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Big city budgets are hellaciously complicated affairs. That much is obvious, but the actual level of management of a budget likely goes far beyond what the average member of the public realizes. Even with that stipulated, the city of Chicago's budget is an absolute mess. Budget shortfalls abound for any number of reasons, ranging from bloated payrolls, to pet projects that have missed the mark on cost projections, to a shortage of income related to police and parking activity from our infamous redlight cameras and our equally infamous privatization of parking meters. Anyone looking to solve this budget crisis is likely to begin pulling their hair out immediately, wondering where to even begin.Except for Alderman Anthony Beale, longtime stooge for the taxi industry, who has suggested an easy fix: just go crazy in taxing the hell out of innovative ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft.

Australia is providing a fairly stunning case study in how not to set up a national hotline for sexual assault, rape, domestic abuse and other such situations. It has a service, called 1800Respect, which lets people call in and be connected to trained counselors from a variety of different call centers around the country. However, as Asher Wolf informs us, a change in how the system will be managed has created quite a shit storm, and leading one of the major providers of counselors to the program to remove itself from the program -- meaning that it will likely lose government funding and may go out of business entirely.The issues here are a bit convoluted, but since its inception, 1800Respect has actually been run by a private insurance company, Medibank Health Solutions, who partners with organizations who can provide qualified counselors. One of the big ones is Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia (RDSVA). While it already seems somewhat troubling that a private insurance company runs the "national" rape and domestic violence hotline -- it's even more troubling when you find out that the company views the service as a profit center:

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recently pitched a new form of backdoor for encryption: "responsible encryption." The DAG said encryption was very, very important to the security of the nation and its citizens, but not so important it should ever prevent warrants from being executed.According to Rosenstein, this is the first time in American history law enforcement officers haven't been able to collect all the evidence they seek with warrants. And that's all the fault of tech companies and their perverse interest in profits. Rosenstein thinks the smart people building flying cars or whatever should be able to make secure backdoors, but even if they can't, maybe they could just leave the encryption off their end of the end-to-end so cops can have a look-see.This is the furtherance of former FBI director James Comey's "going dark" dogma. It's being practiced by more government agencies than just the DOJ. Calls for backdoors echo across Europe, with every government official making them claiming they're not talking about backdoors. These officials all want the same thing: a hole in encryption. All that's really happening is the development of new euphemisms.Rob Joyce, the White House cybersecurity coordinator, is the latest to suggest the creation of encryption backdoors -- and the latest to claim the backdoor he describes is not a backdoor. During a Q&A at Cyber Summit 2017, Joyce said this:

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In the wake of the news about Harvey Weinstein's apparently serial abuse of women, and the news that several of his victims were unable to tell anyone about it due to a non-disclosure agreement, the New York legislature is considering a bill to prevent such NDAs from being enforceable in New York state. According to the Buzzfeed article the bill as currently proposed still allows a settlement agreement to demand that the recipient of a settlement not disclose how much they settled for, but it can't put the recipient of a settlement in jeopardy of needing to compensate their abuser if they choose to talk about what happened to them.It's not the first time a state has imposed limits on the things that people can contract for. California, for example, has a law that generally makes non-compete agreements invalid. Even Congress has now passed a law banning contracts that limit consumers' ability to complain about merchants. Although, as we learn in law school, there are some Constitutional disputes about how unfettered the freedom to contract should be in the United States, there has also always been the notion that some contractual demands are inherently "void as against public policy." In other words, go ahead and write whatever contractual clause you want, but they aren't all going to be enforceable against the people you want to force to comply with them.Like with the federal Consumer Review Fairness Act mentioned above, the proposed New York bill recognizes that there is a harm to the public interest when people cannot speak freely. When bad things happen, people need to know about them if they are to protect themselves. And it definitely isn't consistent with the public interest if the people doing the bad things can stop people from knowing that they've been doing them. These NDAs have essentially had the effect of letting bad actors pay money for the ability to continue the bad acts, and this proposed law is intended to take away that power.As with any law the devil will be in the details (for instance, this proposed bill appears to apply only to non-disclosure clauses in the employment context, not more broadly), and it isn't clear whether this one, as written, might cause some unintended consequences. For instance, there might theoretically be the concern that without a gag clause in a settlement agreement it might be harder for victims to reach agreements that would compensate them for their injury. But as long as victims of other people's bad acts can be silenced as a condition of being compensated for those bad acts, and that silence enables there to be yet more victims, then there are already some unfortunate consequences for a law to try to address.

Early last week, the Deputy Attorney General (Rod Rosenstein) picked up the recently-departed James Comey's Torch of Encroaching Darkness +1 and delivered one of the worst speeches against encryption ever delivered outside of the UK.Rosenstein apparently has decided UK government officials shouldn't have a monopoly on horrendous anti-encryption arguments. Saddling up his one-trick pony, the DAG dumped out a whole lot of nonsensical words in front of a slightly more receptive audience. Speaking at the Global Cyber Security Summit in London, Rosenstein continued his crusade against encryption using counterintuitive arguments.After name-dropping his newly-minted term -- responsible encryption™ -- Rosenstein stepped back to assess the overall cybersecurity situation. In short, it is awful. Worse, perhaps, than Rosenstein's own arguments. Between the inadvertently NSA-backed WannaCry ransomware, the Kehlios botnet, dozens of ill-mannered state actors, and everything else happening seemingly all at once, the world's computer users could obviously use all the security they can get.Encryption is key to security. Rosenstein agrees… up to a point. He wants better security for everyone, unless those everyones are targeted by search warrants. Then they have too much encryption.

Todd Weiler, a state Senator in Utah, has appeared on our pages before. When last we checked in with the good senator, he was quite oddly attempting to purge his notoriously prudish state from the dire threat of pornography. His plan was more than a bit heavy-handed in that it centered on mandating porn-filtering software on all smartphones under his stated theory that "A cell phone is basically a vending machine for pornography." This tragic misunderstanding by a sitting state senator of what a phone is and exactly what its primary functions are aside, government mandates that infringe on free and legal expression are kind of a no-no in these here secular United States. Even setting constitutional questions aside, attempts like these are immediately confronted by the obstreperous demands from the public for a definition of exactly what constitutes "pornography."Well, for Senator Weiler, it appears we may have something of an answer. See, Weiler has more recently decided to try to revive Utah's long-defunct Obscenity and Pornography Complaints Ombudsman position, or "porn czar", that Utah once filled but has left vacant for the better part of two decades.

This week, our winning comment on the insightful side comes in response to the president's recent threats against NBC, with Geno0wl racking up the votes to take first place:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, while Hollywood was wining and dining New Zealand politicians to help get their copyright demands into the TPP, the similarly bad provisions from the dead ACTA were unsurprisingly appearing in CETA. The RIAA was continuing to share bogus math, this time about the supposed decline in musicians, Microsoft was caught sending an especially amusing takedown to Google over a link to... Bing, and copyright maximalists were celebrating the settlement in the Google Books/Authors Guild lawsuit, even as another judge was ruling that book scanning is obviously fair use.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, there was a sea change as more and more artists began to realize that they could try different business models instead of relying on record labels, with bands rushing to embrace free distribution and even some high-profile artists like Madonna taking control of their own business. But for the most part, the recording industry was still trying the same old things, and making incredibly weak attempts to compete with folks like iTunes. Maybe basing your business on copy protection was not such a great idea.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, as the future of webcasting was unclear at best, Silicon Valley was applauding the growing efforts to fight back against Hollywood, even as the copyright battle was heating up thanks to things like broadband fearmongering and a new lawsuit against Mp3.com from some big names in music — or, most importantly, the beginning of the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case before the Supreme Court (which would sadly go on to uphold the constitutionality of the 1998 copyright extension.)

While Google Fiber was initially hailed as the be-all-end-all of broadband disruption, the bloom has come off the rose in recent months. Last fall, Google executives began to have doubts about the high cost and slow pace of the project, resulting in a not-yet cooked pivot to wireless and the departure of two CEOs in less than a year. Company PR reps seem unable to answer basic questions about cancelled installations and the unsteady direction of the project, which has also faced more than a few obstacles erected by incumbent ISPs unhappy about the added competition.But Google Fiber has another problem: the slow but steady death of traditional television.We've noted for some time how smaller cable companies are considering getting out of the pay TV business, since they lack the size and leverage to get the same rates enjoyed by sector behemoths like Comcast NBC Universal. Ultimately, you'll see many of these smaller cable companies shift their focus entirely to broadband, while nudging users toward over the top streaming services. As a smaller pay TV provider, Google is no exception, announcing last week that the company would be removing pay TV service from its service bundles moving forward:

There must be something about using the word "monster" in one's business that turns that business into a true monster from a trademark bully perspective. Readers of this site will be familiar with the two largest offenders along these lines, Monster Cable and Monster Energy Corporation. It's the latter that has continued its prolific trademark bullying ways to date, as recently as earlier this year, when it threatened a root beer company with the word "beast" in its name, claiming that this was too close to "monster" for the purposes of trademark law.Still, as laughable as that spat was, at least it could be said that Monster Energy was going after another beverage company. That isn't the case with Monster Energy's latest failed attempt to block the trademark for a video game company out of Japan.

DreamHost has been fighting the DOJ and its breathtakingly-broad demand for information on all visitors to an anti-Trump website. This has gone on for a few months now, but the origin of the DOJ's interest in the DreamHosted disruptj20.org site traces all the way back to protests during Trump's inauguration.Here's what the DOJ demanded DreamHost hand over:

A year ago, we wrote in great detail about just how ridiculous it was that then Presidential candidate Donald Trump's lawyers had threatened to sue the NY Times over a story about two women who claimed that Trump had groped them inappropriately. Trump insisted to the NY Times that none of it happened, and one of his favorite lawyers, Marc Kasowitz sent a letter calling the story "reckless, defamatory, and constitutes libel per se." It also demanded the article be removed from the Times' website and that a "full and immediate retraction and apology" be posted instead. The letter insisted that "failure to do so will leave my client with no option but to pursue all available actions and remedies."Of course, as we noted at the time, there was basically no chance that Trump would actually sue. The NY Times hit back hard with its response, and it's not a paper easily intimidated by bogus legal threats. Still, it is noteworthy that this week the one year statute of limitations on defamation claims (in New York) passed... and no lawsuit has been filed (though, amusingly, as the Hollywood Reporter points out, the Kasowitz letter demanding a retraction is still posted to Trump's website).As we said last year about this story, it was even more evidence for why we need a strong federal anti-SLAPP law (or, at the very least, stronger state anti-SLAPP laws). New York's anti-SLAPP law remains painfully weak. And while that might not matter directly, since Trump didn't sue, the rise in these kinds of lawsuits and similar threats of lawsuits would be helped tremendously with stronger laws protecting those who the powerful seek to censor and scare. Obviously, Trump might not be too keen on signing such a law right now, but Congress should be working on this. SLAPP suits are becoming an entire industry, helping the rich and powerful silence critics. Congress has the power to stop this abuse of judicial process, and it should follow through.

Yet another lawsuit has been filed against social media companies hoping to hold them responsible for terrorist acts. The family of an American victim of a terrorist attack in Europe is suing Twitter, Facebook, and Google for providing material support to terrorists. [h/t Eric Goldman]The lawsuit [PDF] is long and detailed, describing the rise of ISIS and use of social media by the terrorist group. It may be an interesting history lesson, but it's all meant to steer judges towards finding violations of anti-terrorism laws rather than recognize the obvious immunity given to third party platforms by Section 230.When it does finally get around to discussing the issue, the complaint from 1-800-LAW-FIRM (not its first Twitter terrorism rodeo…) attacks immunity from an unsurprising angle. The suit attempts to portray the placement of ads on alleged terrorist content as somehow being equivalent to Google, Twitter, et al creating the terrorist content themselves.

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By now, you've almost certainly heard about President Trump's multiple tweet attack on NBC for having a story he didn't like. A few times, Trump has suggested that NBC should "lose its license" because he doesn't like the company's reporting.

We've already noted how, despite some empty promises by Sprint and Japanese-owner Softbank, the company's (second) attempted merger with T-Mobile will be a notable job killer. How bad will the damage be? At least one analyst predicts the total number of jobs lost could be more than the total number of people Sprint currently employs (around 28,000). Other analysts estimate the deal could kill something closer to 20,000 jobs, and even the most optimistic tallies put the job damage at somewhere closer to 10,000 lost positions -- most of them either in retail (as duplicate stores are closed) or among redundant management positions.The reduction in major wireless competitors from four to three will also have an obvious, detrimental impact on competition in the space, reducing price competition in the sector and potentially putting an end to the recent, welcome return of unlimited data plans. Just ask career staffers at the Justice Department, who this week leaked word that many of them would be advising agency bosses to block the deal unless their goal is less competition in the space:

Thanks to an investigation by Norwegian newspaper VG, a long-running child porn operation by Australian police has been (inadvertently) uncovered. An IT specialist at VG was monitoring forum activity and only stumbled on law enforcement's involvement on accident.In comparison to the FBI's takeover of the Playpen site, the Taskforce Argos operation was epic. The FBI held onto the seized Playpen seizure for only a couple of weeks. The Australian police served as replacement administrators for eleven months.The government's turn as child porn site administrators began with the arrest of two men in the United States, one of them a Canadian citizen. Both were apparently actively abusing children as well as running the dark web site. According to data gathered by investigators, Childs Play had more than a 1 million registered users by the time it was shut down. (Estimates suggest fewer than 5,000 accounts could be considered active, however.) Based on estimates from multiple countries now involved in the law enforcement action, the eleven-month hosting effort has resulted in nearly 1,000 suspects being identified. Some have already been arrested.The article is worth a read (as is the Guardian's more succinct take), if for no other reason than the sheer amount of detective work performed by a few journalists. The ends are worthy -- the arrest and punishment of child abusers -- but, as in the FBI's child porn operations, the means are highly questionable.Presumably Australian law enforcement used something similar to the FBI's malware to reveal identifying information about the forum's users. No details have been provided to VG, but there's a good chance details will begin to surface as cases proceed to trial.But it is concerning law enforcement felt a need to continue to distribute child porn for eleven months before deciding to shut down the site. It also seems highly possible the site was only shut down was because the operation had been uncovered by VG's detective work.While impersonating one of the arrested forum moderators, police had to provide a monthly update post to prevent the site's warrant canary from kicking in. One requirement was to include a child porn image with this update, under the assumption law enforcement officers wouldn't be legally allowed to distribute this contraband.That leads directly to another problematic aspect of the investigation: the website was relocated for easier exploitation.

Video games have been steadily becoming more realistic since their first creation. Conversations about this progress has mostly centered around graphical enhancements and tech such as virtual reality that strive to better immerse the player in the fictional world in which they play. But graphical and visual enhancements aren't the only form of realism in which video games have progressed. More unsung have been the enhancements in pure data and detail in these games. For this type of progress, one need only look to management-style simulations games, such as those of the sports realm. In games centered on managing sports franchises, the depth of detail that has emerged has become somewhat breathtaking. Baseball sims, such as the excellent Out of the Park series, are an example of this as is the equally deep Football Manager series for soccer fans.So real, in fact, have these simulations become, that they can occasionally create real-world mishaps, as happened with a French soccer player named Ruben Aguilar.

Section 108 of copyright law doesn't get very much attention (though, we did just mention it in regards to an archive of Howard Stern/Donald Trump interviews). It's the part of the law that grants some fairly narrow exceptions to copyright for libraries and archives. In short, it was a recognition that libraries and archives are good and important things, and copyright law under the 1976 Copyright Act would basically make them illegal. Rather than fixing the fact that copyright law was too broad, Section 108 simply carved out a few important exceptions. Many of those exceptions are, unfortunately, under attack from all the usual sources.However Section 108 is important to protect until we fix wider problems with copyright law. Of course, some parts of 108 have rarely, if ever, been tested. The Internet Archive is looking to fix that. It just announced that it is making a bunch of books published between 1923 and 1941 available on the Archive. As you may know from the handy dandy public domain term chart at Cornell, thanks to the 1976 Copyright Act (and various extensions) tons of works that should have been in the public domain long before now have been locked up and unavailable. The key date is 1923. Works before that are clearly in the public domain. After that, it gets... fuzzy.But, Section 108(h) has a neat little exception for libraries and archives:

What is it exactly that makes not storing sensitive customer data unprotected on an Amazon server so difficult for some people to understand?Verizon recently made headlines after one of its customer service vendors left the personal data of around 6 million consumers just sitting on an Amazon server without adequate password protection. A GOP data analytics firm was also recently soundly ridiculed after it left the personal data of around 198 million adults (read: almost everybody) similarly just sitting on an Amazon server without protection. Time Warner Cable (4 million impacted users) and an auto-tracking firm named SVR Tracking (540,000 users) also did the same thing.Now Accenture (who you would think would have the expertise to know better) has decided to join the fun. Reports this week indicate that the company left hundreds of gigabytes of sensitive customer information...you guessed it...sitting open to anyone on the internet in an unsecured Amazon server. That includes 40,000 passwords sitting in one backup database that were stored in plaintext:

More libel-related bullshittery happening on the internet. And, again, Eugene Volokh is on top of it. Between him, Paul Levy of Public Citizen, and Pissed Consumer, we've seen a huge amount of shady-to-completely-fraudulent behavior by lawyers and rep management firms exposed. This is more of the same, although it doesn't appear anyone in the SEO business was involved.Jordan Wirsz is an investment manager with a problem. He's previously gotten in trouble with state regulators for running investment schemes without a license. It's not a huge problem, but it's enough to make people think twice before trusting him with their money.Faced with state regulator decisions cluttering up his search results, Wirsz has apparently opted to make his Google searches even less flattering. He took a commenter named "Richard" to court, alleging defamation based on the contents of comments "Richard" posted to sites like RipoffReport. He won a default judgment, which conveniently contained several URLs not linked to "Richard" or the alleged libel.

Via Josh Taylor, we learn of the recently released "Intergovernmental Agreement on Identity Matching Services", which is a fancy way of saying that the federal government and Australian state and territory governments had agreed to work together on a big face recognition surveillance system. But the truly incredible thing is that these Australian governments have decided to try to out-Orwell Orwell, by arguing that pervasive facial recognition is actually... good for privacy.

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When you've got an official narrative to deliver, you need everyone to pitch in to keep it from falling apart. No one can say ICE didn't try. The Trump administration -- bolstered by supporting statements conjecture from DOJ and DHS officials -- has portrayed undocumented immigrants as little more than nomadic thugs. Unfortunately, there's hardly any evidence available to back up the assertion that people here illegally are more likely to commit serious criminal acts.Back in February, shortly after Trump handed down immigration-focused executive orders, ICE went all in on arresting undocumented visitors and immigrants. Included in this push was a focus on so-called "sanctuary cities" like Austin, Texas, which had vowed to push back against Trump's anti-immigrant actions.Emails obtained by The Intercept show ICE doing all it can to prop up Trump's "dangerous criminal" stereotyping. Unfortunately, despite all of its efforts, ICE failed to come across many dangerous criminals during its February sweeps.

While the lack of competition in residential broadband gets plenty of well-deserved attention, the business broadband market in the United States may be even worse. Just one of three companies (Verizon, AT&T, or CenturyLink) dominate what's dubbed the business data services (BDS) market, which connects everything from cellular towers to ATMs to the broader internet. According to the FCC's own data (pdf), 73% of the special access market is controlled by one ISP, 24% of markets usually "enjoy" duopoly control, and only a tiny fraction of markets have more than two choices of BDS providers.This essential monopoly or duopoly allows these companies to overcharge numerous retailers and organizations for connectivity, and the regulatory capture in the telecom market means countless politicians work tirelessly to keep things that way. Case in point: back in April Trump's FCC announced it would not only be scrapping previous plans to try and make this market more competitive, but would be fiddling with data to try and distort the very definition of "competition." Under the FCC's new plan, countless markets will now be deemed "competitive" if businesses have access to just one broadband provider:

If the name Kali Kanongataa doesn't ring a bell, he was the man who sued roughly all of the news for copyright infringement earlier this year. The whole episode stemmed from Kanongataa having put the birth of his child up on Facebook through the site's live streaming function in 2016. Many, many news organizations used snippets of the video in their reporting on the viral nature of the video, which had been viewed over 100,000 times. Kanongataa ultimately lost those suits on obvious Fair Use grounds and the various news organizations subsequently petitioned to be awarded attorney's fees, which the court ultimately granted.Well, Kanongataa has since petitioned the court to vacate or reduce those attorney's fees awards on two grounds. First, Kanongataa claims his financial situation is such that these awards would bankrupt him. As the court notes however, denying the request, Kanongataa only claimed this and failed to provide any sort of evidence of his financial situation.

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about a proposal from the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) to introduce upload filtering on the ResearchGate site in order to stop authors from sharing their own papers without "permission". In its letter to ResearchGate, STM's proposal concluded with a thinly-veiled threat to call in the lawyers if the site refused to implement the upload filters. In the absence of ResearchGate's acquiescence, a newly-formed "Coalition for Responsible Sharing", whose members include the American Chemical Society (ACS), Brill, Elsevier, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer, has issued a statement confirming the move:

For many, many years now, we've talked about problems with the CFAA -- the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act -- which was passed in Congress in the 1980s in response to the Hollywood movie War Games (seriously). It was a messed up moral panic back then, and over the years it's been abused widely in both civil and criminal cases to define almost anything as hacking. Over the past few years we've been following two cases in particular related to the CFAA: the David Nosal case and the Power.com case. Both involved fairly twisted interpretations of the CFAA -- and, unfortunately, the 9th Circuit found both to be okay. And, unfortunately, this week, the Supreme Court declined to review both cases, meaning they remain good (if stupid) law in the 9th Circuit (which will likely influence cases elsewhere).I won't go into all of the background in both cases, but the super short version is that under the Facebook v. Power ruling, it's a CFAA violation for a service to access a website -- even if at the request of users -- if the website has sent a cease-and-desist. That shouldn't be seen as hacking, but the court said it's "unauthorized access." Power was a service that tried to help consolidate different social networks into a single user interface for users -- and lots of people found that valuable and signed up for the service. But, Facebook didn't like it and sent a cease-and-desist to Power. Power figured that since users were asking it to continue and they were the ones who had the accounts, it was okay to continue. The court, unfortunately, claimed that it was a CFAA violation -- the equivalent of "hacking" into a system (despite having legit credentials) just because of the cease-and-desist.In the Nosal case, the court said that merely sharing your passwords can be a CFAA violation. In that case a guy looking to compete with his old firm had someone still there share a password so he could log in and get customer info. That may be unethical and problematic -- but should it be the equivalent of computer hacking? While the 9th Circuit had rejected an even broader interpretation of the CFAA that would say merely violating a terms of service became "unauthorized access" it said okay to the password sharing one.There was some hope that the Supreme Court would hear these cases and explain that these rulings stretched the CFAA to dangerous degrees. Unfortunately, that's not the case.And so we're back where we've been for a few decades now: talking about why Congress needs to reform the CFAA and fix these problems that leave the law wide open to abuse -- especially in an era where so many people use dozens of services, and sometimes do things like share passwords or ask others to log into sites for them. These should never be seen as "hacking" violations, but in the 9th Circuit, they are.

We've argued repeatedly that it's a bad idea to demand that internet platforms like Twitter and Facebook be more proactive in policing content on their services, because it will lead to really bad results -- especially in the political realm. There's been a really dumb move over the past few months, demanding that Twitter kick Donald Trump off Twitter, pointing out that he's pretty clearly violating many of their terms of service. For example, threatening war with North Korea would likely violate the rules against "violent threats (direct or indirect)." And, of course, our President is a walking, tweeting harassment and "hateful conduct" machine. But, Twitter has recently said that it wouldn't kick Trump off the service (which we agree is the right move), because it has a different standard for "newsworthy" tweets, whatever that means.And, yes, some people will claim that it's unfair to have a double standard, but I think Twitter is correct to not kick Trump off the service. It certainly wouldn't stop the President from getting his thoughts out there, and would only increase the silly martyr act that he and his most vocal supporters love to focus on. But, really, the bigger issue is why anyone should expect Twitter to be doing this kind of decision making in the first place. When you look at other communications systems -- like email or the web in general -- we don't kick people entirely off email or force them to takedown their website just because they say something stupid.And, when it gets into political content, it gets even sillier. For example, while Twitter won't do anything about Trump (again, the right move...), it did decide to block a campaign ad from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who is eagerly running for the Senate to take over the seat Bob Corker is vacating. (Update: as noted in the comment, Twitter allowed the video in Blackburn's stream -- or in anyone else's -- they just blocked it from being promoted through Twitter's ad network). The ad sounded inflammatory and stupid, claiming that she "stopped the sale of baby body parts" and Twitter rejected it for being "inflammatory." Of course, all this did was kick the old Streisand Effect into high gear, giving Blackburn tons of free publicity and extra views of her ad, which was posted on YouTube, without having to buy any advertising. Twitter basically gave her a much wider reach for free by rejecting the ad. And, of course, after all the damage was done, Twitter changed its mind.Now, I tend to think that Blackburn is one of the worst members of Congress (she's terrible on basically every issue we care about here) and would prefer she not move across Congress to be in the Senate, but she should be able to post whatever stupid ad she wants on Twitter, and just let people on Twitter rip it to shreds, rather than being barred from posting such an ad.It seems pretty straightforward, but we shouldn't want a private company -- especially one as consistently confused about these things as Twitter -- to be the final arbiter of what political ads or political speech are okay, and what is too "inflammatory." That only leads to bad results -- and all of the free publicity Twitter just gave Blackburn's dumb ad will mean that other politicians will seek to create even more ridiculous ads to get the free "bump" from a Twitter ban. That hardly seems healthy for democracy.

Frequent FOIA requesters CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) and NSA (National Security Archive) are trying to obtain a court ruling forcing the Trump administration to stop standing in the way of transparency and accountability.Their complaint [PDF], filed earlier this year, accuses the Trump administration of not just serious impropriety, but of actually taking proactive steps to ensure there's no documentation of its questionable deeds.

Back in 2014, the police in Peoria, Illinois raided the home of a guy, Jon Daniel, suspected of running a Twitter account parodying Peoria's mayor, Jim Ardis. Despite knowing no laws had been broken, Ardis pushed hard to prosecute the person for daring to mock him on Twitter. It didn't end well. A year and a half later, the taxpayers of Peoria were on the hook to pay Daniel $125,000 to settle the lawsuit filed against the city (with help from the ACLU).Someone might want to share that story with the police in Miami Beach. Last week they arrested a guy for having a Twitter parody account of the police spokesperson, Ernesto Rodriguez. The story sounds fairly familiar to the Peoria story. As in that case, police are claiming that the "crime" committed by Ernesto Orsetti here is "falsely impersonating" a public official. Yet, as the Miami New Times notes, just a little while ago Rodriguez (the real one) joked with reporters and made it clear he considered it a parody account. He also appears to have made some tweets that are clearly laughing off the parody account.

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The DOJ is apparently going to pick up where the ousted FBI boss James Comey left off. While Attorney General Jeff Sessions continues building his drug enforcement time machine, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein is keeping the light on for Comey's prophesies of coming darkness.Rosenstein recently gave a speech at the US Naval Academy on the subject of encryption. It was… well, it was pretty damn terrible. Once again, a prominent law enforcement official is claiming to love encryption while simultaneously extolling the virtues of fake encryption with law enforcement-ready holes in it.The whole thing is filled with inadvertently hilarious assertions, like the following:

For much of the year, Sprint has been trying to butter up the Trump administration to gain approval for a merger with T-Mobile. Sprint's previous attempts at such a merger were blocked by regulators, who correctly noted that reducing wireless competitors from four to three would raise rates and reduce carrier incentive to improve and compete. But with the Trump administration spearheading a new wave of mindless merger mania in the telecom space, Sprint is poised to try again, and is expected to formally announce its latest attempt to acquire T-Mobile in just a matter of weeks.Of course like any good merger, that will involve countless think tankers, lobbyists, consultants, fauxcademics and other policy voices willfully ignoring M&A history, insisting that the deal will magically spur competition, save puppies, cure cancer, and result in countless thousands of new jobs. But many respected sector analysts are busy noting that the job is expected to be a mammoth job killer. How much of a job killer? One analyst predicts the merged company could result in more net job losses than the total number of employees Sprint currently has:

Some more domestic spying taking place, this time by financial regulators. While the US Treasury Department is well within its legal wheelhouse to investigate domestic financial wrongdoing, its Office of Intelligence and Analysis is only supposed to monitor financial activity occurring outside of the US. The OIA has apparently been helping itself to domestic financial records, as Jason Leopold reports.

Senator Ron Wyden has introduced a trio of energy bills for the Senate's consideration. The three bills each have their own area of focus.One bill [PDF] would direct the Department of Energy -- along with state entities -- to upgrade the flexibility and reliability of energy grids, thus limiting disruption during natural disasters. The second bill [PDF] creates grant programs for consumer-level renewable energy, providing incentives for purchase and deployment of solar panels, electric vehicles, and energy-efficient appliances. The third [PDF] tasks the DOE with leading the way for renewable energy storage R&D in hopes of driving costs down and providing more affordable alternatives to non-renewable energy sources.Beyond their renewable energy focus, these three bills all have one thing in common: law enforcement agencies aren't going to like them. Each bill contains language erecting warrant requirements for law enforcement access of consumer energy usage data.In each bill, under the "Privacy, Security, and Resilience" heading, Wyden has inserted a clause limiting warrantless access to energy customer data to identifying info only

In 2014, following nearly a full year of waging an intellectual property war on YouTubers doing "let's play" videos with its games, Nintendo unleashed upon the world what would eventually become its "Creators Program". Through the program, YouTubers would be allowed to put videos including Nintendo IP on their channels in exchange for revenue sharing between the creator and Nintendo itself. For a company like Nintendo, which had built a reputation for exerting strict control in this arena, it felt like a huge step forward. It took only a few months before the whole thing began devolving into a bureaucratic mess, with: language in the affiliate agreement clearly geared towards garnering positive coverage from YouTubers; a mishandling of the influx of interest in the program by creators themselves; and a strange whitelist and blacklist of what games could be covered, which hurt channels with extensive back catalogs of content that might need to be deleted. Some high profile YouTubers swore off covering Nintendo games in revolt, while everyone else was left wondering why this had to be handled so badly.It doesn't seem to be getting any better. For some reason, in the past few days, Nintendo suddenly nixed live-streams from channels affiliated with the Creators Program.

The rapid forward march of technology has long bred two leading camps of onlookers: the techno-optimists and the techno-pessimists. Honest people on both sides, however, must admit that technological innovation has had both positive and negative effects. Internet legend Tim O'Reilly is one of the people who think a lot about these issues, and his new book WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us — which discusses in detail the world that we are building with technology — was released today, and we're pleased to have him join us on this week's episode to talk about the book and the future of innovation.(Apologies for the lack of an episode last week — an ongoing outage at our cloud recording platform has left us unable to access the audio files. Though that episode is a bit out of date now, we're hoping we'll be able to get it out later this week.)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.

Daniel Rivero and Brendan O'Connor of Splinter recently acquired documents pertaining to ICE's snitch program -- a "see something, say something" but for suspected undocumented aliens. What's contained in these documents is nasty, petty abuse of a crime victim hotline by Americans who don't mind turning the government into their own personal army.This is part of new program started by the Trump Administration -- one presumably meant to pump up numbers for its weekly "Two Minutes Hate" reports, which document the criminal acts of people roaming the county without the proper papers.Splinter didn't find much evidence backing up the administration's fervent belief that "undocumented" equals "hardened criminal." What it did find was Americans using the VOICE tip line to engage in a low-level variant on SWATting: sending ICE to round up people they just don't like.

Last week, the Hollywood Reporter broke the story that famed Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein (formerly of Miramax and more recently of the Weinstein Company -- from which he was fired over the weekend, despite practically begging for his friends to support him) had seriously lawyered up, hiring three high profile lawyers: David Boies, Lisa Bloom and Charles Harder to deal with two apparent stories that were in the works -- one from the NY Times and another from the New Yorker (two publications not known for backing down from threats) -- about some fairly horrible alleged behavior by Weinstein towards young female actresses, employees and more.A day later, the NY Times published its article about Harvey Weinstein and, damn, it's quite an article. It details multiple cases of alleged sexual harassment by Weinstein against both employees and hopeful actresses -- and includes claims of Weinstein having to pay off some of those individuals. The article was not based on a single source, but many sources, including one actress (Ashley Judd) willing to put her name behind the accusations (and just as we were completing this post, the New Yorker published its piece which appears to be more detailed and more damning, with more names and even more horrifying stories about Weinstein). And with the NY Times' publication, much of the "legal team" leaped into action. Of course, if you're not familiar with the three lawyers named above, it may help to do a quick review, before we dig in on the myriad (often contradictory) responses we've now seen from Weinstein and his legal team over the past few days.Boies, of course, shows up everywhere these days, but often not for good reasons. You may recall him representing SCO in its quixotic attack on Linux. Or representing Oracle against Google in claiming that APIs can be copyrightable. Or representing Theranos, the now disgraced biotech firm that exaggerated what it could do. Or representing Sony Pictures when its emails were all leaked, to the point of sending a ridiculous threat letter to us for daring to report on those emails. Lisa Bloom's only appearance here was when she was on the right side of the silly James Woods defamation case against an anonymous tweeter. Many found Bloom's appearance as part of the team quite odd, since she's built her reputation on representing victims of sexual harassment. She later claimed she was just advising Weinstein, rather than acting as his lawyer (hmm....) and then, over the weekend, she resigned from whatever it was that she was doing. However, the NY Times has a quite incredible article suggesting her initial response to the accusations was to effectively go after the women, by posting "photos of several of the accusers in very friendly poses with Harvey after his alleged misconduct." Ick.And, Charles Harder? What is there that needs to be said about Charles Harder? Oh, right, that he's currently leading the legal team that's suing us in a defamation suit that we've won (though he has since appealed).Within hours of the article being published, Harder announced that Weinstein would be suing the NY Times for defamation.

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Over the past few years we've written about some really dumb lawsuits (or threats of lawsuits) filed by actress Lindsay Lohan. There was that time she sued E*Trade for $100 million because it had a baby in its commercial, named Lindsey, who was described as a "boyfriend-stealing milkaholic," which she insisted must be a reference to her (think about that one for a second...). Or there was the time she claimed that a jewelry store releasing surveillance tape footage of her stealing a necklace violated her publicity rights. Then she sued the rapper Pitbull for a lyric "I got it locked up like Lindsay Lohan" (and, bizarrely, that one included accusations of a plagiarized filing by her lawyer. And, of course, most famously, Lohan spent years battling Take Two Interactive, claiming a ditzy starlet character in Grand Theft Auto was also a violation of her publicity rights.Apparently she comes by this apparent proclivity to threaten and/or file nutty lawsuits honestly. Because her parents were reported as threatening to sue a US Senator for making a reference during a hearing to Linsday Lohan. They later "clarified" that they would not be the plaintiffs, but that they're encouraging Lindsay to sue. Here's the original report, though:

When the Trump administration recently decided to gut consumer privacy protections for broadband, many folks understandably rushed to VPNs for some additional privacy and protection. And indeed, many ISPs justified their lobbying assault on the rules by stating that users didn't need privacy protections, since they could simply use a VPN to fully protect their online activity. But we've noted repeatedly that VPNs are not some kind of panacea, and in many instances you're simply shifting the potential for abuse from your ISP -- to a VPN provider that may not actually offer the privacy it claims.Latest case in point: like many companies, a VPN provider by the name of PureVPN has been advertising for years on its website that it keeps no logs of user behavior:

[Update: Thanks to reporting by the Tuscon Sentinel, Rep. Martha McSally has stripped this exemption from the bill and added language clarifying the law should not be construed as exempting CBP from its FOIA duties.]To build a wall, you've got to break a few laws. That's the message being sent by a new bill, which helps pave the way for the eventual construction of a border wall by exempting the CBP and US Border Patrol from a large number of federal laws.H.R. 3548 [PDF] would give the CBP a free pass to ignore all sorts of federal restrictions when engaging in its enforcement activities. All the things citizens can't legally do on federal land, the CBP and Border Patrol would be allowed to. This would keep the federal government from getting in its own way in the event wall construction actually takes place, as well as keep CBP agents from worrying about polluting, killing endangered species, or violating sacred grave sites while pursuing undocumented aliens.

To build a wall, you've got to break a few laws. That's the message being sent by a new bill, which helps pave the way for the eventual construction of a border wall by exempting the CBP and US Border Patrol from a large number of federal laws.H.R. 3548 [PDF] would give the CBP a free pass to ignore all sorts of federal restrictions when engaging in its enforcement activities. All the things citizens can't legally do on federal land, the CBP and Border Patrol would be allowed to. This would keep the federal government from getting in its own way in the event wall construction actually takes place, as well as keep CBP agents from worrying about polluting, killing endangered species, or violating sacred grave sites while pursuing undocumented aliens.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side comes from all the way back on last week's comment post, where an anonymous commenter took a moment to thank us for the openness of our comments:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, as copyright trolls continued their war on open wi-fi, rightsholders in the EU sought new storage media levies for the cloud and US ISPs were gearing up to enact their "six strikes" plan, we were trying to kill the myth that the constitution guarantees copyright. Some people at least seemed to get it, with a high-profile EU Parliament Committee proposing the ability to create non-copyrighted content, a DOJ lawyer exploring the fact that copyright needs to change in the internet age, and Psy mega-amplifying his Gangnam Style fame by allowing anyone to use the song and video for anything.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, it was expected and then confirmed that the RIAA would win its lawsuit against Jammie Thomas — even as we speculated that investors would soon force the RIAA to abandon its aggressive lawsuit strategy. In that trial, a Sony-BMG exec made some pretty absurd statements, around the same time that Viacom's CEO gave a speech demonstrating that the company is wrong about almost everything related to the internet and modern media, and the president of the ESA was calling for lots more DRM. But at least one group of creators was experimenting: Radiohead announced the pay-what-you-want plans for their album In Rainbows.Fifteen Years AgoEven back in 2001 this week, Hollywood already had its hooks in the government (and was working hard on getting them into colleges too). The music industry was heavily on the offensive and sending misguided musicians to complain to the government about downloading. As Napster creator Shawn Fanning was giving interviews about the service's demise (and even selling life story rights to MTV), the next generation of file sharing tools was starting to wonder if the "Betamax doctrine" would ever prove effective as a defense. Meanwhile, Congress was still considering an onerous and extreme DRM bill (which as we'll see in a few weeks was eventually killed, surprisingly, by.... Senator Patrick Leahy, who is more recently known for introducing a terrible copyright bill).

We have a quick update today on the defamation lawsuit that Shiva Ayyadurai filed against us earlier this year. Last month, Judge Dennis Saylor dismissed the lawsuit, pointing out that everything we said concerning Ayyadurai's claim to have invented email (specifically us presenting lots and lots of evidence of email predating Shiva's own work) was clearly protected speech under the First Amendment. Unfortunately, despite us being a California corporation, Judge Saylor did not grant our separate motion to strike under California's anti-SLAPP law -- which would have required Ayyadurai to pay our legal fees.Two weeks ago, Ayyadurai notified the court that he was appealing the dismissal, which we will defend against in court, and we are confident that we will prevail once again. On top of that, today, we've notified the court that we are cross-appealing the decision to reject our motions to strike under California's anti-SLAPP law. We have argued in court that this is an obvious SLAPP lawsuit -- an attempt by the plaintiff, a self-proclaimed public figure, to try to silence detailed, evidence-based criticism of his claims. We believe that the court improperly applied choice of law principles on which state's anti-SLAPP law should apply, and we look forward to making our case before the 1st Circuit appeals court on why California's anti-SLAPP law is the proper law to apply. We'll provide more updates as the appeals progress.

Earlier this year, the Worth County (GA) Sheriff's Department enraged an entire nation by subjecting the entire student body of a local high school to invasive pat downs. The reason for these searches? Sheriff Jeff Hobby believed drugs would be found on campus.