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For months now, the NYPD has been arguing in court it can't possibly hand over records related to its forfeitures. The problem appears to be the NYPD itself. The department spent millions on new software specifically to track the disposition of seized items. But when faced with a public records suit by the Bronx Defenders, the NYPD claimed the software can't do the one thing it's supposed to do: track the disposition of seized items.The NYPD provides limited reporting on forfeitures, but the numbers produced have almost zero relation to reality. According to the NYPD, it only forfeited $12,000 in cash in 2015. According to numbers obtained by the Bronx Defenders, the NYPD's forfeiture office had nearly $69 million in cash on hand when queried in 2013 -- something that would take 5,750 years to amass at the rate cited by the NYPD. Not only that, but other documents showed NYPD property clerks were processing thousands of dollars every month, totaling $6 million in forfeiture transactions in 2013 alone. It seems unlikely the NYPD's forfeitures dropped to this impossibly-low level between 2013 and 2015.But still the NYPD insists it can't make its cradle-to-grave forfeiture-tracking system produce the stats Bronx Defenders are looking for. It needs to figure out its issues soon. The city council is calling the NYPD's bluff.

I'm generally not much for the summer season, but one sensation I do love is getting home from work on a painfully hot day, having just purchased a six-pack of beer, and cracking open a cold one in the evening. The only thing that occasionally gets in the way of that is when I lift the bottle to my mouth and then immediately realize that instead of beer, I bought salsa.Wait, that doesn't ever happen. And, yet, according to a lawsuit brought by Cigar City Brewing against Cigar City Smoked Salsa, customer confusion appears to be a chief concern.

Early last year, a federal court granted immunity to a sheriff's office that raided someone's house based on nothing more than faulty field drug tests and an officer witnessing a resident buying gardening supplies seven months earlier. This is the short version of what went down that day, via the Washington Post.

The first FBI Playpen investigation warrant challenge to reach the appellate level has been denied. Andrew Workman moved to suppress evidence obtained by the FBI's Network Investigative Technique (NIT) because warrant was deployed far outside its Eastern District of Virginia jurisdiction. Workman lives in Colorado.The Tenth Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF] starts with a light treatise on how technology is outpacing the law and the difficulties this poses for law enforcement agencies used to obtaining identifying information with nothing more than a subpoena.

Going back to the earliest days of Techdirt, we wrote numerous times about what a jurisdictional mess the internet was for various laws and legal regimes. But, even so, decades later, it's still pretty shocking just how messy Google's dispute over global censorship with Canadian courts has become. Last month, we wrote about a positively terrible decision in the Canadian Supreme Court, which upheld an appeals court and a district court, ruling that a Canadian court could order a site to block access to content on a global basis. The lawsuit itself, brought by a company called Equustek against another company apparently selling knockoff/counterfeit equipment, pulled Google into its orbit when the court ordered Google, as a non-party in the case -- to block access worldwide to sites managed by the defendant in the lawsuit (who never showed up in court).Google pointed out (quite reasonably) that Canadian courts don't have jurisdiction over the global internet any more than a Chinese or Iranian or Russian court would have jurisdiction across the globe. Over and over again, the Canadian courts more or less ignored the issue, saying, "doesn't matter, block it, this is bad stuff." We've discussed at great length the dangers of such a decision, so we won't rehash it now -- go read the previous posts, if you want to review that argument.But here's where things get... odd. Most people assumed that this was the end of the road on this case. The Supreme Court in Canada is the top of the chain. There was no appeal. Google could (and probably will, if it hasn't already) petition the Canadian government to clarify the law on this. And it may push for clauses in trade agreements that block this sort of thing as well. Some even argued that Google might be able to make an "ISDS" claim out of this (though, that would be messy...). But, apparently, Google felt it had one more way to crack this nut: it has filed for declaratory relief in the US.In short, Google is going to a US court and saying, "this ruling in Canada is offensive to our laws and Constitution, and you should block the Canadian courts from enforcing it." This is... fascinating from a legal geek standpoint. We do have the SPEECH Act, which bars foreign judgments being enforced in the US when it would go against the First Amendment, but this is slightly different. Google is arguing that a US court should, at the very least, stop Canada from being able to enforce the blockade in the US, because that violates both the First Amendment and Section 230 of the CDA.

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The TSA is still in the business of making sure none of your stuff is inside other stuff. Liquids. Laptops. Other things that confuse/frighten failed mall cops. After engaging in a "successful" trial program in ten airports, the TSA is expanding its theater troupe's infliction of misery to airports around the nation.

There are many ways to handle being trolled on Twitter if you're a company or a famous person. You can track down the trolls, investing hundreds of hours all for a payoff that amounts to showing up at their house physically and making them uncomfortable. You can figure out who the trolls are and call their parents, because that's apparently a thing that actually happened. Or you can be James Woods, completely the worst, and whip out the lawsuits to unmask the troll and then gloat gleefully like a three year old that stole his favorite popsicle when the guy happens to die.Now, all of those methods for dealing with internet trolls range from mildly annoying to evil (James Woods), but they are obviously not the only options. You could go the Arby's route and simply be awesome and human and have fun with the whole thing. The fast food chain recently decided to have a little fun with its most famous Twitter troll: Nihilist Arby's. Now, if you're not familiar with Nihilist Arby's, it's a Twitter account with 300k followers and daily affirmations that include such advice as:

Always lawful and subject to strict oversight. Those are the NSA's defenses any time someone leaks something about its surveillance programs or obtains documents indicating abuse of snooping powers. It gets a little old when it's document after document showing the astonishing breadth of the NSA's surveillance programs or the continual abuse and misuse of these powers.The Hill has dug through some recently-released documents and memos from the NSA which show long-term abuse of surveillance programs. The NSA recently ditched part of its Section 702 collection because it just couldn't stop hoovering up Americans' communications. This was "incidental," according to the NSA, and supposedly impossible to stop. But the incidents detailed in these documents suggest a lot of over-collection happened because no one noticed and, if anyone did, no one cared.

It's been a refreshing bit of time since we've last written about a silly trademark dispute in the beer and alcohol space, so perhaps you, the dear Techdirt reader, had thought that the complete fuster-cluck that is trademark and alcohol had somehow begun to calm the hell down. Sadly, not so much, it seems. To serve as one reminder, E & J Gallo, maker of wines and spirits and a company that has previously demonstrated its inability to tell different kinds of drinks apart, has sent a cease and desist notice to E & B Beer, a company that makes, you know, beer.

So by now you've probably noticed that the broadband industry is somewhat, well, broken. Unaccountable giant telecom incumbents, with a stranglehold on both federal and state lawmakers, work tirelessly alongside well-compensated lawmakers and covertly paid policy vessels to protect the status quo (read: limited competition, high prices, poor customer service). Often that involves quite literally writing and buying state laws that make it impossible for anybody to do much of anything about this dance of dysfunction.And when it comes to highlighting the end result of this corruption, there's no better state than West Virginia. Whereas bigger incumbents in more populated states can often hide their stranglehold over a broken market under layers upon layers of exquisitely crafted bullshit, many West Virginia lawmakers and regional incumbent Frontier Communications lack the savvy and competence to mask what they're truly up to.As a result, the state has been awash in controversy over its telecom policies for years now. Local Charleston Gazette reporter Eric Eyre has done yeoman's work chronicling West Virginia's immense broadband dysfunction, from the State's use of broadband stimulus subsidies on unused, overpowered routers and overpaid, redundant consultants, to state leaders' attempts to bury reports highlighting how a cozy relationship with Frontier has led to what can only be explained as systemic, statewide fraud on the taxpayer dime.Obviously letting Frontier dictate state telecom policy has resulted in the state being one of the least-connected states in the nation. Facing growing calls to actually do something about it, West Virginia finally recently buckled to pressure and passed House Bill 3093, recently signed into law by West Virginia Governor Jim Justice. The bill makes a number of changes to try and improve regional competition, including streamlining pole attachment reform, and encouraging local broadband community co-ops to shore up coverage in low ROI areas.We already discussed how Frontier recently fired a long-standing employee for supporting the bill. Said employee's other job was as West Virginia Senate President, an absurd conflict of interest nobody in the state appears to have given much thought to. But Frontier has subsequently decided that it makes sense to sue the state of West Virginia for the new law, taking specific aim at the segment reforming utility pole fiber attachment rules:

You will recall that earlier this year we discussed a lawsuit brought by the makers of a mobile augmented reality game entitled Texas Rope 'Em against the city of Milwaukee over an ordinance it had put in place requiring game developers to obtain a permit to function within the city. Aside from the $1,000 permit fee the ordinance put in place, the requirements to obtain the permit were both odious and laughably non-applicable to the makers of mobile games such as Texas Rope 'Em. Examples of these requirements include plans for garbage collection left by players, plans for on-site security to protect players, and estimates of "crowd sizes." For makers of augmented reality apps, none of these requirements make any sense. When the developer of the game, Candy Lab, cried foul over First Amendment concerns, Milwaukee County replied that the game maker is not entitled to First Amendment rights, arguing that the game wasn't expressive enough to warrant them.Well, in the opening round of the legal action, Candy Lab is a heavy winner. The court has enjoined the city from enforcing the law until the outcome of the trial, while also including language in the order that makes it fairly clear where the court is going to rule on the First Amendment question.

You will hopefully recall the recent story we did on Darden, parent company of the Olive Garden restaurant chain, sending a legal threat letter to the man behind allofgarden.com, a site that reviews Olive Garden dishes, because the internet is a strange, strange place. At issues, according to the threat letter, was that allofgarden.com named Olive Garden in metatags in its reviews of the dishes, which you should already know is nothing remotely resembling trademark infringement or infringement upon any other types of intellectual property, either. With that in mind, Vincent Malone replied to the threat letter in a manner both well-informed of his own rights and one which demonstrated just how funny Malone is. After refusing to comply with the requests in the letter, he demanded a reply within nine days in limerick form.His demands were not met exactly, but Darden has now responded to Malone, apologizing for the letter, promising no further action would be taken against him, blaming an IP enforcement bot for the letter, and sending him a $50 gift card. Sadly, none of this was delivered in the limerick form Malone had requested.

We've written plenty of times about the chilling effects of abusing the legal system to silence critics. Most commonly, we highlight bogus defamation cases -- as that seems to be the favored choice of those trying to shut someone up. Sometimes we've talked about abusing copyright law to silence people as well. But there are other mechanisms to use, and today we'll be highlighting a local political fight in California that resulted in someone getting a "temporary restraining order" on a critic which was clearly little more than an attempt to silence that critic from calling attention to factual information in the past.The story involves two individuals who were engaged in local politics in Santa Clarita, California. One is a guy named Sean Weber, who sought an open City Council seat earlier this year. The other is a guy named Brett Haddock, who also initially sought the same open City Council seat... and also happens to run a very amusing satirical Twitter account, @NSA_PR in which (you guessed it), he channels the satiric id of the NSA's public relations team. (Full disclosure: I've interacted with that Twitter account a bunch online, and I believe that Haddock has purchased some of our t-shirts and backed some of our crowdfunding campaigns, though I haven't gone back to check -- so feel free to read this story with all of that in mind). Neither Weber nor Haddock obtained the open seat.Either way, Haddock and Weber did not see eye to eye on things. The full nature of the dispute isn't all that important, but for one key aspect. In running for City Council, during a radio interview, Weber made two key claims that Haddock felt were misleading. The first was that he volunteered at a local homeless shelter and the second was that he had been working with a local school district on an "active shooter" response system. Haddock, in response, posted a blog post detailing why both of these points were misleading.There are lots of details in Haddock's post, but the very quick summary is that the "volunteering" at a local homeless shelter was actually 192 hours of mandatory community service as part of his probation after being arrested for "dissuading a witness by force or threat." So, yeah. He worked at a homeless shelter, but it's a bit rich to hold that upt as "volunteering."As for the "active shooter" stuff, Haddock points out that it appears that Weber, as part of his job running a "managed service provider," approached the school about selling them on some communications services that might be useful in emergencies. In an email that Haddock obtained from school district officials, it was noted that Weber "cold called" them in trying to sell them some services and the school met with him a few times, and were told that Weber would submit a proposal, which the official does not believe ever came. Whether or not you consider Weber's claims in a radio interview to have met with the school to discuss such a system or to "provide guidance" on such a system to be accurate or not is a matter of your opinion. It certainly does seem that the fact that this was as a sales cold call provides some useful additional context that Weber was less than clear on.All in all this doesn't seem like a big deal. This is Haddock using his Constitutional right of expression to add potentially valuable context to statements made by an individual seeking public office. As you might guess, however, Weber did not appreciate Haddock's blog post, or similar questions that Haddock had raised elsewhere. Haddock and Weber both appear to have participated, sometimes vehemently, in online discussions in a Facebook group, where Haddock felt that Weber was rude and threatening to other members of the group. At one point, the two engaged in a Facebook messaging conversation that appears -- at least -- to initiate with Haddock and Weber totally misunderstanding each other over the use of the common phrase "have you stopped beating your wife?", and rather than resolving the misunderstanding things escalate (as they often do in online conversations). And, boy, do they escalate, with each one promising to leave the conversation multiple times only to see it continue. A few times Weber makes insinuations about Haddock's girlfriend, while Haddock refers to Weber as a "con man." Neither is pleased with what the other is saying. Weber continues to escalate, though, and threatens to inform Haddock's employer about this... and, eventually, reacts the way lots of online bullies act when they get annoyed: with veiled threats of potential legal action (he talks about "tortious interference" and "punitive damages" but also says "not going to sue you as you don't have any assets and it's not my style.")If you've engaged in internet fights, it's not all that different than probably tons you've seen before. That all came a few weeks before Haddock's blog post described above. Immediately after that blog post, Weber filed for a restraining order. That... doesn't make much sense. All there had been was some heated online discussions and a blog post that was clearly protected speech. Yet, in the paperwork for the restraining order, Weber's lawyer said that Haddock had engaged in "a persistent pattern of online 'cyber' harassment that has been increasing in volume and a harassing course of action, including but not limited to posting of the private home address and telephone numbers." It also claims that "the tone and volume of the messages have increased to the point where Petitioner is fearful for his safety and that of his family."As you look through the details most of this is not at all true. It does appear that they had that conversation on Facebook a few weeks earlier, but after that all conversation ceased. The issue of posting "home address and telephone numbers" was apparently a missed redaction in some of the court documents that Haddock posted as evidence. A family member of Weber's asked Haddock to fix and Haddock noted that he had redacted the info and asked politely if any information that should have been redacted had been missed... and never heard back. Weber's restraining order request claims that Haddock ignored the requests which does not appear to be true.Even more ridiculous, Weber and his lawyer present a worker's comp situation that Haddock is engaged with concerning his current employer as evidence that Haddock has psychological problems. That's based on part of the worker's comp claim where Haddock's claim noted he has been having difficulty sleeping due to a back injury after his office chair broke.Finally, after Haddock and his lawyer responded, pointing all this out, rather than prove the supposed increasing cyber harassment, Weber's lawyer filed a truly bizarre response, that is the legal equivalent of "look, squirrel!" Rather than showing the supposed cyber harassment, the brief completely pivots and mostly focuses on combing through Haddock's social media feeds and taking random tweets (usually joke tweets) completely out of context to suggest that Haddock is somehow mentally unstable and therefore dangerous. When put back into context it's quite clear that nothing of the sort is true.The use of the tweets is particularly ridiculous. Some are obvious jokes. Some are devoid of context, such as this one:Beyond the fact that this is from two years ago (well before this dispute happened) and beyond the fact that it's just a general exasperated statement using a Futurama meme, Weber's lawyer ignores that YouTube link. What is it? It's a twerking stuffed dog. Haddock isn't suggesting that he's going to kill himself or do damage. He's mocking the fact that a twerking stuffed dog is the end of civilization. How that could possibly be evidence of either mental instability or "harassment" requiring a restraining order is beyond me. Over and over again, the tweets being used as evidence against Haddock are merely jokes or wry commentary on totally unrelated issues (bizarrely, a few of the tweets actually involve a wholly unrelated issue loosely involving Techdirt and someone who was very angry at one of our own stories).Here's another example, where Weber's filing takes things totally out of context. Weber's filing shows the following two tweets as supposed evidence of Haddock being "disposed to erratic (and possibly violent) behavior":

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Nearly six years after Brett Kimberlin first threatened to sue blogger/prosecutor Patrick Frey (a.k.a. "Patterico") over a factual post about Kimberlin's criminal past, the courtroom battle has finally come to an end.

There's now 11 million comments on the FCC's plan to kill net neutrality, a record for the agency and a significantly higher output than the 4 million comments the FCC received when crafting the current rules. And while many of these comments are fraudulent bot-crafted support for the FCC's plan, the limited analysis we've seen so far suggests the vast majority of those organizations, companies and individuals prefer keeping the existing rules intact. And most people generally understand that removing regulatory oversight in the absence of organic market competition doesn't end well for anybody not-named Comcast.One of the more notable recent filings (pdf) from this tidal wave of opposition comes from a collection of engineers, technologists, professors, current and former IETF and ICANN staffers, and numerous network architects and system engineers. Collectively, these experts argue that the FCC is not only making a mistake in killing net neutrality protections, it doesn't appear to understand how the internet actually works:

As the UK's porn filter move from "voluntold" to mandatory, questions are being raised (again) about the potential for overblocking. As is the case with any filtering system, things that should be allowed to go through sometimes end up caught in the netting.In addition to the opt-out porn filtering system in place at UK internet service providers, the government is also demanding any site that meets its vague definition of pornographic verify users' ages before allowing them access. This will apparently be tied to credit cards and/or mobile phones, so the government can strip porn viewers of anonymity it will be slightly more difficult for the under-18 crowd to avail themselves of over-18 web goodies. (But not really.)Because the blockaded content is so vaguely defined, education sites -- like the Whores of Yore site -- are likely to end up on the government's ID-please naughty list.

Back in the more innocent era of the early 2010s, you may recall that we discussed a series of delightful trademark disputes between clothier North Face and a couple of guys who started a business first called South Butt (later changed to Butt Face). In those series of posts, we discussed two conflicting facts: trademark lawsuits against parody operators such as this are extremely hard to win in court... except that those same lawsuits are crazy expensive to fight, so the parody operators typically just cave and settle. It's one of those corners of the law in which the very framework of the legal system virtually ensures that the proper legal conclusion is never reached. Yay.It seems that North Face's peers in the clothing industry share its disdain for these parody companies. Titleist, for instance, recently filed a trademark and dilution lawsuit against a company called I Made Bogey, suggesting that the following example of its product both will confuse the public as to its origins and will tarnish Titleist's reputation.

The National Archives obviously can't be expected to store every piece of paper generated by the federal government. But it does have an obligation to preserve copies of historically-significant documents. Unfortunately, it's allowing agencies to make these decisions. While it's true some agencies may have a better grasp on a document's significance, other agencies aren't as interested in archiving historically significant documents -- especially ones that might make them look bad.Enter the CIA, which already has a significant history of burying documents it would rather not reveal.

Another batch of FBI National Security Letters has been released, thanks to the expedited review process instituted by the USA Freedom Act. Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, has released five NSLs dating back to 2010, as the result of successful nondisclosure challenges.

So we've noted for years now how incumbent ISPs love to breathlessly insist that net neutrality protections "stifled broadband industry investment," despite the fact that publicly-available SEC filings, earnings reports, and the ISPs' own public statements on this subject have repeatedly proven this claim false. Traditionally, large ISPs like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter have employed industry-friendly economists to massage and cherry pick the data until it looks like a slowdown occurred. But every few months or so a journalist will painstakingly document how this slowdown claim is complete and total bullshit.But this being the broadband industry, and lobbyists being lobbyists, the repeated debunking of their claims never seems to matter. In large part because they know that if they repeat this claim often enough, repetition will forge reality in the minds of people who don't know any better. That's why, several times a week for years, you'll see either editorials like this one by Montana State Senator Doug Kary or claims from organizations that pretend not to take money from the telecom industry, insisting that net neutrality rained all over their investment parade.Ajit Pai once again trotted out this bogus claim during a hearing last week before the Senate Commerce Committee, a move that appeared to annoy Senator Ed Markey:

The Government Accountability Office has taken a run at the TSA's Behavioral Detection program in the past. Its findings were far from complimentary. Specially-trained "Behavior Detection Officers" (BDOs) were basically human coin flips. Deciding whether or not someone was a threat came down to a lot of subjective readings of human behavior, rather than proven principles.In response to this report, the TSA started trimming back the number of BDOs it deployed, converting about 500 of them back into regular TSA officers. But the TSA still believed there was something to its pseudoscience patchwork, so it's still sending out 2,600 BDOs to covertly stare at travelers' throats and eyes (no, really) until terrorism reveals itself.The GAO's second report focuses on the TSA's stubborn insistence that the Behavior Detection program is worth what we're paying for it. It has made claims to oversight that this program is scientifically-backed and scientifically-based. The GAO's investigation [PDF] finds almost nothing that backs these assertions.

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For some reason, this keeps happening and I will never understand why. For years, we have covered incidents where security researchers benignly report security flaws in the technology used by companies and governments, doing what can be characterized as a service to both the public and those entities providing the flawed tools, only to find themselves threatened, bullied, detained, or otherwise dicked with as a result. It's an incredibly frustrating trend to witness, with law enforcement groups and companies that should want to know about these flaws instead shooting the messenger in what tends to look like a fit of embarrassment.And so the trend continues, with a teenager in Hungary being arrested after pointing out a flaw in the ticketing website for the group that acts as the Budapest public transportation authority, the BKK.

So we've noted repeatedly how major ISPs aren't just pushing to have the FCC kill its existing, popular net neutrality rules. They've also been spending a lot of time and money pushing loyal politicians to support the crafting of a new net neutrality law as a replacement. Why? They know that if Congress is even capable of shrugging off its dysfunction and corruption to craft one, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter lawyers and lobbyists will be the ones writing it.On the surface, having Congress craft a new law sounds like a good idea. It finally cements rules into law, and prevents the FCC rules from being created and killed repeatedly by the whims of appointed partisans. And while I've seen a lot of journalists support this route, most of them don't quite understand just how strong of a stranglehold these corporations have over state and federal lawmakers and regulators.There's one reason ISPs support this route: they want to "put the debate to rest" with a flimsy net neutrality law that doesn't actually address any of the current net neutrality areas of contention (usage caps, interconnection, zero rating), only really outlawing things ISPs never intended to do anyway (block websites entirely). As with the FCC's flimsy 2010 rules (that were co-written by AT&T, Verizon and Google), there will be massive, tractor-trailer sized loopholes allowing them to do pretty much whatever they want, provided they at least pretend it's for the security and safety of the network.And while this ISP push for a new net neutrality law has been smoldering under the radar for a while, it's about to be amped up dramatically. House Republicans are asking the CEOs of Facebook, Google, AT&T and Comcast to attend a public hearing in September, purportedly to "help settle the debate over net neutrality once and for all." But if you look at the language used in the invite by Rep. Greg Walden, the objective becomes more clear:

There's general prosecutorial dissatisfaction with the founders' decision to implement due process rights for accused criminals. Flowing from the "limits" of the Fourth Amendment into the Fifth and Sixth, it seems the system is set up for prosecutorial failure. At least, that's the impression you get when you hear prosecutors actively arguing against enshrined rights.Albuquerque, New Mexico is in the middle of a two-year experiment in case management. Far too often, accused were allowed to languish behind bars until the state decided to begin prosecuting their cases. The right to a speedy trial doesn't seem to be so much a right as an easily-ignored guideline. People lose parts of their lives and, often, their employment for having done nothing more than be accused of committing a crime.The order [PDF] says prosecutors have 10 days to work from arrest to arraignment and the rest of the schedule is sped up for both prosecutors and defendants. Most productions of evidence (from either side) must be handled in five days and preparing for trial (including providing lists of witnesses expected to testify) is limited to 25 days.There have been few complaints from public defenders as defendants are being cut loose more frequently thanks to the state's inability to meet this order's definition of a speedy trial. All the complaints are coming from the prosecution's side, which is the side with a greater amount of resources at its disposal.

Here in North America, because 2016 just had to become the most infuriatingly stupid and polarizing year in the history of the multiverse, far too much oxygen was spent on debates over both how much racism was okay on one side and exactly what qualified as racist on the other. It's one of those frustrating contests with nobody to root for, as half of the population proclaimed that racism was dead and everyone was too stuck up about it while the other side managed to find racism everywhere, introducing into the popular lexicon terms like "privilege" that mostly make me want to put my head in a vice and get to rotating that lever.Still, this isn't a debate that should be totally ignored. After all, at its heart is the matter of free speech, not just as a legal framework but also as an ideal that the West tends to claim to hold in high regard. Strangely, one of the beacons of this debate shall now be on the subject of vanity license plates, with a heavy dash of nerd culture thrown in just to make it extra fun. For this story, we go to Winnipeg, where a Star Trek fan received the following vanity plate for his car.

So while the internet-connected age has delivered untold innovation, it has also been a total shitshow for privacy and security. The internet-of-broken-things can't seem to go a week without reports of another major privacy screw up, and even your kid's Barbie is now collecting snippets of data that can be sold to the highest bidder. And while throwing a WiFi chipset into something isn't such a bad idea, companies are so eager to boost revenues that actually securing these products -- or respecting customers' privacy -- has repeatedly been shown to be a distant afterthought.The latest hot topic of conversation on this front is iRobot, makers of robot-vacuum Roomba. iRobot CEO Colin Angle turned a few heads this week after he told Reuters that the company is considering selling all of the data the company's robot collects about the size and layout of your home, to companies like Apple and Google:

The economy is important — very important. But is that because it matters in and of itself, or because it's the engine for achieving the things we really do care about? Here at Techdirt we've always been strong advocates of the free market, but we've never been absolutists about things like regulation, and we believe it's very important to explore these issues in detail. This week on the podcast we're joined by James Allworth, co-host of the Exponent podcast and author of a recent post entitled Prioritizing Economics is Crippling the U.S. Economy, to discuss entrepreneurship, democracy, the economy and more.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.

Let's jump back in the wayback machine for a moment and discuss Untied, your primary source for customer and employee complaints about United Airlines. When we last wrote about the site in 2012, we first mentioned that Untied.com has been a thing since 1997 before detailing the lawsuit United Airlines filed in Canada after it found that Untied.com had redesigned its parody site to look more like United.com.Untied, if you are not aware, is a site that started with a single person's complaint about United Airlines customer service before morphing into an aggregator of such complaints from both customers and internal airline staff and former staff. If you want a bible to be written on what United has done wrong in the realm of customer service, you need not worry because Untied.com is that bible. Had this suit been filed in America, it would face a mountain of caselaw suggesting that so-called "sucks sites" are well within the boundaries of protected nominative fair use. It's worth mentioning that Untied doesn't actively attempt to mislead visitors to the site into thinking it's affiliated with the airline. In fact, visitors are shown a popup upon visiting that alerts them to Untied's status as a parody site. Even a cursory glance at the site's contents would confirm that status, as the entire site is dedicated to taking a metaphorical dump on United Airlines' reputation.Despite the site having existed for so long, and despite the fact that the Streisand Effect exists, United Airlines filed its lawsuit, bringing all manner of attention to Untied that it otherwise would not have had, even as the airline is and has been maligned in nearly every corner of the internet for its laughable attempts at customer service. In its filing, United Airlines insisted that Untied had infringed its trademark rights and copyright rights with the site. It requested an injunction against the site before suggesting that just to make sure the injunction was clear, maybe the court ought to just hand the site over to United Airlines to boot.

Last week we noted how the FCC was acting incredibly suspicious in regards to its May claim that a DDOS attack, not annoyed John Oliver viewers, brought down the agency's website shortly after Oliver's latest rant on net neutrality. Despite pressure from journalists and several Senators, the FCC is simply refusing to release any data providing the existence of the attack, resulting in many media outlets not so subtly implying that the agency was lying:

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The Defense Department's 1033 program allows local law enforcement agencies to buy military equipment. Often, the purchases are made easier with sizable grants, meaning agencies can load up on assault rifles, grenade launchers, armored vehicles, and extra ammo at nearly no cost. (They can also get computers, office furniture, etc. through these grants, but if that were the extent of the program, there would be zero controversy.)The 1033 program is supposed to be tightly controlled and every acquisition vetted to prevent high-powered military gear from falling into the wrong hands. We've already noted local agencies aren't performing much in the way of oversight, resulting in several agencies receiving suspensions for failing to account for the whereabouts of purchased gear.The problem, however, isn't just on the receiving end. The Defense Department isn't doing much in the way of due diligence when adding new agencies to the list of military gear purchases. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) performed a sting operation, setting up a fake law enforcement agency to see if it could acquire used military gear. By the end of it, the fake agency had obtained $1.2 million in gear, all without ever having to speak directly with anyone at the Defense Department. From the GAO's report [PDF]:

Needless to say, consumer advocates and smaller competitors aren't too keen on AT&T's $89 billion plan to acquire Time Warner. They argue that AT&T's long history of unethical behavior, empty promises, and anti-competitive shenanigans make it extremely likely the company will use its greater size and leverage to ill effect. They worry that AT&T will make it harder for competitors to license content necessary to compete with AT&T's DirecTV Now streaming service, and arbitrary usage caps and other tricks like zero rating to similarly put competitors at a disadvantage.Traditionally, these kinds of vertical integration deals aren't blocked because it's harder to clearly prove potential antitrust harm, even if AT&T has a thirty-year documented history of all manner of fraudulent behavior. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised that this was a deal his administration simply would not allow, given the "concentration of power" the deal would deliver:

Things have been mostly quiet as Congress heads towards the possible renewal of Section 702 surveillance powers. The NSA, oddly, made the most noise by dropping its "about" collection because it simply couldn't (or wouldn't) stop harvesting US persons' communications. As usual, privacy activists are sounding the alarm but the general level of noise at the Congressional level is nothing compared to the runup to Section 215's renewal.Quieter is better for the Trump administration, which has already expressed its desire for a clean reauthorization. There are plenty of surveillance hawks who would rather no one messed with the approval process and a few of those have the power to stonewall any legislative reforms that might make their way to the House or Senate in the coming months.But the noisiest silence is emanating from the tech sector, whose platforms and services are integral to the NSA's harvesting of internet communications and data.

A story about surveillance in China is hardly notable -- Techdirt has run dozens of them. But there are some unusual aspects to this report on the Sixth Tone site that make it a little out of the ordinary:

Last month, we discussed a strange spate of DMCA notices going out from Alex Mauer, a video game music composer. Through her DMCA blitz, she managed to get a game removed from Steam, as well as getting several DMCA strikes against several YouTubers that had covered that game, all apparently as a result of a contract dispute she had with Imagos Softworks and her general inability to understand contractual language and copyright law. The tone of that post was justifiably critical, but some are now concerned that there is a well-being issue at hand. For starters, Mauer has now targeted a second game via DMCA takedown and has managed to get Steam to remove the game from its listings.

For decades now, broadband ISPs have abused the lack of meaningful competition in the telecom market by not only refusing to shore up historically awful customer service, but by raising rates hand over fist. This usually involves leaving the advertised price largely the same, but pummeling customers with all manner of misleading fees and surcharges that drive up the actual price paid post sale. And by and large regulators from both major political parties have been perfectly ok with this practice, despite it effectively being false advertising.CenturyLink (combined by the merger of Qwest, CenturyTel and Embarq) has been exceptionally talented when it comes to misleading fees. A few years ago the company began charging its broadband customers an "Internet Cost Recovery Fee," which the company's website explains as such:

That buzzing noise that never seems to leave the Intelligence Community's ears is Sen. Ron Wyden. Wyden's questions -- often unanswered -- are dog whistles for privacy advocates but ear-bleeding tinnitus for agency officials. Persistence is key in Congressional oversight and few are better at it than Wyden is.For years, Wyden has been asking how many Americans have been hauled in by the NSA's Section 702 dragnet. And for years, the NSA and ODNI have sidestepped the question. The surveillance bosses got close to returning an answer -- right before they announced they were shutting down the collection that netted the most Americans.Right before Trump was elected, James Clapper finally said he'd cough up the numbers. But with the regime change, the promise is no longer a promise. The NSA may try to keep this buried, using time and distance from the abruptly-abandoned "about" collection to stiff-arm additional requests for domestic surveillance data.Ever persistent, Wyden has returned with another set of questions [PDF] regarding NSA surveillance. This one pertains to the least-discussed surveillance authorization and the one almost everyone -- including members of oversight committees -- knows nearly nothing about: Executive Order 12333.Like Section 702, there's a good probability intelligence gathered under this authority is being used by domestic agencies. Backdoor searches of NSA intel have been unofficial common knowledge for years now, so there's very little reason to believe the NSA's most mysterious authority doesn't have its own built-in peepholes for the FBI and other federal agencies.Wyden is asking for details on this authority, specifically the number of times it has been used to surveil Americans. As he points out, the order allows the deliberate targeting of American citizens with the Attorney General's approval.

I thought writing about San Diego Comic Con being censorial assholes would be the strangest story we'd write about Comic Con this year, but leave it to airline security to come up with an even more bizarre story. Apparently United Airlines (because of course it would be United) put up a sign at the airport in San Diego telling people that all books needed to be removed from checked bags. A Twitter user named Adi Chappo tweeted a picture of the sign at the airport:United, being United, responded that the TSA was demanding that all comic books from San Diego Comic Con could only go in carry on luggage.Chappo asked for more detail and United told him to reach out to the TSA directly.This wasn't just a one-off either. Another Twitter user posted a Twitter direct message conversation with United, in which it claimed that there was a TSA restriction on any comic books in checked luggage:

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As threatened during comments to an association of district attorneys, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is bringing back asset forfeiture. Specifically, Sessions is loosening the restrictions placed on federal adoption of local seizures by Eric Holder during the last years of the Obama presidency. Holder's directive prevented local agencies from routing cash or vehicle seizures through the feds to dodge local rules. That's all over now. An order [PDF] and directive [PDF] issued by the DOJ are welcoming local law enforcement agencies to once again skirt restrictive state forfeiture laws by asking the DOJ to "adopt" their seizures.

So for years Verizon Wireless refused to compete on price, insisting that the company's network was just so incredible, it didn't have to. Then came increased competition from T-Mobile, which forced the company to not only start competing a little more seriously on price, but to bring back unlimited data plans Verizon had spent years telling customers they didn't need. And while Wall Street cries about this rise in competition hurting earnings at least once a week, it has generally been a good thing for consumers.But there's two things waiting just over the horizon that could ruin everybody's good time. One is a looming merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, which would significantly reduce competition in the wireless sector, eliminating much of the pressure on mobile providers to compete. The other is the impending death of net neutrality protections at the FCC, which currently keep these carriers from abusing this lack of competition to drive up costs and hamper content competitors.But another, important part of net neutrality rules is the requirement that carriers are clear about just what kind of connection you're buying. Last week, Verizon apparently got a running start in being less transparent when it decided to begin throttling its wireless customers without telling anybody. Users at Reddit began noticing that when they streamed Netflix content or accessed Netflix's Fast.com speedtest, their connections were magically limited to 10 Mbps. When they used other companies' speedtests or used a VPN to mask their traffic, they received the full speed of their mobile connections.To be clear, being restricted to 10 Mbps isn't that big of a deal in and of itself. 10 Mbps is more than enough to stream video at 1080p60 and 1440p30, though users say they're running into buffering at 1440p60 or 4K (not that most users care about 4K content on mobile devices anyway). But it was the fact that Verizon couldn't be bothered to tell anybody this was happening that's raising a few eyebrows. And when pressed, Verizon was only willing to give a rather vague answer about how they were simply conducting "tests" that didn't hurt anybody:

It's well known many confidential informants are criminals. Acting as informants is supposed to keep their criminal acts to a minimum while providing access to bigger criminal fish. The same goes for undercover officers and agents. Some illegality is presumed but those running CIs are expected to be making the world a better place, not ignoring vast amounts of criminal activity simply because the informant is now on their side. But that doesn't seem to be the case.The DEA's informant program is being run with almost no oversight, according to an Inspector General's report. Money flowed to informants who were still under federal investigation and no one up top seemed too concerned about the program's bang/buck ratio. The FBI made abusable programs worse by hiding payments to informants and giving them a cut of forfeited property.It's not that informants can't break the law. In some cases, they must. But the illegal acts must be done with permission and as an integral part of an investigation. But that's not how things work out. Trevor Aaronson of The Intercept tells the story of FBI informant Mohammed Agbareia, who participated in terrorism stings while making a healthy, illegal profit on the side.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple anonymous comment, saying something that shouldn't need to be repeated so often but for the weird anti-regulation absolutists who need to be reminded over and over:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, we saw some copyright insanity when BMG issued a YouTube takedown on a Mitt Romney campaign ad for including a clip of Obama singing an Al Green song, and then the next day went on to take down the original clip, because even the President was a pirate in the eyes of the entertainment industry. Thankfully, by the end of the week, YouTube decided the videos were fair use, and restored them. Meanwhile, Viacom was blacking out web clips as part of a spat with DirecTV, leading Jon Stewart to blast them on their own network and get them to reverse the decision for at least some clips. And in New Zealand, the judge in Kim Dotcom's extradition trial spoke out against the TPP and copyright extremism, which forced him to step down from the case (even though the same thing never seems to happen to pro-copyright judges).Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, the RIAA finally found itself on the hook for legal fees in one of its aggressive lawsuits, despite its usual strategy of dropping cases whenever that looked like a possibility. The head of an LA news agency who made headlines by being the first person to sue YouTube for copyright infringement decided he might take his misguided fight to Apple as well. The MPAA was speaking out against net neutrality because it might interfere with anti-piracy enforcement, Clear Channel was trying to use the Sirius-XM merger as a reason to get looser restrictions on terrestrial radio ownership, and Microsoft was making promises about future Windows editions as damage control after the poor reception of Vista.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, webcasters were appealing the new royalty rates that would cripple them, tech executives were seeking a better starting point for a conversation about piracy with Hollywood, and Universal was doing the kind of thing Universal does and appointing a new "senior vice president of anti-piracy". At least one analyst was looking at broadband adoption in a more positive light than usual at the time, while others were not too sanguine on the future of 3D TV — but we also took a moment to celebrate how it's often unglamorous technology that changes history the most, on the 100th birthday of the air conditioner.

As you may know, San Diego Comic Con is going on right now. And, like many techie/geeky people, while I've never attended the show, I always look forward to what comes out of the event. However, SDCC is increasingly looking like a massive censorial bully. A few years ago, we covered what we believed to be a fairly silly trademark dispute that SDCC had filed against the organizers of the Salt Lake Comic Con. We pointed out that trademarking "Comic Con" seemed silly and there was no problem with multiple Comic Con's happily co-existing. And, really, SDCC is the 800-lb gorilla here. It's the dominant comic con and has been for many, many years, as it seems to grow larger and larger. Other cities having their own comic conventions doesn't take away from SDCC (if anything they tend to reinforce the dominance of SDCC).Last month, in covering some news about the case still going on, we added a long (longer than the post itself...) editor's note about the truly weird situation in which SDCC had sent us a ridiculous subpoena demanding (among other things) any internal documents ever mentioning SDCC and implying that we had some sort of business relationship with the organizers of the SLC event (to be clear, we have zero relationship with anyone involved in either event -- we just found a story written about the case and used that as the basis for our posts on the topic). We pushed back on SDCC and noted that it really appeared that their fishing expedition was an attempt to intimidate the press from reporting on this case. It was... really strange.And now, with SDCC happening right now, the Hollywood Reporter has the latest on the case, in which SDCC has filed for one of the strangest legal gag orders I've seen in a while. I mean, I've seen these kinds of gag order requests filed by pro se plaintiffs, but rarely by competent lawyers working at giant famous law firms.You can read the demand for a protective order here or below, and if I had to summarize it, it's basically: "it's no fair that Salt Lake Comic Con is getting good press coverage and we're being mocked, so the court should silence them." I read through the document and I kept expecting more... and... that's really it. They literally complain that they're losing in "the court of public opinion" and argue that it's somehow unfair that one side is talking about this case publicly and they should be barred from any further conversation. And, it gives some more context to the paranoid view that was clear in the subpoena we received: SDCC and/or its lawyers are so focused on the negative press coverage that they seem to assume that something more nefarious is going on... beyond the basic likelihood that lots of people think this lawsuit is over-aggressive bullying by SDCC.

It's no secret that Major League Baseball has proven themselves to be happy bullies regarding its trademarks. Between thinking it owns the letter 'W', forgetting that fair use exists, and its decision to bully amateur baseball leagues, the legal staff for MLB has shown that they can produce some really head-scratching moments.Which brings us to the present, in which Major League Baseball has asked for an extension to decide if it wants to oppose the new logo for Overwatch League, the eSports league dedicated to playing -- you guessed it -- Overwatch.

The Maryland Court of Special Appeals has handed down a ruling [PDF] on quasi-cell site location info. The evidence offered by the state isn't being so much suppressed as it is being rejected. The information wasn't obtained illegally and no rights were violated. Rather, the court finds the evidence to be questionable, as in "evidence of what, exactly?" [via EvidenceProf Blog]The defendant in the case is charged with murder. Bashunn Phillips filed a motion to exclude the evidence, which was granted by the lower court. The state appealed. But there's nothing in it for the state.The "evidence" -- which is going to carry around scare quotes for the remainder of this post -- doesn't tie Phillips to anything. What was submitted isn't even the equivalent of coarse cell site location info. What the state submitted is something that can easily be obtained without a warrant… because it doesn't actually target any person at all.