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When the GDPR was being debated, we warned that it would be a disaster for free speech. Now that it's been in effect for about six months, we're seeing that play out in all sorts of ways. We've talked about how it was used to disappear public court documents for an ongoing case, and then used to disappear a discussion about that disappearing court document. And we wrote about how it's been used against us to hide a still newsworthy story (and that leaves out one other GDPR demand we've received in an attempt to disappear a story that I can't even talk about yet).When I wrote about all of this both here on Techdirt and on Twitter, I had a bunch of "data protection experts" in Europe completely freak out at me that I had no idea what I was talking about, and how any negative impact was simply the result of everyone misreading the GDPR. I kept trying to point out to them that even if that's true in theory, out here in the real world, the law was being used to disappear news stories and was creating massive chilling effects and burdens on journalists. And the response was the same: nah, you're reading the law wrong.And now we have an even more horrifying story of the damage the GDPR is doing to journalism. There's a Romanian investigatory journalism publication called RISE Project that has reported on corruption in Romanian politics. Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy about that. OCCRP -- the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project -- a partner to RISE Project has the worrisome details about how the very Romanian government that RISE Project has been breaking corruption stories on has magically found the need to use the GDPR to demand the journalists turn over their sources.The full story is a bit complex, but in reporting on Liviu Dragnea, the president of the ruling party in Romania, RISE Project made some connections between Dragnea and a local Romanian company, Tel Drum SA, "currently involved in a massive scandal in Romania."

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is James Burkhardt responding to the idea that the EU Copyright Directive may not have blocked the Wonky Donkey viral sensation because "no one is required to enforce copyright":

Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, we learned more about the UK's GCHQ and its use of a packet injection attack to hack an internet exchange, garnering a combined response of "no comment but by the way that would be totally legal" from the agency. John McCain said in an interview that Keith Alexander should be fired (for the wrong reasons) then nonsensically denied the comments. And while the author of the PATRIOT act was telling the EU Parliament that the NSA is out of control, some people were looking at the agency's customer list and noticing that its denials of economic espionage were suspect at best.Meanwhile, this was also the week that the the TPP's IP chapter leaked for the first time, and it was as bad as expected (and even worse than ACTA). Law professors called on Obama to open up the TPP process while Congress was showing signs of being a bit more reluctant to grant fast track authority, and perhaps the most nefarious part of the chapter was its attempt to make copyright reform impossible.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, broadband providers were rolling out usage caps and patronizingly advertising the number of emails that could be sent under the limits, while the industry's apologists pushed the narrative that there was a growing bandwidth crunch (there wasn't). The EU was giving bogus excuses for keeping ACTA secret while another bad copyright deal, the Broadcasting Treaty, was apparently coming back from the dead again. China officially recognized the concept of internet addiction and it was quickly used as a defense in a murder trial. And the FBI's expensive crusade to catch the leakers of the Guns N' Roses album Chinese Democracy ended ignominiously with a blogger pleading guilty to a misdemeanor.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2003, as we marked the 20th anniversary of the computer virus, and internet advertising started recovering from an early collapse, it was beginning to look like a lot of '90s promises about the internet were beginning to arrive, just a little late. Not every offering was impressive, of course, such as Sprint's introduction of TV on mobile phones... at two framers per second. People were blaming Microsoft for the failure of one new product category that wouldn't take off until Apple stepped in several years later: tablet computers. But there was also a new, curious and exciting trend on the rise, referred to sometimes as "social software" and sometimes "social networking". As you know, it never really took off.

Just recently we wrote about why blockchain-based DRM was a terrible idea, and it could be summed up by the simple fact that a blockchain solves none of the "problems" of DRM today, and leverages none of the actual benefits of a blockchain. And... now I feel like writing basically the same exact post around blockchain voting. Like blockchain DRM, blockchain voting is one of those ideas that gets tossed around a lot. For decades, lots of people who actually understand computer security have explained why online voting is a horrifically bad idea in that it involves effectively unsolvable problems. It's not that it's a "hard" problem, it means that online voting is effectively impossible without massive changes to almost everything we do in ways that we can't really comprehend right now. There are some serious researchers who are thinking about this, but to date, there is nothing even remotely close to to being acceptable, and there may never be.And yet, the "simplest" way that some people understand the risks of online voting is basically "it would be bad if someone could change your vote and no one would know." That's an easy to understand point to make, but the problems with online voting go way, way beyond that. Do a simple Google search on why online voting is a terrible idea and you'll get dozens of on-point results, but if you want a nice, simple explanation of just the first pass of potential risks with online voting, check out this video from a couple years ago by Princeton professor Andrew Appel, who has been studying voting security for many, many years:It's 21 minutes, and if you're unsure of why internet voting is dangerous or think there's a simple solution, I'd urge you to watch it. But for those who don't, I'll just toss up one single slide from the presentation, which is not even remotely comprehensive in the list of potential problems with online voting:That doesn't even get at a number of other potential issues (some of which are discussed in the video). And yet -- as with blockchain-for-DRM -- there's always someone who thinks that the only real problem is the double spend problem. Enter Alex Tapscott and the NY Times. Alex Tapscott is the son of Don Tapscott, who has written a number of fairly influential books related to technology and innovation, including "Growing up Digital" and "Wikinomics." In 2016, he teamed up with his son, Alex, and wrote a book called "The Blockchain Revolution," which is a fun read (they sent me a copy), if a bit overly excited in its analysis of potential implementations of the blockchain. As I've said in the past, I'm a believer that blockchain/tokens can completely revolutionize a few areas of the internet, but people have yet to really figure out which areas can take advantage of what is unique about the blockchain (beyond highly volatile currencies).My favorite review of the book on its Amazon page includes this lovely sentence: "After the opening chapter, it turns into a rambling acid trip of delusional fantasies about exactly how blockchain will inevitably fix all the things wrong with society and the world."Anyway, along comes Alex Tapscott and on election day, the NY Times gave him precious space to spew utter nonsense about how it's time for online voting... via the blockchain.

We've obviously talked about the great deal of harm that a protectionist view of copyright can cause, both in terms of its ability to deny the public useful innovations and its use by the powerful to bully the weak. But one of the harms in protectionism and the ever-expanding culture of ownership that pervades modern life that is less talked about, possibly because it's somewhat obvious, is its sheer ability to bog down individuals in an absurdly lengthy legal process that seems to move at a pace purposefully calibrated to be as frustrating as possible.A great example of this is the copyright case Conan O'Brien is embroiled in still, all over accusations that he and his writing staff "stole" a handful of jokes from a freelance comedian, who has claimed copyright over them. We first wrote about this case in the first half of 2017, where a judge had greenlit all of this for a jury trial, but the lawsuit itself was actually filed back in 2015. And, incredibly, it's still going on. The clock is still running at three years, with the most recent news being that the court has refused to allow O'Brien's team two affirmative defenses based on the actions of the plaintiff.

By the time some qualified immunity cases hit the appellate level, there's an air of "why are we even discussing this" about them. But if there's even a 1% chance the next level of review might overturn a lower court ruling, the cases will addressed, no matter how obvious their conclusions.This is one of those cases. In this one, it's a police officer needing to hear one more time that the shit they pulled just isn't legal. It started with a parking ticket and ended with the ticketee being shot by a police officer. In between, there was a misunderstanding and an altercation. And, after this review, the odds are even lower that the officer is going to be able to talk a judge or jury into excusing his actions. Here's the backstory:Craig Strand, a truck driver, needed to take a mandatory drug screening. Since he was unable to fit his truck in the testing facility's parking lot, he obtained permission to park it at a nearby Planned Parenthood office. Officer Curtis Minchuk, who was providing security for Planned Parenthood while in uniform and with the blessing of his department, saw Strand's truck and left two parking tickets on its windshield.Strand returned to his truck and saw the tickets. He returned to the Planned Parenthood office to inquire about them and was directed to meet Officer Minchuk in the parking lot. Strand explained he had received permission to park there. This is where things went downhill for Strand, his rights, and his as-of-yet unwounded body.From the decision [PDF]:

Fifty years after the passage of the Freedom of Information Act, the letter of the law lives on but its spirit has been crushed. While it's definitely preferable to having no opportunity to demand government agencies hand over requested documents, it's not the significant improvement it was promised to be.As was noted here four years ago, the government has pretty much adopted a presumption of opacity that necessitates the filing of lawsuits. This contradicts the law's intentions, as well as proclamations made by President Obama, who declared his administration the "most transparent." This assertion fell flat when government agencies engaged in FOIA business as usual and Obama did nothing to hold them accountable.If you really want the government to turn over documents, you have two choices: lawyer up or add your pending FOIA requests to your will. That is the sad reality of the situation, as C.J. Ciaramella of Reason points out.

A Canadian politician is getting upset -- litigiously upset -- that people are characterizing him by the company he keeps. Parliament member Kerry Diotte's legal rep (Arthur Hamilton of Cassel Brock Lawyers) has sent takedown demands to a handful of Twitter users for calling him a racist.Bashir Mohamed was one such user. His tweet called Diotte a racist for "openly associating" with "white supremacists like Faith Goldy." Goldy was, until recently, a correspondent for the Breitbart-esque Rebel Media. Rebel Media is run by another pal of Diotte's, Ezra Levant, who has shown support for white nationalist groups like the one that headed up the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally that ended with a car being driven into the crowd by someone with white nationalist views.If anyone wants to questions Goldy's white nationalist association -- and by extension, Diotte's tacit approval of her ideals -- here's Goldy in her own words and actions.

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A couple of years ago, we first discussed how Nintendo, long-time maximalists on intellectual property concerns, decided to open up a new front against ROM sites. What at first looked like it might be something of a surgical strike mission-creeped this past summer into a full war on ROM sites generally, with Nintendo using a buckshot lawsuit approach. Many sites simply voluntarily shut down, sweeping away decades of video game history to be once again locked up by Nintendo, while others stared down the company's legal guns. All this, of course, as Nintendo was showing how silly this all is given the insane performance of its Nintendo retro consoles.Well, it looks like the output of this effort is going to be Nintendo playing games with at least one of these suits, getting a settlement that nobody thinks it's actually going to pursue in full just to have a multi-million dollar number to threaten other sites with. The husband and wife operators of LoveROMS.com have agreed to a $12 million settlement they can't pay, and likely won't have to, to have Nintendo call off its dogs.

You'd be hard pressed to find a bigger enemy of consumer safeguards than the fine folks at AT&T. The company has a history of all manner of anti-competitive behavior, from making its bills harder to understand to help scammers rip off its customers, to routinely ripping off programs designed to help everyone from the hearing imparied to the poor. AT&T also of course played a starring role in killing both the FCC's 2010 and 2015 net neutrality rules, and pretty much all meaningful state and federal efforts to protect broadband and wireless user privacy.Yet like clockwork, company executives like to pretend that despite this, they really love net neutrality, privacy, and healthy regulatory oversight. Case in point: AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson attended a conference this week where he once again proclaimed that AT&T really wants Congress to pass meaningful new net neutrality and privacy laws — something the press, as it loves to do, was quick to repeat entirely unskeptically without any necessary context:

One of the key talking points for supporters of Article 13 in the EU Copyright Directive is to absolutely deny that it requires mandatory upload filters. Of course, as soon as you ask them how an internet platform could possibly abide by the rules of Article 13 without implementing mandatory upload filters, they suddenly change the conversation. Usually to something about how YouTube is ripping off all musicians. This is... weird. First of all, YouTube already has its giant upload filter in the form of ContentID. Second, if they can't tell you how it doesn't require upload filters, then... it requires upload filters.As the trilogue negotiations continue between the EU Council, the EU Commission and the EU Parliament, the Council has apparently decided to drop the pretense and is now explicitly demanding mandatory upload filters. The newly proposed language says that any site is liable for all infringement committed by their users unless they block any infringing works they've been informed about from ever appearing on their sites again. It's a "notice and stay down" requirement -- which has all sorts of problems. First of all, this assumes that every use of the same work is equally infringing. It does not take into account that one use may be infringing, while another may be fair use or fair dealing. Second, it requires incredibly expensive technology. ContentID already cost Google over $100 million... and it's not very good. Tons of stuff still gets through. So now, basically, any successful smaller platform would have to spend ridiculous sums of money to implement a useless filter that won't work... and when things slip through, they're still liable for massive damages.And, notice what's missing? What happens if these filters take down content they should not? This happens all the time. But here, of course, there is no punishment for false notifications or for mistakes. While the Council tries to get around this by saying the rules "shall not affect legitimate uses, such as uses under exceptions and limitations," that's entirely meaningless. How the hell do you train a filter to understand parody? Or fair use? Or any other limitation or exception? Google has spent $100 million on its system and it has no clue how to determine fair use.The link above to Julia Reda's site has more info on the current state of the negotiations, but suffice it to say that this still appears to be an utter disaster for the internet, as you have people who have no understanding at all how the internet works, passing sweeping regulations that will have massive consequences for speech online.

A few months back, the Orange County Sheriff's Department admitted it had been listening in on privileged conversations. Calls from inmates to lawyers were being swept up along with everything else by service provider Global Tel Link. This violation of state law (among other things) jeopardized dozens of prosecutions. In all, GTL's so-called "technical error" resulted in the interception of more than 1,000 privileged calls.The Sheriff's Department claimed it told GTL to fix the problem, but didn't appear to have been terribly bothered by this evidentiary windfall... some of which made its way into the hands of prosecutors. It made several disappointed noises about its provider when confronted in court, but its quasi-proactive "knock it off" -- directed towards GTL -- didn't explain its lack of proactivity when it came to informing criminal defendants and their legal reps their cases may have been compromised by attorney-client privilege violations.This was only the tip of the iceberg. The OC Register reports there's been an exponential increase in the number of privileged calls trapped by this "technical error." (h/t Matt Ferner)

So, we were just talking about how Denuvo's new ownership, Irdeto, was busily making the case via the example of some unnamed AAA sports game that even when Denuvo DRM is cracked in a few days it's still worth it to protect a game's initial release window. The comments from Irdeto got so ridiculous that it claimed that even if Denuvo kept titles safe for a few hours, that was still worth it. As specious as this claim might be, it's also formulated to be hard to argue with. After all, with this low of a bar, all Irdeto's Denuvo has to do is barely work for any measurable amount of time before the release of game in order for Irdeto to claim victory. So how can it possibly fail?Well, how about if a game's Denuvo protection is defeated before the game gets released?

For years, smaller cable companies have complained that giants like Comcast do everything in their power to make life miserable (and expensive) for them. These smaller providers have complained that Comcast often mandates they buy and include NBC channels and regional sports networks in their lineups, driving up costs. Many of these companies have considered getting out of the TV business entirely as their margins get tighter and they find themselves increasingly out-maneuvered by ever-growing, vertically-integrated media, telecom, and broadcast giants like Comcast and AT&T.This week, the American Cable Association, a coalition of around 700 mid-sized and small cable providers, simply issued yet another request to the DOJ to, you know, actually maybe do something about Comcast's growing monopoly power:

So by now most people have probably read the New York Times deep dive into what can only be described as Facebook's deep well of internal dysfunction and self delusion. While there's a lot of interesting bits in the piece, one portion that received some extra, justified hyperventilation was the revelation of Facebook's use of smear merchants. Smear merchants that the Times notes Facebook employed to try and discredit those pointing out that Facebook's privacy practices have generally been hot garbage:

For quite some time now, when discussing how the various giant platforms should manage the nearly impossible challenges of content moderation, one argument I've fallen back on again and again is that they need to provide real due process. This is because, while there are all sorts of concerns about content moderation, the number of false positives that lead to "good" content being taken down is staggering. Lots of people like to point and laugh at these, but any serious understanding of content moderation at scale has to recognize that when you need to process many many thousands of requests per day, often involving complex or nuanced issues, many, many mistakes are going to be made. And thus, you need a clear and transparent process that enables review.A bunch of public interest groups (including EFF) have now sent an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, requesting that Facebook significantly change its content removal appeal process, to be much clearer and much more accountable. The request first covers how clear the notice should be concerning what content caused the restriction and why:

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I had missed this story from a couple months back, but reader Kris kindly alerted me to it. It's the story of how a video of a grandmother in Scotland reading a mostly out-of-print children's book to her grandson, and laughing uncontrollably about the book, went viral and turned the book into a total best seller around the world. First, you need to watch the video:It has over a million and a half views on YouTube, and apparently a huge number on Facebook as well. The book's author, Craig Smith from New Zealand appears to be ecstatic about all of this (as he should be!):

Last month we pointed to research out of Northeastern University that showed U.S. wireless video performance was thoroughly mediocre thanks in large part to arbitrary carrier throttling. The study, spearheaded by researcher David Choffnes, found that this carrier throttling usually had absolutely nothing to do with congestion. Instead, much of it was driven by carriers trying to impose arbitrary limits on your connection, then charge you more money to avoid it. For example, Verizon now throttles all video on its "unlimited" wireless data connections to 480p (around 1.5 Mbps), unless you pay Verizon for a more expensive plan.Choffnes is tracking ISP network management by using crowdsourced data from his Wehe app. More recently Choffnes released an updated report that continues to show that carriers arbitrarily throttle video and select apps. But his report and data also found that Sprint (and its prepaid subsidiary Boost Mobile) routinely throttles Skype performance on its networks... without telling consumers about it. The throttling was discovered in 34 percent of 1,968 full tests run between January 18 and October 15 of this year, note the researchers:

Things will get a little less crooked in part of Alabama in the near future. Sheriffs will no longer be able be able to personally benefit from federal funds meant to feed the state's prisoners.More than one sheriff in the state had been caught starving prisoners while picking up nice things for themselves with the leftover money. Weirdly, this is all legal under state law, which allows personal use of unused food funds by sheriffs running the state's jails.Three consecutive sheriffs in Morgan County found themselves in legal trouble for taking advantage of state law. One was hit with a consent decree forbidding county sheriffs from taking home food funds. The next two sheriffs decided to ignore this legal agreement, with one of them earning the nickname "Sheriff Corndog" from his underfed prisoners. The third in line -- continuing a 16-year tradition of ignoring the 2001 consent decree -- raised the bar on county sheriff legal troubles by giving $160,000 in federal food funds to a corrupt car dealership run by a former felon.A sheriff in Etowah County also brought down the heat on himself by taking home $250,000 a year in federal food funds that were supposed to be used to feed inmates. The $750,000 that managed to be accounted for is likely only a small part of the sheriff's total take. According to public records, Sheriff Todd Entrekin managed to acquire $1.7 million in property while officially taking home a $93,000 salary.In Cullman County, this loopholicious law has been closed. As Zuri Davis of Reason reports, voters have decided one local sheriff won't be making himself richer at the expense of the inmates he oversees. Strangely enough, this amendment -- which passed with 88% of the vote -- had the support of the local sheriff.

Visit DontWreckThe.Net to learn about the EU Copyright Directive »As you'll recall, back in September, the EU Parliament voted to approve a draft of the EU Copyright Directive, despite it including a bunch of very problematic pieces -- mainly Article 13's mandatory filters and Article 11's snippet tax. What the EU Parliament approved was not the same as what the EU Council of member states had approved, nor what the EU Commission had approved, so now those three bodies have been working on a "trilogue" process to sync up the various versions and come up with a master version that will have to be approved again by all three institutions. There has been a lot of activity in the past few weeks -- and Italy's change of government has made things a bit interesting.As the Trilogue discussions have continued, we've teamed up with a bunch of platforms and startup organizations both in the EU and the US to make some suggestions. It would probably be best for the internet to drop both Article 11 and Article 13 altogether, but barring that, we have a pretty detailed list of suggestions over at DontWreckThe.Net. As you hopefully see, just by looking at the long list of fixes we're requesting, there are still huge problems with the proposals. Furthermore, given that many of the platforms we've partnered with in developing this list are the ones who will be hardest hit, we're hopeful that the various officials debating this will take notice. Even more important: this is not just about those platforms, but everyone who uses them. If you use Reddit or Patreon or Vimeo, these rules are going to have a massive impact on how you'll be able to interact with the internet going forward. Also, we're asking other organizations to join this project, so if you run an organization that is worried about the impact of Articles 11 or 13, please reach out to us through the site.And please, EU officials, don't wreck the net.

Those of you who geek out over trademark law like me may have seen the recent dust-up between UCLA and a group called National Students for Justice in Palestine this past week. I had intended on writing something up about the whole thing because of how blatantly stupid it was. The pro-Palestinian group has a chapter at UCLA and it is hosting a conference in the future, for which it put out some promotional materials that feature a bear flying a kite with the colors of the Palestinian flag and dared to mention that the conference was being held at UCLA. For this, UCLA lawyers sent a cease and desist to SJP, claiming that the way the promo material displayed the UCLA name and its use of bear imagery created confusion in the public suggesting that the school was affiliated with the conference.

For years we've discussed how ISPs like Comcast have spent millions of dollars quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in 21 states. Said laws either ban or significantly hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks, or in some cases from even engaging in public/private partnerships. It's a scenario where ISPs get to have their cake and eat it too; they often refuse to upgrade their networks in under-served areas (particularly true among telcos offering DSL), but also get to write shitty laws preventing these under-served towns from doing anything about it.This dance of dysfunction has been particularly interesting in Colorado, however. While lobbyists for Comcast and CenturyLink managed to convince state leaders to pass such a law (SB 152) in 2005, the legislation contains a provision that lets individual Colorado towns and cities ignore the measure with a simple referendum, something telecom lobbyists have certainly come to regret. Not surprisingly, with frustration mounting over sub-standard broadband and awful customer service, more than a hundred Colorado cities have voted to exempt themselves from the state law over the last few years.That happened again during the recent midterm elections, when eighteen additional communities voted to opt out of the restrictive, protectionist law. According to the Institute For Local Self Reliance (which helps communities help themselves to improve local connectivity) the votes weren't even close in most of these towns and cities, with voter approval rates like 73%, 80%, and 90%. With this week's votes, the group notes that more than 60% of Colorado communities have taken back their rights to make their own decisions on infrastructure for themselves:

While much of the attention around French President Emmanuel Macron's speech at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) on Monday was focused on the so-called "Paris Call" agreement on cybersecurity, it was also an occasion for the French President to announce a plan to effectively embed regulators with Facebook to learn how to better censor the platform:

New Hampshire investigators will be deposing Alexa in the near future, according to a recent court ruling. The advent of in-home digital, voice-activated assistants has created a wealth of personal recordings law enforcement may now have access to. It's only been a couple of years since we first saw law enforcement attempt to obtain Alexa recordings from Amazon, but as Mike pointed out then, this was going to be the new normal. So the onus is on companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon to give customers more direct control of stored data and recordings.In this case, prosecutors are seeking recordings made by a murder victim's Amazon Echo speaker. They hope the victim's device captured the attack and the removal of her body. Amazon has issued some boilerplate about "valid legal demands" in response, but it's likely the company won't interject itself into this case.The key here -- unlike other cases we've discussed -- is that the device belongs to a crime victim, rather than the person who allegedly committed the crime. The short court order [PDF] from the New Hampshire court makes it clear no one but the prosecution is invited to this evidence-gathering party:

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Let's put some cards on the table to start off this post: I think Andrew Cuomo is a terrible governor of NY (and he was a terrible Attorney General before that), and doesn't deserve to be in office. I also think the NRA is a joke of an organization, that stirs up bullshit fear and racial divisions, and frequently shits on the 1st Amendment plenty of times when people try to challenge the 2nd Amendment. I recognize that some percentage of you probably feel differently about Cuomo and (chances are...) a non-overlapping venn diagram of you probably feel differently about the NRA. I think they're both terrible and should disappear from public life. And I say that upfront because my position on this particular lawsuit has nothing to do with which side I "like." I don't like either one.But on the law in this particular case, clearly the NRA is in the right, while Cuomo is wrong. And thankfully, so far a judge agrees.Let's take a step back, though, to look at what's happening. Cuomo is no fan of the NRA. And he decided to use his position as governor to punish the NRA for its advocacy. Back in April, he put pressure on banks and other financial institutions to cut all ties with the NRA. It's kind of incredible that he would think this would fly. Indeed, the situation is pretty damn close to that time that Cook County (Illinois) Sheriff Thomas Dart pressured credit card companies to stop doing business with Backpage, leading to a pretty massive judicial smackdown from Judge Richard Posner.

When the Trump DOJ sued to stop AT&T's $89 billion merger with Time Warner last year, more than a few eyebrows were raised. After all, the DOJ's antitrust suit, allegedly a bid to protect consumers, came as other arms of the Trump administration were busy utterly dismantling a wide variety of popular consumer protections (like net neutrality) at the direct request of industry. It raised the question: why suddenly care about consumer protection and antitrust power when you've shown absolutely no general concern for those concepts previously?As a result, there's always been a lingering question as to whether Trump's obvious disdain for Time Warner owned CNN was driving a petty bid for vengeance. Others wondered if the DOJ's lawsuit was a personal favor to Trump ally Rupert Murdoch, who had tried unsuccessfully to buy CNN from AT&T at least twice, and had spent much of 2017 lobbying Trump to scuttle the deal as a competitive favor to his Fox empire.With a shakeup in the House, those questions could soon again be making headlines. Incoming House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff told Axios last weekend that one of the numerous things the new House leadership will investigate is whether the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit against AT&T was political:

As you've probably heard by now, last week there was a bit of a scuff up in which the President in his standard manner got irritable and annoyed when CNN's Jim Acosta kept asking questions the President didn't feel like answering. This has resulted in a bunch of nonsense involving everyone trying to justify their own side's talking points -- but the simple fact of the matter is that it's a journalist's job to ask tough questions of politicians. There was a made up controversy involving claims that Acosta "assaulted" an intern who sought to take away his microphone, and the White House supported it with video evidence that some have claimed was doctored, while others have noted just happened (coincidentally) to have been re-encoded in a way that made Acosta's hand motions look more menacing than they really were. Either way, the end result was that the White House removed Acosta's press pass, claiming it was because of what happened with the intern, when literally everyone knows it was because of his questioning (if you want to honestly argue that it was because of the intern, go away).On Tuesday, CNN announced that it had filed a lawsuit against the White House over the removal of the press pass, arguing that it violated both 1st Amendment and 5th Amendment rights. CNN and Acosta are represented by Ted Boutrous and Ted Olson (along with some other Gibson, Dunn lawyers) which is some serious firepower as they're two of the most high profile lawyers out there. Olson, a former Solicitor General during the George W. Bush administration, was rumored earlier this year to be considering joining Trump's legal team, before declining. And now he's suing Trump's White House.The filing is only 18 pages and makes for fairly quick reading. The 1st Amendment claims are basically this:

As you may recall, the Boy Scouts of America decided late last year to -- finally -- allow girls to join their ranks. It was a widely praised decision that was long overdue, with the organization's mission statement not calling for any kind of gender exclusivity. You may also recall that the BSA has some history of being on the wrong side of intellectual property concerns and even has a special law created just for the BSA to allow it to be trademark bullies. These two seemingly unrelated worlds have now collided, with the BSA being sued by the Girl scouts of America over trademark concerns.

On Monday, a bunch of countries and companies officially announced and signed "The Paris Call," or more officially, "the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace." It's getting a fair bit of press coverage, with a lot of that coverage playing up the decision of the US not to sign the agreement, even as all of the EU countries and most of the major tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Cisco and many many more signed on.But, most of those news stories don't actually explain what's in the agreement, beyond vague hand-waving around "creating international norms" concerning "cyberspace." And the reports have been all over the place. Some talk about preventing election hacking while others talk about fighting both "online censorship and hate speech." Of course, that's fascinating, because most of the ways that countries (especially in the EU) have gone about fighting "hate speech" is through outright censorship. So I'm not quite sure how they propose to fight both of those at the same time...Indeed, if the Paris Call really did require such silly contradictory things it would be good not to sign it. But, the reality is that it's good not to sign it because it appears to be a mostly meaningless document of fluff. You can read the whole thing here, where it seems to just include a bunch of silly platitudes that most people already agree with and mean next to nothing. For example:

By now, there's a good chance you've received an invitation to join Initiative Q, and also a good chance that you took one look at it and thought "wow, this seems extremely sketchy." And indeed, there's little reason (other than hopefulness) to see the strange new proposed payment system as anything but a pyramid scheme. But it's got people talking, thanks in no small part to its viral marketing scheme, so this week's episode is all about trying to figure out just what Initiative Q really is.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.

We've already explained why we think Google is making exactly the wrong move in experimenting with a government-approved censored search engine in China, called Dragonfly. However, the company continues to move forward with this idea. CEO Sundar Pichai gave an interview with the NY Times, in which he defends this move by... arguing it's the equivalent of the "Right to Be Forgotten" in the EU, with which Google is required to comply:

Because nothing motivates stupid legislative activity better than a tragedy, various officials are moving forward with dubious activities in the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. In the state of New York, a couple of politicians have just announced a Constitutional violation two-fer, offering to separate residents from their Second Amendment rights by using their First Amendment rights against them.

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Here's one you don't see everyday. The RIAA is telling a court that it needs to be careful about too much copyright protection. Really. This is in the lawsuit over "Stairway to Heaven" that we've been covering for a while now. As we noted, the 9th Circuit brought the case back to life after what had appeared to be a good result, saying that Led Zeppelin's "Stairway" did not infringe on the copyright in the Spirit song "Taurus." While we were a bit nervous about the case being reopened after a good result, as copyright lawyer Rick Sanders explained in a pair of excellent guest posts, there were good reasons to revisit the case -- in part to fix the 9th Circuit's weird framework for determining if a song has infringed, and in part to fix some bad jury instructions.As with the Blurred Lines case, I've been curious how the RIAA and various musicians would come down on these cases. After all, I can imagine how they could easily end up on either side of such a case. Lots of musicians take inspiration from other musicians (it's actually kind of an important way for most musicians to develop), and if that's seen as infringing, that seems like it should be a huge problem. But, of course, to make that argument would require the RIAA to actually admit that copyright can go too far.And... that's actually what it's done. The RIAA and the NMPA (National Music Publisher's Association, which historically is just as bad as the RIAA on many of these issues) actually had famed law professor Eugene Volokh write an interesting amicus curiae brief in support of the 9th Circuit rehearing the case en banc (with a full panel of 11 judges, rather than just the usual 3). Hat tip to Law360's Bill Donahue, who first spotted this.Anyway, who among you ever expected the following in an RIAA brief:

You'll recall that one of the top reasons for killing popular net neutrality rules was that it had somehow killed broadband industry investment. Of course, a wide array of publicly-available data easily disproves this claim, but that didn't stop FCC boss Ajit Pai and ISPs from repeating it (and in some cases lying before Congress about it) anyway. We were told, more times that we could count, that with net neutrality dead, sector investment would spike.You'll be shocked to learn this purported boon in investment isn't happening.A few weeks ago, Verizon made it clear its CAPEX would be declining, and the company's deployment would see no impact despite billions in tax cuts and regulatory favors by the Trump FCC. Trump's "tax reform" alone netted Verizon an estimated $3.5 billion to $4 billion. A recent FCC policy order, purporting to speed up 5G wireless deployment (in part by eliminating local authority over negotiations with carriers), netted Verizon another estimated $2 billion. And that's before you even get to the potential revenue boost thanks to the repeal of net neutrality and elimination of broadband privacy rules.Ironically, Verizon's dip in CAPEX came right on the heels of the wireless industry and Ajit Pai, in perfectly coordinated unison, trying to claim that a CAPEX rise in 2017 was directly due to the repeal of net neutrality. They ignored an important point however: net neutrality wasn't even repealed until June of this year. If this endless roster of favors was to impact network investment, accelerate network deployment, and unleash a magical wave of "innovation," that should all be happening right now. And yet, the opposite is happening. And of course it's not just Verizon. AT&T and Sprint are also reducing overall CAPEX:

At the beginning of this year, we had a fairly long post about a dangerous situation brewing in the Philippines, where President Duterte was clearly trying to retaliate against one of his chief media critics, The Rappler, run by Maria Ressa. As I mentioned, I got to see Ressa speak at a conference last year, and the former CNN bureau chief is a force of nature who seems completely devoted to accurately reporting on President Duterte, no matter how much he dislikes it.When we wrote about Ressa and Rappler in January, it was over some trumped up charges concerning claims of "foreign ownership." That story is a bit complex, but in order to get a grant from the philanthropic Omidyar Network, Rappler sold what are known as Philippine Depository Receipts (or PDRs). PDRs do have value, which are tied to the value of shares in the company, but which don't grant any of the related ownership rights. And yet, Duterte and the Filipino SEC have been arguing that Rappler committed tax evasion by somehow "not reporting" the PDR's.Rappler notes that's a complete fabrication:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with an understandably frustrated call for better penalties when cops abuse their power such as the bogus case against a Nevada man recently dismissed by the courts:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, UK officials were going a bit nuts in response to the fallout from their detention of David Miranda, first arguing that he was, in fact, a terrorist, then that they didn't know he was a journalist, and then that the Snowden leaks would help pedophiles — leading us to wonder of the State Department would condemn their stifling of journalism (okay, not really wonder...)Stateside, Mike Rogers was claiming that more NSA transparency would hurt privacy, while also being opportunistically concerned about the privacy implications of the Affordable Care Act. The agency was positively comparing metadata searches to stop-and-frisk, and making a similar argument that curbing metadata protection would harm privacy. And of course the Inspector General was rejecting a request from Congress to investigate the agency, while the Senate Intelligence Committee advanced a bill to give the NSA more funding.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, while we were wondering why the MPAA gets to review and approve DVD players, the Copyright Alliance was fighting to outlaw remote DVRs. A UK ISP was threatening to disconnect anyone who has open wifi, the French Senate approved the three strikes law that would create the infamous Hadopi, and Italian authors were fighting for a piracy tax on DSL connections (while Italian officials were moving forward with criminal charges against Google executives over a user's video).Today, there's a lot of concern about issues with electronic voting machines and their poor security. Naturally, if people had known about this ten years ago, it would have been fixed by now. Oh, wait...Fifteen Years AgoBut certainly if we'd known about it all the way back in 2003, it'd definitely be fixed by now, right? It's not like we'd need advocacy groups and law clinics to fight to stop Diebold from C&D-ing people who talk about its security issues, right? Oh...Well anyway, also this week in 2003, we saw the first big record label merger of the 21st century, with Sony and BMG turning the Big Five into the Big Four. The RIAA was bragging about the success of its lawsuits based on dubious causality, while studies showed they were somewhat effective in making people delete MP3s and really, really hate the record industry.It was also around this time that the trend of making computers look cool started taking root beyond the world of Apple.

In Robert Jackson Bennett's critically-acclaimed new novel, Foundryside, a scrappy thief-cum-spy explores a world where items can be "scrived" to think for themselves and bend natural laws. The role scriving plays in this alternate reality is powerfully analogous to how software defines so many aspects of our own lives, and the four merchant houses that dominate Bennett's fictional society map closely to the tech monopolies that are accruing more and more power every day in the real world. In the following interview, we discuss the political consequences of technology and the power of imagination.***How does scriving extrapolate the social implications of the internet?The superficial comparisons to software and technology are fairly obvious in the story: magic functions as instructions, which must be carefully written by some very educated people in order to achieve amazing results — only instead of using pattern recognition to identify hidden, unrealized value in large datasets, the programmers in this world smash things together and blow stuff up. So, a bit more dramatic.Things are a bit more interesting when you start to consider how using this technology allows people to reshape reality, both directly and indirectly. This method grants certain kinds of people a great deal of power, which allows them to dictate how the world works — much like how the political and economic schemes of our world are increasingly viewed through the lens of the internet, in the world of Foundryside, everything is shaped by scriving. They cannot imagine living without it, and they can't imagine not using it to get what they want. It's just too easy to colonize and conquer.What can we learn about ourselves from the systemic problems illustrated in the book? How do we build a future that leverages the power of scriving without winding up in a merchant house oligarchy?I think technology and technologists trend toward moral agnosticism. There is a belief that the purpose or value of a technology will reveal itself after being exposed to the market - you make it available for sale, and people, being pretty smart, will use markets to figure out how to use it to produce the most value. In other words, the morality of a technology is often someone else's problem. It's not an engineering problem, in other words.But I think we're seeing now that markets make good servants but poor masters, and right now, technologists seem to believe markets are masters more than servants. Amazon wants to sell facial recognition software to ICE, Google wants to sell a censored search engine to China — these are all decisions that pencil out to make a great deal of money, but are morally bankrupt. If technology continues to develop in this sort of environment, then the world of yawning inequality and tyrannical merchant houses is inevitable.Foundryside is a story of revolution. What are the most misunderstood aspects of real world revolutions? If we want to empower ourselves to make a difference, what should we do and what should we pay attention to?Revolution is examined much more closely in the sequel, but I would say that it's important to realize that a revolution is not a singular event, but a violent series of tug-of-war that has actions and reactions. One can argue, for example, that the French Revolution lasted nearly a century, if not more, as various kinds of liberals seized power, only for various kinds of conservatives to pop up and take it back, practically right up until the First World War.I think we should view revolutions in terms of survival. You should ask: Which groups are the most threatened? Which threatened group has the most power to organize and respond? You fight a lot more when your future's on the line, and your fight makes a difference when you have the actual power to see it through. You can think of this in terms of the Clayton Christensen model of disruption, where disruptors are put into positions where they must disrupt in order to survive, or you can look at the Founding Fathers, who were almost exclusively upper class landholders and merchants — a critical reason why the American Revolution succeeded.If a group's survival is threatened, and if they have enough power to adequately fight back, then a revolution can take place. But if people are distracted or content or fractious, or if they're unable to organize and act, then either nothing will happen, or dissent will get quickly squashed. There are far, far, far more failed revolutions than successful ones.History is full of dead, failed heroes. We tend to forget that when we climb up on our metaphorical horses.The universe the story takes place in has the heft and texture of a fully-realized world that extends far beyond the confines of the novel. How did you build this world?I read a lot of history, and tried to draw from that rather than play to whimsy. I try to build my worlds so that each facet examines a central theme, however elliptically. Good worldbuilding feels organic, and it feels like there's a purpose to it — learning about the sort of ships the world uses tells you something about the world and the people, not just the ships.Even while it wrestles with big problems, the story is packed with intrigue and misadventures. How can "beach reads" that embrace the joy of pulp shed a unique light on important issues and ideas?A spoonful of medicine helps the medicine go down. I'm all about recontextualizing things we're dealing with today in terms that make us rethink them. Like, say, slavery — America has a lot of problems with its history with slavery. But if I make up a slave system for my secondary world, it's suddenly a lot easier for Americans to decide how they feel about slavery. I try to use fun and magical worldbuilding to sort of sneak through the backdoor into people's brains and plant ideas. I'd say it's subversion, but it's really not terribly subtle.What role does speculative fiction play in society? What do journeys of imagination offer us?Speculative fiction gives us the emotional distance to allow us to more dispassionately judge our ongoing moral conundrums. People paint self-portraits sometimes because they wish to distort their faces to see how much they can change and still remain "themselves." Speculative fiction is a literary version of that.What other books would fans of Foundryside enjoy? What books have changed the way you see the world and your place in it?I expressly avoided reading Brandon Sanderson as a writer, because I didn't want to subconsciously steal from him (in fact, I really read almost no fiction these days, for better or worse) but I am told that Foundryside has a lot in common with his works.***

The saga of antipiracy DRM company Denuvo is a long and tortured one, but the short version of it is that Denuvo was once a DRM thought to be unbeatable but which has since devolved into a DRM that cracking groups often beat on timelines measured in days if not hours. Denuvo pivoted at that point, moving on from boasting at the longevity of its protection to remarking that even this brief protection offered in the release windows of games made it worthwhile. Around the same time, security company Irdeto bought Denuvo and rolled its services into its offering.And Irdeto apparently wants to keep pushing the line about early release windows, but has managed to do so by simply citing some unnamed AAA sports game that it claims lost millions by being downloaded instead of using Denuvo to protect it for an unspecified amount of time.

We haven't written much about Qualcomm and Apple's all out nuclear war over patents, but a few recent developments suggest it's worth digging in and discussing. In some ways it sweeps in other companies (mainly Intel) and also involves the FTC and the ITC. I won't go through the entire history here because I'd still be writing this post into next year. Qualcomm is a pretty massive company and while it does produce some actual stuff, it has long acted quite similar to a patent troll. It has also vigorously opposed basically all patent reform efforts, while at the same time quietly funding a bunch of "think tanks" that go after anyone advocating for patent reform (I expect some fun comments to show up below).The reason Qualcomm acts this way is that it has long abused the patent system to jack up prices to ridiculous rates. And it's finally facing something of a reckoning on that. In early 2017, the FTC went after Qualcomm for abusing its patents -- notably: "using anticompetitive tactics to maintain its monopoly in the supply of a key semiconductor device used in cell phones and other consumer products." Specifically, the FTC alleged that Qualcomm, despite promises to the contrary to get its patents into important standards, was not following the FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) licensing of its patents, as required to have its inventions be a part of the standard. Just days later, Apple sued Qualcomm, also regarding Qualcomm's patent shakedown, claiming that Qualcomm had been massively overcharging Apple for the use of its patents, rather than licensing them on a FRAND basis.A few months later, Qualcomm sued Apple, claiming that it had been sharing Qualcomm's proprietary code with Intel. Apple had been using chips from both Qualcomm and Intel, but was in the process of dropping Qualcomm entirely. Qualcomm also launched multiple parallel proceedings at the ITC. As we've discussed for over a decade now, patent holders ridiculously get two shots at anyone they accuse of patent infringement (so long as the accused manufacturers its goods outside the US). The International Trade Commission (for reasons that make no sense) feels that it can judge on its own if patents have been infringed, and if so, it can block the further importation of the "infringing" good. That's the only remedy at the ITC, but it can have quite an impact, obviously, in blocking a product out of the US market. Incredibly, the ITC need not follow the same rules as a regular court and it can do its own analysis while a case is in federal court (which might rule entirely differently).So that's the history. Basically, Apple and Qualcomm are in an all out patent nuclear war, with the FTC and ITC involved around the edges. In the last few weeks, however, pretty much everything has been looking pretty bad for Qualcomm. While an administrative law judge at the ITC did find some infringement, he (somewhat surprisingly) announced that he would not recommend an import ban (again, this is the only remedy the ITC can offer). The full ITC needs to review this recommendation and make a final call. Tons of patent maximalists are screaming their heads off about how the ITC must start blocking iPhones, but as Judge Thomas Pender recognized, banning an entire product because it may have infringed on a single patent is ridiculous. In the language of the judge "the statutory public interest factors weigh against issuing a limited exclusion order as to products found to infringe patents asserted in this investigation." In other words, "grow up Qualcomm, this isn't such a big deal that you get to completely ban the product."And, now, the latest is that the FTC's case against Qualcomm went in the FTC's direction, with Judge Lucy Koh granting the FTC's motion for partial summary judgment and saying that Qualcomm was violating its FRAND promises. This isn't everything to do with the case, but does involve questions around whether or not Qualcomm can limit its licensing to just device makers, or if it also has to license its patents to other chipmakers, like Intel. And Koh points out that basically everyone recognizes that the FRAND agreement it made applies to everyone -- not just a limited subset of companies. Koh repeatedly highlights Qualcomm's own previous statements that support this.Furthermore, Koh points out that allowing Qualcomm to discriminate against chipmakers would hand the company a total monopoly, and that clearly goes against the concept behind the FRAND agreement to put the technology into the standard:

Kind of a key part of the American election setup is the concept of a secret ballot for hopefully obvious reasons. We haven't gone quite so far as eliminating that, but down in Georgia, Secretary of State Brian Kemp (who was running for governor at the same time as he was overseeing the integrity of the election and also putting in place a bunch of attempts at voter suppression) has doxxed hundreds of thousands (291,164 to be exact) of absentee voters by posting an Excel file on the state's website listing out the names, addresses and reasons why they voted absentee.In typical spokesperson Candice Broce fashion (see her previous nonsensical quotes defending her boss), Broce/Kemp denied that there's anything wrong with this at all. The systems, they are all working perfectly:

Because no one has passed legislation (federal or state) mandating encryption backdoors, Manhattan DA Cy Vance has to publish another anti-encryption report. An annual tradition dating back to 2014 -- the year Apple announced default encryption for devices -- the DA's "Smartphone Encryption and Public Safety" report [PDF] is full of the same old arguments about "lawful access" and evidence-free assertions about criminals winning the tech arms race. (h/t Riana Pfefferkorn)You'd think there would be some scaling back on the alarmism, what with the FBI finally admitting its locked device count had been the victim of software-based hyperinflation. (Five months later, we're still waiting for the FBI to update its number of locked devices.) But there isn't. Vance still presents encryption as an insurmountable problem, using mainly Apple's multiple patches of security holes cops also found useful as the leading indicator.The report is a little shorter this year but it does contain just enough stuff to be persuasive to those easily-persuaded by emotional appeals. Vance runs through a short list of awful crime solved by device access (child porn, assault) and another list of crimes unsolved (molestation, murder) designed to make people's hearts do all their thinking. While it's certainly true some horrible criminal acts will directly implicate device encryption, the fact of the matter is a majority of the locked phone-centric criminal acts are the type that won't make headlines or motivate lawmakers. More than a third of these cases involve minor crimes like theft and check kiting. Another 20% is comprised of "sex crimes," which encompasses prostitution -- a crime where law enforcement sometimes chooses to believe the device itself is an "instrument of crime," never mind what other evidence might be hidden inside it.So, more than half the crime involving locked phones isn't the sort of stuff that suggests encryption backdoors are the key to making New York City a safer place to reside. The stuff Vance throws in about unlocked devices producing exonerating evidence is a dodge. It's meant to show how granting law enforcement carte blanche access would be a net benefit for the public. But the examples given use stuff like cell site location info and social media app data -- things that could be obtained from third parties without having to go through the locked phone.Then there's the other part of this argument Vance leaves completely undiscussed: if someone's phone contains exonerating evidence, it's very likely they'll provide officers with this evidence voluntarily, either by unlocking the device or handing over the relevant info/files. Using the very small percentage of cases where exonerating evidence may be recovered from locked phones as an argument for mandated backdoors is incredibly disingenuous.And that's all this "report" is: a petition for federally-legislated encryption backdoors.

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So... the Satanic Temple is suing Netflix for $50 million for copyright infringement. Please insert your own joke here.To be honest, you would kind of hope that the Satanic Temple would, you know, maybe have a bit more excitement when filing federal cases, but this case is just... dumb. I'm almost wondering if it's just a sort of publicity stunt for both the Satanic Temple and the Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. The crux of the complaint is that the show features a Baphomet statue that they feel is too similar to their own Baphomet statue (which the Temple tries to get erected in front of courthouses who want to post the 10 Commandments). If you're thinking but isn't Baphomet "a historical deity which has a complex history, having been associated with accusations of devil worship against the Knight Templar," I'd agree with you and perhaps copy and paste that statement straight from the Satanic Temple's complaint. But... wouldn't that also likely mean that it had been around in a design form for many, many years, meaning most depictions are probably public domain? Yes, again. Hell, even the complaint itself explains this:

We've noted for years how kicking users offline for copyright infringement is a terrible idea for a myriad of reasons. Severing access to what many deem an essential utility is not only an over-reaction to copyright infringement, but a potential violation of free speech. As France quickly learned it's also a technical nightmare to implement. Most pirates hide their traffic behind proxies and VPNs, and even if you kick repeat offenders offline, you then need systems to somehow track them between ISPs. There's also the fact that entertainment industry accusations of guilt are often based on flimsy to nonexistent evidence.None of this is stopping AT&T, which this week quietly indicated they were going to start kicking some users off the internet for copyright infringement for the first time in the company's history.Axios was the first to break the story with a comically one-sided report that failed to raise a single concern about the practice of booting users offline for copyright infringement, nor cite any of the countless examples where such efforts haven't worked or have gone poorly. I talked a little to AT&T about its new plan, who confirmed to me that while they'd still been sending "graduated warnings" to users after the collapse of the "six strikes" initiative, this policy of actively kicking users offline is entirely new (coming right on the heels of the company's $89 billion acquisition of Time Warner).Though this doesn't make the idea any better, it's arguably difficult to get on AT&T's bad side under this new program. According to the company, users will need to ignore nine different warnings about copyright infringement before they lose access. AT&T repeatedly tried to make it clear that the actual users getting kicked offline (around a dozen to start) will be relatively minor.

There has been an unfortunate trend in far too many African nations in which governments there look at the internet as either a source of evil in their countries or purely as a source for tax revenue, or both. The end result in many cases is a speech tax of sorts being placed on citizens in these countries, with traffic being taxed, bloggers being forced to register with the federal government, and populations that could otherwise benefit from a free and open internet being essentially priced out of the benefit altogether.But things have taken a different and far worse turn in Tanzania, where the governor of the country's capital city, Dodoma, has announced his plan to round up anyone who is perceived as being gay on the internet and chucking them in prison.