it in a pretty straightforward manner to decide that the Russians have no case. Like most anti-SLAPP laws, which are designed to stop bogus defamation lawsuits quickly, DC's shifts the burden to the plaintiffs early on, requiring them to establish a likelihood of success in their claims in order for the case to move forward.For that to happen, the Russians needed to show evidence that Steele's statements about them in the dossier were false, damaging and done with actual malice (which means Steele would have had to known they were false, or done so with reckless disregard for the truth). This is a pretty high bar. Rather than just do so, the Russians tried a different strategy, which tried to attack the applicability of the anti-SLAPP law in the first place:

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For the past few years we've been covering a whole series of cases, most of them filed by (I'm not making this up) a silly law firm by the name of 1-800-Law-Firm, trying to argue that various big internet companies provided material support to ISIS or other terrorists, and therefore owe tons of money to surviving relatives of people killed by ISIS or other terrorist organizations. There have been lawsuits against Twitter, Facebook and Google/YouTube. So far, all of these lawsuits have failed miserably -- as they should.Even if the plaintiffs could show that these platforms actively enabled terrorists to use their platform (which they do not, as all of them proactively look to remove terrorist related content), none of the cases makes an even half-hearted attempt to connect the (very unfortunate) deaths of their relatives to any actual content on these platforms. The lawsuits are basically "these bad people use Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, these people killed my relative, thus, those platforms owe me millions of dollars." That, of course, is not how the law works.In the case filed against Google, it was filed by a relative of someone who was killed in the horrific Paris attacks a few years back. The court had already thrown out the case last year, but allowed a third amended complaint to be filed, which has now been rejected as well (hat tip to Eric Goldman for blogging about this as well).As with every other such case, the court relied on CDA 230 in throwing it out last year, but the lawyers tried again with an amended complaint, and have failed again. The new complaint made the same four claims the earlier filing did, and added two more, insisting that CDA 230 does not apply to any of them. Once again, the court says the old claims are easily barred under CDA 230:

We've long discussed how Verizon (like most U.S. cellular carriers) has a terribly-difficult time understanding what the word "unlimited" means. Way back in 2007 Verizon was forced to settle with the New York Attorney General after a nine-month investigation found the company was throttling its "unlimited" mobile data plans after just 5GB of data usage, without those limits being clearly explained to the end user. Of course Verizon tried for a while to eliminate unlimited data plans completely, but a little something called competition finally forced the company to bring the idea back from the dead a few years ago.But the company's new "unlimited" data plans still suffer from all manner of fine print, limits, and caveats. That includes throttling all video by default (something you can avoid if you're willing to pay significantly more), restrictions on tethering and usage of your phone as a hotspot or modem, and a 25 GB cap that results in said "unlimited" plans suddenly being throttled back to last-generation speeds as slow as 128 kbps. In short, Verizon still pretty clearly has no damn idea what the word unlimited actually means, nor does it much care if this entire mess confuses you.The latest case in point: one fire department in Santa Clara County, California had subscribed to what it thought was an unlimited Verizon wireless data plan for its mobile command and control center (OES 5262) vehicle. The vehicle is used to manage department resources during wildfires and other emergencies. But a brief (pdf) filed this week by net neutrality supporters pushing for restoration of net neutrality rules (first spotted by Ars Technica) highlights how the fire department suddenly found the vehicle (and all connected systems) largely unusable because Verizon had throttled its cellular data connection after 25 GB of usage:

Turkey's president Recep Erdogan is the pettiest of tyrants, ruling with an iron fist and an easily-bruised ego. In addition to snuffing out dissent in his own country with a combination of arrests and intimidation, Erdogan and his government scour the planet for non-Turkish citizens who have offended Lord Gollum.This doesn't just take the form of content removal requests and site blocking. It also means actual arrests of foreign citizens residing in other countries. Germany's government was shocked to find an old law on its books -- one that forbade insulting foreign states -- being used against one of its own, a German comedian who wrote an immensely unflattering poem about the Turkish dictator. The government gave in at first before swiftly excising the law.The same can't be said about the Netherlands, another country with bad laws Erdogan is more than happy to exploit to silence criticism. This makes things a little easier for the Turkish government. The last time it punished a Dutch citizen for criticizing the Turkish president, it had to wait for the journalist to visit the country before arresting her.This time the Dutch government is going to be doing the punishing. Erdogan has spoken and, rather than being greeted with laughter followed by a dial tone, the Dutch government appears to be moving forward with a local prosecution.

Trademark disputes in the alcohol industries are often times absurd enough to make the comments section question whether everyone involved was simply drunk. While I'm sure the lawyers on all sides tend to be sober, every once in a while you read a claim in a big-boy legal document that makes you pause and wonder. And, then, sometimes the dispute centers around a public figure punning off his own notoriety, making the trademark claims extra ludicrous.Meet Bob Dylan. Bob used to be a counterculture folksinger hero that eschewed the trappings of materialism and sang as one of the original social justice warriors. Present day Bob sings songs on car commercials and owns a Whiskey brand. And, hey, Bob's allowed to make money, no matter how jarring this might be to those born decades ago. His Heaven's Door Whiskey is, sigh, allowed to exist. It's also allowed to fight back against the absurd trademark lawsuit brought by Heaven's Hill Distillery over its logo and trade dress.

For quite some time now, we've been trying to demonstrate just how impossible it is to expect internet platforms to do a consistent or error-free job of moderating content. Especially at the scale they're at, it's an impossible request, not least because so much of what goes into content moderation decisions is entirely subjective about what's good and what's bad, and not everyone agrees on that. It's why I've been advocating for moving controls out to the end users, rather than expecting platforms to be the final arbiters. It's also part of the reason why we ran that content moderation game at a conference a few months ago, in which no one could fully agree on what to do about the content examples we presented (for every single one there were at least some people who argued for keeping the content up or taking it down).On Twitter, I recently joked that anyone with opinions on content moderation should first have to read Professor Kate Klonick's recent Harvard Law Review paper on The New Governors: The People, Rules and Processes Governing Online Speech, as it's one of the most thorough and comprehensive explanations of the realities and history of content moderation. But, if reading a 73 page law review article isn't your cup of tea, my next recommendation is to spend an hour listening to the new Radiolab podcast, entitled Post No Evil.I think it provides the best representation of just how impossible it is to moderate this kind of content at scale. It discusses the history of content moderation, but also deftly shows how impossible it is to do it at scale with any sort of consistency without creating new problems. I won't ruin it for you entirely, but it does a brilliant job highlighting how as the scale increases, the only reasonable way to deal with things is to create a set of rules that everyone can follow. And then you suddenly realize that the rules don't work. You have thousands of people who need to follow those rules, and they each have a few seconds to decide before moving on. And as such, there's not only no time for understanding context, but there's little time to recognize that (1) content has a funny way of not falling within the rules nicely and (2) no matter what you do, you'll end up with horrible results (one of the examples in the podcast is one we talked about last year, explaining the ridiculous results, but logical reasons, for why Facebook had a rule that you couldn't say mean things about white men, but could about black boys).The most telling part of the podcast is the comparison between two situations, in which the content moderation team at Facebook struggled over what to do. One was a photo that went viral during the Boston Marathon bombings a few years ago, showing some of the carnage created by the bombs. In the Facebook rulebook was a rule against "gore" that basically said you couldn't show a person's "insides on the outside." And yet, these photos did that. The moderation team said that they should take it down to follow the rules (even though there was vigorous debate). But, they were overruled by execs who said "that's newsworthy."But this was then contrasted with another viral video in Mexico of a woman being beheaded. Many people in Mexico wanted it shown, in order to document and alert the world of the brutality and violence that was happening there, which the government and media were mostly hiding. But... immediately people around the world freaked out about the possibility that "children" might accidentally come across such a video and be scarred for life. The Facebook content moderation team said leave it up, because it's newsworthy... and the press crushed Facebook for being so callous in pushing gore and violence... so top execs stepped in again to say that video could no longer be shown.As the podcast does a nice job showing, these are basically impossible situations, in part because there are all different reasons why some people may want to see some content, and others should not see it. And we already have enough trouble understanding the context of the content, let alone the context of the viewer in relation to the content.I've been seeing a microcosm of this myself in the last few days. After my last post about platforms and content moderation around the Alex Jones question, Twitter's Jack Dorsey was kind enough to tweet about it (even though I questioned his response to the whole mess). And, so for the past week or so I've been getting notified of every response to that tweet, which seems pretty equally divided between people who hate Alex Jones screaming about how Jack is an idiot for not banning Jones and how he's enabling hate mongers, and people who love Alex Jones screaming about how Jack is silencing dissent and how he's a liberal asshole silencing conservatives.And no matter where on the spectrum of responses you may fall (or even totally outside of that spectrum), it should come down to this: we shouldn't be leaving these decisions up to Jack. Or Mark. Yes, those companies can and must do a better job, but what people fail to realize is that the job we're asking them to do is literally an impossible one. And that's why we really should be looking to move away from the situation in which they even need to be doing it. My solution is to move the controls outwards to the ends, allowing individuals and third parties to make their own calls. But there may be other solutions as well.But something that is not a solution is merely expecting that these platforms can magically "get it right."

As expected, Mozilla, 22 State attorneys general, INCOMPAS, and numerous consumer groups this week asked a U.S. appeals court to reinstate FCC net neutrality rules. The state AGs, led by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, filed a lawsuit back in January attempting to overturn the repeal, arguing that the decision will ultimately be a "disaster for New York consumers and businesses." Mozilla and a few other companies also filed suit, as well as consumer groups including Free Press and Public Knowledge.The AG's statement-- as well as the brief (pdf) filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit late Monday night--not only urges the court to restore the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules, but asks the court to scuttle ISP and FCC efforts to block states from protecting consumers:

Last week, Tim Cushing had a post about yet another out of control automated DMCA notifier, sending a ton of bogus notices to Google (most of which Google removed from its search engine index, since the sender, "Topple Track" from Symphonic Distribution was a part of Google's "Trusted Copyright Program," giving those notices more weight). The post listed many of the perfectly legitimate content that got removed from Google's index because of that rogue automated filter, including an EFF page about a lawsuit, the official (authorized) pages of Beyonce and Bruno Mars, and a blog post about a lawsuit by Professor Eric Goldman.But, seeing as we're getting towards September when the EU Parliament will again be voting on the big Copyright Directive proposal there, including Article 13, which will require mandatory filters or other automated tools for preventing copyright infringement, I thought it was important to do a separate post calling out one of the other pages taken down by Symphonic Distribution's out of control Topple Track. And that was that it got Google to de-index an article by Julia Reda, a member of the EU Parliament who has been leading the charge against the problematic provisions in the Copyright Directive proposal.Specifically -- and it would be hard to make this up if we tried -- Topple Track's automated filter got Google to de-index this blog post by Reda, in which she details the problems in Article 13 and how it will create mandatory censorship machines, that would likely lead to massive internet censorship of perfectly legitimate content.Let's repeat that so it can sink in. An automated filter helped take down an article by a Member of the EU Parliament, explaining how a (still being debated) proposal would create automated filtering systems that would take down all sorts of legitimate content.This feels like the sort of thing that should end all debate about just how damaging Article 13 might be (though, of course, it won't). When you force more mandatory filters onto the internet, these kinds of problems will only increase. Tons and tons of legitimate and perfectly legal content will get blocked. Last month, we posted a useful demonstration of just how much legitimate content would get censored under such a plan, but we never imagined that a perfect example would present itself just weeks later showing just how bad an idea Article 13 is.

The US government isn't supposed to seek general warrants. And US judges aren't supposed to approve them. The Fourth Amendment requires a showing of probable cause to justify the intrusion by the government into citizens' lives and property. None of that appears to have happened in this case, brought to us by Thomas Fox-Brewster at Forbes.

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Back in 2010, we posted an infographic from The Root showing just how little money that was spent on music actually went to the artist:In 2015, using a report put out by Ernst & Young, we put together our own graphics showing how much of streaming went to the actual artists:You may be noticing a pattern? Very little of the money being made actually goes to the artist. Now we have even more data on this. Citibank recently released a massive and incredibly thorough report on the entire music industry showing how and where the money is made. There's lots of interesting and useful information in the report, but the headline grabbing fact is that musicians end up with just about 12% of global music revenue. As I said, the report is incredibly thorough (and a really useful read if you want to get a sense of just how convoluted and complex the music business really is), but the key is that there was ~$43 billion spent on music in 2017. Approximately $25 billion of that went to everyone (outside of the labels) who helped make the music available: digital streaming services, retail stores, concert venues:That leaves $18.2 billion in money distributed out to the labels. But of that amount, only about $5 billion actually goes to artists, which means right around 12% goes to artists:Of course, it's especially notable that a significant chunk of that revenue going to artists actually comes from... live performances:This shouldn't be a surprise. Hell, we've spent the better part of two decades here talking about how artists need to embrace "scarcities" where they can make money, with live shows being a big part of that. And we kept having people from the recording industry scream about us saying that, but the numbers above don't lie. Citibank notes that one of the big reasons live drives so much artist revenue: You don't have the same amount of monopolistic middlemen sucking the artists dry:

Last week we noted how an FCC "oversight" hearing fell well short of anything actually resembling, well, actual oversight. Three FCC staffers had just been caught making up a DDOS attack and misleading Congress, the press and the FBI about it -- yet the subject was was barely even broached by lawmakers on either side of the aisle. It was another embarrassing example of the absence of anything resembling genuine accountability at the agency.Fortunately one subject that did get a little attention was the FCC's comically-terrible broadband maps, something we've covered at great lengths here at Techdirt. If you want to see our terrible broadband maps at work, you need only go visit the FCC's $300+ million broadband availability map, which is based on the Form 477 data collected from ISPs. If you plug in your address, you'll find that not only does the FCC not include prices (at industry behest), the map hallucinates speed and ISP availability at most U.S. addresses.For example, at my home in Seattle there's only one real ISP available: Comcast. But according to the FCC's data, I supposedly have seven broadband providers to choose from:Three of those options (CenturyLink DSL, CenturyLink fiber, and Startouch Broadband) don't actually exist at my address, something I've confirmed with company engineers. Another three are satellite broadband providers, whose sky-high latency, high prices and daily or monthly usage caps make the services barely qualify as real broadband. That again leaves just Comcast as my only fixed line broadband option (aka a monopoly) in Seattle, supposedly one of the bigger tech-oriented cities in America. If you plug your address into the FCC's map you'll likely see similarly-misleading results.As the FCC eyes where to deploy $4.5 billion in new rural broadband subsidies, more and more lawmakers are growing annoyed at the FCC's failure on this front. That includes Senator Jon Tester, who at last week's hearing proclaimed that the FCC's broadband maps "stink", and figuratively suggested that somebody (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) should have their "ass kicked" for the failure:

Governments -- which will process requests from citizens in statutorily-required time almost zero percent of the time -- never think the private sector moves fast enough. The government says "Jump" and then immediately asks why the jumping wasn't already in progress when it ordered the jumping to commence.Content that isn't even of the "I know it when I see it" variety isn't being taken down quickly enough for the EU. Various members have implemented their own 24-hour policies for the removal of everything from "hate speech" to "extremist content" -- both particularly difficult to classify immediately when context and newsworthiness must be considered.The EU Commission is reeling in the leash it has attached to US social media companies. It pitched the idea back in March but now appears to following through with its threats. The latest move towards impossibility is detailed by The Financial Times.

We've often made the point in the past that much of the trademark legal strife and bullying that occurs throughout the country ought to be squarely blamed on a USPTO that can't be bothered to put much thought into the trademarks it approves. All too often, the Trademark Office acts as a mindless rubber stamping facility, pushing through the application paperwork without thinking about the broader consequences of its approvals, nor the legal minutia involved into what makes a term a valid trademark. That bureaucratic lethargy is precisely how you get trademark bullies wielding trademarks that should never have been granted. And, because trademark bullying generally works, it's rare that anyone outside the USPTO is actually forced to clean up this mess it created.But, on rare occasions, sanity puts a win up on the board. Such is the case with Express Homebuyers USA of Virginia, which defeated WBH Marketing Inc.'s trademark suit in which the latter claimed infringement based on its registered trademark for the phrase "We Buy Houses."

Turkish president Recep Erdogan figures the best critic is a silenced critic. Determined to "earn" the respect of people worldwide, Erdogan and his government have engaged in unprecedented censorship. This goes far beyond the punishment of its own citizens. Erdogan has tried to secure charges and prosecutions from other governments against their own citizens for having the temerity to not take him as seriously as he takes himself.Erdogan takes down newspapers and platforms with equal aplomb. He does this to stop things like the following from circulating:It doesn't work, of course. Nothing gets censored worldwide and whatever censorship hits home can be circumvented. But of all the internet targets, Twitter is Erdogan's absolute favorite. The Committee to Protect Journalists has done the math. Its excellent article on Erdogan's censorship activities makes it clear that all other countries are merely pretenders to the throne when it comes to talking Twitter into doing their dirty work.Over 1.5 million tweets have been withheld in Turkey by Twitter, thanks to Turkish government demands. Frequently targeted by removal requests are citizens who would normally be afforded extra speech protections in countries not run by a thin-skinned thug. And an American company playing ball with an authoritarian doesn't leave much room for recourse.

Recently, Attorney General Jeff Sessions attended the Eighth Circuit Judicial Conference. Considering he was speaking to members of the judiciary, it seems odd he would have used this occasion to deliver a rant against the judicial system.As a prosecutor, Sessions greatly benefited from the system he now maligns. The justice system barely enters the lives of those being prosecuted. An adversarial system designed to provide the accused with due process is rarely engaged. The outcome is predetermined, except for arguments over minor details. As the Supreme Court wrote in a 2012 decision, the criminal justice system is a downhill slope for prosecutors who rarely need more than a light shove to put someone behind bars.