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The Chinese government is going in for a third pass on its "cybersecurity" law -- one that has little to do with security and everything to do with control.This is something the government has been working on for a few years now. It's a chance for it to tame the "Wild West" internet, particularly the "West" part of it with all these ideals about free speech and the spreading of information. The third reading, with all alterations and additions appended, will likely be going into effect this week. Human Rights Watch has a long post detailing the law's negative aspects -- which is almost all of them.Among other things, service providers will be forced to censor "prohibited content." They'll also be required to collect real names and other identifying user information, even if the only service provided is instant messaging.There's also an information-sharing plan not unlike the one the US government has set up for its cyberwar operations. The difference is that the Chinese government makes no pretense about two-way sharing. It simply demands companies turn over harvested info and other data.

So, with basically all the big predictors predicting a fairly easy Hillary Clinton victory last night, I was planning to write a post explaining the many serious problems with her vague, confusing and mostly empty tech policy proposals -- and how there were going to be lots of things to pay attention to and fight for in the next four years. But with the surprise Donald Trump victory, it's basically even worse, in part, because he has no tech policy at all and on the issues that we care about he's bad to horrifically terrible.

The city of Eureka, California loves its cops but hates it citizens. How else can you explain its two-year legal battle to keep police camera footage out of the public's reach?The North Coast Journal has been fighting with the city for the release of dash cam footage of an arrest of a 14-year-old that led to criminal excessive force charges. The city had argued that no footage was accessible via public records requests, an idea the appellate court found ridiculous.So, for two years, it fought against transparency and accountability, funding its fight with taxpayers' money while working in opposition of their interests. Now, taxpayers are on the hook for the paper's legal fees as well. The backstory is this:

Thanks to the ACLU's push to unseal documents related to the FBI's targeting of TorMail users and Freedom Hosting, the warrant affidavits supporting its NIT deployment have been released by the agency. Joseph Cox of Motherboard reports:

Well, today's the day. By tomorrow there will be a new President of the United States, and a large segment of the population claiming that they were robbed by the system. But immediate anger aside, that system is hardly above criticism: the Electoral College has had all sorts of unanticipated and often undesirable effects on democracy, and a wide variety of alternatives have been proposed. This week we discuss the question: is there a better way to pick the president?Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

We don't do partisan politics here at Techdirt, but we sure as hell do talk about free speech rights. And, as we've said many times, there is probably no type of speech more deserving of protection than political speech. It's what makes all the state laws against so-called "ballot selfies" so frustrating: they go to such great lengths battling the hypothetical evils arising from people taking and sharing photos of their completed ballots that they wind up stifling very real speech. And even as some state courts manage to understand that these laws are a clear violation of the First Amendment, states like New York have courts that don't.Which brings us to Eric Trump, son of The Donald, who tweeted out the following this morning.

I really thought we were beyond this kind of idiocy by now, but apparently wherever newish technology shows up, there are technologically clueless lawyers waiting to rush in. Today's example: lawyers for the Canadian Broadcasting Company have sent threat letters to the makers of various podcast apps for letting people listen to CBC podcasts. Apparently, the lawyers at the CBC think that because a podcast app is a commercial product, that means that you can't use it to access their public RSS feeds that offer up the CBC's podcasts. Here's the email that was posted to Reddit, with the name of the specific app redacted:

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We've discussed at length how the rush to market by Internet of Things companies and evangelists with nary a thought toward security has left us all immeasurably less safe. Whether it's smart door locks that are easily bypassed, smart vehicles that can be remotely controlled, or smart electrical outlets being used as the cornerstone of nasty new botnets, we're effectively all living in a barely-believable dystopian novel at this point. And as we've noted repeatedly, this would all be kind of funny if it weren't for the fact that inevitably, these vulnerabilities are going to result in very real, and potentially massive human deaths.

It's always the people neck deep in partisanship that make the most noise about unfairness. In a move that bodes well for free speech, Rep. Kevin Cramer is calling for hearings to sort out this "problem" with "biased" media. Cramer also spent some time as Donald Trump's energy advisor, so it's a good guess he feels his candidate hasn't been treated fairly by The Liberal Mediaâ„¢ -- an entity that's always useful for easy scapegoating when things go south for candidates, legislation, etc. on the Republican side. (The liberals/left do the same when stuff goes wrong for them. Everyone does it. The only difference is the scapegoat.)

Google Fiber executives recently announced that the company would be putting some potential cities on hold as the search giant ponders a pivot to wireless. Building fiber networks from scratch is neither quick nor easy, and there are many at Google who believe that next-generation wireless (especially millimeter wave technology) will allow them to bypass many of the headaches tied to traditional fiber builds. Needless to say, many of the broadband industry's entrenched incumbent ISPs were quick to pounce on Google Fiber's troubles, insisting the Silicon Valley company was finally giving up (it's not).

The streak of losses for spy agencies continues. All this "lawful" bulk collection of domestic data? Not all that "lawful," actually.

When you cover enough stories about trademark disputes, you sometimes are amazed at just how petty these types of things can get. I imagine for those who cover the kinds of arguments and disputes that happen within musical acts, it can be a similar experience. But when you intersect petty band members and a petty trademark dispute, that's when your faith in humanity is truly put to the test.Serving as an example of this is your one uncle's favorite band, Boston. It seems that a one-time member of the band, guitarist Barry Goudreau, has since continued his musical career with other acts. Those acts have occasionally promoted themselves as including a former member of Boston. For this, the band's frontman, Tom Scholz, filed a trademark suit against Goudreau.

Ticket scalpers have a bad rep. Critics deride them as "malicious" and "bad actors" and sometimes even deem them the primary cause of a purported nationwide "bot epidemic." Responding to fan complaints about the paucity of tickets, de facto monopolist Live Nation Entertainment points to the scourge of "bots" – software that allows scalpers to buy tickets en masse and resell them on secondary-market sites like SeatGeek and Stubhub.

As we noted last week, Shiva Ayyadurai, a guy who didn't invent email but has built his entire reputation on the false claim that he did, was able to cash in on the settlement agreed to by Nick Denton to end all of the Charles Harder-related lawsuits against Gawker. Again, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, because of a personal grudge against Gawker, set up lawyer Charles Harder on a retainer, basically agreeing to help fund any lawsuit against Gawker that might help destroy the company. Harder filed a few, but the big one was the one filed by Hulk Hogan. Hogan won that (after losing the first few attempts and then going jurisdiction shopping for a court that would side with him). Almost everyone with any knowledge of the law agreed it was likely the verdict would lose on appeal (the appeals court had already ruled earlier on this case in favor of Gawker). Either way, Denton finally settled the case rather than push on, because of the cost of defending it and because Thiel had promised to keep funding the case as far as it would go. And, of course, it wasn't just that one case.

If there's one thing that the two major Presidential candidates seem to agree on it's that we have too much free speech and all you First Amendment whiners should quiet down. Just this morning, we wrote about Trump threatening a documentary filmmaker with a cease & desist letter (the latest in a fairly long list of defamation threat letters). And it appears that the Clinton campaign is also ramping up its similar legal threat letter business.

Last week, we noted how Disney and ESPN threw a bit of a hissy fit when Nielsen data indicated that ESPN had one of the biggest subscriber losses in company history last month. According to Nielsen's data, ESPN lost 621,000 homes in a single month, as well as losing 607,000 ESPN2 households and 674,000 ESPNU homes. That's of course on the heels of losing more than 7 million subscribers over the last three years or so, thanks largely due to the rise of cord cutting, cord trimming (scaling down your TV package) and the rise of some "skinny bundles" that exclude ESPN from the base channel lineup.

In the last 10 days or so, James Comey sent two letters to Congress -- the first one notifying Congress of some new information in an "unrelated" investigation that may pertain to Hillary Clinton's emails. And then the one from yesterday admitting that there was nothing important in those emails. That was effectively all that Comey said officially. Yet, in between all of that a ton of information leaked from the FBI about the investigation. We learned what it pertained to (the Anthony Weiner investigation), heard estimates of the number of emails involved, heard that the FBI found them weeks ago but only told Comey right before he sent the letter, that the FBI didn't have a warrant to read the emails -- and then that it did, and that a whole bunch of people inside both the FBI and DOJ have opinions on both sides of this whole mess.

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We've been talking about the ridiculousness of e-voting machines for well over a decade. If a machine doesn't include a paper trail for backup, it's suspect. That's been the case since e-voting machines have been on the market, and many of us have been pointing this out all along. And the big e-voting companies have a long history of not really caring, even as their machines are shown to be vulnerable in a variety of ways. So it come as little to no surprise to find out that security firm Cylance has announced that it's found yet another set of e-voting vulnerabilities in the Sequoia AVC Edge Mk1 voting machine. Sequoia especially has a long history of buggy, faulty machines.

I'm not sure if Donald Trump has ever officially weighed in on the famous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, but if he did, I'm guessing he would support that ruling wholeheartedly. After all, he recently hired the former President of Citizens United to be his deputy campaign manager. And, I know that people freak out about the term "Citizens United" and some believe it's the root cause of all evil in American politics today, but that's wrong. At its heart, that case was a First Amendment free speech case, about whether a group (Citizens United) could show a documentary film heavily critical of Hillary Clinton close to the 2008 election. We can all argue about the evils of campaign finance and dark money and super PACs, but there should be ways to fix that without banning movies.

For the past few months, we've been covering the increasingly eager stance of some in the "cybersecurity" and government worlds to proactively launch offensive cyberattacks on Russia. Going all the way back to the early summer, when Russia's role in any hacks was totally speculative, some were already advocating for "cyberwar" as a response. As we reached the fall, suddenly it was leaked that many inside the government were getting itchy trigger fingers to launch some sort of digital attack. And, government officials really seemed to rely on the ever gullible reporters at NBC to push this story.

James Comey continues to be playing by his own ridiculous rules. He was playing by his own rules when he publicly announced that no charges would be sought against Hillary Clinton over her emails back in July. He was playing by his own rules a week ago when he revealed in a letter to Congress that new information had come to light, man. And, he continued to play by his own rules in sending a new letter to Congress saying, "Ooops, turns out there was nothing."

This week, we faced a disastrous plan from the Copyright Office to strip thousands of sites of their DMCA safe harbor protections if they don't re-register with a new system. We suggested that the correct way would be to engage in a proactive campaign rather than holding people's feet over the fire, and Cowardly Anonymous won most insightful comment of the week by going one step further:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2011 we witnessed the true birth of a monster. The PROTECT-IP act morphed into the E-PARASITE act and, realizing how ridiculous that name is, lawmakers began calling it... SOPA. Soon everything went crazy: supporters ranged from Go Daddy (and we all know how that ended) to, uh, firefighters (?) and of course the US Chamber of Commerce and Hollywood astroturf groups like Creative America. Warner Bros. pleaded for support on the basis of poverty despite just having announced record profits, Joe Biden threw his hat into the "pro" ring, and Viacom insisted it wouldn't require changes to the DMCA even as its co-author admitted that was the plan.But the backlash was quick to form too. We published an open letter to Senator Chris Dodd signed by top VCs and innovators, a White House petition started gaining steam, and the Future Of Music Coalition said it couldn't support the bill in good conscience. Larry Downes published an excellent and thorough analysis of the bill's problems, and even the mainstream press started to catch on.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2006, anonymous rumors were painting an intriguing picture of the deals between YouTube and record labels. The owners of UTube.com, desperate for a way to cash in after a slew of mistaken traffic, tried suing Google for clogging their site by buying YouTube. We took a look at how the DMCA could be abused to shut down critics or really just about anyone, and knew it would be on the rise as online video became big business, with early first steps like Google striking a special ad deal on viral "Mentos and Diet Coke" videos and Hollywood's creative class looking to secure its share of this new market.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, people were still amusingly trying to figure out if the iPod would be successful. The market for absurd luxury devices was forming with a $60,000 bejeweled mobile phone. The holes in post-9/11 security theater were already beginning to show. And Google Search unveiled a feature it's hard to imagine life without now: searching by file type.Sixty-Nine Years AgoBefore the World Trade Organization, there was its prototype: the International Trade Organization, which reigned for almost fifty years from the signing of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on October 30th, 1947.

Trust and respect aren't things someone (or something) holds in an infinite, uninterrupted supply. They're gained and lost due to the actions of the entity holding this extremely liquid supply of trust. Oddly, some people -- like Washington Post's Chris Cillizza -- seem to believe trust and respect should be given to certain "venerated institutions," because to do otherwise is to surrender to something approaching nihilism.Cillizza starts out with an obvious conclusion:

The War on Drugs has never really been about eradicating illegal drugs. It's been about putting up numbers: seizures, busts, indictments, convictions. A steady flow of illegal drugs into the country ensures a steady flow of tax dollars into hundreds of government agencies. Officials talk a lot about taking down cartels, but they spend more time grabbing cash from travelers and anything they can from someone who's got nothing more on them than quantities that could be generously called "personal use."Making law enforcement's Drug War "efforts" easier and a whole lot cheaper are field drug tests: notoriously unreliable chemical cocktails that are worth every cent of $2/per they pay for them. In an earlier story about these tests, two New York Times journalists detailed Amy Albritton's experience. Albritton spent three weeks in jail after a false positive from a field drug test determined that the caffeine-and-aspirin "crumb" (roughly the size of a "grain of salt" according to the lab test) was crack cocaine. For $2, Albritton lost most of her life. She served her short sentence -- one she only obtained by pleading guilty -- and now faces a future where her permanent record shows she's a convicted felon.ProPublica is also tackling the issue of cheap, unreliable field tests -- ones deemed just reliable enough to cost people their lives. The Las Vegas Police Department's own crime lab found the field tests used by officers to be so inaccurate they actually lobbied to have their use discontinued.

A settlement reached this earlier this year over the NYPD's pervasive (and useless) surveillance of Muslims is being sent back for retooling. Normally when this sort of thing happens, it's because the the NYPD is convinced any reform efforts put in place are too restrictive and will result in the city being plunged into the nightmarish dystopian hell it's often been portrayed as in popular culture.Fortunately, this isn't one of those times. The judge presiding over the settlement agreement actually feels the proposed reforms (and there are a lot of them) don't go far enough.

Our long national nightmare that has been this election cycle is nearly over. Election day is approaching and early voting has begun, which means you've probably already seen your social media connections happily and proudly posting about their votes. This is a good thing for democracy, in my opinion, as celebrations of participation can only encourage others to participate as well. Yet not everyone is on board with this social media pride. We had already discussed New Hampshire's law against so-called ballot selfies, in which people post their completed voting ballots to social media. That law was struck down as unconstitutional, because of its restriction on the most important form of speech, political speech.But, as you may know, New Hampshire isn't the only state to pass such a law -- in fact lots of states have them, including New York. As in other states, New York's is being challenged in federal court at present. Three voters sued in October to get enforcement of the law blocked. The judge in the case, however, has refused to issue such an order, claiming that to do so would sow confusion on election day.

I thought we were done with this. After cooler heads prevailed, and people realized that the giant conspiracy theory over "Google's" supposed string pulling to get the Register of Copyright fired, actual reporters stepped in and discovered it wasn't true. The reasons behind the firing were much more mundane (and for what it's worth, one of our commenters has a credible explanation for how one longtime anti-Google propagandist was the key force in spreading the claim in the first place).

Franklin Foer is a pretty famous reporter. But this week he totally blew a story that a ton of other media operations had passed on (for good reason), claiming that there was an internet server out there owned by Donald Trump, that was communicating almost exclusively with a server for a Russian bank. It took all of a few minutes to debunk this as technological confusion on the part of Foer, and a whole heck of a lot of confirmation bias between Foer and the security researchers who had concocted this conspiracy theory with data that they're only supposed to be using for malware research. Of course, in this stupid election season where both candidates simply love to fling ridiculous accusations at one another, Hillary Clinton herself tweeted out two separate tweets about the article, and called it "the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow."

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Another day, another example of copyright being a tool for censorship. MarkMonitor is one of the largest companies out there in the "IP protection" business -- and they also have a decently long history of filing bogus DMCA notices. And in one of its recent ones... they targeted a Techdirt news story. You see, three years ago, our own Tim Cushing wrote a little story about how Adobe launched its Creative Cloud subscription offering and had the DRM on it cracked within 24 hours. It was a fun (yet all too predictable) story.

There's nothing the FBI loves more than an investigation. It's right in the name. The on-again, off-again inspection of Hillary Clinton's emails have given director James Comey a chance to really strut his stuff. It's embarrassing stuff -- stuff his underlings wish he'd stop strutting, but there it is. The White House itself actually weighed in on Comey's latest blurt (which was followed shortly thereafter by tons of controlled leaking) and basically called him a loudmouth.Because this election season couldn't get any weirder, a long-dormant FBI Twitter bot suddenly came to life and began spewing links to FBI documents about tangentially-related investigations -- like FBI files on the Clinton Foundation. This only raised more questions about the FBI's political leanings. Sure, the FBI has won over parties in both camps thanks to its investigation of Hillary Clinton, but it has infuriatingly chosen to periodically invert the narrative, leaving both parties unsure of how to feel about their new partner in electioneering.The unexpected burst of activity suggested the FBI was again meddling with the electoral process. Not actually news, of course. The documents had been there all along, but the Twitterbot had failed to inform the public in a timely fashion. It was suppposed to send out a tweet any time the agency dumped something into its FOIA "reading room," but had failed to do so for months.It was enough to suggest nefarious intent. Because the FBI is nothing if not well-funded, it will be taking a much closer look at its malfunctioning Twitter account. (via Slashdot)

A few weeks ago, we were greatly troubled to see the ridiculous copyright policy come out of the EU Commission. The whole thing seemed like a really bad joke. It was a law basically designed to destroy entrepreneurship and startups on the internet, and to basically forcibly take money from large internet companies and give them to failing legacy media companies that had refused to innovate. It seemed to go against what basically everyone (other than those legacy companies) had been telling the European Commission. And it seemed to directly violate what the European Commission itself had said about its plans. The inclusion of things like forcing any company to install filters, the plans to require specific business models at the regulatory level, and the idea that sites should have to pay those they link to are all ridiculous.

Yet another whistleblower is detailing their depressing experiences with the "proper channels." Writing for The Intercept, former CIA imagery analyst Patrick Eddington discusses the attempts the CIA made to prevent information on US soldiers' exposure to chemical weapons during the Gulf War from being made public.

Since both US presidential candidates have said that they are against TPP -- whether they mean it, is another matter -- the Pacific trade deal has rather dropped off the political radar. But the US is not the only country that needs to ratify the deal: most of the other 11 countries participating need to do the same if it is to come into force. Because of the size of its economy, the critical one is Japan. But something rather strange has just happened: where it looked certain that country would ratify TPP this week, it has now been postponed. A story in The Japan Times explains the sequence of events that led up to this surprising twist:

Trademark disputes are often petty, heated, and vitriolic. We know this. Interestingly, it often seems as though the temperature level for trademark disputes is inversely proportional to how valid they are: the pettiest disputes are often the most heated. And we cover enough of those sorts of things that it can often seem like no companies out there approach a trademark issue in any other way.But that isn't the case and it's probably useful to highlight when companies get this right. Enter Hopworks Urban Brewery in Portland, makers of a beer it has named "Abominable." Another brewery, Fremont Brewing Company, has produced a very popular seasonal brew for some time that it has entitled "Abominable Winter Ale." In other words, there is an actual potential trademark issue here, with a naming convention and vernacular unique enough to quite possibly result in some confusion. So Hopworks set its lawyers to work, right?Wrong.

Police unions are best known for creating distance. They carve out space between police officers and accountability. They widen the gap between fiction and reality. They often act like the loudmouthed relative with the missing brain/mouth filter you always hope won't insert themselves into discussions about current events.On rare, rare occasions, they come across misconduct even they can't condone. Every so often, police union heads act like normal, decent human beings.

So, yesterday we wrote about how Nick Denton had settled all the remaining legal disputes that Gawker had involving three lawsuits filed by lawyer Charles Harder. Most of the attention was paid to the big one -- the settlement with Hulk Hogan. We, however, focused on one of the other cases, since it was one that we followed closely and which showed how Peter Thiel was full of shit in claiming he only bankrolled these anti-Gawker lawsuits to "protect privacy" (and, yes, it's hilarious to see the early backer of both Facebook and Palantir pretending to care about privacy).

The Great Firewall of China is pretty well-known these days, as is the fact that it is by no means impenetrable. The Chinese authorities aren't exactly happy about that, and we have seen a variety of attempts to stop its citizens from using tools to circumvent the national firewall. These have included Chinese ISPs trying to spot and block the use of VPNs; deploying China's Great Cannon to take out anti-censorship sites using massive DDoS attacks; forcing developers of circumvention tools to shut down their repositories; and pressuring Content Delivery Networks to remove all illegal circumvention, proxy and VPN services hosted on their servers.Despite years of clampdown, anti-censorship tools are still being used widely in China -- one estimate is that 1-3% of China's Internet users do so, which would equate to millions of people. However, Global Voices has a report of police action in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, whose indigenous population is Turkic-speaking and Muslim, that may be the harbinger of even tougher measures against circumvention tools. It concerns a leaked police report, which contains the following passage:

As AT&T fires up its lobbyists and various policy tendrils to sell the company's $100 billion (including debt) acquisition of Time Warner, the focus of the conversation has very quickly shifted to net neutrality and zero rating. AT&T already exempts its own content from the company's usage caps, and its DirecTV Now streaming service, launching later this month, is expected to follow suit. Once AT&T acquires Time Warner and its various properties (HBO, CNN), the worry is that this content will also get a leg up by being cap-exempt, creating an unlevel playing field for competing content and streaming services.

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Back in 2013, Time Warner Cable (now Charter Communications) struck an $8.35 billion deal with the LA Dodgers to create LA SportsNet, the exclusive home of LA Dodgers games. To recoup that money, Time Warner Cable began demanding exorbitant prices from competing cable providers if they wanted access to the channel. Unsurprisingly, all of Time Warner Cable's competitors in the region balked at the $5 per subscriber asking price for the channel. As a result, for three years now a massive portion of Los Angeles hasn't been able to watch their favorite baseball team, since Time Warner Cable's asking price not only kept competing cable operators from delivering the channel, but prohibited over-the-air broadcasts of the games.

It looks like Israel wants to take a UK-esque approach to internet porn. The Israeli government is considering mandating site blocking at the ISP level, rather than allowing end users to make their own decisions, as Quartz's Anaya Bhattacharya reports:

To be fair to our neighbors to the north, Canada really tried. Amidst calls to implement something like the "notice and takedown" system for copyright infringement claims that we have in the States, Canada instead did what Canada does and tried to implement a nicer version of this, called "notice and notice." The idea was that ISPs and service providers, rather than simply taking down content or banning people from the internet over copyright violations, would instead notify users that their behavior had been reported as infringing. More specifically, it allowed copyright holders to pass along these messages, with ISPs acting as the go-between. The theory was that when internet users -- or in many cases family members of those internet users, such as parents -- learned that potentially infringing activity was occurring, the notifications would cause the behavior to cease.As our own Karl Bode noted in 2014, this theory was backed by the ISPs, who claimed these notices helped curb a majority of piracy. We also noted in that post that the "notice and notice" system appeared to be preferable to our "notice and takedown" system because it appeared to be a less likely avenue for abuse by copyright holders and trolls. Sadly, that was immediately disproven by Rightscorp, with abuse of the system continuing up to the present. When eighty-year-old women are getting settlement shakedown threats from copyright trolls over video games, the aims of educating the public have clearly been subverted.And it seems some in the mainstream press are finally waking up to it. The CBC published a post detailing that shakedown story along with a few others, before openly wondering whether this system is working as intended.

A case about where free speech ends and "true threats" begin has made it all the way up to the Supreme Court and back and the question still remains unanswered.Anthony Elonis has been engaged in a long legal battle in hopes of proving that a bunch of truly nasty things he posted on Facebook weren't threats, but rather "rap lyrics" posted solely for entertainment purposes.

Pennsylvania is looking to regress. Police accountability is always a struggle, but the state legislature wants to take a huge step backwards. A bill sitting on the governor's desk would allow law enforcement agencies to withhold the names of officers who deploy excessive force, possibly indefinitely.The decision to release names of officers deploying excessive or deadly force has usually been made at the local level by each individual department. Some were better than others at doing so. Some, like Philadelphia's police department -- moved more proactively, instituting a 72-hour release policy in accordance with DOJ recommendations. This discretion would be removed and replaced with a state law that would only serve to further separate officers from accountability.That this bill is even on the governor's desk is largely due to a local police union's power, as Reggie Shuford of the ACLU explains:

I spent some time in Asia earlier this year, and while people in the US focus on Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Google Hangouts and a variety of other chat apps, the chat app of choice over there was Line. Basically everyone used it. A year ago, Line moved towards true end-to-end encryption. Earlier this year, the company made end-to-end encrypted chats the default, rather than as a user option (Thank you Snowden!).

We noted this towards the end of our post on how the FBI is leaking like a sieve in revealing details about the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails -- that Comey seemed to be handing reporters a perfect comeback to the bullshit response the FBI normally gives that it "won't comment on ongoing investigations." As the Intercept is now noting, Comey seems to be saying that there's a "public interest" exception to that rule, though as of right now only he gets to decide what's in the public interest: