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So we've noted for a while that T-Mobile's brand reputation as a fiesty consumer-friendly disruptor is only really skin deep. While the T-Mobile of a few years ago certainly added some much needed competition to the wireless sector at first, more recently the company has started to look a lot like the bigger competitors (AT&T, Verizon) it pretends to be superior to. From mocking groups like the EFF to opposing net neutrality, the company isn't all that different from the companies its brash CEO likes to make fun of. Especially as it snuggles up to Trump to gain approval for a merger with that Sprint nobody asked for.Meanwhile, the company's promised efforts at "disruption" aren't quite what they used to be either. The company's long-hyped new TV service, for example, was unveiled this week and doesn't appear to be much different from the traditional offerings the company had promised to supplant:

Earlier today, I posted my article about how Starz was issuing obviously bogus takedowns concerning tweets about a news story on TorrentFreak concering how a social media agency, The Social Element, had issued bogus DMCA takedown notices to Twitter, about another story on TorrentFreak about some TV shows leaking online.Last night I had reached out to Twitter, The Social Element, and Starz, but had not received a real response by the time the story went out (Starz had emailed back suggesting that I did not give them enough time to respond, but had somehow managed to issue a weird apology statement to others). Eventually, more than half an hour after my story went out, Starz emailed me the following statement:

In an effort to boost bust numbers and further cement its reputation as the ugly embodiment of punitive xenophobia, ICE set up a fake university in Michigan to ensnare immigrants attempting to do something the law allows them to do: stay in the country while they earn a degree.This wasn't just some online university with sketchy bonafides. This was a (bogus) university sporting a real campus and accreditation secured from a national accreditation service -- everything needed to start converting tuition fees into arrests and detentions. ICE took in $60,000 in application fees alone before it started rounding up people who, for the most part, were just trying to do something legal. Instead of being able to live and work in the US while they completed a degree, more than 160 duped students were taken into custody by ICE. So far, only eight are actually facing charges.In this day and age, it takes more than national accreditation to convince people you're real. You also need a social media presence. As The Guardian reports, ICE also steamrolled Facebook's terms of use while engaging in this bullshit sting operation.

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Something weird is going on with Starz over the past few days. Either it really, really doesn't want you to know that a bunch of unreleased episodes of well known TV shows were recently leaked online. Or it really, really, really wants you to know all about it. Which one of those two things is true may depend on just how familiar whoever is manning the Starz copyright-takedown desk is with the concept of the Streisand Effect.You see, a week ago, TorrentFreak published the article linked above. This is a pretty typical TorrentFreak kind of article, noting that some high profile shows or movies have leaked, perhaps providing screenshots, but not providing any links or really telling anyone how to get the shows. It is just reporting that the leaks exist. Two of the shows leaked were from Starz. As TorrentFreak wrote:

One of the stupidest fights over internet points has reached its latest nadir. It's nadirs all the way down, tbh. If you're interested, there's an entire Wikipedia page with a blow-by-blow of YouTuber PewDiePie's fight against Indian content conglomerate, T-Series. It starts with subscriber counts and ends with a court order. In between, there's racism, hacked printers, billboard purchases, invective of all varieties, and this salvo from the controversial PewDiePie: a "diss track" called "Bitch Lasagna."If you're inclined to click through and assail yourself with "Bitch Lasagna," you'll be greeted with some of the worst white boy rapping since white boys started rapping. Robert Van Winkle is rolling over in his grave. [Note: My apologies to all of us: I've been informed Mr. Van Winkle is, unfortunately, still alive.] Contained in this video are some slurs against the country of India and its inhabitants -- not all that unexpected for a diss track.What's a little more unexpected is how far T-Series will go to up its subscriber count and fan the flames of this meaningless -- but lucrative -- battle over numbers in a little red box. There's now a court involved.

In 2015, the man behind darknet drug marketplace Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, received two consecutive life sentences from a New York judge. Her rationale was that Ulbricht was no different than a "dangerous Bronx drug dealer." No leniency was given. The government, which participated in its own share of misconduct during the investigation, argued Ulbricht should be personally financially-responsible for every drug transaction on the Silk Road: a total of $184 million.The government got its win -- all of it. But it was only temporary. Silk Road 2.0 swiftly took the original's place, run by another young man who knew he was going to be pursued by law enforcement across the world as soon as he fired it up. Long before it was shut down, Silk Road 2.0 was double the size of the original Silk Road, proving once again that sellers and buyers of illicit substances will find each other, no matter how many roadblocks governments erect.The operator of this marketplace was arrested in San Francisco -- just like Albricht was. But that's where their stories drastically diverge. For one, the person arrested in San Francisco was not the founder of Silk Road 2.0. That title belonged to Dread Pirate Roberts 2 (DPR2). That person, Thomas White, was arrested by the UK's National Crime Agency.Unlike Ulbricht's prosecution -- which played out in public thanks to our justice system's presumption of openness -- White's prosecution occurred in secret, shielded from the public eye by UK law. White was arrested in 2014, but his sentence has only now been handed down. Ulbricht got two life sentences and $184 million in fees from a US court for running the Silk Road. The creator of Silk Road 2.0 -- doing double the business of Silk Road 1.0 at its peak -- is looking to be out of prison years before his inspiration sees freedom.

This week, Mason Wheeler scored a first place win on both the insightful and funny sides. For insightful, it was a response to our mention of Jack Valenti's famous "Boston stranger" comment in the launch of our new Sky Is Rising report:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, former NSA and CIA boss Michael Hayden was getting pathetically aggressive, calling Dianne Feinstein too emotional to judge the CIA torture report (which we were only learning about via piecemeal leaks), and calling congressional staffers "sissies" while accusing Ron Wyden of not acting like a man. At the same time, Mike Rogers was still pushing his "Ed Snowden is a russian spy" angle, while Snowden himself was saying the NSA lied in its claim that he didn't raise concerns through proper channels, and telling the Council of Europe about how the agency spied on Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.Meanwhile, Hollywood was piling on to the already-dead Megaupload with a far-reaching lawsuit that packed in multiple attacks on the internet in general, and was quickly followed by the RIAA filing a virtually identical suit of its own.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, Amanda Palmer was sharing insights into how her fans support her work while Trent Reznor was taking his business model experiments into the mobile space, and a new service was announced that would let musicians pre-fund their releases (and it's not around anymore — but two weeks later, Kickstarter would launch).The Associated Press announced its plans to sue news aggregators, Fox fired a movie columnist for reviewing a leaked copy of Wolverine, old-industry guard like U2's manager and Andrew Lloyd Weber were out trashing the internet, and Hollywood's favorite lawmakers were preparing for the next big copyright expansion push.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, we saw the first court ruling to state that online content aggregation was legal, setting the stage for later tantrums like the AP's, and the outrage of some publishers today. Gmail was the new kid on the internet block and people weren't sure how they felt about it (or whether it violated EU data privacy laws), just as mathematicians weren't quite sure how they felt about proofs that rely on computer calculations — while some clueless analysts were very sure about how much they hated the "fad" of camera phones. Google and Yahoo both stopped accepting ads for online casinos, seemingly out of the blue until we learned of some nasty letters recently sent out by the DOJ.This was also the week that we saw the beginnings of a terrible idea that simply refuses to die, and rises like a zombie every now and then to this day: the WIPO broadcast treaty.

You may have heard the recent news that President Trump has decided to label the the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) a "foreign terrorist organization." The IRGC is Iran's powerful military/security/law enforcement apparatus -- that also owns a ton of businesses. As the White House itself admits, this is the first time a foreign government agency has been referred to as a foreign terrorist organization. This is big news in a huge variety of ways -- in large part because it could end up criminalizing lots of people and businesses who unwittingly do business with the IRGC including (checks notes) a firm called The Trump Organization.But, leaving that aside, it raises some other issues as well. We've been talking about the impact of the terrible EU Terrorist Content Regulation that the EU Parliament will soon be voting on. But, as we've discussed in the past, there are lots of questions about who decides just what is "terrorist" content. Daphne Keller tweeted about the IRGC decision, wondering what happens when one country's laws demand the removal of content from another country's government and suggests (accurately) this is going to lead to a huge mess.

Even if you haven't read through our previous stories about giant beer brewer AB/InBev being very much into protecting its intellectual property to the extreme, you probably would have guessed that to be the case as a matter of instinct. With a large legal war chest and an equally large legal team, the company has had no problem with gobbling up questionable trademarks and then wielding them as a weapon against even the smallest of non-competitors. With such a strict view on its own IP rights and such an expansive view on trademark law, you would think that InBev would be super into making sure it's own actions fell well within the bounds of trademark law.You'd be wrong. Patagonia, the rather well known clothier, has sued InBev over how it's used a trademark it received in 2012 for "Patagonia". While you're sure to be wondering how there could be customer confusion, as the apparel and beer markets are quite different, the details in this case definitely matter. We can start with what InBev did in the early days of holding the trademark, which mounts to essentially: not a thing.

In April 2018, House Republicans held a hearing on the “Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms” that focused on misguided claims that Internet platforms like Google, Twitter, and Facebook actively discriminate against conservative political viewpoints. Now, a year later, Senator Ted Cruz is taking the Senate down the same path: he lead a hearing earlier this week on “Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse.”While we certainly agree that online platforms have created content moderation systems that remove speech, we don’t see evidence of systemic political bias against conservatives. In fact, the voices that are silenced more often belong to already marginalized or less-powerful people.Given the lack of evidence of intentional partisan bias, it seems likely that this hearing is intended to serve a different purpose: to build a case for making existing platform liability exemptions dependent on "politically neutral" content moderation practices. Indeed, Senator Cruz seems to think that’s already the law. Questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last year, Cruz asserted that in order to enjoy important legal protections for free speech, online platforms must adhere to a standard of political neutrality in their moderation decisions. Fortunately for Internet users of all political persuasions, he’s wrong.Section 230—the law that protects online forums from many types of liability for their users’ speech—does not go away when a platform decides to remove a piece of content, whether or not that choice is “politically neutral.” In fact, Congress specifically intended to protect platforms’ right to moderate content without fear of taking on undue liability for their users’ posts. Under the First Amendment, platforms have the right to moderate their online platforms however they like, and under Section 230, they’re additionally shielded from some types of liability for their users’ activity. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.In recent months, Sen. Cruz and a few of his colleagues have suggested that the rules should change, and that platforms should lose Section 230 protections if those platforms aren’t politically neutral. While such proposals might seem well-intentioned, it’s easy to see how they would backfire. Faced with the impossible task of proving perfect neutrality, many platforms—especially those without the resources of Facebook or Google to defend themselves against litigation—would simply choose to curb potentially controversial discussion altogether and even refuse to host online communities devoted to minority views. We have already seen the impact FOSTA has had in eliminating online platforms where vulnerable people could connect with each other.To be clear, Internet platforms do have a problem with over-censoring certain voices online. These choices can have a big impact in already marginalized communities in the U.S., as well as in countries that don’t enjoy First Amendment protections, such as places like Myanmar and China, where the ability to speak out against the government is often quashed. EFF and others have called for Internet companies to provide the public with real transparency about whose posts they’re taking down and why. For example, platforms should provide users with real information about what they are taking down and a meaningful opportunity to appeal those decisions. Users need to know why some language is allowed and the same language in a different post isn’t. These and other suggestions are contained in the Santa Clara Principles, a proposal endorsed by more than 75 public interest groups around the world. Adopting these Principles would make a real difference in protecting people’s right to speak online, and we hope at least some of the witnesses tomorrow will point that out.Reposted from the EFF Deeplinks blog

We have already talked about how the two separate defamation lawsuits Devin Nunes has filed against critics and journalists are bullshit SLAPP suits designed to intimidate and attack protected speech. But now Nunes himself has gone even further, admitting out loud that his intent with at least the second lawsuit, against the Fresno Bee, is to force the newspaper to give up its sources:

These are dark days for freedom on the Internet. As Cory Doctorow wrote in a recent post on Boing Boing: "We are witnessing the realtime, high-speed Chinafication of the western internet." Country after country is adopting laws that undermine freedom of speech, usually in the name of "enforcing" copyright, which is apparently more important. Add South Korea to that list of shame. The government there is proposing to give its existing Copyright Protection Agency the power to cut off access to Web sites that it says have infringing material. A new campaign, "Stop Internet Censoring", has been launched to fight the plans:

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Well, it appears that the attacks on Section 230 of the CDA are now officially bi-partisan. Following the path of Republicans Rep. Louis Gohmert and Senator Ted Cruz, now we have Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi deciding it's time to attack Section 230 of the CDA, by completely misrepresenting what it does, why it does that, and what it means to the internet. In a podcast with Kara Swisher, Pelosi said the following:

We've been covering for a while how Paul Ryan's once-heralded Foxconn factory deal in Wisconsin quickly devolved into farce. The state originally promised Taiwan-based Foxconn a $3 billion state subsidy if the company invested $10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. But as the subsidy grew the promised factory began to shrink further and further, to the point where nobody at this point is certain that anything meaningful is going to get built at all.Last October, reports emerged clearly illustrating the ever-shrinking nature of the deal. They also highlighted how Foxconn was effectively just using nonsense to justify its failure to follow through, showing that while the company hadn't built much of anything meaningful in the state, it was still routinely promising to deploy a "AI 8K+5G ecosystem" in the state to somehow make everything better. Shockingly, that mish-mash of buzz words is effectively meaningless.Fast forward to this week, and reporters who've been visiting the state to determine the progress of the project continue to find its even lamer than everybody had initially worried. One local politician effectively compares the scandal directly to the Fyre Festival, and the piece is littered with disappointment by locals who say the company is being aggressively secretive and often misleading. Even many of the "innovation hubs", which Foxconn promised would somehow be better than the ever-shrinking factory it originally proposed, are little more than empty buildings at this juncture:

Yesterday, we wrote a bit about the Julian Assange indictment, noting that it was focused on CFAA and conspiracy arguments, rather than (what many people expected) Espionage Act claims. The CFAA charge of trying to help hack a hashed CIA password that Assange instructed Chelsea Manning to supply does raise some real legal questions. However, as we noted, there were still some significant press freedom concerns linked to the case (and we fully expect those concerns to grow as the inevitable superseding indictment is released).Among the many concerns are that from what's in the initial indictment, it appears that the DOJ is, in fact, presenting perfectly normal, reasonable and legal, steps that many journalists take to cultivate and protect sources, and using that as evidence of the "conspiracy" here. From the indictment:

Update: As was pointed out by some in the comments and at other media outlets, we want to clarify that the video in quesiton was not created by the Trump campaign, but was instead created by a Reddit user and then passed around the internet by Trump himself and his campaign. None of that really changes the overall point on the hypocrisy of the President, given his widespread use of intellectual property law, nor does it change the laughable response from his campaign manager.Every political campaign season, which now apparently perpetually overlap and place us all in a never ending and hellish new reality, we always end up hearing about supposed copyright infringement by political campaigns. These claims typically involve music that accompanies candidates at public events, and the claims typically are misguided, as campaigns usually get a blanket license for this music. Still, more recently, we've also seen the occasional use of music by a campaign that actually does appear to be infringement, as both Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee have found themselves having to defend their use of music on the trail. As you keep that history in your head, place it directly next to the rather infamous view Donald Trump has taken on intellectual property in general, and even on how his campaign has used it jealously in particular.And then read about how the Trump 2020 campaign decided to release a campaign video that just flat out used music from The Dark Knight for some reason.

So we've noted how AT&T's latest round of merger mania isn't providing quite the returns the company expected. After spending $67 billion to buy DirecTV and another $86 billion to acquire Time Warner, AT&T had hoped to become a juggernaut in the internet video and online advertising space. But those efforts haven't gone quite according to plan. The company has been losing both traditional TV (DirecTV, IPTV) and streaming video (DirecTV Now) customers at an alarming rate, thanks largely due to AT&T price hikes imposed to try and recoup the massive debt load AT&T acquired during its fit of merger mania.A new lawsuit (pdf) is now complicating AT&T's ambitions further. The lawsuit, filed last week in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses AT&T executives like CEO Randall Stephenson of violating the US Securities Act by "knowingly or recklessly" making false statements to investors by failing to disclose that the company's DirecTV Now streaming platform wasn't doing all that well.More specifically, the lawsuit accuses AT&T of issuing press releases, filings, and other public statements that actively downplayed or omitted the fact that the company's streaming customers were headed for the exits (267,000 in Q4 alone), in large part thanks to several rounds of rate hikes on the company's DirecTV Now streaming platform.The firm backing the lawsuit focuses specifically on the June 2018 registration statement issued in connection with the stock issuance during the Time Warner Merger, which proclaimed that the losses AT&T was seeing on the traditional TV front (DirecTV) weren't that big of a deal because they'd be offset by growth at the company's new streaming service. Omitted was the fact that price hikes were actually driving subscribers away, resulting in the company's stock taking a notable dive when the collective video losses were formally announced in October of 2018:

It's always struck me as a little odd when cities and townships go out and trademark their logos and official seals. On the one hand, I get it. A city wants to control its branding so others can't abuse it, even if those methods for abuse could probably be combated by laws against fraud and so on. On the other hand, far too many city governments tend to wield these trademarks to stamp out criticism, parody, and political challengers.That said, the rush to trademark city logos and seals also isn't universal. Florida's Marathon City, for instance, has a logo that has not been registered as a trademark. Marathon City Councilman Mark Senmartin has been making all kinds of noise about how the city should absolutely codify its logo as a trademarked city seal. But when the larger city government examined the issue, it found no reason to do so.

The FBI wanted in on the cyberwar. The problem was recruits. Years of treating Americans and their rights like garbage have turned the young ones against the feds. The FBI struggled to find enough willing and able youthful whitehats to send to the frontlines of the The Great War (Internet Edition).The FBI had the budget, the permission, the power… but not the personnel. It also probably wasn't the best agency for the job. The FBI knows investigations, but its part in the CyberWar included sharing info with private sector hacking targets. Sharing isn't in the FBI's nature. It's appears to enjoy the sneakier parts of its cyber work, but when it comes to protecting companies and their customers, the FBI apparently isn't up to the task.A recently-released Inspector General's report [PDF] shows the FBI is an unorganized mess when it comes to notifying victims of cyberattacks and data breaches. The FBI's Cyber Guardian system received a purpose (notifying victims of cyber intrusions) and a nifty logo (a lion wielding a sword), but not much internal guidance or outside assistance.The FBI is breaking the law by not doing the things it's supposed to be doing. It's violating an Executive Order, as well as the DOJ's own policies on notification. Federal mandate says victims are to be notified. But failure every step of the way is apparently the process.

We've talked for a while about the sheer silliness of (mainly) Republican politicians whining about supposed "anti-conservative bias" on social media platforms. As we've pointed out, the actual evidence hasn't shown any evidence of bias. The random anecdotal examples of badly moderated content have mostly just shown how difficult it is to do content moderation at scale. The "bad" moderation decisions impact lots of folks across the political spectrum -- it's just that some grandstanding Republicans like to engage in confirmation bias (the only actual bias that seems to be occurring here) to suggest the moderation mistakes are politically motivated. We've pointed out multiple times now that crying wolf on this issue is not a good look for conservatives -- on multiple levels.Beyond the fact that the evidence seems to disprove the claims of bias (oh, and yet another study has shown no evidence of bias), for years these very same Republicans kept attacking the idea of the "fairness doctrine," which was an FCC rule in place for a few decades, demanding "equal representation" of political views on the public airwaves. It hasn't been in place for a while, but for a few years, this same group of Republicans grandstanded about false claims that Democrats were trying to bring it back. And yet, what they seem to be demanding now is the return of the fairness doctrine, but in an even more ridiculous way. Rather than on the public airwaves -- where at the very least there was some legitimate claim to the government being able to set some conditions -- these Senators now seem to want to force private companies to run businesses the way they want them to. What a bunch of hypocrites.And the largest of the hypocrites is Senator Ted Cruz, who has continued to repeat this myth, holding multiple hearings on the topic, including a new one yesterday, with representatives from Facebook and Twitter in attendance. Someone from Google was supposed to be there but (get this), Ted Cruz rejected the Google witness, likely after discovering that Google was sending a former Ted Cruz staffer, who would have done a nice job debunking his former boss's nonsense. Kinda ironic, in a hearing on platforms supposedly blocking conservatives from speaking, the Senate itself decided to block a conservative from speaking.Most of the hearing went pretty much as planned, with the usual nonsense. Cruz, once again, misrepresented the nature of Section 230 of the CDA and also made noises about changing it. He also threatened other attacks on social media companies, including antitrust. The big "gotcha" moment that some in the press have picked up on was particularly dumb. Cruz rolled out an anti-abortion quote from Mother Theresa that had been used in an ad on Twitter that was apparently blocked, and demanded that Twitter and Facebook execs answer "is this hate speech?".That, of course, misses the point massively. As Twitter's representative on the panel, Carlos Monje Jr. noted, the tweet was caught in an automated system review, but that the advertiser behind it remains as an advertiser in good standing on the platform -- and he also noted that advertisements on both sides of the abortion debate had been blocked at times on Twitter, which makes total sense, given the strong emotions and controversy felt around that issue. But the bigger point is trotting out a single example is nonsense. It's grandstanding. As we've discussed time and time again, content moderation is an arena of massive gray space, rather than black and white. There are tons of judgment calls, and much of it depends on what it is the platform is actually trying to accomplish. Some platforms don't want controversial content. Some platforms don't want "hate" speech. But what falls into those categories is an open question and in a free market system (the kind Republicans used to claim they supported), we let the companies decide for themselves.Thankfully, a bunch of conservative/Republican groups and commentators spoke out against Cruz's nonsense as well. The group Americans for Prosperity put out a statement calling out Cruz's nonsense:

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Yesterday the House voted 232-190 to approve the Save The Internet Act, three-page legislation that would fully restore not just the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules, but its authority to police the telecom sector. As we've long noted, the Ajit Pai FCC's repeal involved effectively neutering the FCC at the telecom sector's behest, then shoveling any remaining oversight authority to the FTC, which lacks both the authority and attention span to effectively police telecom giants. The idea that telecom oversight would be lost in the cracks was, of course, the entire point of the telecom lobbying gambit.The bill now heads to the Senate, where Mitch McConnell has already stated it will be "dead on arrival." The bill also needs to somehow avoid a Trump veto, which the White House all but guaranteed with a statement this week saying Trump would be advised to veto the measure. Why? The administration proclaimed it was because killing net neutrality had resulted in incredible benefits to American consumers:

Julian Assange has been arrested in the UK on behalf of the US, as Ecuador has finally tired of their overstaying asylumed house guest. We're about to see quite a major legal battle, first in the UK and then almost certainly in the US, about Assange. The current charges seem narrowly focused on a CFAA-based "conspiracy" between Assange and Manning to try to hack a CIA computer, but if they expand to other Wikileaks activities, there should be concerns over press freedom issues.I am no fan of Julian Assange or Wikileaks. However, for years I've made it clear that prosecuting him for publishing leaked documents would be a huge mistake by the US. The DOJ spent years trying to come up with an excuse to charge Assange, but kept realizing they had no case, because while he may have had malicious intent, none of his public actions in releasing documents were any different -- legally speaking -- than what any investigative journalism outlet did in releasing obtained documents. The Supreme Court has made it clear that publishing classified documents is protected by the First Amendment. If he went beyond just releasing documents, as the indictment alleges, it becomes a lot trickier -- but there's a fine line here.It's been clear in the last year or so, that despite years of not finding anything, the DOJ was finally moving ahead with plans to charge him. As we noted last year, everyone who believes in a free press should be concerned about what this might mean for press freedoms in the US as the case proceeds. And that's true, even if the specific charges right now are limited to actions that are unrelated to the publishing of the documents.A few minutes ago, the DOJ released a fairly barebones 7-page indictment, alleging he was in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning to hack into government computers to obtain documents. From the indictment, the charges are separate from releasing the documents that everyone knows Manning provided to Assange, and specifically revolve around Manning and Assange apparently working together to try to hack the CIA after Manning had finished handing over all of the documents we already know about. The indictment claims (and I kid you not) that Manning "used special software, namely a Linux operating system... to obtain the portion of the password provided to Assange." What was obtained apparently was a hashed password to a CIA computer system, that Assange was allegedly going to try to crack, in order to enable Manning to get more info out of the CIA.If all of this is true, then it certainly could go beyond issues related to press freedoms. It's one thing to receive classified documents and publish them. It is a different issue altogether to work with a source and participate in trying to hack a government system. There is no evidence that Assange was ever actually successful in cracking the password, but he's facing CFAA and conspiracy charges here that may have more staying power. If the indictment is accurate and there's evidence to back it up, then Assange could potentially be in (and this is the legal term) deep shit.But so much of what Assange did, even if we might disagree with his reasons for doing it, is little different than what many media organizations do. What will be necessary is watching closely how the case against Assange advances and changes (it is unlikely that these will be the only charges against Assange). If it is narrowly limited to the actions described in the current indictment, the dangers to press freedoms may be limited. However, if it strays beyond that into some of the other, more journalistic efforts of Assange, it could still represent a huge attack on a free press. Given our current President's near daily attacks on the free press, with repeated announcements that he'd like to change the laws to harm them, going after Assange legally (which may seem a bit ironic, given all the accusations that Assange's leaks in 2016 were designed to help Trump get elected), might be the best way to actually achieve that goal.

Update: The Internet Archive has issued a minor correction to its original story, noting that it was not actually Europol who sent the demand, but rather the French Internet Referral Unit using the Europol system, so that it looked like it was coming from Europol. Here is there update:

Late last year, we wrote about a fairly strange case of a trademark opposition involving Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals and its Black Mamba HYPERRUSH line of diet pills, and Kobe Bryant and his Black Mamba line of being a basketball player. The whole thing was both messy and rather pointless. Pointless because the pharma market and anything Kobe Bryant is involved in are quite divergent marketplaces, making the trademark opposition fairly pointless. And, yet, it's been going on for years. Messy, because the timelines are not particularly in Bryant's favor, given that Hi-Tech applied for its mark a year before Bryant applied for his, leading to Hi-Tech requesting to depose Bryant and get documents from him detailing exactly how he came up with his nickname. Bryant's lawyers rebutted the request by suggesting that deposing Bryant would be like deposing Lil Wayne, because the present is a farce we're all somehow forced to live through.Instead, Bryant's lawyers insisted he answer only written questions, all while warning that Bryant's answers would probably be entirely useless. They predicted that Bryant wouldn't recall the answers to the questions Hi-Tech would want to ask, which is more than a little odd, given that this all centers around how he came up with his now-famous nickname. But, give credit where credit is due: Hi-Tech is now complaining that Bryant has been every bit as useless as his lawyers predicted.

The ACLU has secured a win for privacy in Virginia after taking on the state law enforcement and their many, many automatic license plate readers.The state's ALPR track record isn't great. Law enforcement and other government agencies love the tech, even if they have a considerable amount of trouble showing that plate readers do anything more useful than catch property tax cheats. Law enforcement agencies have turned their plate readers on political rally attendees, raising First Amendment issues along with the usual privacy concerns.The ACLU attacked the state's use of plate readers using one of the state's own laws. According to the "Government Data Collection and Dissemination Act," the long-term collection of untargeted plate data was illegal. The state's attorney general even issued an official opinion to this end, pointing out that active collections seeking targeted plates was permissible, but passive collections with no end date and unrelated to ongoing investigations wasn't.That opinion -- issued in 2013 -- did nothing to alter law enforcement ALPR operations. A lawsuit followed when records requests showed plenty of passive collection was still taking place. The ACLU pointed out (again) these collections violated state law. Fairfax County Circuit Court judge Robert J. Smith agreed.In his 5-page opinion [PDF] granting the ACLU an injunction blocking the Fairfax County Police Department from engaging in passive, untargeted collections, the County Court agrees with the state Supreme Court's findings: the ALPRs are subject to the state data privacy law and the ALPRs -- despite law enforcement protests to the contrary -- collect protected personal info.The FCPD argued the passive license plate collection did not automatically connect plates to car owners. The additional steps officers needed to perform somehow exempted this collection from the state's data privacy law. The court disagrees, pointing to the part of the state law the FCPD decided to ignore when crafting its argument.

Late last year, we brought you the story of how the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Emmy Awards, somehow decided to oppose Emmy's Best, a pet products company named after the founder's cancer-surviving, good, good puppy. At the time, the opposition was fresh with very little back and forth between the parties, which didn't stop me from pointing out that this whole thing was plainly absurd. Television can only metaphorically be compared to a gnawing bone, after all, and it sure seems like there isn't a great deal of customer confusion to be had here. Despite that, Kevin Rizer offered to drop the application entirely, but NATAS decided that wasn't enough and has instead insisted that Emmy's Best change its name and hand over control of its website.This has continued to the present, with Rizer offering concession after concession, without success.

If there's one consistent theme that we've talked about on Techdirt over the past few decades, it's that attempts to regulate the internet based on a specifically observed "harm" almost always leads to bad outcomes. That's because trying to regulate away a harm frequently fails to take into account context and the specifics of how such laws would be interpreted. For example, over the last few years, there's been plenty of concern about fake news and questionable "political advertising" that is really just, let's say, "propaganda" from parties wishing to mess up the democratic process, rather than actually encourage effective democracy. Because of this we've seen attempts to pass "fake news" laws and "online political ads" laws that clearly come from a place of good intentions (mostly), but the actual impact can be far reaching and lead to unintended consequences.For example, just last week people suddenly realized that, with the EU Parliamentary elections coming up next month, and France's new anti-fake news political advertisements law, that Twitter would be blocking the French government's own "get out the vote" advertising campaign:

For over a decade, some Web sites have been moaning about adblockers. The German publishing giant Axel Springer hates them. It has been pursuing Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, through the courts in Germany for years, accusing it of unfair competition. Here's how that turned out for the publisher, as reported by Eyeo on its blog:

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I originally wrote a draft of this post over the weekend, before Nunes, filed a second bullshit lawsuit against Liz Mair, but now that that has happened, it has become even more relevant. I've lightly updated the original text to include this new lawsuit.Lots of folks laughed about Rep. Devin Nunes' crazy lawsuit against a satirical cow on Twitter that mocked him, but much of the case is no laughing matter for those on the receiving end. While it is unlikely (but not impossible) that a court will let the case get far enough to unmask who is behind the satirical Twitter accounts, those individuals will still need to lawyer up. Also, while it gets ignored in much of the reporting on the case, there was one named defendant: political strategist/communications expert Liz Mair, who seemed to get sued for tweeting criticisms of Nunes.While the fake cow account got hundreds of thousands of new followers, Mair didn't get quite the same bump. But she's got even more crap to deal with in this case -- as well as the second case that Nunes just filed. She's now written a thoughtful post on just how totally fucked up it is that a sitting member of Congress would sue a critic for being mean to him on Twitter:

We've noted for a while that 5G is being aggressively over-hyped. While it's an important evolutionary step in wireless connectivity, it's far from the revolution hardware vendors and cellular carriers are promising. Verizon, for example, insists that 5G is the "fourth industrial revolution" that will almost miraculously spur the smart cities and smarter cars of tomorrow. While 5G is important (in the sense that faster, more resilient networks are always important), the idea that 5G will fundamentally transform the broken broadband market tends to overshoot the mark.Under the din of hype, groups like the EFF have repeatedly warned that fixating on the technology obscures the industry's failure to deploy fiber broadband to countless Americans despite billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks. Fiber that's essential in driving 5G outside of major metro markets.Meanwhile, companies like Verizon continue to overstate not only what 5G can do, but where it's available. A closer look at Verizon's "Home 5G" service (which affixes a 5G antenna to user homes) in cities like Sacramento has found it to be barely available. Last week, Verizon again heralded the "world first" launch of truly mobile 5G service in both Chicago and Minneapolis. Again however reporters who visited the city to cover the launch walked away unimpressed, noting that while speeds were blisteringly fast (upwards of 500 Mbps on the test network), actually getting a steady signal was largely impossible:

Fake news laws aren't harmless. They don't protect the public. They're useless. And they lend themselves to censorship. Given these factors, it's tough to believe any of the proponents of fake news laws are proceeding in good faith but blinded by good intentions and fuzzy logic.Anywhere they've been put in place, they've lead directly to governments taking action against political opponents, dissidents, and activists. Excuses are made about national security and protecting the public, but in the end, it's the public that ends up short on protection.Singapore's new fake news bill is no exception. Legislators began pushing this bill last year, using their own fake news to claim the proposal had widespread support from the country's residents. The committee behind the legislation heavily editorialized the feedback it received at a public hearing, presenting a vocal opponent's comments as being supportive of instituting a fake news law.Roughly a year later, the bill has materialized, according to the New York Times.

Last week we wrote (not for the first time) about the really dreadful Terrorist Content Regulation making its way through the EU regulatory process. As we noted, this is Article 13 on steroids. Everything that's bad about Article 13 is worse in the Terrorist Content Regulation, even though it's getting much less attention.Perhaps because it's getting so little attention it just sailed through an EU Parliament committee's approval process. This was in the LIBE Committee, which is supposedly in charge of protecting civil liberties. And yet here, it seems to be stamping them out.

Sometimes stories that appear to have good outcomes end up with unsatisfying ends. Such appears to be the case with the recent changes to Canada's copyright laws. After ISPs in Canada began making a great deal of noise about the plague that is settlement threat letters, which ISPs are required to pass through to their customers under threat of fines, the government did the unthinkable and changed the law. The changes made it so that copyright trolls could not force ISPs to pass these letters to ISP customers if the letters contained the usual tactics: offers to settle the claim of infringement, requests for payment or personal information, a reference or link to any such demands, etc. This should have been the end, in other words, of copyright troll fishing expeditions as facilitated by ISPs.But, as Michael Geist pointed out at the time, that hope was always fleeting, as the new law failed to put in place any punishment for copyright trolls should they simply ignore the law. And ignore the law they most certain did!

Unfortunately, as you know by now, the EU Parliament approved the current (disastrous) version of the EU Copyright Directive, which is now on track to become the law of the land. It's not good, but things aren't quite over yet. For this week's episode, we've got returning guest MEP Julia Reda — who has been a key force opposing the terrible articles in the Directive — to talk about what happens now.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.

Some good news is one the way for Tennesseans. Attorney Daniel Horwitz -- who knows his way around stupid libel lawsuits -- sends word that a revamp of the state's mostly-useless anti-SLAPP law is a step or two away from landing on the governor's desk.The current law does nothing to shield citizens from bogus lawsuits clearly intended to silence criticism. This lack of protection has resulted in a number of merit-less lawsuits being filed. One of the most ridiculous -- a former university program head suing his replacement for things a journalist said -- managed to make its way all the way up to the state's appeal court. In the end, the defendant was awarded $10,000 in legal fees, but none of that was guaranteed when the plaintiff started wasting everyone's time and money.As the law stands now in Tennessee, only communications to public officials about public entities are shielded from defamation lawsuits. It doesn't cover things like negative reviews of businesses, criticism of any public figure, or -- like the case above -- things defendants never actually said.The new law would actually function like an anti-SLAPP law should. It would halt discovery until a ruling on the anti-SLAPP motion and allow the prevailing party to recover fees.

It appears that Devin Nunes wants to become the new poster-child for filing bullshit SLAPP suits to silence and intimidate his critics. Just a few weeks after filing an obvious SLAPP suit against two satirical Twitter accounts, Republican strategist Liz Mair, and Twitter itself, Nunes is back in court again, suing news giant McClatchy and Liz Mair again. The first lawsuit was for $250 million. This one is for $150 million. Both are SLAPP suits that seemed designed to shut up his critics -- especially Mair. Nunes is represented by the same lawyer, Steven Biss, in both cases (Biss has, well, a colorful history).The latest lawsuit is as equally ridiculous as the first. It is mostly about the very same article that was central to the first lawsuit, an article by The Fresno Bee (a McClatchy-owned newspaper), talking about how a winery that was partly owned by Nunes was involved in a scandal involving cocaine and potentially underage prostitutes on a yacht. The McClatchy article has (from its initial publication), made clear that Nunes' investment in the winery doesn't involve any role with the winery or any management functions:

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Last week Australia rushed through a ridiculous bill to fine internet companies if they happen to host any "abhorrent content." It appears the UK took one look at that nonsense and decided it wanted some too. On Monday it released a white paper calling for massive fines for internet companies for allowing any sort of "online harms." To call the plan nonsense is being way too harsh to nonsense.Theresa May herself announced the plan in a video that she posted to the very same social media she insists is harmful to children, because consistency is not a strong point of people looking to shackle the internet:

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.That was again exemplified by reports on how this data often winds up in the hands of bounty hunters, and can often include 911 location data that's supposed to be protected by law.Throughout all of this, the Ajit Pai FCC has largely been mute and feckless. In large part because taking action would require actually standing up to the industry's biggest wireless carriers, something that's indisputably not in Pai's wheelhouse. New FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks apparently has no such reservations, and in an editorial in the New York Times doesn't tread gently, noting the scale at which this data can be (and is) abused for a wide variety of reasons:

A Georgia politician -- apparently tired of being questioned by uppity journalists -- has decided the First Amendment shouldn't apply in his state. James Salzer of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports the departing state rep, Andy Welch, has lobbed an unconstitutional bomb into the legislature on his way out the door.

People's confusion as to what trademark law protects and doesn't protect is a source of neverending frustration for those of us who simply cannot stand the growth of ownership culture. There is this pervasive and growing sense by those who aren't particularly well informed that trademark law simply allows one to own a word or phrase to the exclusion of every other person's use. That, obviously, is not the case and it's always worth reiterating over and over again that the point of trademark law is to prevent the public from being misled as to the source of a good or service. And, yet, that baseline fact eludes far too many people.Such as Dave Johnson, for instance. Johnson is a rather renowned announcer for horse racing, having spent time on the Illinois circuit and, more famously, calling races at Santa Anita Park. If you're a fan of the pony races, you may know his signature call even if you don't know his name: "And down the stretch they come!" Johnson trademarked the phrase in 2012. He also recently sued the Weinstein Co. over the 2014 Bill Murray film, St. Vincent, in which Murray uses the line.

People's confusion as to what trademark law protects and doesn't protect is a source of neverending frustration for those of us who simply cannot stand the growth of ownership culture. There is this pervasive and growing sense by those who aren't particularly well informed that trademark law simply allows one to own a word or phrase to the exclusion of every other person's use. That, obviously, is not the case and it's always worth reiterating over and over again that the point of trademark law is to prevent the public from being misled as to the source of a good or service. And, yet, that baseline fact eludes far too many people.Such as Dave Johnson, for instance. Johnson is a rather renowned announcer for horse racing, having spent time on the Illinois circuit and, more famously, calling races at Santa Anita Park. If you're a fan of the pony races, you may know his signature call even if you don't know his name: "And down the stretch they come!" Johnson trademarked the phrase in 2012. He also recently sued the Weinstein Co. over the 2014 Bill Murray film, St. Vincent, in which Murray uses the line.

One of the worst defenses of civil asset forfeiture has been penned by retired police chief Robert Stevenson for the Michigan news site, the Bridge. It's written in response to two things: pending forfeiture reform bills in the state legislature and the Supreme Court's Timbs decision, which indicated forfeiture may fall on the wrong side of the 8th and 14th Amendments.Michigan definitely needs to overhaul its forfeiture laws. Law enforcement claims it's dismantling drug cartels, but a look at the state's forfeiture stats shows cops are just piling up low ball seizures to create a suitably impressive total. Cash seizures are routinely below $1,000. Vehicle seizures are also popular with Michigan cops, but the average value of vehicles taken from alleged drug dealers also falls below the $1,000 mark.It's these tiny seizures -- the ones not worth fighting in court -- that the state legislature is trying to curb. It's hoping to implement a conviction requirement for any forfeiture under $50,000. Chief Stevenson says this would let the drug dealers win. But beyond using some florid language to flesh out a tiny parade of horribles, Stevenson cannot actually say why this conviction requirement would harm drug enforcement efforts. He tries. Lord, how he tries. But there's nothing coherent in his defense of cops taking property from citizens just because.First, Stevenson argues that cops should be able to take money they feel deeply in their hearts is derived from drug dealing even if it can't find any evidence linking the person carrying it to a crime.

You can add Colorado to the growing list of states finalizing state-level net neutrality legislation. Colorado's new Senate Bill 78 would not only block ISPs from engaging in all the usual anti-competitive shenanigans (blocking or otherwise throttling a competing service), but it would also force ISPs to pay back state taxpayer-backed grants if they engage in said behaviors. After a last-second GOP attempt to add porn filters to the legislation failed, the bill passed the Colorado General Assembly last week and heads to the desk of Colorado Governor Jared Polis for signature.Colorado legislators note the effort is just one of 120 bills and resolutions in 34 states (and DC) crafted on this subject since Ajit Pai's FCC voted to kill net neutrality in late 2017. The bills are a direct reflection of the strong bipartisan majority of Americans that support such protections.As we've seen countless times before, telecom industry backed organizations like the AT&T-funded Colorado Competitive Council were quick to complain that such state-level efforts would only create regulatory confusion, and that enforcement of net neutrality should be left to the FTC:

A handful of former intelligence officials are suing the US government for engaging in prior restraint. It's a novel take on a First Amendment issue -- one that involves a vetting process for books, articles, and op-eds written by these officials containing details of their work in the CIA, Defense Department, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.While the government obviously has some right to ensure classified or sensitive info isn't leaked in post-career memoirs, the plaintiffs argue the vetting process has no guidelines and no firm timetable, which has resulted in planned publications being held up for years with zero explanation. Charlie Savage has more details at the New York Times.