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Under increasing pressure from overreacting and fearful bureaucrats, it seems that the big social media companies -- Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft -- have all agreed to block "terrorist" content and will agree to share hashed versions of it among the other companies so something blocked on one site can easily be blocked across them all.

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So, it seems like "fake news" is all the rage these days. As we've discussed, the sudden focus on fake news is a silly distraction. It's not likely to be changing many minds -- and the talk about fake news seems mostly to be leading to calls for censorship. And a big part of the problem is that "fake news" is such a broad and vague label. It's been applied to outright propaganda, to satire, to serious reporting, to serious reporting people don't like... and to serious, but mistaken, reporting. The problem is that when you lump all those things together, things get pretty damn messy.

Okay fine, CBS hasn't sued "the public domain" — but at this point I suspect that's only because they haven't figured out how to do so. In the mean time, they're suing a YouTube channel for copyright infringement after it posted sixteen public domain episodes of the Andy Griffith show. How, you ask? Isn't the public domain the, uh, public domain? Apparently not if you get creative with your lawsuit:

Last month, we noted how the FCC had finally woken up from a deep slumber to realize that zero rating (an ISP exempting its own or a partner company's content from usage caps) can be anti-competitive. The FCC's net neutrality rules don't specifically ban zero rating, but the agency had said it would act on a "case by case basis" should the practice be used anti-competitively. But a year came and went, and the FCC consistently failed to act as ISPs from Comcast to Verizon began giving their own content an unfair leg up in the market.

Those defending bulk domestic surveillance have dismissively referred to the take as "just metadata." To many people, this likely seems acceptable. It's nothing but call records... or so it often seems. But "just metadata" is actually surveillance state slang for almost anything that can be obtained without a warrant or subpoena -- which includes anything the government considers to be a "third party record," like financial transactions and historical cell site location data."Just metadata" is actually a dangerous thing when left in the hands of intelligence agencies. It's what turned State Department advisor Robin Raphel's diplomatic work with Pakistani officials into a severely misguided -- and severely intrusive -- espionage investigation. A series of blundering investigations into people who had done nothing wrong resulted in the DOJ changing its investigative guidelines, but not before Raphel's house was raided (twice) by the FBI and her reputation severely damaged.In the end, the government had nothing left of its espionage investigation but a single allegation that Raphel kept classified documents at her home. (Not that she shared them with anyone, unlike General Petraeus, who suffered a mild wrist slap and was temporarily considered for a Trump cabinet position.) In the beginning, though, it was all "just metadata."

It's the holiday season, that time of year when many people shrug off the comforting fullness surrounding the far-superior holiday of Thanksgiving for the stressful gift-bonanza of Christmas. What is billed as a time of peace and happiness too regularly instead is anything but. And it seems that Christmas itself occasionally plays a role in the tumult.Up in Canada, a Toronto-area shopping mall and a male model are currently battling over who gets to control the rights to "Fashion Santa." Paul Mason played the role of Fashion Santa for the Yorkdale Mall in each of the past two Christmas seasons, donning white hair and a magnificent beard along with designer clothes, taking pictures with shoppers and generally being a fashionable representation of Santa Claus. After he refused to reprise his role this year, Yorkdale hired Adam Martin to fill in for him. Mason says the mall cannot do this, because he has a copyright on "Fashion Santa."

For some time now, I've been ringing the warning bell for cable television providers that the cord-cutting trend has only thus far been prevented from becoming a deluge by live sporting events. It's one thing to watch TV dramas and reality programming either in binge-fashion or streaming days after the original television airing, but live sports is still a major draw for cable TV audiences. Because of the combination of broadcast partner deals many of the leagues have worked out with cable providers and the nature of the sports product, this may be the last bastion of hope for cable TV as we know it today.But that thread of survival continues to unravel. In the past two years or so, we've seen the major athletic leagues begin to open up on the concept of live-streaming games. The NFL was among the first of the major players to ink toe-in-the-water streaming deals, but the NBA and MLB have followed closely behind. And while those deals are meager and fragmented in terms of the streaming providers in question, it's worth noting that Amazon is reportedly targeting sports streaming generally as a way to expand its Prime product.

Last month, Pennsylvania legislators wrapped up a little gift for the state's law enforcement agencies: a bill that would have allowed agencies to withhold the names of officers involved in deployments of deadly force for at least 30 days. This was just the mandatory withholding window. The bill never stipulated a release date past that point, meaning "never" was also an acceptable time frame.The normal concerns for "officer safety" were given as the reason for the new opacity. Rather than see disclosure as an essential part of maintaining healthy relationships with the communities they served, law enforcement agencies saw disclosure as just another way to hurt already very well-protected officers.The DOJ itself -- often a defender of entrenched police culture -- recommended a 72-hour window for release of this information. State legislators, pushed by local police unions, felt constituents would be better served by being kept in the dark. Given the back-and-forth nature of public sentiment, it was unclear how Governor Tom Wolf would react to the passed proposal.Fortunately, Governor Wolf has seen the bill for what it is: something that further distances police officers from the people they serve. In a letter [PDF] announcing his veto of the bill, Wolf points out the law would have done far more harm than good. (via PINAC)

A legal dispute that goes back in some form or another to at least 2001 has resulted in the 5th Circuit Appeals court thankfully reminding people that patent infringement is actually good for competition. To say that the details and background of this case are confusing and convoluted would be... quite an understatement. If you want to read the background in the full ruling, go ahead, but I'd recommend bringing along a white board, a compass and a large Thermos of coffee. Let's just say that two companies that make different versions of retractable syringes, RTI and BD, have been less than happy with each other for many years, and there have been some lawsuits covering a variety of different theories for why RTI doesn't want BD selling safety syringes (or, if not stopping the company from doing that, compelling it to fork over lots of money to RTI). There have been patent claims, antitrust claims, unfair competition, false advertising and some more. It's... convoluted. While the court's background explanation is convoluted as anything, where things came down recently was that RTI argued that BD's patent infringement (which had already been ruled on by the court earlier in this neverending saga) was also a form of an antitrust violation. Even this part is confusing, because RTI has a few different reasons for why it argues BD is violating antitrust law, with only one of them being its infringement of RTI patents.

One of the reforms included in the USA Freedom Act is the actual ability to challenge National Security Letter gag orders. Prior to the passage of this bill, recipients were limited to challenging gag orders once per year -- challenges that rarely succeeded. The process is no longer restricted to annual challenges, but many recipients won't be aware of this fact because the FBI hasn't been interested in telling them.The Internet Archive -- with the assistance of the EFF -- has managed to lift a gag order on an NSL it received. This NSL [PDF], like the thousands of NSLs the FBI issues each year, came with outdated information regarding recipients' options for challenging gag orders.

Last week, we wrote about the atrocious treatment of famed Canadian reporter Ed Ou by the US's Customs & Border Patrol agents. Ou was on his way to document the protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline and he was detained, had his devices confiscated and searched, and then was denied entry into the US. And, of course, as we've seen before in similar stories, Homeland Security's response to these sorts of stories is to shrug and basically say "we don't have to tell you anything."

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It appears that the "nerd harder" disease has spread across the Atlantic, and none other than the UK's Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has caught it. In discussing the (frequently overhyped, but still real) issues of cyberbullying and sexting, Hunt has decided that it's no problem at all, because the nerds can put their minds to it and magically block it:

Software updates are seldom painless. The history of the Windows operating system is littered with stories of computers/programs bricked by auto-update patches and OS iterations. They're not much fun on the IT end either, especially when businesses depend on functioning computers/programs for pretty much everything. An enterprise-level OS upgrade can take days or weeks -- and that's not counting the aftershocks which continue for months after as every interdependent application finds new and exciting ways to clash with the upgraded system software.Days, weeks, months chewed up by an upgrade. It's horrible, but hey, at least you're still relatively free to step outside periodically and/or exit the building when you've had enough for one day. It could be much much worse.

UK police are experimenting with a new brute force technique to defeat cellphone encryption:

To get a general feel for European law enforcement encryption sentiment (so to speak), the European Union sent questionnaires to member countries, asking for details on what forms of encryption are encountered most frequently and what these agencies feel would be the best approach to tackling encrypted data going forward.Surprisingly, the EU received several responses and most have been published in full. (The list of PDFs/HTML versions can be found near the bottom of this page.) They were issued in response to a public records request by Rejo Zenger of Dutch digital rights group, Bits of Freedom.Security researcher Lukasz Olejnik went through the posted documents to find the highlights/lowlights of the submissions. Several countries responded to the EU's questionnaire, but only twelve of those made their answers public. (And, in the case of the UK and the Czech Republic, some answers were redacted.)Most responding agencies in most countries are running into the same encryption issues.

This week we, like most other websites, had to re-register with the Copyright Office for DMCA safe harbor protection. Our most insightful comment of the week came in response to our post about this, where aerinai suggested this system should work both ways:

Five Years AgoAnd so the SOPA/PIPA fight continued this week in 2011. The chorus of opposition grew larger: first the New York and LA Times both came out against the bills, then the Wall Street Journal joined them — though the world of smaller publications was way ahead of them; DNS providers, educators and best-selling author Barry Eisler all expressed their serious concerns, and even Stephen Colbert did a segment on the bills.On the flipside, an ex-RIAA boss was ignoring all criticism and claiming it's just an attempt to justify theft, the MPAA pretended to take concerns seriously but didn't, several tech companies that still supported the bills were being called out for it, NBC Universal was muscling partners into signing "grassroots" support of the bill, a very questionable consumer group released a very questionable pro-SOPA study, and Rep. Lamar Smith attempted to defend the bill by equating infringement with child pornography.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2006, the explosion of YouTube was still causing all sorts of chaos. The misplaced blame game was extremely popular, obviously with copyright and infringement issues but also with weirder things like blaming YouTube for lockpicking videos. Google was trying to pay off entertainment companies to leave it alone, experts were grappling with the liability issues around linking and embedding, and the Wall Street Journal was tragically confused about the copyright issues involved. Meanwhile Wal-Mart was trying to get into the online video game itself, but not exactly knocking it out of the park.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, the chaos was around audio, and there was a huge disconnect since new devices like the iPod did not work with new subscription services like Pressplay. Ringtones were becoming the next big thing while a judge with little technical understanding was trying to stop KaZaA, and smarter folks were already pointing out how the industry dropped the ball on digital music. Meanwhile, while Ed Felten was spared the aggression of the RIAA for publishing research on SDMI cracking, another court was upholding the ruling that banned publication of the DeCSS code.Two-Hundred And Six Years AgoI've mentioned before that I love a good hoax, and on November 27th, 1810 the city of London was witness to a classic. In order to win a bet that he could make any home in the city the most talked about address within a week, Theodore Hook sent out thousands of letters on behalf of a random house's owner, requesting services and deliveries. The results were utter chaos:

We've written plenty of posts about police body cameras -- how useful they can be and how useless they often are. What should result in additional law enforcement accountability has been turned into a mostly-optional documentation system. The new tech and its accompanying guidelines have done very little to increase accountability.Body cameras are pretty much mainstream at this point, but when excessive force and/or misconduct are alleged, footage captured by police is often nonexistent. Officers disable recording equipment, delete footage, or simply claim the camera "malfunctioned." Some repeatedly "forget" to activate their cameras ahead of controversial arrests and interactions.But what can be done about it? So far, law enforcement agencies have done little but promise to create more policies and guidelines -- ones that can continue to be ignored by officers who'd rather not create a permanent record of their actions. There's been some discipline, but what little of it there is hasn't been very severe. And stories of repeated tampering with recording devices in some agencies suggests what is in place isn't much of a deterrent.The ACLU of Massachusetts has a suggestion: if missing/incomplete recordings are central to a prosecution or a civil rights lawsuit, a better deterrent might be to allow juries to impose evidentiary consequences for failures to record. From the ACLU's "No Tape, No Testimony" report [PDF]:

A couple weeks back, we wrote about a ridiculous and massively overbroad demand from the IRS that virtual currency exchange/online wallet host Coinbase turn over basically all info on basically all Coinbase users. They did this because they saw evidence of a single person using Bitcoin to avoid paying taxes. Coinbase expressed concern over this, but Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley didn't seem too concerned, and has granted the IRS's request by literally rubber stamping the DOJ's request. I know it's not all that uncommon for judges to accept "proposed orders" but it's still a bit disturbing to see it happen on something with potentially massive consequences.Coinbase has indicated that they're going to push back on this legally, but it's still quite unfortunate that the judge didn't seem all that concerned about this. While Coinbase says it expected the court to grant this order, and that "we look forward to opposing the DOJ's request in court," it's unfortunate how quick judges are to agree to these kinds of orders. Either way, this is going to be a case to follow.

Canada's attempt to force Canadian cable providers to deliver cheaper, more flexible cable TV bundles appears to be a comedy of errors. Last year, driven by user complaints, the CRTC passed rules requiring Canadian cable companies to provide a $25 so-called "skinny bundle" of discounted TV channels starting March 1 of this year, and the option to buy channels individually (a la carte) starting December 1 (aka this week). Companies responded by first pouting, then by offering new "discounted" TV bundles so layered with hidden fees, surcharges, and caveats as to be effectively useless.

One of the longest-running, and most extraordinary, sagas on Techdirt concerns the island of Antigua. Over 13 years ago, the country filed a complaint at the World Trade Organization (WTO) over the US ban on online gambling, which Antigua said violated a trade agreement between the two countries. Long story short, the WTO not only agreed, but said that the Caribbean country could ignore US copyrights, and set up a WTO-authorized pirate site to obtain the $21 million in WTO sanctions that the US was refusing to pay as compensation for blocking Antigua's online gambling sites. In 2013, Antigua was still saying it was definitely going to do this if it couldn't come to some agreement with the US on the matter, and the US was still refusing to settle.Three years later, Antigua -- officially known as Antigua and Barbuda -- has just told a meeting of the WTO's Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) the following:

Thanks to the EFF's efforts, another set of National Security Letters have been published and their recipient freed to discuss them. CREDO Mobile received two NSLs in 2013 -- both accompanied with the usual indefinite gag order. The NSLs [PDF 1] [PDF 2] requested a wealth of data on three of CREDO's customers -- including all call records, financial information (credit cards used, etc.), and personal information (name, address, etc.) -- dating back to April 2008.CREDO challenged the constitutionality of the indefinite gag orders as well as the constitutionality of the NSLs themselves.

As we mentioned last month, the Copyright Office -- despite being warned this was a bad idea -- has decided to implement a brand new system for websites to register DMCA agents, and has done so in a way that will undoubtedly fuck over many websites. It's already ridiculous enough that in order to be fully protected under the DMCA's safe harbor rules (that say you're not liable if someone posts infringing material to your website), you need to register a designated "DMCA agent" with the Copyright Office. The idea behind this is that by registering an agent, copyright holders will be able to look up who to send a takedown notice to. And, sure, that makes sense, but remember that this is the same Copyright Office that supports not requiring copyright holders to register their works, meaning that there may not be any legitimate way to contact copyright holders back.

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We've noted several times that the cable industry is somewhat shielded from the rise of cord cutting because of its growing monopoly over broadband. You see, as AT&T and Verizon give up on unwanted DSL customers they don't want to upgrade (as part of a pivot into content and ads), there are now huge swaths of the country where users really only have one option for broadband above 25 Mbps: cable. Users fleeing neglected DSL lines sign up for cable, and because TV bundled with broadband is cheaper than broadband alone, users sign up for TV service they may not even want.

We've been a lot more skeptical than most about all the claims of "Russian interference" with the US Presidential election this year. While I don't doubt there was some effort to do something, Russia is such an easy scapegoat. Still, plenty of people insist that it's true, including those who at least should have a fair bit of insight into what actually happened. To me, the bigger issue is that attribution in many of these things is a lot more difficult than most people make it out to be.

Could President Obama actually declassify and release the full 6,800 page report on the massive failures of the CIA's torture program from a decade ago? While it seems unlikely, Senator Dianne Feinstein is urging the President to release the document, fearing that the massive report may disappear into the memory hole soon.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed [PDF] the dismissal of a copyright infringement suit brought against Electronic Arts by Robin Antonick, a programmer who worked on the Apple II version of the game Madden back in the mid-80s.Antonick was locked out of royalties for other versions of the game by the software company, but alleged Electronic Arts did nothing more than copy his code when porting it to other platforms -- creating a "derivative work" that he was supposedly entitled to collect royalties on. Antonick might have had a case. But while allegations are nice…

When you cover enough trademark disputes, you come to expect a fairly typical pattern to them. Entity X bullies entity Y over a vaguely similar use of a mark that often times is overly broad or generic, and then there is either a capitulation to the bullying, a settlement, or the rare instance of a trial that results in an actual ruling. The outcomes aren't typically favorable for those of us that think trademark law has been pushed beyond its original intent, but the pattern persists.But every once in a while, you find a zebra amidst the thundering hooves of horses. Such is the case with a very strange dispute currently going on between Iceland Foods, a foodstuffs retailer, and Iceland, the island nation between Greenland and the rest of Europe. Due to the retailer's aggressive protection of its trademark, which consists of a generic term preceeded by the name of a country, Iceland has petitioned to revoke the trademark Iceland Foods has on its name for all of Europe.

The amendments to Rule 41 are now law, thanks to Sen. John Cornyn, who prevented bills opposing the immediate adoption of the changes from being debated.

You might recall that earlier this year there was a massive backlash against Facebook for its often clumsy attempts to try and dominate emerging developing nation ad markets through what many saw as bogus altruism. The entire fracas bubbled over in India, where regulators banned Facebook's attempt to create a sort of zero-rated, net neutrality-violating walled garden of Facebook-curated content under the pretense of helping the nation's farmers. Facebook didn't help itself by trying to drum up fake support for its initiatives while labeling those worried about the plan as extremists.

Albert Gidari of Just Security/Center for Internet and Society has been looking into the US Courts' wiretap reports for 2014 and 2015. The problem with these reports is that nothing adds up. As he wrote for Just Security last year, there's a huge discrepancy between the numbers reported by the US Courts Administrative Office and those reported by the service providers complying with the orders.These numbers should be much closer than they are. If a wiretap is issued by a court, then the recipient service provider should report being served with one wiretap order. But that's not what has happened. The US Courts AO reported 3,554 federal and state wiretap orders in 2014. Service providers, however, reported receiving 10,712 wiretap orders for that same year.As Gidari pointed out in 2015 (examining the 2014 wiretap report), there's not much that explains this discrepancy.

President-elect Donald Trump's promise to "drain the DC swamp" has become a bit of a running gag as his administration plugs a wide variety of lobbyists and cronies into key cabinet positions. Telecom is certainly no exception, with Trump appointing a number of telecom sector lobbyists and allies to guide telecom policy and help select a new FCC boss. One of these picks doesn't believe telecom monopolies exist. None of them can actually admit the broadband market isn't competitive. And all of them have made it abundantly clear that they intend to roll back net neutrality and effectively gut the FCC from the inside out.

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Techdirt has been following for some years China's embrace of patents, loudly applauded by Western companies who believe this will give them more power there. The country has just passed a notable milestone in this area:

If you're having trouble quelling dissent at ground zero, maybe the next move is to limit the coverage. We've already seen local authorities issue arrest warrants for journalists covering the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Now, we're seeing something more proactive, courtesy of Customs and Border Protection.

We've been discussing how despite all of the "populist" rhetoric on the Trump campaign trail, the President Elect has nominated several cozy telecom industry insiders to guide his telecom policy and select a new FCC boss. Both Jeffrey Eisenach and Mark Jamison have lobbied and worked for large ISPs, spending most of the last decade vehemently fighting against any and every consumer reform in telecom. Both have made it abundantly clear they not only want to roll back net neutrality and new broadband privacy rules passed under current boss Tom Wheeler, but they want to dismantle the FCC entirely.

Contained in a long list of rights violations allegedly perpetrated on activist Matt Akins is a very interesting First Amendment claim. It's not that Akins' claim is particularly interesting. It's that the court's decision on that issue seems completely wrong.Akins is no stranger to arrests and interactions with law enforcement.

The Onion once ran a piece titled "I invented YouTube back in 2010." The joke, of course, is that YouTube launched in 2005. This month's Stupid Patent of the Month is just as ridiculous. US Patent No. 8,856,221, titled ‘System and method for storing broadcast content in a cloud-based computing environment,' claims a mundane process for delivering media content from remote servers. This might have been a somewhat fresh idea in, say the mid-1990s, but the application for this patent was filed in 2011.The patent suggests using "at least one server" that should have "a memory that stores media content and a processor." The server then communicates with "a consumer device" that can send messages and receive content. Aside from these prosaic details, the patent makes only a half-hearted effort to distinguish its supposed invention from the massive array of cloud-based media services that already existed when it was filed. For example, the description suggests that existing services were inadequate because customers might pay a flat monthly fee yet make few downloads. The patent recommends tailoring customer cost to the content actually downloaded. But even if that was a new idea in 2011 (and it wasn't), routine pricing practices should not be patentable.Overall, the '221 patent contains little more than rote recitations of long-existing technologies ("[a] list of media content may be provided to the consumer and displayed on consumer device display, e. g., via a website displayed in a web browser") and pricing models ("[t]he cost amount may be based on factors such as playback time"). The patent's claims, which describe the formal boundaries of the invention, merely list steps for using this conventional technology.In addition to being obvious, the claims of the '221 patent are invalid as abstract under the Supreme Court's decision in Alice v. CLS Bank. Under that case, an idea does not become eligible for a patent simply by being implemented on a conventional computer. In fact, the '221 patent goes out of its way to emphasize that "any kind of computing system" is suited to perform the claimed functions. In our view, it would not survive a challenge under Alice.The '221 patent is owned by Rothschild Broadcast Distribution Systems, LLC ("RBDS"). We were unable to find any sign that RBDS engaged in any business other than patent litigation. It is based in, you guessed it, the Eastern District of Texas. Court records show that RBDS has sued about 25 companies, ranging from startups to The Walt Disney Company.The inventor of the ‘221 patent also won the August 2015 Stupid Patent of the Month for a patent on a drink mixer connected to the Internet. That patent, which had claims so broad it arguably covered the entire Internet of Things, is owned by a company called Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations, LLC ("RCDI"). After one of defendants went to the expense of challenging the validity of the drink mixer patent, RCDI dismissed the case without collecting a cent. This is classic troll behavior, forcing defendants to choose between paying the high cost of defense or a license fee that the patent owner does not deserve. We believe that RBDS's litigation similarly has only nuisance value.We need broad patent reform (including venue reform) to stop this wasteful patent trolling. We also need reform at the Patent Office so that it doesn't issue terrible patents like this in the first place. Contact your Senators and tell them to pass patent reform.Republished from the EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month series.

Denuvo, as you will recall, is the name of a modern version of anti-piracy DRM, foretold to be the end of video game piracy, when the reality is that its legend exceeded its capability. While we've begun to see an uptick in stories of game developers actively limiting or excluding the use of DRM in their games, those stories tend not to be about Denuvo DRM. Many have taken this to be an indication of Denuvo's strength and usefulness, even if it isn't 100% effective.But now we do indeed have a story about a game developer that had initially included Denuvo in its game, only to yank it via a patch at a later date.

An interesting ruling [PDF] has been handed down by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on the warrantless use of Stingray devices to locate individuals. Wisconsin police used an IMSI catcher to track down Damian Patrick for a parole violation. He was arrested while sitting in a car on a public street.Multiple factors played into the court's decision, which found that using Stingrays without a warrant to locate people was not a Fourth Amendment violation. But it's not quite as simple as it might first appear to be. Complicating things were the circumstances of the arrest and arguments raised in Patrick's suppression request.Patrick argued that the location tracking warrant (not a search warrant) was invalid. First, the tracking warrant made no mention of the Stingray the police used to locate him. Second, he argued that his personal location was not "contraband or the proceeds of a crime," making his location "off limits" to the Wisconsin PD's investigatory efforts. The court disagrees.

For some time now the trend du jour among many media outlets has been to ban news comments -- then insult reader intelligence by proclaiming this is being done out of a deep-rooted love of "conversation" and "relationships." You see, these websites aren't banning comments because they're too lazy or cheap to weed out spam and trolls, but because they love you. These sites aren't outsourcing all human interactivity to Facebook because bean counters can't monetize quality on-site discourse in a pie chart, they're doing it because they care so very deeply about their community.

The Internet Archive is probably the most important site that most people have never heard of, much less used. It is an amazing thing: not just a huge collection of freely-available digitized materials, but a backup copy of much of today's Web, available through something known as the Wayback Machine. It gets its name from the fact that it lets visitors view snapshots of vast numbers of Web pages as they have changed over the last two decades since the Internet Archive was founded -- some 279 billion pages currently. That feature makes it an indispensable -- and generally unique -- record of pages and information that have since disappeared, sometimes because somebody powerful found them inconvenient.Given the way the world is going at the moment, that's a problem that is likely to get worse, not better. The founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, is worried about that prospect, as he makes clear in a blog post:

The reason there are so many controls and layers of oversight over wiretap warrants is because the potential for abuse is huge. The FBI abused its wiretap authority for years, which resulted in new restrictions for federal wiretap warrants. The DEA has found a way to route around these, but at the expense of its investigations.At the state level, the vetting doesn't appear to be as thorough. An insider who knew the weaknesses in the system abused wiretap warrants to perform some very personal surveillance.

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For this week's podcast -- our 100th episode -- we have both a special guest and an announcement. On the podcast, we have Jack Conte, the founder and CEO of Patreon, a fascinating company that we've written about a few times, for providing a really compelling platform for connecting content creators and fans, and giving those fans a way to support the creators. And with that conversation, we're also launching a Techdirt Patreon page and asking for folks to support our continued efforts to make great content. The Patreon campaign is focused on the podcast, but you can use it to support Techdirt as a whole if you'd like. If you don't actually listen to the podcast, there's still a good reason to support it: if we get enough support via Patreon, we'll use it to fund transcripts of the podcasts, so those of you who would prefer to read it can do so.

While it seems pretty darn clear that President Obama has no interest in issuing a pardon for Ed Snowden -- despite the well-organized campaign in support of such a pardon -- more and more people are stepping up to argue why Obama should change his mind on this. The latest is a big one: fifteen members of the Church Committee have sent President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch a memo outlining the reasons why Snowden deserves a pardon.

While we knew it was impossible for President Obama to truly rein in the massive executive powers that he helped expand (following on the massive expansions from previous administrations) concerning national surveillance and war -- we had still hoped that maybe his concern about a President Trump would let him do a few small things to limit some of the most egregious powers. Instead, it appears that President Obama is doing the opposite, and expanding his war powers, just as he's about to hand them to someone that he, himself, has loudly criticized as being unfit for the Presidency.