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Jason Smith, over at Indivigital has been doing quite a job of late in highlighting the hypocrisy of European lawmakers screaming at internet companies over their privacy practices, while doing little on their own websites of what they're demanding of the companies. He pointed out the EU Commission itself appeared to be violating the GDPR, leading it to claim that it was exempt. And now he's got a new story up, pointing out that the website of UK Parliament member, Damian Collins, who is the chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee... does not appear to have a privacy policy in place, even though he took the lead in quizzing Facebook about its own privacy practices and its lack of transparency on how it treats user data.Now, there are those of us who believe that privacy policies are a dumb idea that don't do anything to protect people's privacy -- but if you're going to be grandstanding about how Facebook is not transparent enough about how it handles user data, it seems like you should be a bit transparent yourself. Smith's article details how many other members of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee don't seem to be living up to their own standards. They may have been attacking social media sites... but were happy to include tracking widgets from those very same social media sites on their own sites.

Section 230 of the CDA gave us the internet we know today. It has allowed hundreds of tech companies and dozens of social media networks to flourish. To some people, however, Section 230 immunity is the internet's villain, not its hero. Recent legislation has created some damaging holes in this essential protection, but it's still insular enough to fend off most legal action in which plaintiffs choose to sue service providers rather than the end user who did/said whatever the plaintiff finds tortiously offensive.Similar to what has been argued in multiple piracy-related lawsuits, the plaintiff in this lawsuit filed against Snapchat alleged one of the company's photo filters encouraged users to break the law. This lawbreaking had particularly tragic consequences.

It's been a long tradition here on Techdirt to show examples of politicians and political parties pushing for stricter, more draconian, copyright laws are often found violating those same laws. But the French Rassemblemant National (National Rally Point) party is taking this to new levels -- whining about the enforcement of internet filters, just as it's about to vote in favor of making such filters mandatory. Leaving aside that Rassemblemant National, which is the party headed by Marine Le Pen, is highly controversial, and was formerly known as Front National, it is still an extremely popular political party in France. And, boy, is it ever pissed off that YouTube took down its YouTube channel over automatically generated copyright strikes. Le Pen is particularly angry that YouTube's automatic filters were unable to recognize that they were just quoting other works:

Stanford's Daphne Keller is one of the world's foremost experts on intermediary liability protections and someone we've mentioned on the website many times in the past (and have had her on the podcast a few times as well). She's just published a fantastic paper presenting lessons from making internet platforms liable for the speech of its users. As she makes clear, she is not arguing that platforms should do no moderation at all. That's a silly idea that no one who has any understanding of these issues thinks is a reasonable idea. The concern is that as many people (including regulators) keep pushing to pin liability on internet companies for the activities of their users, it creates some pretty damaging side effects. Specifically, the paper details how it harms speech, makes us less safe, and harms the innovation economy. It's actually kind of hard to see what the benefit side is on this particular cost-benefit equation.As the paper notes, it's quite notable how the demands from people about what platforms should do keeps changing. People keep demanding that certain content gets removed, while others freak out that too much content is being removed. And sometimes it's the same people (they want the "bad" stuff -- i.e., stuff they don't like -- removed, but get really angry when the stuff they do like is removed). Perhaps even more importantly, the issues for why certain content may get taken down are the same issues that often involve long and complex court cases, with lots of nuance and detailed arguments going back and forth. And yet, many people seem to think that private companies are somehow equipped to credibly replicate that entire judicial process, without the time, knowledge or resources to do so:

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FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's career came to a sudden end earlier this year. Following in his predecessor James Comey's footsteps, McCabe swiftly found himself on the front sidewalk with a Sessions footprint on his ass. An Inspector General's report followed soon after, detailing many reasons McCabe might have been fired -- lying to investigators, leaking stuff to the press, evading concerns about his investigative neutrality in light of his wife's acceptance of donations from a Clinton-linked PAC... We don't know if any of these are why Trump fired McCabe, but pretty much any one of these things makes a firing justifiable.Lying to the FBI is serious business, even when it's just its oversight. Ask anyone who's been charged with nothing but lying when the FBI fails to build a better case. For McCabe, though, it was just a little "administrative misconduct." Something that could be addressed with a writeup or, in this case, a firing. That the trigger was pulled hours away from McCabe's retirement sucks for McCabe, but I find it very difficult to sympathize with career government employees who feel they're still owed a lifetime of retirement benefits after they've been fired for cause.McCabe is still trying to get what he thinks taxpayers owe him. He claims the firing was "politically motivated." Given the general nature of Trump's personnel decisions, he's probably not wrong. But the IG report shows him engaged in behavior that could result in termination. McCabe doesn't believe that's the case and he's demanding the DOJ hand over documents and manuals related to internal policies and firing practices. And he's doing this like an actual civilian: by filing FOIA requests.Unsurprisingly, that's not working. McCabe's lawyers are asking the DC court to force the DOJ to hand over all policies and manuals. As is argued in this quasi-FOIA lawsuit [PDF], the DOJ has been shirking its obligations to the public for decades.

So you might recall that part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the concept of line sharing, or local loop unbundling. Simply, the rules set forth by that law required that incumbent telcos needed to share their networks with smaller competitors, providing wholesale access to bandwidth. It was an effort to foster something vaguely resembling competition in the broadband space by letting smaller companies piggyback on existing network infrastructure. The thought was that because the barriers to market entry were so high, this could help smaller competitors gain footholds that would otherwise be impossible.Unsurprisingly incumbent telcos utterly loathed this idea, and quickly got to work dismantling it. First by ensuring that the coordination between incumbent telcos (ILECs) and smaller competitors (CLECs) was as clunky, cumbersome and annoying as possible (something you probably noticed if you ever waited for installs from one of these smaller ISPs in the late 90s or early aughts), then by lobbying to have the rules dismantled. Incumbent telcos then used the resulting failure as evidence that the idea was doomed from the start, despite the fact we never truly gave it a chance.The idea of opening incumbent networks to competitors is pretty common in some parts of the world. France for example managed to take the same concept and made it work quite successfully in cities like Paris, where to this day users can get TV, phone, and 100-500 Mbps broadband connections for a tiny fraction of what American consumers pay ($40 to $50 or so). A variation on this theme is open access, where multiple ISPs come in and compete over a core (sometimes government co-run) network; an idea that works well here and abroad, but also sees fierce incumbent ISP opposition for obvious reasons.It's a battle incumbent telcos won handily thanks to lobbying power, but there remains a few lingering rules they're now trying to eliminate. As such, they've been petitioning the Ajit Pai FCC to eliminate the remainder of these rules. In a blog post by telco lobbying organization US Telecom, telcos argue that the rules are no longer necessary, and (much like their attacks on net neutrality) argue that eliminating them will drive "innovation and investment":

What's up Europe? We've been talking a lot about insanity around the new copyright directive, but the EU already has some pretty messed up copyright/related rights laws on the books that are creating absurd situations. The following is one of them. One area where US and EU laws differ is on the concept of the "database right." The US does not grant a separate copyright on a collection of facts. The EU does. Studies have shown how this is horrible idea, and if you compare certain database-driven industries in the US and the EU, you discover how much damage database rights do to innovation, competition and the public. But, alas, they still exist. And they continue to be used in positively insane ways.Enter Hakon Wium Lie. You might know him as basically the father of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Or the former CTO of the Opera browser. Or maybe even as the founder of the Pirate Party in Norway. Either way, he's been around a while in this space, and knows what he's talking about. Via Boing Boing we learn that: (1) Wium Lie has been sued for a completely absurd reason of (2) helping a site publish public domain court rulings that (3) are not even protected by a database right and (4) the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff (5) in 24 hours (6) before Lie could respond and (7) ordered him to pay the legal fees of the other side.I've numbered these because I had to break out each absurd part separately just to start to try to comprehend just how ridiculous the whole thing is. And now, let's go through how each part is absurd in turn:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Damien with a simple summary of the lack of logic behind link taxes:

Five Years AgoThis week, instead of going through the usual look at what was happening five, ten and fifteen years ago, we're going to put all the focus on the events of this week in 2013. Why? Because it's the week that the revelations of NSA spying, which dropped last week, truly hit the fan. There was a whole lot of news about it, almost completely dominating Techdirt, and it's worth a closer look.As the leaks kept coming, it was revealed that the source was Edward Snowden, who described his ability to wiretap anyone from his desk. As politicians scrambled to defend the program, the DOJ was trying to cover up the secret court ruling about it, and we realized the big scandal wasn't that the NSA did something illegal, but that it probably didn't.Some defenders of the PRISM program tried to claim it helped stop an NYC subway bombing, but the evidence was lacking and even the Associated Press soon called bullshit. James Clapper was simultaneously claiming that the leaks were a danger to us all, and also no big deal, while the author of the Patriot Act stepped up to say NSA surveillance must end, and that the law was supposed to prevent data mining. It started becoming clear that the metadata story was the biggest one.Some politicians began speaking out, with Senator Rand Paul calling for a class-action lawsuit against the NSA, and Senator Ron Wyden calling for congressional hearings, before a group of Senators got together to introduce a bill to end the secrecy of the FISA courts. One Senator had previously predicted a lot of this, but unfortunately he got voted out of office in 2010.Meanwhile, a former NSA boss said the leaks show America can't keep secrets, even though they really showed the opposite. The public was divided in its opinion on the program, depending heavily on how the question was asked. And we pointed out that the leaks show the importance of Wikileaks and similar operations.The backlash grew, with Derek Khanna calling for James Clapper to be impeached for lying, a team of 86 companies and other groups called on Congress to end the spying, and the ACLU suing the government for 4th amendment violations. Various former NSA whistleblowers spoke up in defense of Snowden and against the agency's practices. Of course, there was also some pathetic backlash in the other direction, with Rep. Peter King calling for the prosecution of journalists who report on the leaks, and Congress moving to improve secrecy instead of fixing the problem.Then things began getting even worse, with the possibility emerging that the PRISM program enabled espionage against allies. A new leak at the end of the week revealed the NSA's talking points for defending itself, and sales of George Orwell's 1984 began to skyrocket, and... well, let's just say there's plenty more on the way in the coming weeks.

Crowdsourcing has obviously now been a thing for some time. Along internet timelines, in fact, crowdsourcing is now something close to a mature business practice and it's used for all manner of things, from the payment for goods created, to serving as a form of market research for new products and services, all the way up to and including getting fans involved in the creation and shaping of an end product. The video game industry was naturally an early adopter of this business model, given how well-suited the industry is to technological innovation. Here too we have seen a range of crowdsourcing efforts, from funding game creation through platforms like Kickstarter to empowering supporters to shape the development of the game.In that last example, it was Double Fine and Tim Schafer getting gamers involved in what would otherwise be the job of the creative team behind their game. The personalities here may matter greatly, because Ubisoft has recently unveiled an attempt to further get their fans involved in the game-creation process, yet many people are up in arms over it. Let's start with what Ubisoft is attempting with its anticipated next installment in the Beyond Good & Evil franchise.

Yet another Florida sheriff with a penchant for publicity is using his office (and manpower) to start some garbage viral War on Drugs. Hence, every bust made by his department -- utilizing armored vehicles and deputies that look like they shop at military surplus stores -- is splashed across the department's Facebook page. Fine, if that's what gets your blood flowing, but these scenes of busts, featuring the Sheriff front and center, contain claims that just aren't backed up by the actual paperwork. George Joseph of The Appeal has the details.

The New York State Senate just keeps pitching unconstitutional law-balls over the plate, apparently assuming legislators' good intentions will overwhelm judges asked to determine just how much the new laws violate the First Amendment.The senate recently passed an anti-cyberbullying bill -- its fifth attempt to push this across the governor's desk. The law couldn't be bothered to cite which definition of "cyberbullying" it was using, but once the definition was uncovered, it became apparent the bill has zero chance of surviving a Constitutional challenge should it become law.Eugene Volokh's post on the bill passed along several examples of criminalized speech the bill would result in, including one with its finger directly on social media's pulse.

The internet is many things to many people. Some of these things are good, while others are bad. Still, it should be fairly uncontroversial to say that the internet has generally done a good job of empowering ordinary people. With the advent of a platform sans gatekeepers, millions of people suddenly had a voice that they would not otherwise have been afforded. The result of this has been the explosion in blogs, podcasts, forums, and other outlets. The internet brings the ability to reach others and that has resulted in an explosion of thought and speech.It will come as no surprise that plenty of national governments throughout the world aren't huge fans of their people suddenly having this sort of voice and reach. After all, that kind of free expression can often times come in the form of critiques of those very governments, and that kind of reach can create movements of dissent. You may recall back in April when Glyn Moody detailed Tanzania's attempt to tamp down this critical speech by forcing bloggers to register with the government at a cost greater than the average per capita income of its citizens. While this was a fairly naked attempt to keep the voices of its citizens from being heard, Glyn pointed out that the Tanzanian government was at least attempting to be cynically subtle about it.

SESTA/FOSTA was pushed through with the fiction it would be used to target sex traffickers. This obviously was never its intent. It faced pushback from the DOJ and law enforcement agencies because pushing traffickers off mainstream sites would make it much more difficult to track them down. The law was really written for one reason: to take down Backpage and its owners, who had survived numerous similar attempts in the past. The DOJ managed to do this without SESTA, which was still waiting for presidential approval when the feds hits the site's principal executives with a 93-count indictment.The law is in force and all it's doing is hurting efforts to track down sex traffickers and harming sex workers whose protections were already minimal. Sex traffickers, however, don't appear to be bothered by the new law. But that's because the law wasn't written to target sex traffickers, as a top DOJ official made clear at a law enforcement conference on child exploitation. Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan's comments make it clear SESTA/FOSTA won't be used to dismantle criminal organizations and rescue victims of sex traffickers. It's there to give the government easy wins over websites while sex traffickers continue unmolested.

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Large ISPs like Comcast, Charter, Verizon and AT&T this week uniformly proclaimed that the death of net neutrality is going to be a really wonderful thing for American consumers. Charter Spectrum, for example, took to the company's policy blog to insist that the neutering of historically popular consumer protections on this front will somehow result in everybody getting better broadband. The ISP's argument, as it has throughout this entire little dog and pony show, focused on the repeatedly debunked claim that the FCC's pretty modest net neutrality rules demolished telecom industry investment:

The damning report the President has been waiting for has arrived. The Inspector General's report covering everything from James Comey's handling of the Clinton email investigation (terribly with bonus insubordination) to a couple of FBI agents forming a two-person #Resistance (stupid and made the FBI look bad, but not illegal) runs almost 600 pages and won't make anyone looking to pin blame solely on one side of the partisan divide very happy.It's been claimed the report would finally show the FBI to be an agency filled with partisan hacks, further solidifying "Deep State" conspiracy theories that the government Trump runs is out to destroy Trump. It was somehow going to accomplish this despite many people feeling the FBI's late October dive back into the Clinton email investigation handed the election to Trump.Whatever the case -- and whatever side of the political divide you cheer for -- the only entity that comes out of this looking terrible is the FBI. That the FBI would engage in questionable behavior shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but the anti-Trump "resistance" has taken Trump's attacks on the FBI as a reason to convert Comey, the FBI, and the DOJ into folk heroes of democracy.The summary of the report [PDF] runs 15 pages by itself and hands out enough damning bullet points to keep readers occupied for hours. Then there's the rest of the report, which provides the details and may take several days to fully parse.Here are some of the low lights from Inspector General Michael Horowitz, possibly the only person who should be touting "Deep State" theories since he's spent his IG career being dicked around by the DEA, DOJ, FBI, and DEA.The report says everything about the Clinton email investigation was unusual. Termed the "Midyear Exam" by the FBI, the investigation was mostly a voluntary affair. Most of the evidence and testimony obtained was obtained from consenting witnesses and participants. The FBI rarely felt the need to compel testimony or evidence with subpoenas. It also did not access the contents of multiple devices used by Clinton's senior aides, devices that may have contained classified info that had been circulated through a private email server. As the report notes, this is at odds with Comey's sudden interest in Anthony Weiner's laptop, where his estranged wife (and former Clinton personal assistant) Huma Abedin apparently had stored copies of Clinton emails.The IG says the tactics used were unusual but does not pass official judgment on them. However, the actions of five FBI employees involved in the investigation did further damage to the FBI and its reputation by taking an investigation already viewed as politically-questionable and aggravating the perception.

We've been writing a lot about the EU's dreadful copyright directive, but that's because it's so important to a variety of issues on how the internet works, and because it's about to go up for a vote in the EU Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee next week. David Kaye, the UN's Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression has now chimed in with a very thorough report, highlighting how Article 13 of the Directive -- the part about mandatory copyright filters -- would be a disaster for free speech and would violate the UN's Declaration on Human Rights, and in particular Article 19 which (in case you don't know) says:

There's an old saying: once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a trend. It seems now we are officially in the coincidence part of that mantra. You will recall that we recently discussed famed author Chuck Palahniuk's apology for blaming piracy for his stagnant finances when the real story was that a business partner at his literary agency was simply stealing money from him. We noted at the time that this business partner was the one feeding Palahniuk the false story that piracy was responsible for his dwindling money and that such a story was made believable in part because of the efforts of the copyright industry and its lawyers demonizing the internet and copyright infringement at every turn.Well, recent news reports detail the sentencing of three Danish lawyers to years in prison for defrauding their copyright holder clients, while supposedly working for them on anti-piracy efforts. The organization now known as Rights Alliance, previously Antipiratgruppen, had hired lawyers from the Johan Schluter law firm for representation in piracy cases. The firm worked on these efforts for Rights Alliance for years before an audit showed just how shady these beacons of justice for rightsholders actually were.

A 64-year-old man, an Albanian with legal US citizenship, was stripped of more than $58,000 in cash by Customs and Border Protection at Cleveland's Hopkins Airport last year. Rustem Kazazi was headed to Albania with the cash to fix up his family's old home and possibly buy property there. The CBP claims... well, it really claims nothing, other than its right to Kazazi's life savings.CBP agents thought it was suspicious Kazazi would have so much cash on hand, despite Kazazi also carrying with him documentation of the cash's origin. That didn't slow the CBP's cash-hauling efforts at all. Asset forfeiture allowed the CBP to take Kazazi's money, say something ominous about violating federal law by not reporting the funds, and never bother charging Kazazi for all the violations the CBP claimed it spotted.It is illegal to take more than $10,000 in funds out of the country without reporting it. The problem is there's nothing in airports suggesting this is the case. Literature at airports, as well as information posted at the TSA's own website, do little to clarify what must be done if you plan to take money out of the country. Even if you do know what needs to be done, it's almost impossible to do before boarding a flight. The funds must be reported at the time of the departure. But they must be reported to a customs office, which is rarely conveniently located on airport property and very definitely never in the terminal.What's more, Kazazi was apparently planning to follow the law. According to his lawyer, he was going to fill out the forms at the "point of departure," which he assumed would be the Newark, NJ airport where his flight leaving the country would depart from.Kazazi's money was spotted by a TSA agent, who immediately reported it to CBP officers. This is something the CBP and DEA strongly encourage, skewing the focus from airline security (which is part of TSA's name) to scanning for dollars. The CBP agents made sure the whole experience was as awful as possible for Kazazi (whose command of the English language is limited) even before they walked off with his money.

Four years ago, we wrote about the House voting to keep itself ignorant on technology, and unfortunately, I can now basically just rerun that post again, with a few small tweaks, so here we go:The Office of Technology Assessment existed in Congress from 1972 until 1995, when it was defunded by the Newt Gingrich-led "Contract with America" team. The purpose was to actually spend time to analyze technology issues and to provide Congress with objective analysis of the impact of technology and the policies that Congress was proposing. Remember how back when there was the big SOPA debate and folks in Congress kept talking about how they weren't nerds and needed to hear from the nerds? Right: the OTA was supposed to be those nerds, but it hasn't existed in nearly two decades -- even though it still exists in law. It just isn't funded.Rep. Mark Takano (in 2014 it was Rush Holt) thought that maybe we should finally give at least a little bit of money to test bringing back OTA and to help better advise Congress. While some would complain about Congress spending any money, this money was to better inform Congress so it stopped making bad regulations related to technology, which costs a hell of a lot more than the $2.5 million Takano's amendment proposed. Also, without OTA, Congress is much more reliant on very biased lobbyists, rather than a truly independent government organization.The fact that we're seeing this kind of nonsense in Congress should show why we need it:

A couple of months ago, we wrote about an important case at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the region's highest court. The final judgment is expected to rule on whether the Privacy Shield framework for transferring EU personal data to the US is legal under EU data protection law. Many expect the CJEU to throw out Privacy Shield, which does little to address the earlier criticisms of the preceding US-EU agreement: the Safe Harbor framework, struck down by the same court in 2015. However, that's not the only problem that Privacy Shield is facing. One of the European Parliament's powerful committees, which helps determine policy related to civil liberties, has just issued a call to the European Commission to suspend the Privacy Shield agreement unless the US tries harder:

The FBI lost control of the "going dark" narrative. Part of it unraveled thanks to outside vendors. Two vendors -- Cellebrite and Grayshift -- announced they could crack any iPhone made. This shot holes in the FBI's theory that locked phones stayed locked forever and thereafter were only useful for hammering legislators over the head with until they cranked out an anti-encryption law.The second unraveling was the FBI's own unforced error. Supposedly it couldn't count phones without software and the software it had couldn't count phones. What the FBI and others claimed was 8,000 uncrackable threats to the safety of the American public was actually a little over 1,000 phones. As for the latent threat posed by these locked devices, that's still pure speculation until the FBI starts handing over some info on what criminal acts these phones are tied to.The FBI will probably be looking to restart its "going dark" campaign, thanks to Apple's latest effort, which will render Cellebrite and Grayshift's phone cracking boxes obsolete.

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Every electronic device capable of storing data is just another tool in the pirate's chest. If you think your phone or mp3 player or hard drive is just something for storing data and perhaps even purchased software, movies, and music, think again. The simple fact you've decided to purchase any of these devices pretty much ensures content creators everywhere will go bankrupt.The "you must be a pirate" tax is being pitched again. The senseless fee tacked on to blank plastic discs for so many years continues to migrate to electronic devices, including the tiny chips stashed away inside smartphones. Apparently, the Canadian music industry needs something to replace the revenue stream that dried up when people stopped buying blank CDs. Michael Geist, working with documents secured through a public records request, reports the Canadian music industry is looking for a hefty payout from the government.

Encouraged by AT&T's massive merger victory this week, Comcast has made its own $65 billion acquisition offer for a large chunk of 21st Century Fox. According to the Comcast announcement, the company's all cash $65 billion dollar offer is a notable step up from Disney's own $52.4 billion all-stock package, setting up a showdown between two companies that have had a contentious relationship since Comcast's 2004 failed hostile takeover attempt of Disney.The deal includes the FX Channel, numerous regional sports networks, and a minority stake in European cable TV giant Sky, which would all be tacked on to the NBC Universal assets Comcast acquired back in 2011. Fox will however retain Fox News, Fox Sports, and Fox broadcasting, which will all remain under the existing Fox brand. In its statement, Comcast rolled out the usual claptrap about how the combination would be lovely for all involved:

It's understandable that people are getting fatigued from all the various attacks on the internet, but as I've noted recently, one of the biggest threats to our open internet is the incredibly bad Copyright Directive that is on the verge of being voted on by the EU Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee. The Directive is horrible on many fronts, and we've been highlighting two key ones. First, the dangerous link tax and, second, the mandatory upload censorship filters. Each of these could have major ramifications for how the internet will function.Incredibly, both are driven mainly by industry animus towards Google from legacy industries that feel left behind. The link tax is the brainchild of various news publishers, while the upload filters are mainly driven by the recording industry. But, of course, what should be quite obvious at this point is that both of these ideas will only make Google stronger while severely limiting smaller competitors. Google can pay the link tax. Google has already built perhaps the most sophisticated content filtering system (which still sucks). Nearly everyone else cannot. So, these moves don't hurt Google. They hurt all of Google's possible competitors (including many European companies).Six years ago, there was another threat in the EU for a horrible copyright plan, which was the ACTA "anti-counterfeiting trade agreement" being pushed (note a pattern here) by legacy copyright industries, looking to expand copyright law in a misguided attack on Google. Like this time, the horrible plan was being mainly pushed by the EU Commission. But with ACTA, the EU Parliament stepped up and rejected ACTA. However, that only happened after citizens hit the streets all over Europe to protest ACTA.It is impossible to expect that every time politicians are about to do something bad on the internet or with copyright law that everyone can take to the streets. That's not going to happen. But the new Copyright Directive is significantly worse than anything that was in ACTA, and if the EU Parliament doesn't realize that by next week, the internet we know and love may be fundamentally changed in a way that we will all come to regret. I mentioned these already, but check out SaveYourInternet.eu, ChangeCopyright.org and SaveTheLink.org.You can (and should) also follow MEP Julia Reda who has been leading the charge against these awful proposals and who has been posting how to help stop it on her website and on her Twitter feed. You can also listen to Reda discuss all of this on our podcast.

Radley Balko is uncovering more rights violations and more law enforcement falsehoods with his coverage of South Carolina resident Julian Betton's lawsuit against the Myrtle Beach-area drug task force. Betton's house was raided by the drug unit after a confidential informant made two pot purchases for a total of $100. The police didn't have a no-knock warrant, but they acted like they did, going from zero to hail-of-gunfire in mere seconds. (via FourthAmendment.com)

One of FCC Chair Ajit Pai's claims about how he's changed the FCC is that he's making it more transparent. And, to be fair, he did make one key change that his predecessors failed to do: which is releasing the details of rulemakings before they're voted on. That was good. But in so many other ways, Pai has been significantly less than transparent. And this goes all the way down to incredibly stupid things, like his silly stupid giant Reese's coffee mug. That mug is so famous, that even John Oliver mocked it in his story on net neutrality:Taylor Amarel had some questions about the mug, and made a FOIA request using Muckrock, that might shed some details on the mug (and, perhaps, a few other things):

One of FCC Chair Ajit Pai's claims about how he's changed the FCC is that he's making it more transparent. And, to be fair, he did make one key change that his predecessors failed to do: which is releasing the details of rulemakings before they're voted on. That was good. But in so many other ways, Pai has been significantly less than transparent. And this goes all the way down to incredibly stupid things, like his silly stupid giant Reese's coffee mug. That mug is so famous, that even John Oliver mocked it in his story on net neutrality:Taylor Amarel had some questions about the mug, and made a FOIA request using Muckrock, that might shed some details on the mug (and, perhaps, a few other things):

Our courts will let the government get away with almost anything. Although judges have expressed immense amounts of displeasure at the ATF's sting operations involving fictitious drug stash houses, it has seldom resulted in reversed convictions. To "shock the conscience," the government must cross lines courts are very reluctant to draw. Running a child porn website for a few weeks doesn't do it. Neither does taking a trucking company's truck and employee and returning both full of bullet holes after a sting goes south.Very occasionally, the government will find its way across this line. Eric Goldman has uncovered one of these rare cases. It involves a child sex sting operation perpetrated by a law enforcement agency, during which the undercover officer refused to leave a "target" alone after he repeatedly made it clear he wasn't looking to buy sex from an underage female.

Last week, Mike provided a virtuoso excoriation of the European publishers' shameless demand to be given even more copyright control over tiny snippets of news stories as part of the awful EU copyright directive. As that post pointed out, the publishers' "mythbuster" did nothing of the sort, but it did indicate a growing panic among the industry as more critical attention is brought to bear on the ridiculous "snippet tax" -- Article 11 of the proposed new EU copyright law -- which has already failed twice elsewhere. The German site Über Medien -- "About Media" -- offers another glimpse of publishers trying desperately to justify the unjustifiable (original in German). Actually, it's one publisher in particular: Mathias Döpfner. He's the CEO of the German company Axel Springer, one of the world's largest publishers, although even his company is unlikely to benefit much from the snippet tax. Speaking on Austrian television, Döpfner made a rather remarkable claim:

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France's government will likely be following Germany's into the halls of speech regulation infamy. Germany's new "hate speech" law backed 24-hour removal demands with hefty fines to ensure social media platform compliance. This has prompted proactive enforcement by Twitter and Facebook, resulting the removal of content that doesn't violate the law, along with the removal of satire's life support.The French government is already eyeballing a carbon copy of this hate speech law. But it's willing to do Germany one better: it wants to regulate "fake news." This push comes from new president Emmanuel Macron, who's decided to make his personal beef with fake news a public concern. A false story about offshore accounts owned by Macron made its way around the internet during his presidential campaign, prompting him to declare war on "fake news" if he was elected.He's been elected, and now appears to be abandoning the base that thought he would be less radical and more reasonable than many of his opponents.

So we've been noting how (thanks to FOIA requests) the FCC has been caught completely making up a DDOS attack in a bizarre, ham-fisted attempt to downplay public opposition to their net neutrality repeal. In short, agency e-mails confirm agency staffers routinely fed false claims to gullible reporters that the FCC website outages caused by John Oliver's coverage of the repeal were the result of a malicious attack, then used those false claims to further prop up the bogus narrative. The goal was apparently to try and downplay massive public backlash to what Americans overwhelmingly believe to be shitty, corruption-fueled policy.Not too surprisingly, the FCC has gone radio silent in response to press inquiries on this from numerous press outlets. For such a normally chatty agency, that suggests that FCC lawyers are well aware that this entire fracas could prove to be legally problematic, given the repeated false DDOS claims to the reporters, press, and public (pdf). Most of the e-mails provided so far via FOIA requests are heavily redacted, suggesting there's likely much more to this story that's going to emerge over time.Meanwhile, Senators Brian Schatz and Ron Wyden this week pressed the issue, sending the FCC a letter demanding more insight into the DDOS attack that never was. In the letter, the duo ask for any and all FCC evidence on the phantom attack, and the results of any internal FCC investigations that may have occurred so far:

A bad idea that continues to persist is a favorite of many government officials. The problem with the internet is anonymity, according to them. Wouldn't we all be better off if we were forced to identify ourselves before using social media platforms? The theory is people won't say mean, stupid, or regrettable things if their posts and comments are linked to their real names. Several years of Facebook-only commenting systems has proven this wrong.And yet the idea continues to be pushed by European politicians and DHS officials. The latest to call for an internet drivers license is UK security minister Ben Wallace. His theory is the use of real names and verifiable info will inflict mass civility on the internet, which is currently home to roving bands of ruffians and Wild West content. [Paywall ahead.] [Alternate link to article provided by Alec Muffet, who has helpfully taken a screenshot of the print edition.]

The FBI may have overplayed its hand in the encryption game, but that doesn't mean someone further down the legislative food chain won't suffer from a sudden burst of enthusiasm for destroying encryption in the wake of a local tragedy. The same DC legislators looking to prevent federal legislation mandating encryption backdoors is taking the fight to the state level. Or, rather, looking to disqualify legislative contestants before they even enter the ring.

AT&T has defeated the DOJ in a court battle over whether or not the company will be allowed to acquire Time Warner for $86 billion.In a ruling (pdf), U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon stated that the government failed to make its case that the merger would harm AT&T's competitors, most of which are now trying to keep pace in the streaming video space. Consumer advocates have routinely warned that AT&T will use its greater leverage to make must-have content (like Time Warner owned CNN or HBO) significantly more costly for companies hoping to compete with AT&T's own TV services, including its newish streaming video effort, DirecTV Now.That a company with a thirty-year history of anti-competitive behavior will likely use this greater leverage to behave badly shouldn't have been a particularly hard case to make, suggesting that DOJ lawyers may have flubbed key components of its case. The DOJ sued to thwart the deal last November, and while the agency claimed it was to protect consumers, the incongruity with other Trump administration consumer policies (like, well, everything) have fueled speculation that Trump's disdain for Time Warner owned CNN, or his close relationship with Rupert Murdoch may have colored the DOJ's decision to sue.It's an indisputable and massive win for AT&T, and the DOJ's first antitrust court loss since 2004. Leon didn't just kill the lawsuit, he didn't offer any conditions to mitigate potential anti-competitive problems, and largely urged the DOJ not to appeal. AT&T, as you might expect, was thrilled with the court's failure to block its latest megamerger:

The latest entrant on the decentralized transportation scene is the suddenly-ubiquitous electric scooters that are taking over San Francisco and other cities. Their appearance has triggered the inevitable controversy, with some saying they are ruining cities while others laud their convenience for urbanites. And, of course, a regulatory battle wasn't far behind. On this week's episode, we discuss the e-scooter trend and its many pros and cons.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.

It's that time of year when kids are graduating from high school, and the age old tradition of the valedictorian speech is happening all around the country. While exciting for the kids, families and other students, these kinds of speeches are generally pretty quickly forgotten and certainly tend not to make the national news. However, in nearby Petaluma, California, something different is happening, all because a bunch of spineless school administration officials freaked out that the valedictorian, Lulabel Seitz, wanted to discuss sexual assault. During her speech, the school cut her mic when she started talking about that issue (right after talking about how the whole community had worked together and fought through lots of adversity, including the local fires that ravaged the area a few months back). Seitz has since posted the video of both her mic being cut off and then with her being filmed giving the entire speech directly to a camera.And, of course, now that speech -- and the spineless jackasses who cut the mic -- are getting national news coverage. The story of her speech and the mic being cut has been on NPR, CBS, ABC, CNN, Time, the NY Post, the Washington Post and many, many more.In the ABC story, she explains that they told her she wasn't allowed to "go off script" (even pulling out of a final exam to tell her they heard rumors she was going to go off speech and that she wasn't allowed to say anything negative about the school) and that's why the mic was cut, even as the school didn't know what she was going to say. She also notes -- correctly -- that it was a pretty scary thing for her to continue to go through with the speech she wanted to give, despite being warned (for what it's worth, decades ago, when I was in high school, I ended up in two slightly similar situations, with the administration demanding I edit things I was presenting -- in one case I caved and in one I didn't -- and to this day I regret caving). Indeed, she deserves incredible kudos for still agreeing to give her speech, and it's great to see the Streisand Effect make so many more people aware of (1) her speech and (2) what a bunch of awful people the administrators at her school are for shutting her speech down.As for the various administrators, their defense of this action is ridiculous. They're quoted in a few places, but let's take the one from the Washington Post:

As readers here will already know, the GDPR is now in full swing in Europe, with all of its crippling and stupid regulation in the name of personal privacy. It's a hilariously overly broad law that has had the happy coincidental effect of forcing companies that store personal data to at least be more upfront about how they are using that data. This effect has caused some to embrace the GDPR as wholly good, which is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw. Instead, the GDPR swings way too far in the direction of users controlling their personal data mostly by reaching way too far and keeping its language as vague and broad as possible, something that is already causing chaos in the digital marketplace.And, yet, it cannot be ignored that the revelations of just how users' data are being abused by some bad actors keep coming. The latest of these concerns the mobile app for La Liga, Spain's most popular soccer league. La Liga recently revealed, having its hand forced by the GDPR, that users of its mobile app were unwittingly part of La Liga's spy network for uncovering unauthorized broadcasts of soccer matches at public venues.

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On Friday, I wrote about all of the many problems with the link tax part of the proposed EU copyright directive -- but that's only part of the problem. The other major concern is around mandatory upload filters. As we discussed with Julia Reda during last week's podcast, the upload filters may be even more nefarious. Even the BBC has stepped up with an article about how it could put an end to memes. While that might be a bit of an exaggeration, it's only just a bit exaggerated. Despite the fact that the E-Commerce Directive already makes it clear that platforms should not be liable for content placed on their platforms by users absent any notice and that there can be no "general monitoring" obligation, the proposal for Article 13 would require that all sites have a way to block copyright-covered content from being uploaded without permission of the copyright holder.As per usual, this appears to have been written by those who have little understanding of how the internet itself works, or how this will impact a whole wide variety of services. Indeed, there's almost nothing that makes any sense about it at all. Even if you argue that it's designed to target the big platforms -- the Googles and Facebooks of the world -- it makes no sense. Both Google and Facebook already implement expensive filtering systems because they decided it was good for their business to do so at their scale. And even if you argue that it makes sense for platforms like YouTube to put in place filters, it doesn't take into account many factors about what copyright covers, and the sheer impossibility of making filters that work across everything.How would a site like Instagram create a working filter? Could it catch direct 100% copies? Sure, probably. But what if you post a photo to Instagram of someone standing in a room that has a copyright-covered photograph or painting on the wall? Does that need to be blocked? What about a platform like Github where tons of code is posted? Is Github responsible for managing every bit of copyright-covered code and making sure no one copies any of it? What about sites that aren't directly about the content, but which involve copyright-covered content, such as Tinder. Many of the photos of people on Tinder are covered by copyright, often held by a photographer, rather than the uploader. Will Tinder need to put in place a filter that blocks all of those uploads? Who will that be helping exactly? How about a blog like ours? Are we going to be responsible to make sure no one posts a copyright-covered quote in the comments? How are we to design and build a database of all copyright-covered content to block such uploads (and won't such a database potentially create an even larger copyright question in the first place)? What about a site like Airbnb? What if a photo of a home on Airbnb includes copyright-covered content in the background? Kickstarter? Patreon? I'm not sure how either service (which, we should remind you, both help artists get paid) can really function if this becomes law. Would they need a filter to block creators from uploading their own works?And that leaves out even more fundamental questions about how do filters handle things like fair use? Or parody? To date, they don't. Now making such filters mandatory even for smaller sites would be a complete and total disaster for how the internet works.This is why it is not hyperbolic at all to suggest that this change to how the EU looks at copyright could have a massive consequence on how the internet functions. At the very least, it is likely to limit the places where users can participate, because that will price out tons of services. It takes the internet far, far away from its core as a communications platform and moves it more and more towards one that is broadcast only. Perhaps that's what the EU really wants, but at least the discussion should be honest on that point. So far, it is not. The debate goes over the usual grounds, claiming that copyright holders are somehow being ripped off by the internet -- though that is stated without evidence. If the EU wants to fundamentally change how the internet works, it should at least justify those changes with something real and be willing to explain why those changes are acceptable. To date, that has not happened.Internet companies are trying to speak out about this, but many are so busy fighting other fires -- such as the net neutrality repeal here in the US -- that it's difficult to run over to Europe to point out just how moronic this is. Automattic (the people who do Wordpress) have put out a big statement about the problems of this plan that is well worth reading:

We've discussed for a while how the FCC appears to have completely made up a DDOS attack in a bizarre effort to downplay the "John Oliver effect." You'll recall that both times the HBO Comedian did a bit on net neutrality (here's the first and the second), the resulting consumer outrage crashed the FCC website. And while the FCC tried to repeatedly conflate genuine consumer outrage with a malicious attack, they just as routinely failed to provide any hard evidence supporting their allegations, resulting in growing skepticism over whether the FCC was telling the truth.Last week, e-mails obtained via FOIA request revealed that yes, FCC staffers routinely misled journalists in order to prop up this flimsy narrative, apparently in the belief they could conflate consumer outrage with criminal activity. The motive? It was likely for the same reason the FCC refused to do anything about the identity theft and bogus comments we witnessed during the repeal's open comment period: they wanted to try and downplay the massive, bipartisan public opposition to what the lion's share of Americans thought was an idiotic, corruption-fueled repeal of popular consumer protections.Understandably with so much going on, the story floated semi-quietly under the cacophony of other national outrages. But the FCC's response to the story has proven to be somewhat comical all the same.One of the FCC staffers accused of making false statements about the DDOS attack was recently departed FCC IT chief David Bray. Original reports stated that Bray and other staffers had been feeding this flimsy DDOS narrative to gullible reporters for years, then pointing to these inaccurate stories as "proof" the nonexistent attack occurred. Under fire in the wake of last week's report, Bray first doubled down on his claims, adding that the 2014 "attack" hadn't been publicized because former FCC boss Tom Wheeler covered it up. But Wheeler himself subsequently stated in a report late last week that this was unequivocally false:

We recently wrote how various parts of the EU governing bodies were in violation of the GDPR, to which they noted that the GDPR doesn't actually apply to them for "legal reasons." In most of the articles about this, however, EU officials were quick to explain that there would be new similar regulations that did apply to EU governing bodies. Jason Smith at the site Indivigital, who kicked off much of this discussion by discovering loads of personal info on people hosted on EU servers, has a new post up looking at the proposals to apply GDPR-like regulations on the EU governing bodies itself.There are two interesting points here. First, when this was initially proposed last year, the plan was to have it come into effect on the very same day as the GDPR went into effect: May 25, 2018, and that it was "essential" that the public understand that the EU itself was complying with the same rules as everyone else.

The New South Wales Police think they've figured out this whole drugs-and-music thing. To slow the entry of drugs (and drug users) to events where drugs (and drug users) might be found, they're going to station their most unreliable officers at the entrance and have them point out the people who should be forbidden from entering. From the NSW Police Facebook post:

A few weeks ago we, and others, filed an amicus brief in support of Airbnb and Homeaway at the Ninth Circuit. The basic point we made there is that Section 230 applies to all sorts of platforms hosting all sorts of user expression, including transactional content offering to rent or sell something, and local jurisdictions don't get to try to impose liability on them anyway just because they don't like the effects of those transactions. It's a point that is often forgotten in Section 230 litigation, and so last week the Copia Institute, joined by EFF, filed an amicus brief at the Wisconsin Supreme Court reminding them of the statute's broad application and why that breadth so important for the preservation of online free speech.The problem is that in Daniels v. Armslist, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals had ignored twenty-plus years of prior precedent affirming this principle in deciding otherwise. We therefore filed this brief to support Armslist in urging the Wisconsin Supreme Court to review the Court of Appeals decision.As in so many cases involving Section 230 the case in question followed an awful tragedy: someone barred from owning a gun bought one through the online marketplace run by Armslist and then shot his estranged partner. The partner's estate sued Armslist for negligence in having constructed a site where dangerous people could buy guns. As we acknowledged up front:

As you probably already knew, federal net neutrality rules finally die today after the FCC's unpopular repeal vote last December. And as you might expect, FCC boss Ajit Pai is making the rounds doing what he's done throughout this entire process: bullshitting the public about what his historically unpopular (and misleadingly-named) "Restoring Internet Freedom" order actually does. Over in a CNET editorial for example, Pai goes so far as to proclaim that gutting these extremely popular open internet protections will somehow make everything much, much, better:

If any state still has a criminal defamation law on the books (and there are more than you would think), it needs to get rid of it posthaste. Besides the obvious Constitutional implications, the laws act as lèse-majesté analogs wielded by powerful government officials to silence their critics.Criminal defamation laws have been abused multiple times by law enforcement officers and their public official friends. Louisiana public officials (and the law enforcement that willingly serves them) seem especially fond of deploying a law already declared unconstitutional to harass citizens who just won't stop complaining about the actions of their public officials.For whatever reason, New Hampshire still has a criminal defamation law on the books. It's only a misdemeanor but that's still plenty of hassle for those who've been targeted by vindictive cops. [h/t Adam Steinbaugh]