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For years now, we've noted that some companies apparently think it's a good idea to punish security researchers that expose vulnerabilities in their products, even when the researchers use the proper channels to report their findings. This kind of absurdity runs hand-in-hand with international attempts to criminalize security research -- or the tools researchers use -- to do their jobs. Obviously, this kind of behavior has one tangible end result: it makes all of us less secure.

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One of the frequent rumors during the election season was that Donald Trump, if he lost, was going to quickly start up a new TV news network, which everyone (obviously) dubbed Trump TV. Of course, then Trump won the Presidency... and it appears he may be getting Trump TV anyway, just that it will be financed by American taxpayers. For years, the well known broadcasting operations of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty have actually been kept separate from the political pressure from the White House, in part due to a bi-partisan panel that runs stuff, called the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). This hasn't always been totally effective and there have been lots of problems with the BBG and how VOA, RFE and RL have worked... but for the most part they were generally considered reliable sources of news in the countries where they operated.

Over the last few weeks, we've noted that Senator Dianne Feinstein has pushed for the CIA Torture Report that she originally commissioned be declassified (beyond the 500 page, heavily redacted, executive summary that was declassified). And then we wrote about two former Senators asking for President Obama to make sure that he preserve the report as a federal record. This is important. The full report, approaching 7,000 pages and costing $40 million to prepare, apparently details all sorts of wrongdoing by the CIA in torturing people in the Middle East. It's a comprehensive look into not just the horrific program by the CIA, but its failure to produce anything useful and the details of how the CIA lied about it. And here's the problem: Feinstein's colleague on the Senate Intelligence Committee, the current chair, Senator Richard Burr, wants the report destroyed.

As we've been discussing, there's absolutely every indication that the incoming Trump administration intends to not only gut net neutrality, but defang and defund the FCC entirely. All three of Trump's telecom advisors have made it abundantly clear they see no role for the FCC as a broadband consumer watchdog. None of them have been able to admit the broadband space suffers from a lack of broadband competition; in fact, one of his top advisors is a Sprint lobbyist who doesn't think telecom monopolies are real.

Another ruling [PDF] has been handed down in the FBI's multitudinous Playpen cases, this one consolidating four defendants in a Washington federal court. While the court does find aspects of the FBI's child pornography distribution unpleasant, it's not enough to result in anything more than some stern words. All evidence remains unsuppressed and all motions to compel discovery are denied. (h/t Brad Heath)This was everything that was done with a single, Virginia-issued warrant.

As we've noted, TPP is unlikely to come back from the dead, despite what some seem to think or hope. For example, the Japanese government has decided to go ahead and ratify TPP anyway. That seems foolish, since it has just thrown away most of its bargaining counters for other trade negotiations, in what amounts to an act of political seppuku. As Sean Flynn points out, Japan has form here, since it also ratified the infamous Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), just as pointlessly.One of the most important trade deals still under active discussion is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Techdirt first wrote about this 18 months ago, while recently we noted that many of its provisions are even worse than those in TPP. One aspect of RCEP that has received little attention so far is the corporate sovereignty chapter. The Transnational Institute (TNI) has put together a useful document looking at what it calls the "hidden costs" of including investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in RCEP. It provides an excellent summary of corporate sovereignty activity in Asia that complements a 2014 study from Friends of the Earth Europe, which looked at the same "hidden costs" of ISDS in Europe. Here are a few of the main findings for RCEP nations (pdf):

Without citing the Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision, the Superior Court of Delaware has returned a ruling [PDF] that should serve as a deterrent to law enforcement fishing expeditions. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)Two state courts recently held that extending an interaction beyond the objective of a traffic stop is unconstitutional, pointing out that it's not the length of the constitutional violation that's a problem, but the violation itself. There is no de minimis Fourth Amendment violation acceptable under the Rodriguez decision.The court here could have found similarly but didn't even have to make it as far as the Supreme Court's decision to find the officers' post-traffic stop actions unconstitutional.The defendant seeking suppression of evidence was pulled over for speeding. Everything about the stop was completely normal. As the court sees it -- according to the officers' own testimony and reports -- there was nothing else for them to do but issue a speeding citation.Officer Hamilton stopped the defendant (John Geist) and asked for the usual documents. These were provided and the citation was written up. Six minutes after the initiation of the stop, Officer Hamilton to Geist he was free to go. Another officer showed up during the stop and asked Geist if he had any questions. Geist asked the officer what the dollar amount of the speeding fine was.The stop's objective had been achieved and Geist had presented nothing that amounted to reasonable suspicion to justify further questioning. But Officer Hamilton proceeded with more questions, almost all of them focused on getting Geist to consent to a search of his vehicle.

So far, very little has been done with the Senate Intelligence Committee's 6,700-page "Torture Report." Some agencies haven't even read it (and have blocked others from doing so). Others have been completely careless in the handling of their copies. Most of the federal government -- especially the White House -- just seems to want it to go away.Dianne Feinstein, who helped keep the full document from being made public (costing requesters like Jason Leopold thousands in legal fees), now wants the report declassified. The Obama administration has shown little interest in doing so.Two former long-term Senators, Carl Levin and Jay Rockefeller (who both retired last year) -- taking a look at the incoming administration -- say it's basically now or never if the full report is going to be saved. And these are two Senators who had plenty of experience and exposure to these issues. Rockefeller chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee at one point and Levin chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee.

So we've noted how the surge in the internet-of-poorly-secured things has put us all at risk by introducing thousands of new attack vectors in homes and businesses around the world. We've also noted that the rise of these not-so-smart cameras, toys and hackable tea kettles has resulted in a spike in larger DDoS attacks than we've ever seen before, as these devices are compromised and used maliciously within minutes of being connected to the internet. Many security experts have started to warn us that it's only a matter of time before the check comes due, potentially involving infrastructure failure and mass fatalities.

Ever since people started flipping out about the so-called "fake news" problem on Facebook, we've been warning that this is going to lead to calls for outright censorship of certain ideas. In the US, we've already seen Rep. Marsha Blackburn argue that companies have some sort of obligation to make "fake" news disappear.

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The DHS finally got serious about protecting election infrastructure from hackers by appointing a bunch of career politicians to its "working group." With all this tech expertise on board, there could be little doubt the 2016 election would be the securest of all.Following in the wake of Donald Trump's surprise electoral college victory came the news that President Obama wanted a full-scale investigation into alleged Russian hacking that may have affected the outcome of the election. Voting machines remained as insecure as ever though, and no one really seemed to have a problem with that.The DHS -- caretakers of the non-hacked election -- did whatever the hell it was doing with a handful of Secretaries of State in charge. Presumably, this was limited to making a mockery of the term "paperless office." However, it appears it did actually do some sort of cybersecurity stuff. And, as it is prone to do, the federal government angered others by doing it. (via Slashdot)

President Elect Donald Trump has made no secret of his dislike for any reporter who reports stuff about him in a negative light, and throughout the campaign and even after being elected, he has spent a tremendous amount of time insulting, attacking and berating the press. Oh, and threatening them with bogus defamation claims that rarely seem to turn into actual lawsuits. Trump famously promised to "open up" the libel laws if he became President, though there really isn't that much he can do on that issue directly.

California judge Michael Bowman hinted -- with a tentative ruling issued last month -- that he didn't think much of Attorney General (now US Senator)[ ಠ_ಠ ] Kamala Harris' grandstanding, misguided, First Amendment-damaging attempt to prosecute Backpage executives for pimping.Not only did Harris pretend Section 230 immunization didn't exist, she actively fought to have the executives prosecuted for the actions of others. The twisted legal rationale deployed by Harris didn't win over Judge Bowman, who noted Backpage had, at best, republished third-party content. If Harris wanted site owners to be punished for third-party content, she would have to ask the nation's legislators to fix it.

Thanks to ProPublica's research -- and a high-profile article in the New York Times -- prosecutors in Oregon will no longer accept guilty pleas based solely on the results of often-inaccurate field drug tests.

This week, after we took a look at the latest assault on the public domain (this time coming from CBS), TheResidentSkeptic won the vote for most insightful comment of the week with his definition of the public domain:

Five Years AgoToday we're dedicating this post to another focused look at the events of this week in 2011, in the midst of the SOPA fight and some other important developments on the copyright and internet freedom fronts that highlighted the government's and the industry's hypocrisy on the issue.Firstly, the backlash against SOPA/PIPA continued to grow. Anti-virus firm Kaspersky dumped its association with the BSA over the organization's support for SOPA, while the American Bar Association was having an internal fight over how to react to the bills; human rights groups and people with disabilities spoke up to point out how much SOPA could hurt them, constitutional scholars explained why it doesn't pass First Amendment scrutiny, a former White House technology advisor explained the disastrous effect it could have on privacy, and Paul Vixie declared that he would stand against the bills even though they'd probably help his business.With all this backlash, how was SOPA still standing? For one thing, big media firms were donating plenty of money to the bill's sponsors, and spending plenty more buying astroturf support since the public overwhelmingly opposed them. And surprise, surprise: two congressional staffers who helped write SOPA got comfy industry lobbyist jobs. Plus, there were still plenty of nonsensical and/or hilarious arguments for the bill, and bizarre claims about being able to ignore its worst provisions. When Chinese internet users laughed at the US for considering its own Great Firewall, the MPAA boss shockingly upped the ante by holding China's successful censorship up as a shining example.And that's where we begin to see the amazing hypocrisy inherent in SOPA, for that very same week Hillary Clinton was speaking out against internet censorship — something the State Dept. has always done alongside the government's ongoing attempts to regulate the internet domestically. And this was also the week that the details of the embarrassingly terrible Dajaz1 domain seizure came out, revealing that the government censored a blog for over a year for no good reason. The site deserved a huge apology, but ICE avoided admitting anything while the RIAA outright refused to apologize and stood by the seizure. Meanwhile, yet another website was in similar limbo: the court dismissed the case against Puerto 80 and Rojadirecta but refused to give back the domain, leaving the company to try to explain to everyone why the seizure was unconstitutional.Oh and speaking of the RIAA? They were also nosing their way into the Righthaven fight, because I guess their reputation wasn't tarnished enough. And amidst that, just for fun, they also had the gall to claim they already solved the piracy problem years ago.Give them an inch and they'll take a mile, then publish a press release demanding 10 and fund a "grassroots" organization that calls it half a million inches. Little has changed in five years, and as we approach yet another copyright reform fight, it's good to look back on SOPA and remember how stalwart we're going to have to be.

Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy points to a recent Georgia Supreme Court decision [PDF] that lets trademark holders know that just because some use of their trademark is less than complimentary doesn't mean the use "tarnishes" the brand.McHugh Fuller Law Group, using nursing home surveys published by the federal government, often seeks to gather litigants for class action suits against possibly-abusive nursing homes/employees. In this case, it decided PruittHealth-Moultrie's survey responses warranted further litigation. It published an ad seeking "suffering loved ones" who might be interested in suing the nursing home -- one that prominently used the nursing home's logo and name.Naturally, PruittHealth felt this use of its trademark to be disparaging, as it hinted that the company was mistreating its residents. It sued for damages, claiming the law firm's use of its name and logo "diluted" the brand. But its argument had nothing to do with the normal sort of "dilution" often claimed in court. PruittHealth didn't feel potential customers would be misled, but rather that its use in this form took the PruittHealth name down a notch or two.

As you will recall, in 2013 Russia instituted a delightfully obtuse piece of legislation that made it illegal to disseminate "propaganda" within the country that centered around "non-traditional sexual relationships." This law, designed essentially to both push the LBGT community back into the closet and to effectively criminalize being too gay in public, has butted heads with modernity several times now. The silver lining in this is that the law's practical application has forced its supporters to publicly display exactly how petty and silly they are, as powerful legislators attempt to take action against such virile threats as emojis. Coupled with the Russian governments worry that American streaming media might be a form of HAARP-style mind-control, not to mention the government's willingness to show the world how its vaguely-crafted legislation can be used purely to silence dissenting speech, Russian officials have painted quite a picture of the country's lack of a commitment to basic freedoms.But where slapping around dissenting political speech is par for the authoritarian course, the laser focus the Russian government has on our LGBT brothers and sisters is confounding. That bigotry exists is not news, but Russia's dedication to it from a legislative perspective reeks of distraction-farming. And, as said previously, it can reach really silly levels, such as members of the Russian government calling on a ban of EA Sports' FIFA17 game, purely because the game includes the option to have players wear rainbow shoelaces, as their real-life counterparts did.

Another high-profile asset forfeiture battle has resulted in the government relinquishing its claim on seized cash and returning it to its owner.In February 2014, DEA agents took $11,000 from Charles Clarke at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. The DEA claimed Clarke's luggage "smelled" like marijuana. It may have been right (Clarke was a recreational marijuana smoker), but it didn't even bother to get a second opinion from a drug dog. Nor did it find any drugs or paraphernalia when it searched Clarke and his baggage.It did, however, declare the $11,000 in college funds Clarke had saved over five years to be drug money. So, it took the cash from him and sent him on his way.Normally, the burden of proof falls on the person whose property has been taken. That's how civil asset forfeiture works. The government files a claim against the seized property, cutting the original owner of the property out of the loop as much as possible. Fortunately, the judge presiding over the forfeiture dispute shifted the burden back on law enforcement after finding Clarke to be a credible complainant.

We just recently wrote about Senators on the Intelligence Committee requesting that President Obama declassify information about the Russians' activities in trying to influence the last election. While much of "the Russians did it!" chatter that's been going around has felt exaggerated, the real issue is that so little actual evidence has been presented one way or the other. It would be good to actually reveal publicly what has happened, if anything. Now comes the news that President Obama has, at least, asked the intelligence agencies to compile a report on the evidence:

We didn't cover anything about the whole bogus story that Rolling Stone published last year about campus rape at UVA, which it later had to retract and take down. The whole thing was something of a clusterfuck, but not directly relevant to what we write about here. Eventually, it led to a defamation case filed by UVA's former associate dean, Nicole Eramo, against Rolling Stone, which was pretty interesting and resulted in a somewhat surprising loss for Rolling Stone. As we've discussed plenty of times, winning a defamation lawsuit -- especially against a public figure -- is particularly difficult (and that's a good thing). The actions need to be particularly egregious. And, in this case, the jury decided that they were. I'm certainly not going to defend Rolling Stone and its ridiculously shoddy reporting, which seemed to be confirmation bias piled upon confirmation bias.

We didn't cover anything about the whole bogus story that Rolling Stone published last year about campus rape at UVA, which it later had to retract and take down. The whole thing was something of a clusterfuck, but not directly relevant to what we write about here. Eventually, it led to a defamation case filed by UVA's former associate dean, Nicole Eramo, against Rolling Stone, which was pretty interesting and resulted in a somewhat surprising loss for Rolling Stone. As we've discussed plenty of times, winning a defamation lawsuit -- especially against a public figure -- is particularly difficult (and that's a good thing). The actions need to be particularly egregious. And, in this case, the jury decided that they were. I'm certainly not going to defend Rolling Stone and its ridiculously shoddy reporting, which seemed to be confirmation bias piled upon confirmation bias.

It's well-known at this point that HBO guards its intellectual property on the Game of Thrones franchise more jealously than a direwolf with a freshly harvested bone. To that end, the company often times treats some of its biggest fans with disdain, such as when it killed off viewing parties that would otherwise generate more interest in the show, or the times it abused the DMCA process as a way to keep spoilers from the show from permeating. These actions are indeed annoying, but they lack a certain something in the pure evil department.Unlike, say, HBO issuing a takedown on some art produced by a thirteen-year-old autistic child just because that art included a trademarked catchphrase from the show.

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Last month, we pointed out that that pretty much everyone agrees that TPP is dead... except that some still cling to the hope that Trump might be persuaded to carry out another swift U-turn and revivify the zombie deal. As Mike noted, Trump doesn't seem to be against these kinds of mega-trade deals in principle, it's just that he says the US generally concedes too much in them. That means he'd need some kind of high-profile win to make TPP 2.0 compatible with his earlier condemnation of TPP 1.0's terms.The hope amongst true TPP believers seems to be that Trump could reopen the negotiations, talk tough, and strike a deal that is far more favorable to the US, which he could then ratify, holding it up as another Trump triumph. But in an article on the Cobram Courier site, the Australian ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, says it would be "fanciful" to think the other TPP nations would happily reopen negotiations so that Trump could rewrite it in his favor. Leaving aside the fact that as one of Australia's top diplomats, Hockey doubtless knows exactly what his government's views are on this and thus speaks with authority, his logic is simple and pretty inarguable:

I have some admiration for South Korea's ability to look squarely at the national hostage situation that is its northerly neighbor and spend so much time enjoying video games. That this dedication to my favorite hobby occasionally pulls the country's government into putting forward dumb laws is an unfortunate by-product, however. It seems the South Korean government is still at it, as it attempts to join Japan in criminalizing cheating in video games.And it has managed to construct this law to criminalize cheating in what simply has to be the dumbest way possible.

Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn doesn't have a very good history demonstrating any knowledge of how the internet works. She's generally in favor of two very stupid policies related to the internet. First, getting rid of net neutrality. Second, forcing tech companies to censor the internet to stop "piracy." The fact that her rationales for these two things are completely in conflict with each other doesn't seem to enter her thought process. That is, she claims that there shouldn't be any net neutrality because it's important to keep the internet free from all regulations. Here's Blackburn explaining this point in a nice, quick and utterly idiotic whiteboard video:If you can't see that, she starts out by talking up how wonderful the internet is just as it is today, and notes that it's necessary for creating jobs. Then she says this:

All year long, there have been reports talking about how the Pirate Party in Iceland were poised to take control over the Icelandic government in the elections. Many publications acted like it was a foregone conclusion. However, if anything should be obvious this year, what the polls and the press are telling you about likely outcomes of elections should be taken with a large grain of salt. So we didn't report on it -- even after the election when the Pirate Party did well, but still came in third place. However, with the top two parties failing to build a coalition to form a new government, the Iceland Pirates have been given a shot and they're hard at work trying to build a coalition that will form the government.

Back in April, we wrote about an interesting lawsuit filed over excessive fees for PACER, the federal court system's electronic records system. If you're not a lawyer or journalist, and have never used PACER, it is difficult to put into words what a ridiculous and outdated system it is. Not only does it look like it was designed and built in 1998, the court system leverages ridiculous fees for everything you do in it. It's officially 10 cents per page (with a limit of $3 max per document), but that's not just per page you download of court documents, but everything. Do a search? That'll be at least 10 cents and possibly more if the magic PACER system decides the results are long enough. Look at a docket of a court case? Better hope it's not one with hundreds of filings, because just opening the docket can cost you $3 -- and that's before downloading any documents. As we pointed out years ago, the fees charged for PACER appear to be illegal. The law, 28 USC 123, that allows the court system to charge for PACER limits the fees to being "reasonable" -- and that means, among other things, that the fees are only used for the upkeep of PACER, and not for other stuff.

Bethesda has something of a complicated history on our pages. The company is at once often terrible on matters of enforcing its intellectual property in a protectionist manner, while also occasionally acting quite good on matters of connecting with its fans in a meaningful and downright sweet manner. Few and far between have been the stories of those two separate philosophies intersecting, but we have such an instance now as Bethesda has demanded any Bethesda trademark words be removed in metatags on the website for DoomRL, a fan-made rogue-like inspired by the classic Doom games.

So we've talked a bit about the privacy implications of smart toys, and the fact that people aren't exactly thrilled that Barbie now tracks your childrens' behavior and then uploads that data to the cloud. Like most internet-of-not-so-smart things, these toys often come with flimsy security and only a passing interest in privacy. As such we've increasingly seen events like the Vtech hack, where hackers obtained the names, email addresses, passwords, and home addresses of 4,833,678 parents, and the first names, genders and birthdays of more than 200,000 kids.

The House Judiciary Committee has been "exploring" various copyright reform proposals for a few years now, asking for feedback, holding a "listening tour" and more. Through it all, it seemed pretty clear that the Judiciary Committee is (reasonably) fearful of getting SOPA'd again, and thus was trying to figure out some less controversial proposals it could push forward first to see how they worked. Two, in particular, have been brought up multiple times: moving the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress... and creating a "small claims court" for copyright infringement. And it appears that's what the Judiciary Committee is now moving forward on, even though both are pretty bad ideas.

Earlier this year, AT&T announced that it planned to shell out $100 billion to acquire Time Warner. That comes on the heels of the company spending $70 billion to acquire DirecTV. Why is AT&T spending countless billions on content and a legacy satellite TV provider when the lion's share of the company's broadband network desperately needs upgrading? Because fixed and wireless broadband subscriber growth has slowed, and telco executives believe they need to turn to content and advertising (read: slinging videos at Millennials) to please investors.

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Sometimes you wonder just how ridiculous some legacy industries can be. The latest is the News Media Alliance, which is apparently the new name of what was the Newspaper Association of America. Just a few months ago, we were mocking that organization's ridiculous proposal that readers of newspaper websites should be forced to allow invasive ad trackers, and that adblockers shouldn't be allowed. And believe it or not, now the group has even worse suggestions. It has sent a "white paper" to Donald Trump with the types of things it's looking for from a Trump administration. The white paper is really just a 3 page memo dressed up slightly with the term "white paper" at the top -- as opposed to a carefully developed plan.

A very interesting (read: wtf) case from Texas [PDF] -- one that resulted in criminal charges of official oppression against a Dept. of Family and Protective Services employee -- posits that there may be yet another warrant exemption: the "I don't approve of your lifestyle and/or choices" exception.This "exception" has often been used by actual parents when searching rooms/electronic devices of their children, but private searches usually don't violate the Fourth Amendment. Searches using the same moral prerogative, when performed by agents of the state, do.The case involves a warrantless search of a 15-year-old's cellphone by Natalie Reynolds, a Department supervisor. The Sheriff's Department located the runaway teen (referred to only as "A.K." throughout the decision) and turned her over to Reynolds. Reynolds confiscated A.K.'s personal belongings, including her cellphone, which she then decided to search for a number of stated reasons -- none of which was allowable under state case law, much less the Supreme Court's Riley decision.The Riley decision is only referenced in a footnote, as the illegal searches were performed in 2012, roughly two years before the Supreme Court arrived at its conclusion. But that didn't prevent the court from finding state precedent that upheld Reynold's conviction.Reynolds' coworkers provided plenty of testimony against her, rebutting her assertion that her search and seizure of the teen's cellphone was somehow related to finding A.K. somewhere to live.

In 2014 Sprint owner Softbank gave up on its planned merger with T-Mobile after regulators at the DOJ and FCC made it clear they planned to block the deal. And, just like the blocking of AT&T's attempted T-Mobile merger, this wound up being a good thing, as it protected what passes for competition in the wireless space, driving T-Mobile to compete even more intensely. That said, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son hasn't given up on a Sprint T-Mobile merger, back in August making it abundantly clear he'd be trying again should the FCC see a shift in leadership:

Techdirt has been covering so-called trade deals like TPP, TTIP, TISA and CETA for many years, and we've reported on the deep problems that people have discerned in their proposals. A legitimate criticism might be that pointing out difficulties is all very well, but what are the alternatives? One was offered back in 2013, from something called the Alternative Trade Mandate Alliance:

We recently wrote about the strange situation going on between a British company, Iceland Foods, and the nation of Iceland. What was clear was that this spat was over the trademark on the word "Iceland" held by the grocer, which had been ridiculously granted to cover all of Europe by the EU. Iceland had initiated a petition to have that trademark revoked, prompting the company to send a delegation to Reykjavik in an attempt to work something out that would allow the company to retain its control of a trademark consisting of the name of a member of the European Economic Area. It seems that this meeting did not go as well as Iceland Foods had hoped.

Some people just don't work well without direct supervision. When not responding to calls, officers are often left to their own discretion. Some do well with this freedom. Others… well, others do this sort of thing. [PDF]

Sitting on the president's desk is a bill [PDF] that will finally prevent companies from tying customers up with restrictive contracts at the point of purchase -- including forbidding the insertion of non-disparagement clauses. The bill is called the Consumer Review Fairness Act, but it might as well be called the KlearGear Act, after the infamous tech toy also-ran that gained international notoriety after it ran a customer's credit rating into the ground attempting to collect a $3,500 fee for violating a non-disparagement clause it inserted into its Terms of Use after the customer had already posted her negative review.There are any number of existing applications for the bill once signed into law. Companies are still including non-disparagement clauses in contracts, despite there being ample evidence all it really does is generate massive amounts of disparagement from parties not bound by the contractual language. It's basically a pre-emptive federal anti-SLAPP law narrowly focused on protecting consumers from litigious companies who feel the "service" part of "customer service" involves a process server. (That being said, there's nothing stopping companies from filing bogus libel lawsuits over negative reviews -- one of many reasons there needs to be a federal anti-SLAPP statute.)But that's not the only thing the law will prevent. The language will also keep companies from placing a bunch of restrictions on customers as a thank you gift for choosing to do business with them. Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen points to another all-too-frequent abuse of customers this law will address.

There is a beautiful passage in Hunter S. Thompson's otherwise largely overrated book, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, that always stuck out to me. Speaking on the anti-war and free-love movements of the sixties, he writes:

You might recall that during the fight over net neutrality rules, giant legacy ISPs (and the armies of think tankers, lobbyists and consultants paid to support their often flimsy arguments) repeatedly insisted that if net neutrality rules were passed, tubes would clog, innovation would die, and investment in broadband networks would shrivel up completely. There was no subtlety to these claims; ISP-loyal politicians and hired economists time and time again breathlessly insisted that net neutrality would be a disaster because nobody would be willing to keep building broadband networks.

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Here's today's insane story of FBI ridiculousness: the FBI has been investigating an editor at Huffington Post, Nick Baumann, for an obvious joke tweet mocking fake news. Really. To understand what happened, it requires a bit of background, especially if you're not steeped in Twitter culture -- but it's the kind of background that (1) you can pick up quickly and (2) shouldn't confuse an FBI agent... but apparently it did. Still, it requires knowledge of two separate jokes, then a third attempt at a joke... and general knowledge that the FBI doesn't seem to get jokes. Especially Twitter jokes.

After being insulted online by a 20-year-old student with back injuries resulting from a collision with a drunk driver, the Khuu law firm of Houston, Texas, claimed it "had no choice" but to burn its already-questionable reputation to the ground file a $100,000+ defamation lawsuit.Like many other entities, the Khuu law firm felt the best response to a negative review was to get litigious. Unlike many other entities, the Khuu Law firm presumably employed actual lawyers with actual knowledge of actual laws. Presumably. If so, it overrode this knowledge to engage in litigation featuring the internet's favorite tort: "Yelp review I didn't like."According to Lan Cai -- the student who had the misfortune of initiating contact with Khuu -- a representative from the office showed up at her house unannounced and questioned her while she was still in her underwear. Shortly after making a bad first impression, the company made a bad second impression by ghosting its new client. Lawyers at the firm only seemed interested in engaging with Cai when they had a lawsuit to serve.Backlash ensued and the Popehat Signal was (unofficially) lit. Houston attorney Michael Fleming picked up Lan Cai's case pro bono and has now obtained an anti-SLAPP judgment in favor of his client. Joe Mullin of Ars Technica reports:

While T-Mobile has certainly brought some welcome changes to the wireless industry (including a CEO with a rare sense of humor), the consumer-friendly brand they've established has consistently fallen short when it comes to one major subject: net neutrality. The company lobbied and fought consistently against the reclassification of ISPs as common carriers and the creation of net neutrality rules. The operator then pissed off much of the internet when CEO John Legere mocked the EFF for raising questions about the misleading nature of the company's zero rating and throttling practices.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld [PDF] a terrorism conviction, despite its own concerns about the government's behavior during the investigation. (h/t Brad Heath)Mohamed Osman Mohamud appealed his conviction for attempting to detonate a bomb during a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon, raising several arguments -- one of those being entrapment. But the court had this to say about the FBI's sting operation.