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We've been following the evolutionary milestones for eSports for some time now. What was once an event class considered equal parts fringe and foreign has made impressive strides towards the mainstream in mere years. It started with a small university granting scholarships for eAthletes, progressed into the realm of coverage on sports broadcasting giant ESPN, and made yet another leap with an eSports section of the pie being carved out by the NBA.Not all progress towards the mainstream needs to be of a new type, of course, and eSports reached another milestone harkening back to its first, with the announcement that the University of Utah, a member of the Pac-12 Conference, has started its own varsity eSports program.

The governor of Idaho doesn't care about his constituents. State legislators had successfully pushed through an asset forfeiture reform bill with overwhelming support, but Governor Butch Otter vetoed it on April 6th. (h/t Ed Krayewski at Reason)The bill ran into some law enforcement resistance on its way to being passed. A 58-10 vote sent it to the governor's desk over the concerns of law enforcement, who apparently felt that law enforcement via asset forfeiture would just be too difficult if some form of actual due process was recognized.

Since Congress threw out new privacy rules for ISPs that were supposed to come into effect soon, there's been a renewed uproar on all sides of the debate about internet regulation. While the big ISPs generally want to be able to do as they please, there are smaller service providers out there that fully understand and embrace the need for privacy, net neutrality and more. One such ISP is Sonic, and this week we're joined by CEO Dane Jasper to discuss why these rules are a good thing.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.

Give an inch and they will take a mile, as the saying goes. This mantra applies quite nicely to the recent spate of site-blocking efforts that have taken place around the world. Once content owners, chiefly Hollywood and music groups based in America, manage to slightly open the door to having entire sites blocked by order of government, they then barge through and expand the scope of the site-blocking exponentially.And the groups doing this barging don't even bother to hide their plans. In Ireland, one can see this in the recent news of the Motion Picture Association submitting an order to have several websites blocked by ISPs there.

Trump's DOJ -- led by Jeff Sessions -- is rolling the clock back… on everything. Sessions has problems with the country's interest in decriminalizing personal marijuana use. Weed has been a big moneymaker for the FBI and DOJ, and no one likes losing paying customers -- especially not the private prisons that bad drug laws have kept full of taxpayer-supported "guests."He also wants to roll back the DOJ's Civil Rights Division to the good old days. You know, before it actually existed and/or did anything about unconstitutional policing. Even though crime rates in most cities are still at historical lows, Trump and Sessions believe the country is under siege by violent criminals, who must be dealt with in the harshest, most expensive way.Now, there's this: Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post reports the DOJ will be reversing course on the junk science it so often refers to as "forensic science."

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For years we've noted how more than twenty states have passed laws -- often quite literally written by ISP lobbyists -- that prevent towns and cities from building their own broadband networks (either alone, or with a private partner). Even in instances where, as is often the case, the incumbent broadband provider refuses to upgrade them. ISP lobbyists (and the lawmakers that love them) usually try to defend these protectionist laws by first demonizing municipal broadband as some kind of vile socialist cabal, then pretending new state laws are necessary to protect local communities from themselves.In reality, municipal broadband is an organic, grassroots reaction to broadband market failure. And buying laws that restrict local communities' rights to decide local infrastructure matters for themselves is little more than regulatory capture. Like net neutrality and privacy rights, municipal broadband actually has broad, bipartisan support -- and most municipal broadband networks are built in Conservative markets with local voter support. But by framing the issue in a partisan way (government run amok!), ISP lobbyists have been able to sow dissent and stall progress that could challenge their status quo.A new survey of 4,000 consumers by the Pew Research Project once again drives that point home, highlighting that 70% of Americans support letting towns and cities build their own broadband networks -- if they're not getting decent service by the regional incumbent:

France's presidential election season has kicked in. The supposed "moderate" of the bunch -- Emmanuel Macron -- has managed to gain considerable support in the last several months. Some of this has sprung from our own recent election. Earlier this year, the candidate took digs at Trump's anti-climate change stance, stating France would welcome dejected US scientists with open arms.He also said this, taking a shot at Trump's planned border wall.

When it comes to bastions of hope in the video game industry on intellectual property matters, we've been happy to laud CD Projekt Red (CDPR) for getting most things right most of time. The company's stance on keeping its games DRM-free while being immensely successful has been a breath of fresh air, while its tendency towards bucking the DLC trend in gaming by not nickel-and-diming its fanbase for every last little thing. These are generally good folks, in other words, which is why it's a little disheartening to see how the company is handling the backlash over its attempt to trademark the term "Cyberpunk" in the EU.But first, some background. Cyberpunk 2020 is a pen and paper roleplaying game developed by Mike Pondsmith. CDPR announced in 2014 that it was making a game based on that system, entitled Cyberpunk 2077. To that end, it acquired the already granted US trademarks for the term "Cyberpunk", originally registered in 2011, from Pondsmith's publishing company. Cyberpunk is also, of course, a common genre term for fiction, movies, and video games. If you're asking why the USPTO ever should have granted a trademark on the singular term "Cyberpunk", the answer is obvious: it shouldn't have. The term was coined in the 80s and quickly grew in usage to the point where its an established genre of fiction. Trademarking it for the use in titles within a common medium of fiction is crazy. Yet, in the course of acquiring the rights to make the game, the original granted mark was transferred to CDPR when it began making the game, and the company likewise got a trademark registration for the full name of its game, Cyberpunk 2077.The recent uproar is because now CDPR is attempting to register the term "cyberpunk" in the EU itself, as opposed to having it transferred from a previous owner. The backlash was quite severe.

We've discussed before how difficult it is to strip law enforcement officers of qualified immunity. Courts have been spectacularly unwilling to take this protection away from cops, even when confronted with horrendous rights violations. Even in cases where the court decides a rights violation has occurred, unless it has "clearly established" precedent to work with -- something stating that this particular violation in this particular set of circumstances has resulted in the stripping of immunity before -- the officer being sued usually remains shielded from liability.So, if the court is unwilling to set the precedent, the violation can occur again and again and again until the presiding court decides it's had enough. When a case comes through where immunity has been denied -- or stripped away by a higher court -- it's immediately notable.In this case [PDF] handled by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the standard for losing qualified immunity is still high. It's just that the law enforcement officer in this case went out of his way to be an abusive asshole. The court's unwilling to let that slide.Paul Stephens and his cousin, Roan Greenwood, were guests of Greenwood's girlfriend at an apartment complex that sat atop a row of stores. They were both checking out Greenwood's girlfriend's car, attempting to track down the source of the "check engine" warning that came on right before it was parked.Deputy Nick DeGiovanni decided the two might be planning to break into the shops below the apartments. He ignored Greenwood's offer to take him up to his girlfriend's apartment to prove he had permission to be there. While he was questioning Stephens (really just demanding he produce some ID), Stephens took a call on his phone using his Bluetooth headset. It all went downhill quickly from there.

Just days after Montreal prosecutors cut loose 35 suspected Mafia members rather than disclose the details of Stingray device use by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the RCMP is admitting that, yes, it does use Stingrays.It's not like it's not known the RCMP owns Stingrays. It has for nearly a decade now. It's just that it would rather not discuss it in court… or in public… or in public records responses.The official revelation occurred in Ontario, and it didn't come as the result of a multitude of alleged criminals being released back into the general population. Instead, the (unwelcome) discussion of the RCMP's cell tower spoofers was prompted by a CBC investigation into "suspicious signals" and apparent cell phone tracking around the nation's capital.

Over the past few years we've covered what may seem like a side issue in the many legal issues facing Kim Dotcom, but it's an important one: is the US able to legally take all of his money and stuff, despite (1) him not being found guilty of anything and (2) that stuff not being anywhere near the US? As we've said, even if you think Dotcom is guilty of horrible crimes and should rot in jail, how the US is going about taking his assets should concern you massively. The fact that courts have blessed the DOJ's actions doesn't make it any less concerning.On Friday, Dotcom (along with some powerhouse legal help) asked the Supreme Court to review this issue. The real issue here is one that we've covered a lot in other contexts: civil asset forfeiture, in which the US seizes and sues stuff rather than people. That's why this lawsuit is not actually against Kim Dotcom (there are other such lawsuits), but rather the United States v. All Assets Listed in Attachment A (no, really, that's the case). Of course, "Attachment A" is all of Dotcom's assets, mostly in Hong Kong. But the situation with Dotcom takes the normal questions about asset forfeiture and adds layer upon layer of complexity.There are three specific issues that Dotcom is asking the Supreme Court to review, and all are important here. The first is whether or not a US court can allow for asset forfeiture for assets that are outside the US and outside of US government control. As the dissent pointed out in the appeals court ruling in this case, a federal court issuing a ruling is supposed to be a binding ruling, not an advisory ruling. And if the assets are held outside the US and not under the jurisdiction of the US courts, the ruling can't be binding.The second two issues are connected: and it's basically the question of whether the courts were right in saying that the federal government could take Dotcom's stuff and that Dotcom could not protest, because he was "a fugitive." Of course, he's not a "fugitive." He's just fighting extradition to a place he's never been. He isn't running away and is going through the full legal process he's entitled to in New Zealand. That's not someone hiding from the US, it's someone who is following the basic rules of due process, which the US wishes to deny him. The specific questions are at what stage of the process he can be declared a fugitive and the other is whether or not intent needs to be shown.As we have noted repeatedly, the Supreme Court rejects most requests to hear cases, but the lawyers here (Dotcom's long-term lawyer Ira Rothken along with legal giant Quinn Emanuel) have done a good job demonstrating real circuit splits in appeals courts on each of the three questions, which is often important in convincing the Supreme Court to actually take a case. As the filing notes:

So we've talked repeatedly how the shoddy security in most "internet of things" devices has resulted in increasingly-vulnerable home networks, as consumers rush to connect not-so-smart fridges, TVs and tea kettles to the home network. But this failure extends well beyond the home, since these devices have also resulted in historically-large DDoS attacks as this hardware is compromised and integrated into existing botnets (often in just a matter of minutes after being connected to the internet).Whether it's the ease in which a decidedly-clumsy ransomware attacker was able to shut down San Francisco's mass transit system, or the fact that many city-connected devices like speed cameras often feature paper mache security, you can start to see why some security experts are worried that there's a dumpster fire brewing that will, sooner rather than later, result in core infrastructure being compromised and, potentially, mass fatalities. If you ask security experts like Bruce Schneier, this isn't a matter of if -- it's a matter of when.In what should probably be seen as yet another warning shot across the bow: slightly before midnight in Dallas last Friday a hacker compromised the city's emergency warning systems and managed to set off the city's 156 warning sirens more than a dozen times. Needlessly to say, the scale of of the warning, and the number of sirens, led many people in Dallas to believe that the city had somehow been physically attacked in the middle of the night:Dallas officials were forced to shut the system down around 1:20 am on Saturday, and despite informing the public to ignore the false alarms, a city that had already been having 911 issues the last few months found its 911 systems inundated with a massive influx of calls from concerned citizens:

Late last week an important, but disappointing, ruling came down from the 9th Circuit appeals court. The ruling in the case of Mavrix Photographs v. LiveJournal found that volunteer moderators could be deemed agents of a platform, and thus it's possible that red flag knowledge of infringement by one of those volunteer moderators could lead to a platform losing its safe harbors. There are a lot of caveats there, and the ruling itself covers a lot of ground, so it's important to dig in.The case specifically involved a site hosted on LiveJournal called "Oh No They Didn't" (ONTD) which covers celebrity news. Users submit various celebrity stories, and ONTD has a bunch of volunteer moderators who determine what gets posted and what does not. Some of the images that were posted were taken by a paparazzi outfit named Mavrix. Rather than send DMCA takedowns, Mavrix went straight to court and sued LiveJournal. LiveJournal claimed that it was protected by the DMCA safe harbors as the service provider and the lower court agreed. This ruling sends the case back to the lower court, saying that its analysis of whether or not the volunteer moderators were "agents" of LiveJournal was incomplete, and suggests it tries again.There are a number of "tricky" issues involved in this case, starting with this: because ONTD became massively big and popular, LiveJournal itself got a bit more involved with ONTD, which may eventually prove to be its undoing. From the decision by the court:

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Surprising nobody, FCC boss Ajit Pai has been privately meeting with large broadband providers, informing them he'll be taking an axe to net neutrality protections soon. What exactly this will look like isn't yet clear, especially given the massive support for the rules, and the fact that Pai can't just roll back net neutrality (and the FCC's Title II reclassification) without justifying it to the courts. But anonymous sources tell Reuters that Pai seemingly wants to replace real net neutrality protections with voluntary commitments from companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast:

Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute testified at a Senate Intelligence Committee last week, giving his insight into Russia's propaganda machine. Like everyone else in Washington, the Senate is trying to determine how much of a role the Russian government might have played in the recent election. An FBI investigation into Trump's ties with Russia is ongoing.Watts noted Russia's attempts to influence American thinking isn't really new, nor is it solely tied to Trump's unlikely political success. He points out he began seeing major inroads being made almost three years ago. Here at Techdirt, we noticed the stateside spread of the Russian troll army, confronted directly here by Karl Bode in response to a stream of pro-Russia comments on one of his articles.Also of concern to many (although in varying degrees) is "fake news." Much of what's considered fake news tends to be in the often-partisan eye of the beholder, but a growing network of conspiracy theory sites and news outlets with Russian government ties aren't helping. Watts states this is simply more the same Cold War tactics by the Russian government, but with the advantage the internet's built-in instant amplification power.

Last December, we wrote about China reaching a rather questionable milestone: filing one million patents in a single year. As Techdirt has pointed out repeatedly, more patents do not equate to more innovation, so simply filing huge numbers of patents means very little in itself. The government of India has just found this out the hard way. As The Hindu reports, CSIR-Tech, the commercialization arm of India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has had to shut down its operations. The reason? It's run out of money as a result of filing too many patents:

This week, the influential voice of Unesco joined the chorus of people objecting to the addition of DRM to the HTML5 standard. Both of our winning comments on the insightful side are anonymous, came in response to an accusation of hypocrisy, in which a commenter compared the EME DRM scheme to HTTPS encryption for websites. The first-place winning response covered the key differences in purpose and function:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, a worrying report from the White House suggested they were still seeking a legislative solution to piracy even in the wake of SOPA's failure. Meanwhile, in an interview, the MPAA's Chris Dodd suggested backroom negotiations were already underway on that front, though the association quickly tried to backtrack those comments. But our attention was already shifting from SOPA to another even more problematic set of proposed laws: the cybersecurity bill CISPA.Viacom gained some ground in its lawsuit against YouTube when the appeals court sent the case back to the district court, though this wasn't the big win that some people portrayed it as. And given recent revelations about the Copyright Office, it's notable that five years ago this week that we were talking about its struggles to modernize and pointing out Maria Pallante's questionable grasp of the purpose of copyright.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, EMI — one of the few labels that occasionally showed signs of "getting it" — announced (with the help of Steve Jobs) that it would offer DRM free music through the iTunes store. Weirdly, other comments from Jobs showed that despite his anti-music-DRM stance, he was pro-DRM when it came to video (for some highly illogical reasons). Meanwhile, some record store owners were fed up and ready to point fingers at the RIAA for destroying the recording industry, the world of online guitar tablature was starting to go legit, and a judge declared DVD jukeboxes to be legal to the chagrin of DVD DRM groups. Also this week in 2007, Google and Microsoft were fighting to acquire DoubleClick while the internet advertising giant was trying to make itself even more valuable.Fifteen Years AgoToday the world frets over fake news and clickbait and propaganda and what to do about it, but this week in 2002 it was grappling with the basic early questions like how much can automated news curation and gathering replace human editors, and what happens with internet journalism in the middle of a major crisis. Courts were starting to recognize that computers were important enough to life that you can't just stop people from using them, XM satellite radio was growing much faster than we expected, and employees at various companies were struggling to get their older bosses to understand why they need wireless technology. Canada got plenty of attention this week too. It beat the US to launching a good intercarrier SMS system, and made headlines with two April Fools pranks: one in which some radio hosts managed to keep Bill Gates on the phone by masquerading as the Canadian Prime Minister, and another in which a too-convincing joke about the Finance Minister quitting his job caused the Canadian dollar to take a hit.Meanwhile, never one to shy away from colorful hyperbole, Jack Valenti called media consumers "devilish" and accused them of "terrorizing" the industry.Sixty-One Years AgoBetween subscription-based specialty cable, streaming services like Netflix, and the rise of YouTube and internet video in general, the past few years have seen the a long-standing convention begin to get dethroned: standardized half-hour and hour runtimes for TV shows. This framework is going to stick around for a long time and still play a role on network television, but cable and streaming shows are starting to get much more flexible with their runtimes (Netflix's The OA made headlines with episodes that vary wildly in length, from 30 minutes to as much as 71 minutes in the same season). But in the early 1950s and before, even the half-hour standard timeslot didn't exist yet — serial shows were instead standardized at 15 minutes. It was on April 2nd, 1956 that soap operas As The World Turns and The Edge Of Night debuted in the US as the first serial shows with half-hour episodes. People didn't like the format at first, but it would soon come to be the norm for a half-century of television.

Connecticut's legislature has managed to back into legalizing law enforcement use of weaponized drones. In writing a new drone law, lawmakers banned the use of weaponized drones, but made an exception for police. It's not a case of "Hey, let's give the cops weaponized drones!" as much as it is a case of not wanting law enforcement to be unable to have that option.As for how police will or won't be able to deploy weaponized drones, that's still up in the air (I am so sorry):

For years now, we've written about the years-long effort, led by the MPAA and others, to put DRM directly into the standard for HTML5 (via "Encrypted Media Extensions" or EME) which continues to move forward with Tim Berners-Lee acting as if there's nothing that can be done about it. It appears that not everyone agrees. Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has come out strongly against adding DRM to HTML5 in a letter sent to Tim Berners-Lee (found via Boing Boing).

For a long time now, "use a VPN" has been the default online privacy advice -- but is it really so effective? Following the recent VPN boom that came on the tails of Congress scrapping new ISP privacy rules, a few security experts have stepped forward to explain how VPNs aren't all they're cracked up to be, and choosing and using one isn't as easy as many articles and social media posts suggest. Among them are this week's guests, Kevin Riggle (who provided a quick and dirty primer with the key suggestion that most people are safer not using a VPN) and Kenn White (who assembled a list of VPNs he deems "terrible" and not without good reason, recommending a roll-your-own solution instead). They join us to dig deeper into the reality of VPNs and hopefully help some people make better choices.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

I've got a deep dive story over at The Verge, taking an in-depth look at the fight over taking the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress. I've written some about that here, but if you want to look at the full history of what's going on, and why this seemingly simple move could be a disaster for copyright on the internet, go take a read:

We've talked in the past about how government FOIA officers seem to really love exemption b(5) which covers "inter-agency or intra-agency memorandum or letters which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency." But, in my experience, I've seen a ton of the next exemption: the b(6) exemption, often called the "privacy exemption." Officially, the law (5 USC 552(b)(6)), says only that "personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."That seems like a perfectly reasonable exemption. Even if it is part of a government discussion, we don't want the government revealing medical files or something of a similar nature. But, over the years, this has gotten abused in weird ways, such as the time a FOIA officer used b(6) to redact Beyonce's name in a FOIA request about Beyonce. Really.However, now I think we've seen the b(6) exemption to end all b(6) exemptions. This came to investigative reporter David Sirota, who filed a FOIA request to find out about emails between Makan Delrahim and employees of the DOJ's antitrust division. This is potentially useful info, because Delrahim was just nominated to head that very division. But, more importantly, Delrahim has been a powerful lobbyist for Anthem who tried to help it get its merger with Cigna approved -- an effort that just recently failed in court, but may have another chance with Delrahim in a position of power.Thus, Sirota made a fairly standard FOIA request for communications between Delrahim and the DOJ's antitrust division during the time that he was working as a lobbyist for Anthem. And, stunningly, the DOJ came back with a Glomar response (you know, the infamous "we can neither confirm nor deny...."), pointing to b(6) as the reason why (along with b(7)(C) which is for records that "could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" -- kind of a repeat of b(6), really).If you can't read that, the key paragraph notes:

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Canadian law enforcement brought down a massive criminal conspiracy. Now, thanks to information it doesn't want to release to the court, most of what was brought down will be re-erected by the suspects it's cutting loose. (h/t Techdirt reader Pickle Monger)

Large ISPs like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast spent a significant part of Friday trying to convince the press and public that they didn't just screw consumers over on privacy (if you've been napping: they did). With the vote on killing FCC broadband privacy protections barely in the books, ISP lobbyists and lawyers penned a number of editorials and blog posts breathlessly professing their tireless dedication to privacy, and insisting that worries about the rules' repeal are little more than "misinformation."All of these posts, in lock step, tried to effectively make three key arguments: that the FTC will rush in to protect consumers in the wake of the FCC rules being repealed (not happening), ISPs don't really collect much data on you anyway (patently untrue), and that ISPs' lengthy, existing privacy policies and history of consumer respect mean consumers have nothing to worry about (feel free to pause here and laugh).For more than a decade, large ISPs have used deep-packet inspection, search engine redirection and clickstream data collection to build detailed user profiles, and their longstanding refusal to candidly talk about many of these programs should make their actual dedication to user privacy abundantly clear. Yet over at Comcast, Deputy General Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer Gerard Lewis spent some time complaining that consumer privacy concerns are little more than "misleading talk" and "misinformation and inaccurate statements":

A recurrent theme here on Techdirt has been the way in which the West has ceded the moral high ground in so many areas involving the tech world. For example, in 2010, we noted that the US had really lost the right to point fingers over Internet censorship. The moral high ground on surveillance went in 2013 for people, and in 2014 for economic espionage. Meanwhile, the UK has been shown to be as bad as the most disreputable police states in its long-running blanket surveillance of all its citizens.The UK's most recent move to cast off any pretense that it is morally superior to other "lesser" nations is the Investigatory Powers Act, which formalizes all the powers its intelligence services have been secretly using for years. One of the most intrusive of those is the power to carry out what is quaintly termed "equipment interference" -- hacking -- anywhere in the world. That means it certainly won't be able to criticize some new rules in China, spotted by the Lawfare blog:

No technology is perfect and facial recognition software is obviously no exception. But whereas law enforcement groups use this flawed technology in too many instances, device manufacturers are beginning to ship out security features that rely on facial recognition software almost ubiquitously. Many might look at this modern technology and imagine defeating it and logging into another person's phone would resemble some kind of Mission Impossible style convolution. Sadly, as proven again recently with the release of Samsung's Galaxy S8, defeating the security feature is laughably simple.

If you're of a certain age, you will remember the derision with which video games as an entertainment industry were met some time ago. While many of the claims about gaming encountered during that time, such as the impact of violent games on young minds or the assured claims that playing games would rot the brains of young people who played them, please understand how much louder that silliness was shouted years back. I can personally recall my own father insisting that if I played video games, I would end up having oatmeal for brains. Good one, Dad, except I played them anyway and now I'm a real-life grown-up with a family and two jobs and a house and all that jazz. Jazz, of course, being a previous receptacle for many of these same claims, but I digress.Less vociferous have been those on the other side of the "video games will rot your brain" position, but reverse claims do exist. Some have posited that there could actually be benefits to playing video games, from instilling in players a baseline sense of achievement, improving cognitive ability, or preparing them to be better at business than they would be otherwise. And now a recent study suggests that simple video games may in fact be useful therapeutically for those who have suffered trauma or addiction.

FOIA clearinghouse MuckRock has been on the receiving end of government antipathy before. Local government agencies aren't happy the service is able to work around location restrictions by offering proxies for out-of-state requesters. So far, this hasn't done much to slow the flow of public records to MuckRock.MuckRock users have been thwarted individually, mainly with FOIA fee requests ranging from $270,000 to $660 million. Various agencies have also cut MuckRock out of fee exemptions, claiming the service just isn't journalistic enough to avail itself of fee waivers.Dell Cameron of the Daily Dot reports a federal agency has decided to screw MuckRock users by making it more difficult to make requests. It's not one of the expected enemies of transparency, however. It's one that's been historically very easy to work with.

Roughly a year ago, a Canadian court ruled that Vice Media must turn over conversations one of its journalists had with an alleged terrorist to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The ruling created a chilling effect, carving a hole in journalistic protections in favor of national security concerns. Not only would it deter journalists from speaking to sources who might, at some point in the future, face criminal charges, but it also would deter sources from speaking to journalists for fear their cover might be blown by law enforcement court orders.Vice appealed the decision. Unfortunately, there's no better news awaiting them at the Ontario Court of Appeals. Elizabeth Raymer of Legal Feeds reports the higher court has upheld the previous ruling.

Previously unreleased documents acquired by Techdirt show, fairly conclusively, that Congress will be making a huge and dangerous mistake if it moves forward with changing how the head of the Copyright Office is appointed. And despite the fact that the RIAA & MPAA are eagerly supporting this change, the people it will hurt the most are content creators. Because the Copyright Office is basically incompetent when it comes to modernizing its technology. That's what was found by a thorough (but not publicly released) Inspector General's report, detailing how the Copyright Office not only threw away $11.6 million on a new computer system that it said would cost $1.1 million, but also lied to both Congress and the Library of Congress about it, pretending everything was going great.In reality the project was a complete and utter disaster. It was put together by people who seemed to have no clue how to manage a large IT project, and there was basically zero effort to fix that along the way. After literally wasting $11.6 million on nothing, the entire project was scrapped in October of last year.The timing here is important. October is when Carla Hayden reassigned Maria Pallante, effectively firing her. Pallante had led the Copyright Office since 2011 (soon after the big project began), so she was in charge through the vast majority of this disastrous project. While legacy copyright folks tried to spread evidence-free conspiracy theories about why Hayden fired Pallante, it seems a lot more likely that it was because Pallante had overseen a project that flat out wasted $11.6 million, and during the course of the project the Copyright Office repeatedly lied to the Library of Congress about its status.But here's the astounding thing. Congress is trying to reward the Copyright Office for this scandal, and give it more power and autonomy despite this absolute disaster. Perhaps because, until now, the Copyright Office has been successful in keeping this whole thing hidden.As we've mentioned, Congress is effectively trying to move the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress by having the new Register of Copyright (who heads the Office) be appointed by the President and approved by the Senate (i.e., making it a political appointee), rather than be appointed by the Librarian of Congress as has been the case since the creation of the Copyright Office. One of the key arguments in favor of this is that the Copyright Office is woefully behind on technology, and needs to be modernized. Almost exactly two years ago, a fairly scathing report from the GAO came out about the lack of leadership on IT issues from then-Librarian of Congress James Billington. Thankfully, Billington is gone and Carla Hayden is in charge now -- and she actually has a history of modernizing a library. Reports from folks at the Library say that Hayden has moved quickly to establish a real modernization plan for the entire Library, including the Copyright Office, and that those efforts are already starting to move forward.And that's got to be better than giving the Copyright Office autonomy to modernize itself. As we're releasing here for the very first time publicly, an Inspector's General report looking at various IT projects related to the Library of Congress is absolutely devastating in revealing how incompetent the Copyright Office is at modernizing itself. Specifically, in 2010, the Copyright Office asked for $1.1 million it said it would need to build its Electronic Licensing System (eLi). Just about everything turned out to be a complete disaster and a waste of money. From the executive summary of the report:

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The DOJ is attempting to prosecute the creator of a remote access software -- not because he used it for nefarious purposes -- but because it can (and has been) used by criminals. Kevin Poulsen has the whole bizarre story at The Daily Beast -- one that involves a 26-year-old programmer and the remote administration tool (RAT) he created and sold.Taylor Huddleston, creator of NanoCore, a RAT that has been linked to intrusions in ten countries, had his home raided by FBI agents on December 6th. The 14-page indictment paints Huddleston as a willing accomplice -- someone who sold his product to bad people to do bad things.But the facts of the case -- things that can be proven with forum chat logs and Huddleston's proactive efforts to prevent his RAT from being abused -- disagree with the government's narrative. NanoCore does all the things an administrative tool is expected to do, including keylogging and granting control to remote administrators. But Huddleston claims he created the tool to be a low-cost solution for cash-strapped businesses and small government agencies. His actions appear to back up the claims that he never intended this to be a plaything for criminal hackers.While Huddleston did debut and offer his product for sale at HackForums -- hardly the best marketplace if one wants to be seen as purely innocent -- he took corrective actions and issued strict warnings about illegal deployment.

Rep. Devin Nunes, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, has been all over the privacy/security map in recent weeks. He's publicly decried the supposed "illegal surveillance" of former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn while trying to avoid undercutting the NSA programs and presidential authority that make it all this spying possible.His hypocrisy knows no bounds. Nunes has repeatedly suggested NSA spying activities (under Executive Order 12333) should receive even less oversight. Now he's complaining the spy infrastructure he wholeheartedly supports is too big and dangerous, now that it's resulted in Mike Flynn's departure.But it goes even further than that. Nunes is utilizing an informal network of what he calls "whistleblowers" to leak him details of investigations. Then he immediately goes and discusses these investigations in public. Barton Gellman (who handled some of Snowden's leaks) points out just how far Nunes has gone in defending both Mike Flynn and Trump White House.

Following the Congress vote to dismantle privacy protections for broadband subscribers, VPNs have suddenly become a very hot area, despite the complex issues surrounding them. We've reported on various instances of authorities around the world either banning VPNs, or flirting with idea of doing so. But there's no doubt that the main battleground over VPNs is in China, where the government has been clamping down on their use with ever-greater rigor.For example, back in 2012, China started blocking VPNs, but in a rather ad hoc and piecemeal way. As Karl reported in January of this year, the authorities have now taken a much harsher line, requiring all VPN providers to obtain prior government approval in order to operate. Although that still allows people to use VPNs, it places them under strict control, and means they can be turned off by ordering suppliers to shut them down. The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reveals that in the major city of Chongqing, the local authorities have taken these measures to their logical conclusion -- banning VPNs completely:

This week, after James Comey unveiled his idea for an international encryption backdoor partnership (still impossible to do safely), DannyB racked up the votes to win most insightful comment of the week by reflecting the style of Comey's demands of technologists:

Only Available Until Monday Night: Necessary Hashtags Gear

As is commonly said, mistakes happen and it's what we do about those mistakes that is important. Too often when the mistakes are concerning trademark bullying, there is nothing done to acknowledge or address that bullying. The bully will simply state the oft-repeated excuse that they must bully according to trademark law, which isn't remotely the case. And, because there is no acknowledgement that anything was done wrong, the bullying then continues.Well, after a recent dust-up over trademarks between BrewDog, a self-styled "punk brewery," and a family-owned pub, it seems that the brewery is actually going all in on reforming how it approaches trademark issues, and even intellectual property more generally.

While copyright collection societies the world over tend to be good hosts for the disease of corruption, not all corruption is equal. These collection groups often like to jack up fees when someone points out that they actually have to do their job, to threaten businesses in the most insane ways, and also to, oops, sometimes just totally forget to pay the artists they purport to benefit. Over in Kenya, however, the dominant copyright collection group, MCSK, went for and hit the corruption trifecta by engaging in all of three at the same time. Not a good look for anyone who thinks these collection groups have a role to play for artists.It got so bad, in fact, that the Kenyan government has decided to pull MCSK's license to operate.

Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute wants to know why device searches at the border have skyrocketed since the beginning of this year. As was reported earlier this month, the number of devices searched in February 2017 equals the total searched in all of 2015. Even last year's jump from 5,000 to 25,000 searches looks miniscule in comparison. Border device searches are on track to more than double last year's numbers. (h/t The Intercept)The Knight First Amendment Institute filed FOIA requests with the DHS, ICE, and CBP for "statistical, policy, and assessment records" related to the steep increase in device searches. It's also looking for any legal interpretations the agencies might have on hand that explain their take on the Supreme Court's Riley decision, which instituted a warrant requirement for cell phone searches.It asked for expedited handling given the significant public interest in all things immigration and border-related, which has climbed along with the device searches thanks to several presidential directives, some of which are being challenged in court.As the lawsuit [PDF] notes, the public definitely should be apprised of the policies and procedures governing border device searches. If there's been an increase in searches, the public should be made aware of why this is happening, as well as their rights and remedies when it comes to entering or leaving the United States. The suit also points out that several recent reports suggest devices have been taken by government agents by force, or "consent" obtained through threats of further detention and/or violence.Naturally, the FOIA requests have been greeted with non-responses and indifference by these agencies, which has prompted the Institute's FOIA lawsuit. The FOIA requesters seek the court's assistance in pushing the agencies into quicker responses. To date, it's received nothing but acknowledgements. There have been no estimates of time needed to fulfill the requests or any indication the agencies have even begun searching for responsive documents.Of course, this immediate lawsuit strategy could backfire. The government has been pushing back against FOIA requesters' lawsuits filed shortly after the statutory response period has expired. It claims these immediate lawsuits are nothing more than certain requesters hoping to push their requests to the front of the line, rather than allow theirs to be ignored/mishandled/stonewalled in the order it was received. Of course, the government's arguments would be more sympathetic if multiple federal agencies didn't repeatedly engage in these tactics and do whatever they can to keep requested documents out of requesters' hands.

Spotify is pulling the plug on free access to some artists' newest releases, according to The Guardian. Currently, Spotify's 50 million paid users fork over £10/month to play their music offline without ads, but now they're also getting exclusive access to artists' biggest new releases. Meanwhile, Spotify's other 50 million free users have their access suddenly restricted.This has been a major sticking point with some artists and labels for many years. They've long demanded that some music only be available to paying subscribers because the royalties shared there are much higher. With this new setup -- which Spotify loudly resisted for years -- Spotify benefits by paying fewer royalty fees to record labels, though those fees from free streaming were lower per stream than paid streams anyway. But it's the record labels that pushed this one through:

Eugene Volokh, just recently teamed up with Paul Levy to track down who was behind a scam abusing the court system with forged or fraudulent court documents to get questionable or fake court orders to force Google to takedown links. It's a sketchy (and illegal) "reputation management" trick and it appears that at least a few folks are doing it. Volokh has just spotted another one and it comes with a Prenda Law twist. Volokh nicely sums up the background info leading up to this:

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The House Oversight Committee finally took on the FBI's Facial Recognition Program and discovered what critics have been saying about it for years: it's broken, filled with innocent Americans, and completely out of control.

For a few years now, our intelligence overseers have been insisting that we shouldn't be too concerned about surveillance programs that collect "just metadata" because that doesn't really reveal too much. But, of course, we've shown how "just metadata" can ruin a career diplomat's life, and former NSA/CIA boss Michael Hayden has admitted that the US kills people based on metadata.Either way, I find it fascinating that reporter Ashley Feinberg needed just a few small bits of innocent metadata from FBI Director James Comey to track down his secret Twitter account. It took her all of four hours or so. Just last night, Comey admitted that he was on Twitter, leading lots of people to go searching for the account since there is no official one. I won't describe all of how Feinberg tracked it down (it involves some pretty excellent sleuthing and is worth reading) but suffice it to say, it's metadata that gives Comey away. The account, @projectexile7, was then almost certainly confirmed as Comey's based on metadata about who was following it, who it was following, and what it liked:

Last week, the UK's Home Secretary Amber Rudd said that WhatsApp risked becoming a "place for terrorists to hide." Then, like many others that have used this tired old trope, she went on to call for the development of some magic unicorn key to unlock all encrypted communications, one that was somehow available only to those on the side of truth, beauty, law and order, and not to the other lot. In doing so, her cluelessness was particularly evident, as her invocation of the "necessary hashtags" emphasized, but she's not alone in that. Despite the chorus of experts pointing out for the thousandth time why it's not possible, the EU Justice Commissioner has just said that the EU must have magic unicorn keys, too. As EurActiv reports:

Readers here will hear the name "Monster Energy Corporation", makers of the Monster Energy beverage, and likely immediately roll their collective eyes. Monster Energy has truly been a monster when it comes to trademark bullying over some of the most frivolous claims imaginable. From threats against breweries over location-based puns, to threats against beverage review sites it doesn't like, and even threats against an actor that featured in a monster movie over a photo he tweeted holding a Monster Energy drink, the company is something of a joke in trademark circles.Which hasn't kept the company from continuing its bullying ways, of course. The latest version of its efforts concerns a startup root beer company in DC that dared to use the word "beast" in its name, with Monster Energy asserting that beast is too close to monster and oh my god why is this universe such a silly, silly place?