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Earlier this month Ars Technica reported on the arrest of the alleged operators of Mugshots.com, a website that does what it says on the tin: hosts mugshots. The issue is, the site operators didn't just host mugshots; they also charged people to have their mugshots removed from the site through a companion site, Unpublisharrest.com.Assuming the arrest warrant is fairly stating things, the site's operators may not have had the best of intentions in running their site the way they did. According to the facts alleged they were more interested in making money by charging people to have their pictures removed from their site than in serving as any sort of public records archive.But it shouldn't matter why they pursued the editorial policy that they did. First of all, mugshots are generally public records, and for good reason. As South Dakota's attorney general Mark Jackley noted last year, when South Dakota declared them to be public records:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is an old-school law and order man. He wants asset forfeiture returned to its former glory -- no longer questioned by all and sundry for its ability to enrich law enforcement agencies without making much of a dent in criminal activity. He wants drug sellers jailed for as long as possible, suggesting the last time he read a policy paper was sometime during the mid-1980s. And he thinks people questioning law enforcement efforts should be ashamed of themselves, what with the dangers faced occasionally by officers whose workplace can't even crack the Top 10 Deadliest Jobs in America list.Sessions goes where he's wanted when he speaks, ensuring he'll receive applause and accolades, rather than a bunch of "wtfs?" when he delivers bullshit like this:

As we careen wildly into a post-GDPR world at the end of this week, you've probably already been inundated with tons upon tons of emails from various companies where you either have an account or have been signed up for their mailing list. Some of these emails likely note that they want you to confirm that you want to remain on their list because of the GDPR. Others pretend they're just checking in with you for the hell of it. According to an expert in EU regulation, many of these emails probably violate another EU regulation, one designed to make spamming illegal. As for the others? They're almost certainly not necessary under the GDPR and appear to be people misunderstanding the GDPR "out of an abundance of caution."In short, if a service already has proper permission from you, then it doesn't need to get it again. If it doesn't, it's violating EU spam regulations by asking you to give your consent to receive such messages.

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Germany's new hate speech law -- and its intersection with social media platforms -- has been a disaster. Subjecting platforms to millions of Euros in fines for each violation, the push to cleanse the (German) internet of hate speech has resulted in plenty of predictive content policing. When not nuking legal criticism or satire mocking intolerant speech, the new law is creating a moderating nightmare for Facebook and other social media services.The German wing of Facebook's moderation employs 1,200 moderators who forward anything borderline to Facebook's legal team, who then forward close calls they can't make to another outsourced team of lawyers well-versed in German law. That's a lot of money spent to avoid 50 million euro fines, but likely necessary given the law's demand illegal content be removed within 24 hours. Facebook may have to the money to do this, but other platforms simply don't have the resources. Compliance will result in Germans being given fewer services to choose from, all in the name of "protecting" Germans from hateful speech.But is the law really serving the German people? Or is it a legislative feel-good effort of marginal utility with the possibility of collecting massive fines the ribbon on top? Linda Kinstler's long article on Facebook's proactive moderation efforts in Germany suggests the general public doesn't need these extra protections as much as the government seems to think they do.

Last year you'll recall that somebody abused the nonexistent privacy protections at the FCC website to flood the net neutrality repeal proceeding with millions of fake comments. While the vast majority of real people oppose the repeal, a bad actor was able to either fraudulently use the identities of real people (like myself), or hijack the identities of dead people to spam the proceeding with bogus support. The goal: undermine public trust in the public comment period in order to downplay the massive opposition to the FCC's handout to AT&T and Comcast.Up to this point, the FCC has done less than nothing to investigate the fraud or prevent it from happening again, largely because it aided the FCC's agenda. In fact, the FCC went so far as to block a law enforcement investigation into who was behind the fraud.Hoping to pull the scandal back onto a front burner, Senators Jeff Merkley and Pat Toomey this week sent a letter to the FCC stating that they've discovered that their names were also used to post fake comments during the repeal. The two demanded the FCC implement some kind of CAPTCHA system to help police automated bogus comments (a bot seems to have posted millions of bogus comments in alphabetical order), and asked what the agency was doing to prevent the problem from occurring again:

Call it a lie. Call it a misrepresentation. Call it a convenient error. Call it what you want. Just don't call it a fact. Devlin Barrett at the Washington Post delivers a bombshell: the thousands of phones the FBI supposedly just can't crack despite a wealth of tech solutions at its disposal? It's nowhere near as many as consecutive FBI directors have claimed.

We've talked a great deal about my home city of Chicago, largely for the myriad of awful, corrupt practices it has put in place around topics that we cover here. For instance, we have an alderman trying to shore up the city budget by taxing the shit out of Uber and Lyft, our Mayor thought it was a great idea to have his own private email accounts to conduct business, and a red light camera system so hilariously geared towards bilking money from citizens that the courts have tossed out huge swaths of the tickets it generated, which led the city to decide to make it barely less corrupt by a measure of tenths-of-seconds worth of leeway for drivers crossing the intersection.Now, you might be thinking that all of this effort to be corrupt and insidious seems like a waste. Wouldn't it be far easier, you might be thinking, to simply run the city in a sensible way? Wouldn't that actually require less effort and be better for the people of Chicago? Perhaps, but then Chicago wouldn't have received the prestigious award of "most corrupt city", as it did this past week.

Lawyer Stephen Doniger seems to be going out of his way to file lawsuits that involve creative interpretations of copyright (and by "creative" I mean "wrong.") You may recall that Doniger was the lawyer behind Playboy suing Boing Boing for copyright infringement for linking to an Imgur collection of Playboy centerfolds. That case went so poorly that the judge tossed it out in just two months. Before that, Doniger made a name for himself (I kid you not) being a fabric copyright troll, filing loads of lawsuits against companies offering similar designs on fabric. He's also jumped in on the whole situation created by the "Blurred Lines" mess by filing a bunch of "sounds alike" copyright cases.It's almost as if he's filing all sorts of nutty copyright cases just to demonstrate for us just how ridiculous modern copyright law has become, and how far from its purpose it has strayed. Indeed, that's about the only explanation I can find for a new filing by Doniger, as noted by the Hollywood Reporter, in which Doniger, representing director Robin Bain is suing actress Jessica Haid for using a clip of the film, Nowhereland in her own demo reel.In short, Bain claims that Haid asked for permission to use clips in her demo reel and Bain refused (nice of him). She then got a copy of the film and gave it to another company to include it in her demo reel. Bain is now suing, claiming it's an "unauthorized derivative work." Indeed, the lawsuit claims that the clips in the demo reel "included a significant amount of unreleased footage from The Film, which taken together, encompassed the heart of The Film, as well as revealed the ending to The Film."The claim that this uses "the heart" of the work is an attempt to get around a fair use claim and a reference to the famed Harper Row v. Nation Enterprises case. Looking over the fair use factors, it seems hard to see how this isn't fair use. It's clearly transformative. The use is quite different than the movie itself -- it's a small clip used to advertise the actress, not to show the film. Despite the claims of this being "the heart" of the film, it's still just clips for a demo reel, rather than the full film. And, finally the impact on the market is going to be nil. Or, if anything, it might encourage people to see the full film (unless the film sucks, of course).Either way, I can't imagine that this is what the framers of the Constitution imagined when they were putting in place the copyright clause. How the hell does it "promote the progress of science" to have a director sue an actress for advertising her acting ability? But, as yet another example of just how ridiculous copyright law is these days, it works perfectly. So thanks Stephen Doniger for adding to the list of examples of ridiculous copyright lawsuits. 379511115 Bain v Film Independent (PDF)

For the past year much has been made of the President's unwillingness to adhere to anything close to reasonable security when using his mobile phones. Whereas the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the National Security Agency usually work in concert providing state leaders with "hardened" devices that are heavily encrypted, routinely updated, and frequently swapped out, Trump has refused to use these more secure DMCC-S devices (effectively a Samsung Galaxy S4 device utilizing Samsung's Knox security architecture) because they apparently infringe on his ability to Tweet.Just a few months ago, Senators sent a letter expressing concern that Trump's mobile phone practices were leaving the President open to potential hacking by foreign entities:

More bad news on the privacy front, thanks to one of America's largest corporations. Documents obtained by the ACLU show Amazon is arming law enforcement agencies with cheap facial recognition tech, allowing them to compare any footage obtained from a variety of sources to uploaded mugshot databases.

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This is it — the last day of the campaign! If you haven't yet backed our project to revamp and produce the CIA's declassified training game, today's your last chance to check out the Kickstarter page for CIA: Collect It All and secure a copy.The campaign closes tonight at midnight! Don't delay!We've had a huge influx of last-minute backers thanks in large part to The Verge's review of an advance copy of the game, so if you're not yet a backer, help us keep that momentum going — and if you are, please tell your friends! CIA: Collect It All comes with over 150 high-quality playing cards, with physical copies available for $29 (shipping to 170 countries), the print-and-play PDF version for $10 (anywhere, of course!) and a five-copy bundle for retailers or groups who want to team up to save on shipping.We are planning to continue accepting some additional pre-orders before we complete the game, but we don't have that set up just yet, and we still have no plans to continue production beyond a single print run — so if you definitely don't want to miss out, back the campaign before it's too late!

For years now broadband providers have used a lack of competition to impose all manner of obnoxious additional fees on the backs of broadband consumers. That includes arbitrary and obnoxious usage caps and overage charges, which not only raise rates on captive customers, but quite intentionally make using streaming video competitors more expensive and cumbersome. Once caps are in place, large ISPs often exempt their own content from usage caps while still penalizing streaming competitors (aka zero rating).ISPs used to claim that such limits were necessary to manage network congestion, but as that argument was increasingly debunked (caps don't actually help manage congestion) they've shifted their justifications to more flimsy alternatives. These days, ISPs usually offer no justification at all, or issue vague declarations that they're simply trying to help users "better understand their consumption habits."Case in point: Verizon DSL customers in Virginia recently began noticing language on Verizon's website indicating that the company's already expensive (and slow) DSL service will now face ambiguous "usage" limitations depending on the speed of your tier. While caps are now pretty common among cable ISPs, it's the first time Verizon has begun flirting with such limits:For some context: Verizon has long been trying to get rid of DSL customers it doesn't want to upgrade so it can spend more of its time focused on slinging ads at Millennials via its new Oath (Yahoo and AOL) brand. It has been doing this by either refusing to repair and upgrade these users, or by constantly imposing rate hikes on lines that can't even get close to the FCC's 25 Mbps definition of actual "broadband." Because regulations require they keep servicing these lines (since most were taxpayer subsidized), they've had to engage in more creative methods to drive users off of them.When I pressed Verizon as to why the company felt the need to impose any "usage" restrictions upon slow, over-priced DSL lines at all, it first informed me that these aren't caps because they aren't being enforced (yet). It then tried to claim that the company was simply trying to help consumers "see their usage":

Journalist Adam Johnson's FOIA lawsuit against the CIA has been brought to a halt. Johnson sued the CIA for refusing to release classified documents it had previously voluntarily "leaked" to selected journalists. The CIA argued the documents were still classified and not subject to FOIA requests. Johnson argued the CIA had already released the documents to the public when it decided to release this classified info to journalists.Back in February, it appeared the court was on Johnson's side. Responding to the government's motion to dismiss, the court pointed out the CIA couldn't waive FOIA exemptions when dumping docs to journalists and then seek to use them when other journalists asked for the same info.

Whenever a company like HBO gets targeted with a lawsuit over intellectual property concerns, you might think we find it tempting to jump all over them in each and every case. After all, HBO has the distinction of being notably horrible when it comes to enforcing its own IP, from shutting down viewing parties, to offering streaming options, to abusing the the DMCA process just to keep spoilers from existing, as though that could possibly work.But the truth is the fun we have in cases where these types are found to be in legal trouble over intellectual property only extends to when that legal trouble is in some way warranted. When its not, we find that there is a helpful other party on which to heap our ire. That's the case in a lawsuit HBO recently won against graffiti artist Itoffee R. Gayle, who complained about his work appearing in a scene of the HBO show Vinyl. The court ruled that HBO's use was de minimis, or so fleeting so as to cause no injury and therefore not be actionable.But just how fleeting was HBO's use? Well...

When the FBI sued Apple a couple of years ago to compel Apple's help in cracking an iPhone 5c belonging to alleged terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, the lines seemed clearly drawn. On the one hand, the U.S. government was asserting its right (under an 18th-century statutory provision called the All Writs Act) to force Apple to develop and implement technologies enabling the Bureau to gather all the evidence that might possibly be relevant in the San Bernardino terrorist-attack case. On the other, a leading tech company challenged the demand that it help crack the digital-security technologies it had painstakingly developed to protect users — a particularly pressing concern given that these days we often have more personal information on our handheld devices than we used to keep in our entire homes.What a difference a couple of years has made. The Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report in March on the FBI's internal handling of issue of whether the Bureau truly needed Apple's assistance. The report makes clear that, despite what the Bureau said in its court filings, the FBI hadn't explored every alternative, including consultation with outside technology vendors, in cracking the security of the iPhone in question. The report also seemed to suggest that some department heads in the government agency were less concerned with the information that might be on that particular device than they were with setting a general precedent in court. Their goal? To establish as a legal precedent that Apple and other vendors have a general obligation to develop and apply technologies to crack the very digital security measures they so painstakingly implemented to protect their users.In the aftermath of that report, and in heartening display of bipartisanship, Republican and Democratic members of Congress came together last week to introduce a new bill, the Secure Data Act of 2018, aimed at limiting the ability of federal agencies to seek court orders broadly requiring Apple and other technology vendors to help breach their own security technologies. (The bill would exclude court orders based on the comparatively narrow Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act—a.k.a. CALEA, passed in 1994--which requires telecommunications companies to assist federal agencies in implementing targeted wiretaps.)This isn't the first time members of Congress in both parties have tried to limit the federal government's ability to demand that tech vendors build "backdoors" into their products. Bills similar to this year's Secure Data Act have been introduced a couple of times before in recent years. What makes this year's bill different, though, is the less-than-flattering light cast by the OIG report. (The bill's sponsors have expressly said as much.) At the very least the report makes clear that the FBI's own bureaucratic handling of the research into whether technical solutions were available to hack the locked iPhone led to both confusion as to what was possible and to delays in resolving that confusion.But worse than that is the report's suggestion that some technologically challenged FBI department heads didn't even know how to frame (or parse) the questions about whether the agency possessed, or had access to, technical solutions to crack the iPhone's problem. And even worse is the report's account that at least some Bureau leaders may not even have wanted to discover such a technical was already available—because that discovery could undermine litigation they hoped would establish Apple's (and other vendors') general obligation to hack their own digital security if a court orders them to. As the report puts it:

If you haven't yet heard about CIA: Collect It All, here's the short version: the CIA recently declassified a top secret card game that it uses to train new recruits, and we're making a version that you can play at home. The game puts players in the shoes of analysts leveraging a variety of real-world intelligence gathering techniques to solve global crises. It comes with over 150 high-quality playing cards, and is also available as a print-and-play PDF.And you've got less than 36 hours to back the Kickstarter campaign and secure your copy!We currently have no plans to continue production of the game beyond this first print run, so now might be your only chance to get your hands on CIA: Collect It All. For more information on what the game's all about, check out our recent Kickstarter update all about gameplay, as well as the latest episode of the Techdirt Podcast.We're continuing to work on playtesting the game, redesigning the cards, and filling in the redacted text from the CIA documents. We're really excited to get this game into everyone's hands, so check out our Kickstarter before the campaign ends tomorrow at midnight.

Oh, Rupert Murdoch. When we last checked in with him, he was literally begging Facebook to pay News Corp. money because (he claimed) News Corp was "enhancing the value and integrity of Facebook." We noted at the time that Murdoch -- a staunch public defender of free market capitalism and a loud opponent of "socialism" -- seemed to be a bit hypocritical in effectively demanding a corporate handout from other, more successful companies, when his own company had struggled for years to adapt to the internet.He's not done yet. Apparently, if Facebook (and, one presumes, Google) don't want to just hand him money for nothing, he's now demanding that they be heavily regulated:

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Last month, we wrote about the problems of the CLASSICS Act that the House was voting on. There's a lot of background (much of it included in that post), that is not worth repeating, but the very short version is that sound recordings from before 1972 are treated somewhat differently under copyright law than songs recorded since February of 1972. Specifically, pre-1972 sound recordings are not covered by federal copyright law, but by a weird batch of state laws. Due to a bunch of shenanigans, many of those works will not be put into the public domain until 2067, even if by any other measure they should be in the public domain. The RIAA has always liked this aspect of pre-1972 songs. However, there are other aspects of pre-1972 songs that the RIAA does not like, and that's mainly that the lack of federal copyright coverage means that those works (mostly) don't get any performance rights, since most state laws didn't have such a concept. That's money the RIAA feels is being left on the table.One way to handle this would be to just federalize the copyright on pre-1972 works and put all works on an equal footing. Easy, right? But that's not what the CLASSICS Act does. Instead, it just modernizes the parts of copyright for those works that help extract more money from people (such as adding in performance rights) while refusing to bring with it the parts of copyright law that protect the public -- including the timeline for things moving into the public domain.Larry Lessig has a piece over at Wired where he explains how this is really just the latest attempt at copyright extension. Earlier this year, we had noted (happily!) that it appeared that the usual crew of copyright maximalists had appeared to give in, saying they had no intention to push for any sort of copyright term extension this year, meaning that for the first time in decades in the US, some works may actually enter the public domain on January 1st next year. And while the CLASSICS Act isn't a straight-up copyright term extension, it is a form of copyright expansion on old works, done for no other purpose than to give the copyright holders more ways to extract money, without any corresponding public benefit. As Lessig notes, this is explicitly a welfare system for musicians:

A company by the name of LocationSmart isn't having a particularly good month.The company recently received all the wrong kind of attention when it was caught up in a privacy scandal involving the nation's wireless carriers and our biggest prison phone monopoly. Like countless other companies and governments, LocationSmart buys your wireless location data from cell carriers. It then sells access to that data via a portal that can provide real-time access to a user's location via a tailored graphical interface using just the target's phone number.Theoretically, this functionality is sold under the pretense that the tool can be used to track things like drug offenders who have skipped out of rehab. And ideally, all the companies involved were supposed to ensure that data lookup requests were accompanied by something vaguely resembling official documentation. But a recent deep dive by the New York Times noted how the system was open to routine abuse by law enforcement, after a Missouri Sherrif used the system to routinely spy on Judges and fellow law enforcement officers without much legitimate justification (or pesky warrants):

Techdirt has written many stories about facial recognition systems. But there's a step-change taking place in this area at the moment. The authorities are moving from comparing single images with database holdings, to completely automated scanning of crowds to obtain and analyze huge numbers of facial images in real time. Recently, Tim Cushing described the ridiculously high level of false positives South Wales Police had encountered during its use of automated facial recognition software. Before that, a post noted a similarly unacceptable failure rate of automated systems used by the Metropolitan Police in London last year.Now Big Brother Watch has produced a report bringing together everything we know about the use by UK police of automated facial recognition software (pdf), and its deep flaws. The report supplements that information with analyses of the legal and human rights framework for such systems, and points out that facial recognition algorithms often disproportionately misidentify minority ethnic groups and women.The UK situation is fairly well known. There's been less coverage of automated facial recognition systems in the US, and the Big Brother Report offers some comments from experts about what is happening there. For example, Clare Garvie from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology, writes:

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side came in response to our post about some police realizing that SESTA/FOSTA has made their job harder. The curiously-named any moose cow word won first place with a simple statement:

We're nearing the end of the Kickstarter campaign for CIA: Collect It All, our polished and fully-playable version of a formerly top secret card game used by the CIA to train new recruits. In this special Saturday edition of the podcast, the three of us working on the project — myself, Mike, and Randy Lubin of Diegetic Games — sit down to talk all about what players can expect from CIA: Collect It All.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.

I'm not sure why any nation with at least a passing respect for civil liberties would continue treating Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a world leader worth discussing ideas with. Erdogan rolled into the United States with his entourage of thugs and thought he could have critics beaten and unfriendly journalists tossed from press conferences. He continually petitions other countries to punish their own citizens for insulting him.Back at home, Erdogan is jailing journalists by the hundreds, claiming they're terrorists. A failed coup set off the latest wave of censorial thuggery, with Erdogan bolstering his terrorist claims by pointing to criminal acts like… robbing ATMs. A massive backlog of "insulting the president" cases sit in the country's court system -- a system that's certainly aware it's not supposed to act as a check against executive power.And yet, world leaders continue to act as though Erdogan is an equal, rather than an overachieving street thug with an amazingly fragile ego. UK Prime Minister Theresa May, hoping to strike a trade deal with Turkey, invited Erdogan to not only discuss a possible deal, but speak publicly.May tried to keep Erdogan from being Erdogan…

You may recall that way back in early 2015, we discussed the absurd story of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority suing Jersey Boardwalk Pizza for trademark infringement. At issue was that the pizza joint's owners, both from New Jersey, had crafted a clever logo that mimicked the logo for the Garden State Parkway, except it altered all the words to be the parlor's name and the food it served. It was a clear homage. Nobody denied it. That didn't change the fact, however, that the NJ Turnpike Authority is both not in the business of selling pizza, nor is it in the business of being in Florida. As such, there was zero potential for customer confusion, and the court dismissed the case.You would have thought that would be the end of this story. But, no, the NJTPA decided to go the trademark office and try to have the pizza parlor's trademark invalidated. Why in the hell it bothered doing so is anyone's guess. Regardless, it didn't work out well for the Garden State.

It's kind of incredible how frequently we see people who seem to think that the fact that social media platforms are so bad at moderating the content on those platforms is because they just don't care or don't try hard enough. While it is true that these platforms can absolutely do a much better job (which we believe often involves providing the end user more tools themselves), it's still amazing at how many people think that deciding what content "belongs" and what content doesn't belong is somehow easy. Earlier this month, in Washington DC there was the Content Moderation at Scale "COMO" conference. It was a one day event in which a bunch of companies revealed (sometimes for the first time) how they go about handling questions around content moderation. It was a followup to a similar event at Santa Clara University held back in February (for which we published a bunch of the papers that came out of the event).For the DC event, we teamed up with the Center for Democracy and Technology to produce a live game for everyone at the event to play -- turning them all into a trust & safety team, tasked with responding to "reported" content on a fictional social media platform. Emma Llanso from CDT and I ran the hour-long session, which included discussions of why people chose their decisions. The video of our session has now been posted which helpfully edits out the "thinking/discuss amongst yourselves" part of the process:Obviously, many of the examples we chose were designed to be challenging (many based on real situations). But the process was useful and instructive. With each question there were four potential actions that the "trust & safety" team could take and on every single example at least one person chose each option. In other words, even when there was a pretty strong agreement on the course of action to take, there was still at least some disagreement.Now, imagine (1) having to do that at scale, with hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of pieces of "flagged" content showing up, (2) having to do it when you're not someone who is so interested in content moderation that you spent an entire day at a content moderation summit, and (3) having to do it quickly where there are trade-offs and consequences to each choice -- including possible legal liability -- and no matter which option you make, someone (or perhaps lots of someones) are going to get very upset.Again, this is not to say that internet platforms shouldn't strive to do better -- they should. But one of the great things about attending both of these events is that it demonstrated how each internet platform is experimenting in very, very different ways on how to tackle these problems. Google and Facebook are trying to throw a combination of lots and lots of people plus artificial intelligence at the problem. Wikipedia and Reddit are trying to leverage their own communities to deal with these issues. Smaller platforms are taking different approaches. Some are much more proactive, others are reactive. And out of all that experimentation, even if mistakes are being made, we're finally starting to get some ideas on things that work for this community or that community (and remember, not all communities work the same way).As I mentioned at the event, we're looking to do a lot more with this concept of getting people to understand the deeper questions involved in the tradeoffs around moderating content. Setting it up as something of a game made it both fun and educational and we'd love some feedback as we look to do more with this concept.

It appears the concept of "extreme vetting" at our borders has been backburnered. The Washington Post is reporting ICE has scrapped plans to acquire software capable of strip-mining immigrants' social media accounts and converting this info into a RATE MY DANGEROUSNESS number. However, it does not appear the concept is being done away with entirely.

If you've been following how much the record labels stumbled around the internet for the past couple of decades, then you know the basics here. But time has a way of erasing some of the nuances of history, and I find it incredible to watch the RIAA and the record labels these days walking around proudly acting as if they were the ones who "saved" the music industry by embracing streaming services that now make up the bulk of the recording industry's revenues. Indeed, as we've pointed out for years, the recording industry has a very long history of overvaluing the music and undervaluing the services that people want. They've spent so long insisting that the music is the sole source of the value of what they produce, that they always downplay (or entirely erase) the rest of the equation: getting the music to fans in a manner that is convenient, reasonable, and non-burdensome. Instead, they always focus on killing the golden goose -- insisting that any successful music tech service pay them more and more until they're squeezed dry.Over at Motherboard, Ernie Smith, has a good history of how the recording industry screwed up streaming in the early days (unfortunately he does what most people do and refers to what's really the "recording industry" as the "music industry" -- and also simplifies the history to be just one round of mistakes, rather than many, many mistakes leaving a graveyard of dead tech companies in its wake -- but the overall article is still excellent). It's a very instructive piece in detailing exactly how the record label bosses were so focused on making sure that they had control and limits, that they didn't care at all about providing a service that people actually wanted. Much of it focuses on the two idiotic music label-approved streaming services that the industry tried to launch MusicNet and PressPlay (which we dubbed MusicNot and PressPause way back in 2001). Smith details how both services were built entirely focused on "how do we protect our revenue stream" rather than "how do we serve the customer." Thus, you had lots of DRM and lots of stupid limits:

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The government is still trying to land a conviction from its mass arrest of participants in last year's Inauguration Day protests in Washington, DC. So far, it has nothing to show for its efforts but a far-too-casual disregard for civil liberties.The prosecutions began with the government's breathtaking demand for the personal info of all 1 million+ visitors to the Disrupt J20 website. From there, things did not improve. The government's prosecutors accused protest participants of "hiding behind the First Amendment" while attempting to strip away First Amendment protections. One of those charged by the government with rioting was journalist Alexi Wood, who had filmed the protests and had the footage to show he wasn't a participant in violent or destructive acts.The government compounded its unconstitutional behavior in court when its lawyer (Jennifer Kerkhoff) tried to downplay the significance of a foundational part of our justice system -- that the accusers must prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" the accused committed a crime.

By now you've probably been informed that the next-generation of wireless broadband technology is going to revolutionize everything. Much like they did with 3G and 4G, wireless carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile have repeatedly hyped the fifth-generation (5G) wireless standard, insisting that the technology will somehow usher forth a "societal transformation" that's going to have a magical, cascading impact on every sector in technology, from the internet of (broken) things to the smart cities and self-driving car technologies of tomorrow.The idea that we're in a "race to 5G" with other nations has been a cornerstone of the Trump administration's factually-dubious protectionism aimed at blacklisting Chinese hardware vendors. And hoping to pander to this sentiment, both T-Mobile and Sprint have played up this rhetoric in public statements as they seek approval of their job and competition killing megamerger:

The UK government's continuing efforts to save the country's children from the evils of internet porn are increasingly ridiculous. Filtering efforts applied by ISPs have managed to seal off access to plenty of non-porn sites while still remaining insanely easy to circumvent. The government -- with a straight face -- suggested there was nothing not normal about internet customers turning over personal information to ISPs in exchange for the permission to view porn. It's as if building a database of the nation's porn aficionados was the government's original intent.Since nothing about this was working about the way the porn filter's architects (one of whom was arrested on child porn charges) imagined, the UK government decided the same non-functioning tech could be put to work filtering out "terrorist content." Bad ideas have repeatedly been supplanted by worse ones, and now it appears UK citizens may be able to opt out of ISP porn-related data harvesting by [squints at press report] buying a porn license from their local newsjobber.

It's not always true that in the lamest trademark disputes it's universally a big company trying to push around a much smaller company, but that does happen an awful, awful lot. For some reason, it seems that the moment a company or brand gets big enough, it suddenly transitions into a trademark bully looking to stamp out even the most benign competition.That certainly seems to be the case with Tommy Gun's Original Barbershop chain firing off a C&D to the owner of Tommy's Barber Shop, claiming that the shaggy public will be super-confused as to exactly who is cutting their hair in Nova Scotia.

A federal judge has allowed the ACLU, EFF, and the several plaintiffs they represent to continue their Fourth Amendment lawsuit against DHS, ICE, and CBP. The plaintiffs are challenging the Constitutionality of border device searches -- something that has skyrocketed in recent years. As it stands now, these agencies believe nothing stronger than reasonable suspicion is needed to perform highly-intrusive searches. In many cases, not even suspicion is needed, thanks to the "border search" exception to the Fourth Amendment courts have carved out for the government.Policies for agencies performing border device searches are pretty much identical. All allow searches and seizures of devices without individualized suspicion. This warrantless, suspicionless search may also result in the device being confiscated for weeks or months while a forensic search is undertaken -- again, supposedly without violating travelers' rights. CBP's policy was altered this year, requiring forensic searches and the mirroring of devices to at least reach the level of reasonable suspicion. Better than ICE's policy, but still nothing approaching a warrant.The government sought to have the lawsuit dismissed, claiming the plaintiffs had no standing to assert violations, much less seek injunctive relief on the theory they would likely be subjected to intrusive device searches the next time they traveled.The court disagrees with all the government's arguments. The government claimed the number of device searches -- although steadily increasing -- is still a small percentage of the overall whole. The court points out it doesn't really matter what the percentage is. It's whether or not CBP and ICE perform these searches routinely. From the decision [PDF]:

The "fake news" law erected in Malaysia was put in place to do one thing: allow the government to increase its control of journalists. Top-level corruption needed to be buried, and a "fake news" law seemed like a handy way to do it. The law made one thing clear: the government alone would decide what news was fake. The most likely target appeared to be reporting about the mysterious appearance of $700 million in Prime Minister Najib Razak's personal bank account.The law claimed its first victim shortly after being enacted. A Danish citizen visiting Malaysia was arrested and charged after he posted a YouTube video allegedly misrepresenting the time it took for emergency services to respond to the shooting of a Hamas engineering expert. The man will now spend a month in jail after being unable to pay the $2,500 fine handed down by the court.It once looked like the law might be headed for a swift derailment. Mahathir Mohamad promised he would abolish the law entirely if elected Prime Minister. The BBC reports only part of the previous sentence has come to pass.

Any review of our ongoing coverage of Comcast will leave you with the impression that the mega-company is almost perfectly terrible at customer service, seems only interested in growing as large as possible as quickly as possible while tamping down anything resembling the potential for competition in its market, and has done everything in its power to kill net neutrality on top of it all. While many might believe that Comcast is getting killed by the same cord-cutting epoch causing so many others in the entertainment space to reach for the Tums, we recently noted that the cable company is actually still raking in money hand over fist. This is done, at least in part, by the company's subtle strategy of simply upping what they charge customers for internet services.It's also apparently done in part by charging Comcast customers with installation fees for locations already tuned up on Comcast service.

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Last week on NPR's Fresh Air, I first heard about the publication of the book Barracoon, which sounds fascinating -- as is the backstory behind the book. The book was actually written in 1931, based on interviews anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston did with then 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis, then the last known living person to have been brought to America from Africa on a slave ship. In the Fresh Air piece, Maureen Corrigan described the decades long delay in publishing the book this way:

While people remain exclusively fixated on the telecom industry's attacks on net neutrality, the reality is companies like Comcast, Charter, AT&T and Verizon are busy trying to eliminate nearly all federal and state oversight of their businesses. And while deregulation has its uses in healthy markets as part of an effort to protect innovation, you may have noticed that the telecom market isn't particularly healthy. As such, the end result of eliminating most meaningful regulatory oversight without organic market pressure in place is only likely to make existing problems worse.This battle is getting particularly heated on the state level. After the Trump administration dismantled net neutrality and consumer privacy protections, states began flexing their muscle and attempting to pass their own privacy and net neutrality rules. ISP lobbyists, in turn, tried to head those efforts off at the pass by lobbying the FCC to include (legally untested) language in its net neutrality repeal "pre-empting" states from being able to protect broadband consumers in the wake of federal apathy.And in the wake of the net neutrality repeal, companies like Charter (Spectrum) are trying to claim that states have no legal authority to hold them accountable for failed promises, slow speeds, or much of anything else.For example, Charter is already trying to use the FCC net neutrality language to wiggle out of a lawsuit accusing it of failing to deliver advertised speeds. And the New York Public Service Commission also recently stated it found that Charter has been effectively lying to regulators about meeting conditions affixed to its $89 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. As part of the deal, Charter was supposed to deploy broadband to a set number of additional homes and businesses, but regulators found (pdf) several instances where Charter actively misled regulators.Last week Charter replied to these allegations by again claiming that states have no authority over them. As part of that effort the company is already citing the FCC's pre-emption language buried in its net neutrality repeal:

The FBI's growing number of uncracked phones remains a mystery. The agency claims it has nearly 8,000 phones in its possession which it can't get into, despite multiple vendors offering services that can allegedly crack any iPhone and countless Android devices.The push for mandated backdoors and/or weakened encryption continues, with successive FBI heads (James Comey, Chris Wray) declaring public safety is being threatened by the agency's locked phone stockpile. This push seems doubly insincere given a recent Inspector General's report, which revealed agency officials slow-walked the search for a third-party solution to unlock a phone belonging to the San Bernardino shooter.Legislators have taken notice of the FBI's disingenuous push for a legislative mandate. Back in April, a group of lawmakers sent a letter to the FBI asking what it was actually doing to access the contents of its growing collection of locked phones and why it insisted there were no other options when it was apparent vendors were offering phone-cracking solutions.The EFF has questions as well. It has sent a FOIA request [PDF] to the FBI and DOJ asking for details on the FBI's locked phone stash.

We've spent many years talking about the issue of intermediary liability on the internet. While the term is one that nearly everyone agrees sounds boring as anything, it's incredibly important in protecting your rights to express yourself online. The key issue is who is liable for speech that is posted online. The common sense reaction should be that "the speaker" is responsible for any speech they make online. However, for reasons I still don't full comprehend, many, many, many people would prefer that the site hosting the speech should be liable. In many cases, this might not seem to matter. But it can actually matter quite a bit for absolutely everyone. While most speech is perfectly legal, there remain some exceptions (including copyright, defamation, true threats and more).And while some people think that those exceptions are narrow enough that pinning liability on websites shouldn't be a big deal, that's not true in practice. Because if you say that the website (the intermediary or platform) is liable for the speech, then merely making an accusation of illegality in the speech has a high likelihood of censorship of protected speech. That's because most platforms will take down speech that is reported in an attempt to avoid potentially crippling legal liability. Indeed, in many cases, platforms are then pressured (either by law or threat of laws or legal action) to pre-filter or moderate certain content just to avoid even the possibility of legal liability.And because of that, lots of perfectly legitimate, protected speech gets blocked and censored. Much of this is abusive. Because once you've supplied a tool that allows someone to flag certain content for censorship, that tool gets used, even if the content doesn't really qualify, and the internet platform is heavily incentivized to remove that content to avoid liability.That's why this matters so much. That's why we're so concerned at attempts to chip away at intermediary liability protections in the US, such as the immunity clause under CDA 230 or the safe harbor clause under the DMCA 512. But the US is, of course, just one country of hundreds. And lots of other countries have their own (frequently changing) laws on intermediary liability. For years Stanford's Center for Internet and Society has hosted a World Intermediary Liability Map, and that map has just been updated. This is an incredibly thorough and useful tool in understanding how these laws play out in other countries, how they differ and even the impact of how they work.With the updated version, you can also drill down on topic pages around specific types of liability regimes, such as looking at how the Right to be Forgotten has been spreading around the globe, or look at how intermediary liability is handled around the globe for copyright or look at the monitoring obligations imposed by various laws.For those of us who continue to believe that proper intermediary liability laws are key to a functioning internet and freedom of expression online, this is a fantastic tool -- only slightly marred by the fact that so many of the developments concerning intermediary liability (including here in the US) have been around successful attempts at chipping away from those principles, leading inevitably to greater censorship.

Today the Senate voted 52 to 47 to reverse the FCC's attack on net neutrality, setting up a tougher showdown in the House.As noted previously, net neutrality advocates managed to convince Congress to try and use the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to reverse the FCC's misleadingly-named "Restoring Internet Freedom Order."That order, approved by a 3-2 FCC vote last December, not only kills net neutrality (as of June 11), but eliminates much of the FCC's authority to police monopoly ISPs. Since many still don't seem to understand this, it's worth reiterating that the attack on net neutrality is just one part of a much broader plan to severely hamstring FTC, FCC, and state oversight of giant broadband monopolies that face little to no organic market competition.Today's hearing before the Senate included all of the favorite hits culled from a decade of net neutrality debates, including ISP-loyal lawmakers like John Thune repeating the entirely false claim that net neutrality rules somehow devastated sector investment (SEC filings, earnings reports, and countless CEO statements disprove this). Claims that U.S. net neutrality rules were "heavy handed government regulation of the internet" were also frequently repeated (that's also not true, and the U.S. rules are arguably modest by international standards).Net neutrality activists had been trying to secure additional Senate votes for months, something made arguably difficult by ISP lobbyist success at stupidly framing net neutrality as a partisan issue, despite widespread bipartisan support. But activists managed to get three key Republicans to join their ranks: Maine Senator Susan Collins, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, and Louisiana Senator John Kennedy. Kennedy's yes vote was a notable surprise, given he'd been supporting ISP efforts to pass a bogus net neutrality law with an eye toward pre-empting tougher state or federal rules.But at the last moment he came along for the ride, his justification being notably amusing:

It's apparently time for a legislative update to The War on Cops. Apropos of nothing, legislators from both sides of Congress have flung some more "cops are more equal than others" legislation into the ring. Senators Orrin Hatch and Heidi Heitkamp have joined their House counterparts in attempting to make any crime against a police officers a hate crime. From Hatch's press release:

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So, we're now less than a week away from the close of our Kickstarter campaign for our version of the CIA's recently declassified training card game, which we've dubbed: CIA: Collect It All.We've been working hard on our version of the game, filling in redacted cards, testing and tweaking certain variations and playtesting, playtesting, playtesting. The game is quite a bit of fun -- which is not something I'm used to saying about something the CIA initially created. The campaign ends next Tuesday, and we don't currently have any plans to print the game after we do this one big run, so if you're on the fence about it, now would be a good time to lean towards supporting it.Since a bunch of people have had questions about the game, we thought it would be good to go on Reddit and do an AMA about the game. The three of us who have been working on the game -- myself and Leigh Beadon from Techdirt, and Randy Lubin from Diegetic Games -- will all be hanging out on Reddit doing the AMA starting at about 10am PT / 1pm ET today. I'll update this post with the link once it's live, but you should just be able to hit up the /r/IAmA/ subreddit and find it. That'll be the best place to have a discussion about the game, gameplay, design choices and the like (though we'll also answer questions here or on Kickstarter). So stop by and ask some questions and find out what it feels like to play the CIA's own card game. Update: Here's the link to the AMA.

While the rate of cord cutting is expected to double for Comcast this year, the phenomenon isn't having as dire an impact on the company's bottom line as you might expect. That's thanks to Comcast's growing monopoly over broadband in countless markets where the nation's phone companies are simply refusing to upgrade their networks at any real scale. That lack of competition lets the company not only jack up the standalone price of broadband (starting at $75 in many markets), but it allows the company to implement punitive and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees to drive up your bill should you embrace streaming alternatives.Speaking at a telecom conference in New York this week, Comcast cable CEO Dave Watson very quietly acknowledged the fact that when a customer cuts the cord, the fact that Comcast doesn't have to pay content licensing costs for that user -- combined with the fact that they simply drive up the cost of broadband for that user -- means that the company comes out ahead anyway:

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), passed in 1998, governs the sort of data that can be collected from children under the age of 13. That's why kids have to age themselves prematurely to create accounts on some social media networks. It's a law kids under the age of 13 subvert every day, but it's in place to protect kids from online services and restricts information collected by apps and online services that cater to children.Unfortunately, there are a lot of app developers ignoring this law. A recently-published research paper shows a host of violations and questionable practices that smartphone/tablet app developers are engaged in. Serge Egelman, one of the paper's co-authors, notes that thousands of apps are violating this law every day. In just one example, an advertising SDK (software development kit) made by ironSource is harvesting personal data from 466 child-directed apps.It's not as though this is a simple oversight. In an earlier blog post detailing COPPA violations, Egelman points out Android developers must take a series of affirmative steps to market apps directed at children. There's a long list of stipulations that must be met before Google will allow apps to become part of its Designed For Families program.Apps using ironSource's SDK are being marketed to kids, making the presence of a targeted advertising tool not merely questionable, but possibly illegal. As Egelman's blog post notes, it certainly violates ironSource's own terms of service. This is taken from its privacy policy, as archived late last year.

Website blocking is now all the rage across much of the world. The way such website censorship happens is, however, as varied as the countries in which the censoring occurs. While some nations enact laws for internet filtering on all sorts of grounds -- be it porn, extremist content, or political dissent --, other countries have ISPs that proactively do this kind of filtering for their host countries. In many cases, this results in "parental filters" designed to keep harmful content from finding the eyeballs of children. In reality, when Comcast tried this here in America, it managed to block TorrentFreak for some reason.But nobody does collateral site-blocking damage like UK ISPs. The stories about "for the children" and "but...terrorists!" ISP website filtering are legion, but recent reports put any focus by ISPs on the well-being of children in heavy doubt, given the amount of purely innocent children's content that is getting blocked by ISP filters.