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I saw a lot of excitement and happiness a week or so ago around some reports that the EU's new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) might possibly include a "right to an explanation" for algorithmic decisions. It's not clear if this is absolutely true, but it's based on a reading of the agreed upon text of the GDPR, which is scheduled to go into effect in two years.

Well, the era of robocop has begun. As you've probably heard already, in order to get the sniper in Dallas who shot and killed a whole bunch of police, the Dallas police apparently sent in a bomb robot to detonate a bomb. Normally that robot is designed to save people from bombs, but in this case the police decided to use it to deliver a bomb and blow up the guy, Micah Xavier Johnson, accused of doing the shooting. The city apparently recently got 3 Remotec robots for its bomb squad:Each one apparently costs about $200k. In asking around, it appears that those who are familiar with bomb robots can't find any examples of police using them in this way in the past. Though, of course, people have certainly raised the theoretical question of using remote automated systems, whether robots or drones, to take down killers who are on the loose.

This has been rumored before, and perhaps isn't a huge surprise due to Whatsapp's use of end to end encryption, but Facebook has launched a trial of end to end encryption in Facebook messenger, under a program it's calling "Secret Conversations" (which also allows for expiring conversations).

Journalist Terri Buhl -- who gained a bit of Techdirt infamy by claiming her public tweets couldn't be republished (which led to wild claims of copyright infringement and defamation) -- is still dealing with some legal woes of her own, stemming from the posting of someone else's actually private information to Facebook.

Earlier this year, computer science professor and cryptography expert Matt Blaze happened across a Pennsylvania state-owned vehicle attempting to d/b/a a Google Street View… um, SUV. Taking that info, local reporter Dustin Slaughter dug deeper into the origins of that fake Google Street View vehicle.Multiple state agencies were contacted by Motherboard for clarification, but the site only received the normal obstruction government officials provide when there's no logical explanation for a thing that has happened under their purview.The Pennsylvania State Police denied the vehicle belonged to it, suggesting it might belong to a different agency. The placard in the window identified it as state vehicle whose use was governed by the state's fleet manager, who suggested it was actually a city vehicle, but wouldn't narrow down which city agency the vehicle belonged to.Google denied any involvement, surprising no one, as it was perfectly clear the SUV looked nothing like the tiny, fuel-efficient vehicles Google normally uses -- which are covered from bumper-to-bumper with Google branding, rather than just a couple of badly-printed window stickers.After some more phone/email tag, the Philly Police Department finally stepped up and admitted the vehicle was theirs, and that it did not condone the sort of thing it hadn't prevented from happening.

A recent decision by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals may not directly reference the Hillary Clinton email fiasco, but the conclusion reached set off irony detectors all over as it arrived the same day FBI director James Comey announced that Clinton's private email server may have been a stupid idea, but not a criminally stupid one.There were indications that Clinton's use of a private email address was an attempt to route around FOIA requests. As her server was being set up, communications from both her staff and the State Department's noted that an account in her name existed already, but would be subject to FOIA requests.This has been a problem elsewhere. Several government officials have conducted an inordinate amount of government business using private email accounts or personal devices in hopes of skirting public records requests. The DC Circuit Court's case deals with a little-known government agency, but an all-too-familiar dodge by public officials.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the push by the Russian Duma to pass a massive new surveillance bill that would mandate backdoors to encryption as well as massive data retention requirements for service providers, including saying that they need to store recordings of phone calls. As you may have heard, earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the bill into law. And apparently to prove that he's serious about all of this, Putin has also signed an executive order telling the FSB (the modern version of the KGB) to make sure it gets encryption keys to unlock everything within the next two weeks.

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There are cameras everywhere. But when cops start shooting, it's usually bullets and never footage. The first recordings that ever make their way to the public are those shot by bystanders. Anything else captured during a shooting remains under strict control of law enforcement… even when the recordings don't belong to law enforcement.

We write about lots of nutty court cases around here, and semi-frequently, parties engaged in those lawsuits aren't always happy about our coverage. Not too long ago, we received a series of emails and phone calls and more from an individual who was involved in some lawsuits that we covered. Without providing too many details at all, the individual in question made a pretty straightforward case that he or she absolutely regretted filing the lawsuits, and provided some additional information about why it had happened, while also noting that the Google searches on this person's name were now linking to the few news stories that covered the lawsuit, including the court documents that we had posted. It was explained that these search results were making life difficult for this person who was trying to get his or her life back on track and believed that Google searches on the name were making it harder to find a job.

We've been talking a lot about how the FCC is pushing a new plan that would force cable providers to provide their programming to third-party hardware vendors. The idea is to put an end to the $21 billion in annual rental fees consumers have to pay for often outdated cable boxes and create some competition in the cable box space, resulting in better, cheaper hardware for everyone. Given it's a hugely profitable monopoly and third-party boxes would be more likely to direct users to competing services, the cable industry has shelled out big bucks for misleading editorials and high test Congressional whining.

The House Homeland Security Committee has decided to weigh in on the encryption debate with the release of a report [PDF] entitled "Going Dark, Going Forward." Despite the use of Comey's pet term for the increasing deployment of encryption by service providers and device makers, the committee points out backdoors are a terrible way to address the problem.

Nothing says "exigency" like 270+ minutes of standing around.

While we've had some reservations in the past about the FTC's guidelines on endorsements and testimonials in the online arena, our concerns have tended to be about the grey areas of the law. The way that reviews for books, music and games often work falls into this grey area, with products and media handed out for review, and the disclosure guidelines the FTC laid out seem overly intrusive. Whatever our reservations about those guidelines, however, the goal of preventing the surreptitious pimping of a product or service by a trusted source that has direct connections with it was laudable.Which brings us to two YouTube personalities, TmarTn and Syndicate Project, whose real names are Trevor Martin and Tom Cassell. These two have spent a great deal of time urging their followers to use the CSGO Lotto website while, at best, barely disclosing the site's sponsorship, and never even coming close to acknowledging that they are executives of the company behind the site.

We've been talking for several years now about how modern "smart cars" don't adhere to particularly smart security practices. Nissan recently opened Leaf owners to remote attack via a nasty vulnerability in the car's app. The Mitsubishi Outlander was similarly unveiled to be relatively trivial to hack. And last year, hackers showed just how easy it was to manipulate and disable a new Jeep Cherokee running Fiat Chrysler's UConnect platform.

We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.

The sort of thing that happens all the time -- the sharing of public documents concerning public litigation -- has resulted in sanctions against the lawyer who shared them with a local journalist. An Ohio judge has issued a chilling decision [PDF] (currently being appealed) that basically says that any sharing of public information that could be viewed as adversely affecting the other party in litigation is not permitted. The ACLU's Jonathan Peters has more details.

The FBI has decided to insert itself into another public records battle. The agency has long been known to cc: itself to public records requests for Stingray documents, but this time it's claiming any requests for local law enforcement documents related to the Orlando nightclub shooting need to be routed through it.

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Remember David Nosal? He was the former Korn/Ferry executive looking to set up his own competing firm, but one that mainly relied on Korn/Ferry's big database of people. As part of that process, after he left the company to head out on his own, he had some former colleagues who were planning to join him log into their Korn/Ferry accounts to access information. Then after those employees left, they got another former colleague to share her password so they could continue to log in. He was charged with violating the criminal portion of the CFAA, under the theory that convincing his former colleagues to gather info for him was a terms of service violation -- and that meant he had "exceeded authorized access" under the statute. This became a key case in determining whether merely violating a terms of service could be considered criminal hacking under the CFAA. Thankfully, back in 2012, the 9th Circuit rejected such a broad ruling of the CFAA, pointing out that such an interpretation would "unintentionally turn ordinary citizens into criminals" and that couldn't be the intent from Congress. This was a huge win that helped limit some of the worst abuses of the CFAA.

For years T-Mobile has been making some welcome changes to U.S. wireless service, implementing everything from free data while roaming internationally, to rollover data plans that let you keep unused data. T-Mobile's strange, new tactic of treating consumers well has paid incredible dividends for the company, which has been adding significantly more postpaid wireless subscribers per quarter than any other major carrier. Between the elimination of consumer pain points and its foul-mouthed CEO, T-Mobile's been a welcome change for the sector (just ignore its attack on the EFF and failure to support net neutrality).

You would think that "the law" is obviously part of the public domain. It seems particularly crazy to think that any part of the law itself might be covered by copyright, or (worse) locked up behind some sort of paywall where you cannot read it. Carl Malamud has spent many years working to make sure the law is freely accessible... and he's been sued a bunch of times and is still in the middle of many lawsuits, including one from the State of Georgia for publishing its official annotated code (the state claims the annotations are covered by copyright).

We first wrote about India's Aadhaar system, which assigns a unique 12-digit number to all Indian citizens, a year ago. Mainstream media are finally waking up to the scale of the project, as this article in the Guardian indicates:

If you'll recall, back when the American presidential campaign was still in full swing and we weren't all left with only two candidates that basically distill the concept of the lesser of two evils argument for voter participation, Mike Huckabee held a rally for Kim Davis and played Eye of the Tiger by Survivor to introduce her. While there was enough wrong in the entire episode to fill up many, many pages, Techdirt focused first on Frank Sullivan of Survivor's lawsuit against Huckabee for copyright infringement. Most observers initially thought that the suit wouldn't go anywhere, as most of the time these politicians have the proper blanket licensing to play these songs as part of their campaigns. Upon further inspection, however, the Kim Davis rally couldn't really have been considered part of Huckabee's ill-fated campaign, which would render any license his people had obtained useless. This was confirmed when Huckabee bizarrely put forth affirmative fair use defenses, claiming that the use was non-substantial and non-commercial...because the Kim Davis rally was a religious rally.I said at the time that the tactic was unlikely to work and, additionally, was quite a disgusting attempt, given the piety that Huckabee likes to portray. Debasing religious conviction to get out of copyright infringement is stunningly shrewd, even to a devout secularist such as myself. Especially when Huckabee could have simply found a band willing to give permission for the use, setting up some kind of God v. Copyright showdown seemed slimy.But that's what the former candidate chose to do, which brings me to this strange string of words I never thought I'd put in this particular order: God lost to copyright.

For years now, consumers have been stuck in the middle of increasingly-ugly carriage fee disputes between broadcasters and cable companies. Usually they go something like this: a broadcaster demands a massive rate hike from cable companies to carry their channels. Cable TV providers balk, and the broadcaster pulls access to the channels in question until the cable provider pays up. Consumers not only lose access to content they're paying for (refunds are never provided), but they're also hammered by ads from both sides trying to get consumers to call and bitch at the other guy for being greedy.

Hey, guys, how was your 4th of July? Good? Lots of hot dogs and brats? Nobody firecrackered their nuts off or anything? Maybe just drank a little too much? Whatever your 4th of July experience, it sure wasn't as bad as this guy's.

In the United States, copyright trolls are finding it more difficult to save on filing fees by pursuing file sharers en masse. More than a few judges have shot down attempts to file infringement suits against "Does 1-30," etc., ruling that these defendants are improperly joined.Meanwhile, in Canada, copyright trolls are trying a novel approach to suing alleged file sharers in big bunches: the reverse class action. Voltage Pictures is suing a nominative "class" of Does yet to be named for copyright infringement. This is its attempt to route around restrictions placed on it by another court, as well as the costs associated with complying with the demands.But in doing so, Voltage Pictures is making a mess of Canadian privacy laws. Rogers, the service provider standing between Voltage and the subscriber information it's demanding, wants to know why the studio is abusing Canada's "notice and notice" system to obtain information it's not supposed to be able to acquire without a court order.

Earlier this month, we wrote briefly about the Supreme Court's second Kirtsaeng ruling, which focused on the issue of fee shifting in copyright cases. We didn't spend that much time on it (and hadn't covered the run up to the Supreme Court either). We had basically assumed that the first Kirtsaeng ruling from the Supreme Court, about whether or not the First Sale Doctrine applied to goods outside the US, was the real legacy of the Kirtsaeng fight, rather than a more mundane issue about fee shifting -- especially when the more recent Kirtsaeng ruling was basically just "courts need to look at more than just if the original lawsuit was 'objectively reasonable'" (but fails to give much guidance about what else should be looked at). Yes, we noted, this may ward off some bogus copyright lawsuits, depending on what standards the courts start to coalesce around, but there wasn't much big news in the ruling.

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It would appear that Congress is not so happy that the State Department is a major funding source for the Tor project. Tor, of course, is the internet anonymyzing system that was originally developed with support from the US government as a way to promote free and safe access to the internet for people around the globe (mostly focusing on those under threat in authoritarian countries). Of course, other parts of our government aren't huge fans of Tor, because it doesn't just help activists and dissidents in other countries avoid detection, but also, well, just about anyone (except on days when the FBI decides to hack their way in).

We've seen government officials do some pretty questionable things to avoid turning over documents to FOIA requesters. The most common method is just to stick requesters with a bill they can't pay. Stonewalling is popular, too -- so much so that the federal government sends out "Still interested?" notices to people whose requests have been backburnered for years.More rarely, officials will race requesters to the courthouse, hoping to secure a judgment in their favor stating that they've already fully complied with a FOIA request -- even when they've done nothing but withhold and redact. Stripped of all the legal wrangling, this is basically the government suing individuals for asking for documents, forcing taxpayers to go out-of-pocket if they hope to counter the officials' assertions.But one thing we haven't seen is a government official securing a grand jury indictment against open records requesters… for making open records requests.

We've long noted how Comcast is a bit of an anti-competitive jackass on both the TV and broadband fronts. When the nation's biggest cable provider isn't using usage caps to hinder streaming video competitors, it's busy finding new and creative ways to prevent paying customers from wandering too far outside of Comcast's well-cultivated walled garden. And while many global cable companies have joined the year 2016 by integrating Netflix functionality into their cable boxes for consumer benefit, Comcast has historically fought such a move, instead trying to drive consumers to its own Netflix knockoff.

Whatever accountability and transparency could be achieved with the deployment of police body cameras often seems to be undercut by legislative activity. Minnesota legislators, prompted by law enforcement, tried to cut the public out of the process. So did a sheriff-turned-legislator in Michigan. The LAPD preemptively declared its body cam footage would not be considered "public records," which means legislators will have to act to roll back the PD's policy. And in Illinois, a law enforcement agency decided to stop using body cameras altogether because accountability is just too much work.Over in North Carolina, one legislator is sponsoring a bill that would exempt body cam footage from public records laws. His concern, of course, is the privacy of all involved.

In recent years, there have been a couple of really important US Supreme Court decisions in the biotech field. One is the 2013 judgment striking down gene patents. The other is a ruling from 2012 that rejected the patenting of basic medical diagnostics, in a case involving Mayo Collaborative Services and Prometheus Labs. The resultant loss for biotech companies in terms of devalued patent portfolios, and their reduced ability to control the market using intellectual monopolies, has been so serious that it is no surprise that there are periodic attempts to get these decisions mitigated through subsequent court rulings.For this reason, the industry has been watching with great interest a case involving Sequenom, and its patent on a non-invasive pre-natal diagnosis test using the fact that fetal DNA is present in the blood plasma of expectant mothers. A lower court invalidated that patent on the basis of the Mayo decision, and Sequenom appealed to the Supreme Court to review the ruling. But a statement from the company has now dashed the biotech industry's hopes:

A drug conspiracy with no drugs. A house searched because a car carrying no drugs was registered to the address. It's little things like these that add up to a successfully suppressed evidence, even if it took defendant Ricky Brown a trip to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to achieve it.The DEA, working with Michigan State Police, pulled over two vehicles that had left a house they had under surveillance, apparently on their way to a heroin buy set up by an informant. One vehicle, a Chevy Silverado driven by Steven Woods, was searched after a MSP traffic stop and approximately 565 grams of heroin were recovered. The other vehicle, a GMC Yukon in which Brown was a passenger was stopped as well. However, there were no drugs in this vehicle, just four cell phones.Despite this lack of evidence, the MSP booked both the vehicle's driver (Marzell Middleton) and Brown on charges of "conspiring to deliver drugs." Search warrants were obtained for both Brown and Middleton's residences, and 90 grams of heroin were found at Middleton's house.The route to the search warrant for Brown's residence was a bit more circuitous. The idea to search Brown's residence was apparently predicated on little more than the fact that a vehicle he owned (another Yukon, but not the one that was being driven when both parties were arrested) was parked in Middleton's driveway while that residence was searched. From the decision [PDF]:

The TSA -- still reeling from an investigation showing agents couldn't find explosives in a fireworks factory and mounting complaints about long screening lines stemming from its unofficial work slowdown, one that began shortly after the agency's inception -- has decided to generate more positive PR by brutalizing a disabled nineteen-year-old girl with a brain tumor.If this sounds like broad satire of the often-thuggish agency rather than real life, read on and be amazed/dismayed. First, let's take a quick look at the threat to traveler safety TSA agents neutralized at the Memphis International Airport.The unarmed nineteen-year-old somehow set off the metal detectors. TSA agents swiftly moved in to secure the threat, blowing right past Hannah Cohen's mother, who tried to inform them that sudden, violent motions were not going to be exactly helpful. (via Raw Story)

You may recall that last fall, a judge ruled that Warner/Chappell did not hold the copyright on the song "Happy Birthday," as the company had alleged for decades (and which it used to take in approximately $2 million in licenses per year). Of course, while many in the press immediately claimed the song was in the public domain, we noted that was not what the court actually said, and the song had actually become something of an orphan work, and theoretically, someone else could claim the copyright. Indeed, the heirs of Mildred and Patty Hill (who are often cited as the creators of the song) stepped up to claim the copyright. In December, all the parties agreed to settle the case with Warner agreeing to pay $14 million to go to some of the people who had falsely licensed the song. But, part of the settlement agreement was a stipulation that the song, finally, officially be declared in the public domain.

Technology has made "direct democracy" — letting citizens vote on specific, granular issues instead of just electing representatives — more viable than ever, but does that mean it's a good idea? This week, we discuss the ins and outs of direct democracy, including a special addendum on the surprising results of the Brexit referendum.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

The US Courts' 2015 "Wiretap Report" is out and it seems to show that fears of "going dark" are largely overstated. Here's Alex Emmons of The Intercept:

At long last -- after annual assaults on entrenched government secrecy interests -- FOIA reform has finally been signed into law.

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FBI Director James Comey just held a press conference detailing the FBI's findings during its investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. The findings are irrefutably ugly.The FBI, "painstakingly" reassembling emails scattered to the digital wind by device abandonment, multiple server upgrades, lawyers' brute-force attempts to separate personal emails from work-related emails, and a general lack of professionalism across the board, found that Clinton's private email server contained :

Who's leading the installation of police officers inside schools and the implementation of zero tolerance policies? In New Jersey, the answer is the local prosecutor's office.A little background: police were called to a third-grade class party because a nine-year-old allegedly made a racist remark when discussing the brownies they were eating. NO. REALLY.

Earlier this year, we noted how companies like AT&T and Time Warner Cable were engaged in incessant whining about Google Fiber's planned entry into Louisville, Kentucky. More specifically, the ISPs were upset that Louisville passed "one touch make ready" fiber rules that dramatically speed up fiber deployment times by letting licensed third-party contractors move other ISPs' equipment when necessary. Such reforms generally help all ISPs by dramatically reducing the time it takes to deploy fiber infrastructure, often by as much as half a year.

Terrorism is scary. That's the entire point of terrorism, of course. The relatively meager bodycounts of acts of terror -- compared with, say, most minor individual battles in either of the World Wars -- are actually attempting to create some kind of political or social change amongst the victims. And guess what? It totally works! After all, western nations, the bastions of freedom and puppy dogs that we are, have reacted to what is ultimately a minor threat by reporting toddlers to the authorities, freezing the bank accounts of people with dogs whose names are a couple of letters off of the scary terror-enemy, and refusing online services to people with scary (read: Islamic) sounding names. Freedom, you see, isn't free, and we have to pay for it with freedom.And the real lesson that should be learned from pretty much the entire early part of this century is that once you start the fear-ball rolling when it comes to terrorism, it gets really hard to prevent it from trampling a great deal of innocent people in some of the dumbest ways possible. Take, for instance, Sony just flat out banning a guy's Playstation Network account because his parents named him "Jihad."

It's been a while since we've had a double winner, but this week Rekrul took first place for both insightful and funny, in response to the warning from US intelligence agencies that Americans travelling abroad should use burner phones and trust nobody. His response was to note a key omission in this warning:

Five Years AgoHactivism was a big topic this week in 2011, especially after infamous group LulzSec announced that it would be disbanding. Australian telco giant Telstra was reconsidering its censorship plan due to hactivist fears, while the RIAA was unsurprisingly using hactivism as another reason to promote the PROTECT IP bill. Governments were struggling to address the issue, though some people were smart enough to point out that the best approach would be to examine their own policies. And, hot of the heels of the major Sony hack, the company was claiming it was targeted due to the fact that it enforces its intellectual property. As for the other high-profile Sony hacker, George Hotz, well — he was busy getting hired by Facebook.Last week we talked about turntable.fm, the exciting new music service that we knew wasn't long for this world, and indeed this week it was blocked to all non-US users in the first step towards its demise. This was also the week that Prince made his bizarre statements about how digital music supposedly has a different effect on the brain. And, in ruling that was predictable but highly important, the Supreme Court struck down California's anti-violent-videogame law for violating the First Amendment.Ten Years AgoBefore Sony was the victim of hackers, it was the hacker — or at least the hacker's friend — thanks to its horrible rootkit, and it was this week in 2006 that the authors of a virus leveraging that rootkit were arrested. At the same time, Microsoft was rolling out "Windows Genuine Advantage" and some were wondering if it would become the next such fiasco. And before the question of violent video games made it to the Supreme Court, the New York DA's office was pulling out all the stops in a desperate effort to find something to bring down Grand Theft Auto.The net neutrality fight was raging too, but with a severe dearth of actual honest discussion. Cory Doctorow was suggesting a P2P-driven shaming system for bad broadband providers, while Senators were strutting their hypocrisy by opposing net neutrality regulation and supporting broadcast flag regulation in the same bill.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, before the days of WGA, Microsoft was trying out more mundane copy protection schemes and pissing off serious users of Microsoft Office. Rumors were beginning to spread about a Google IPO, though it wouldn't materialize for another three years. Amazon unveiled free shipping, but coupled with some quiet price hikes that mitigated the impact. And advertisers were scrambling to figure out how to make money off the instant messaging craze.But no doubt the biggest tech news this week in 2001 was the fact that a federal appeals court reversed the antitrust decision that said Microsoft must be broken up. Of course, absolutely everyone had something to say about this fact, and we've still got a few more years left to fact-check Steward Alsop's prediction that Microsoft will fail in 2020 or 2021.Forty-Two Years AgoToday, barcodes are ubiquitous. They were conceived in the late 1940s, patented in the early 50s, and shopped around for some time after that before the critical development of the Universal Product Code that dominates the retail world. It was on June 26th, 1974 that the first UPC barcode was scanned at a retail checkout, ringing up the price of a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum in Troy, Ohio.

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As self-driving cars have quickly shifted from the realm of science fiction to the real world, a common debate has surfaced: should your car be programmed to kill you if it means saving the lives of dozens of other people? For example, should your automated vehicle be programmed to take your life in instances where on board computers realize the alternative is the death of dozens of bus-riding school children? Of course the debate technically isn't new; researchers at places like the University of Alabama at Birmingham have been contemplating "the trolley problem" for some time:

It's pretty common knowledge at this point that the Chinese government spends a great deal of time and effort attempting to censor the internet at its own whim. And, while the walls of censorship erected are penetrable with enough effort, it still results in much of the population being unable to search out information that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government, such as references to the Tiananmen Square incident, for instance. But while examples like that can make some measure of sense to outside observers, even as they still decry the censorship, the fact is that the Chinese government's application of this censorship has been managed so erratically and unpredictably that the result is everyone watches where they step for fear of a takedown.Which naturally brings us to Lady Gaga, whose meeting with the Dalai Lama recently resulted in the Chinese government attempting to wipe her off of the China-facing interwebz.