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Motherboard has obtained a copy of the warrant used by the FBI to deploy its NIT (Network Investigative Tool) to obtain information about visitors to child porn site "Playpen." This site was seized by the FBI and left running for two weeks while it gathered information.

In the year since the FCC passed net neutrality rules, ISP allies in Congress have run the agency through an endless gauntlet of show-pony hearings. While most of these hearings profess to be focused on agency transparency and accountability, they're really geared toward one single purpose: to publicly shame the agency for standing up to deep-pocketed telecom campaign contributors. Given the fact the only real way to overturn the rules is for ISPs to prevail in court or via Presidential election, this showmanship has been little more than a stunning display of wasted taxpayer dollars and stunted intellectual discourse.

The head of GCHQ has decided to make some belated overtures to the tech companies intelligence agencies have alienated over the past few years. With the UK's ever-evolving Investigatory Powers Act hanging around like an unwanted, hungover and extremely nosy houseguest, GCHQ Director Robert Hannigan says it's time for the government and tech companies to work together for the mutual betterment of both to give government agencies the access they're stopping just short of legislating into existence.

Last year, Techdirt wrote about how one of the most significant breakthroughs in the field of genomics is already embroiled in a nasty patent battle. But it's not just the fundamental techniques in this field that are being held back by selfish attempts to "own" key technologies. An article in the MIT Technology Review reports that the dominant manufacturer of DNA sequencing machines, Illumina, is trying to use patents to throttle an upstart rival:

Eye color isn't a simple single gene trait. In a rare 1% of the population, some people have two different colored eyes or eyes with multiple colors (aka heterochromia iridum. Most people have brown eyes, but it's easy to change your eye color with contact lenses to any color you want -- even scary unnatural monster eyes. Eye color doesn't seem to have much meaning -- as long as you don't teach kids otherwise -- but genetic studies will probably find some interesting correlations in the future.

We wrote last year about a copyright dispute between DC Comics and guy by the name of Mark Towle, who had been custom producing Batmobiles for Batman fans. Mike's analysis in that post is wonderfully detailed and you should read it if you want a deep dive into the specifics of how the court ruled, but I will summarize it here for you as well. The 9th Circuit ruled that the Batmobile was deserving of the same copyright protections as other fictional characters, despite it being a depiction of an inanimate object, and it completely ignored the entire expression/idea dichotomy that is supposed to govern copyright law. That dichotomy can be explained as giving copyright protection to specific expressions of an idea without protecting the idea itself. For instance, the depiction of HAL the homicidal computer in 2001 A Space Odysseymay be covered under copyright, but the idea of a homicidal artificial intelligence is not.

Teens sexting can't be addressed by existing laws. Law enforcement -- which far too often chooses to involve itself in matters best left to parents -- bends child pornography laws to "fit" the crime. They often state they're only doing this to save kids from the harm that might result by further distribution of explicit photos. How exactly turning a teen into a child pornographer who must add his or herself to the sex offender registries is less harmful than the imagined outcomes cited by law enforcement is never explained.

Our crowdfunding campaign to support our coverage of the encryption fight continues, and following on EFF director Cindy Cohn's post on why you should support Techdirt, this week we have former CIA covert operative and current author Barry Eisler -- an occasional Techdirt contributor whose thriller novel NSA surveillance overreach is a must read -- has also shared his thoughts.

Among the many questions swirling around the challenge to U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym's Order that Apple create software to bypass the iPhone passcode screen, a matter of paramount public interest may have been overlooked: Even if the government prevails in compelling Apple to bypass these iPhone security features: (A) evidence for use in a criminal trial obtained in this way will be challenged under the Daubert standard (described below) and the evidence may be held to be inadmissible at trial; and (B) the Daubert challenge may require disclosure of Apple's iPhone unlocking software to a number of third parties who would require access to it in order to bring the Daubert challenge and who may not secure the new software adequately. To state that neither consequence would be in the public interest would be an understatement in the extreme.

Do you like irony? Documents obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (and shared with Jason Leopold of Vice) through an FOIA request show how the Obama administration and various agencies worked together to dismantle FOIA reform efforts. "Presumption of openness," my [REDACTED].

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The deeper you dive into the various DOJ filings to try to use the All Writs Act to force Apple to hack into encrypted iPhones, the more and more dishonest they seem. We already covered some of the misleading claims in the DOJ's latest filing in NY, including pointing to a 2012 case as evidence that the All Writs Act can be used to force Apple to break into a phone, when the actual ruling in that case said only that Apple had standing to oppose an All Writs Act order.

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance must be exhausted. Vance has been the New York face of the anti-encryption push -- a state-level James Comey with the NYPD as his backing band. He's held histrionic press conferences and issued editorials via The Paper of Record. He's also leveraging the web to muster his anti-encryption forces. As Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports for Motherboard, he's asking law enforcement officers to show him on the webform where the encrypted phone abused the investigation.

The FBI's attempt to force Apple to help it break into an iPhone hasn't been going well. A lot of that has to do with the FBI itself, which hasn't exactly been honest in its portrayal of the case. It tried to fight off claims that it was trying to set precedent by claiming it was just about this one phone… which worked right up until it dropped details about twelveother phones it couldn't break into.

The Maryland Special Appeals Court isn't buying government lawyers' arguments that warrantless deployment of Stingray devices has no 4th Amendment implications. The government had argued that "everyone knows" phones generate location data when turned on and this information is "shared with the rest of the world" (but most importantly with law enforcement).

Being familiar with our story roster when it comes to traffic and speed cameras, the only logical conclusion that can be reached is that these devices have almost nothing to do with driver safety and almost everything to do with bringing in revenue for local governments. And, with the focus being on revenue as opposed to keeping human beings from harm, the mystery for all of the corruption surrounding how these camera contracts are awarded and implemented vanishes into a story of the age-old greed of the human being.

The rise of fantasy sports and realistic video games for every major sport has expanded the audience and engagement incredibly. Even if you can't throw a spiral, you can still manage a fantasy football team. Sabermetrics changed baseball, and deep learning algorithms are about to change how a lot of other sports are played. Computers aren't just going to beat people at chess and Go. They might become better talent scouts and strategists for every major sport.

Two former Obama tech staffers -- Professor Colleen Chien (who advised the administration on intellectual property issues) and Quentin Palfrey (who worked for years in the Commerce Dept and the Office of Science and Technology Policy on intellectual property issues) -- have written a fantastic opinion piece for The Hill, arguing that the White House has one last chance to actually be transparent in trade negotiations as it moves forward with the TTIP agreement with the EU. The piece notes that part of the reason that the TPP agreement is in so much trouble was its secrecy:

With few protections in play, most of the last decade broadband ISPs have collected any and every shred of data about their customers' online behavior. It began with clickstream data, which ISPs sold to third parties, then either refused to comment on or outright lied about. Since then, more intelligent network hardware has let ISPs use deep packet inspection to track and monetize user online behavior down to the second. In wireless, carriers like AT&T and Verizon not only collect and sell user online behavior and location data, but now embed stealth packet headers to track and profile users across the entire Internet.

I don't think I need to reiterate how important the battle over the future of encryption is. It's not new, but rather the latest clash in a fight that has been raging for years, and the high-profile example of the San Bernardino attacker's iPhone has cast a spotlight on it. This week, we're joined by longtime Techdirt friend Marvin Ammori to dig into the details of this issue, its potential consequences, and its context in the history of encryption. 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.

Over the years, we've written a few times about Shiva Ayyadurai, a guy who's basically staked his entire life on the misleading to false claim that he "invented" email. Every couple of years he pops up again as he's able to fool some reporters into believing him. In 2012, he fooled the Washington Post and, astoundingly, the Smithsonian. In 2014, he was somehow able to get the Huffington Post to publish a multi-part series claiming he had "invented" email -- though after we called them out on it (and after they stood by it) -- those stories were eventually deleted. Ayyadurai also threatened to sue us for calling out his false claims, but there's been no lawsuit yet.

Support our crowdfunding campaign to help us keep covering stories like these! Blake Ross (boy genius Firefox founder and later Facebook product guy) has written a somewhat bizarre and meandering -- but totally worth reading -- article about the whole Apple v. FBI fight, entitled (believe it or not): Mr. Fart's Favorite Colors. There are a few very good points in there, about the nature of programming, security and the government (some of which even make that title make sense). But I'm going to skip over the farts and colors and even his really excellent description of the ridiculousness of TSA security theater in airports, and leap forward to a key point raised in the article, focused on airplane security, which presents a really good analogy for the iPhone encryption fight. He points out that the only thing that has truly helped stop another 9/11-style plane hijacking (as Bruce Schneier points out repeatedly) is not the TSA security theater, but reinforced, locked cockpit doors that make it impossible for people in the cabin to get into the cockpit.

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Okay, so it was already fairly obvious that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had something of a thin skin. This is the guy who is trying to put a local doctor in jail for posting a picture comparing Erdogan to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Erdogan, when he was Prime Minister, also sued his own government for failing to shut down or block accounts on Twitter that were saying things about him that he disliked.

Yeah, by now, we get it. The legacy copyright folks have spent decades beating into the minds of the public that every idea and concept and philosophy is "owned" and that you need to get permission for just about everything that it's no surprise to see crazy, nutty copyright lawsuits pop up every here and there. At least, usually, the really nutty ones are filed pro se (i.e., without a lawyer) and quickly dumped. However, it's doubly amazing when you get a lawsuit that feels like a pro se lawsuit, but is actually filed by a real lawyer. In this case, the lawyer is Joel D. Peterson, whose website lists "intellectual property" as one of his specialties. If that's the case, he may want to demand a refund from his law school.

This is hardly a big surprise, but the Justice Department is not at all happy about NY magistrate judge James Orenstein's decision last week in the case against accused drug trafficker Jun Feng, that it cannot force Apple to break the security on an iPhone using the All Writs Act. While so much of the attention concerning iPhone encryption has been placed on the case in San Bernardino, the NY case made news well before the California case, and Orenstein was clearly aware that his ruling would have a much wider impact (and it was clearly written with that intent in mind). The Justice Department, of course, is now, in effect asking for a second opinion on the issue, carefully trying to position this case as something quite different than the San Bernardino case. In particular, the Justice Department is claiming that since this particular iPhone is using iOS 7, rather than 8, Apple already has a backdoor, and can easily unlock the contents of the phone.

The Department of Defense (home of the NSA!) has decided it's finally time to start looking to outsiders for help securing government systems. It has started a bug bounty program, which in true cyberwar machine fashion, will scare away more helpful hackers than it will gather.

Corporate sovereignty was devised decades ago as a weapon for Western nations to wield on behalf of their investors against emerging nations who stepped out of line. However, its inclusion in NAFTA, the 1994 trade deal between the US, Canada and Mexico, changed the situation dramatically, and saw numerous investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) suits being brought against Canada, rather than by it. As a 2015 report on ISDS cases under NAFTA from the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives noted:

The stereotype of a nerd wearing glasses is deeply set into many cultures. But it might not be too long before it's not just "nerds" wearing glasses. More people (nerds and jocks alike) are staring at screens and need corrective eyewear. Treatments like LASIK could become more popular -- or people could start wearing smartglasses for augmented reality and a clearer view of the world. Even if you have 20/20 vision now, almost everyone seems to get presbyopia, so count yourself lucky if you're not reading this with corrective lenses.

Just to close the loop on this one: just after the firestorm last week when Amazon was called out for removing device encryption from Fire OS 5 (at the very same time as its CTO was saying encryption is "mandatory" and the company signed on to a brief supporting Apple in the encryption fight, the company has admitted that it will restore encryption to Fire OS 5 "sometime in the spring."

This isn't a huge surprise, but this morning the Supreme Court refused to hear Apple's appeal of its loss in the case brought by the Justice Department for engaging in price fixing on ebooks with the big book publishers. During the course of the case and appeals, Apple worked out a settlement, agreeing to pay $450 million -- but only after the appeals process was exhausted. And, that's now happened. As with basically all appeals rejected by the Supreme Court, the court gave no reason. It just denied cert. Meanwhile, even as Apple has now lost the case, it did still succeed in forcing the price of many ebooks much, much higher.

As Techdirt reported recently, the controversial "right to be forgotten" -- actually more of a right to be de-linked in search engines -- is starting to spread around the world. But its spiritual home is definitely in Europe, where privacy concerns tend to outweigh other considerations, like freedom of speech, that are regarded as paramount elsewhere -- in the US, for example. Leading the charge in the EU is France, which has been pushing Google to de-link items even more widely. According to a report in The Telegraph, France's zeal in protecting everyone's privacy may turn out to have some rather unexpected consequences:

Last year you'll recall Verizon Wireless found itself in hot water after being caught modifying user packets to insert stealth tracking technology. By embedding each packet with a unique identifier traffic header, or X-UIDH. Verizon and its marketing partners were not only able to ignore user browser preferences and track their behavior around the Internet, they were then able to use this technology to build detailed user profiles. Verizon Wireless launched and operated the technology for two years before security researchers even noticed the program, and it required another six months of public pressure for Verizon to even offer an opt-out option.

Yet another story of how badly DRM screws over legitimate buyers, with no actual benefit for copyright holders. This time, it's about the total failure of Barnes & Noble's Nook ebook reader, which is struggling globally, and shutting down entirely in the UK. Nate Hoffelder has a great article explaining why the Nook has been such an abject failure, but a key point highlighted by the Register is that the company is still working to see if there are ways that legitimate buyers can keep access to at least some of the books they purchased.

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Support our crowdfunding campaign to help us keep covering stories like these! There have been a few stories lately that have all combined to make a few key points crystallize in my mind, concerning various legal powers and the way that some people view them. It starts with an excellent article from Trevor Timm in which the title lays out the issue: Imagine Obama's national security policies in Trump's hands. After all, this is the guy who hasn't been shy in promising to settle scores if he's elected.

So, the political season is really starting to ramp up now, which means the insanity ramps up along with it. This particular go around in presidential politics has been particularly absurd, causing even those of us that try to view it all through the prism of entertainment to be more than a little frightened. Still, there can be no doubt that there has been an uptick in the engagement level of the American people, including from musical artists looking to provide commentary on American politics. Take this song and video released by music duo Fight Clvb, for instance. It's called Donald Trumpand it is massively NSFW.

Okay, this is just getting silly now. A bunch of reactionary French politicians have voted to put tech execs in jail if they refuse to decrypt data for criminal investigations:

Nothing quite tells the public to mind its own business like attaching a ridiculous fee demand to an FOIA response. It's pretty easy to price the public out of the transparency market, seeing as it doesn't have access to the monetary resources its tax dollars are paying for.

The rest of you commenters have got to start competing with That One Guy! He's back this week with a triple win, taking the first place spot for insightful and both top spots for funny. His first place insightful win came in response to the overhype about 5G wireless:

Five Years Ago We saw some great stuff coming from Congress this week in 2011. Senator Ron Wyden demanded debate over the Patriot Act, Senator Chuck Schumer promoted the idea that websites should switch to HTTPS, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren challenged the IP Czar on the legality of ICE's recent domain seizures (which the agency's boss was struggling to defend). On the flipside, Rep Darrell Issa was making some more problematic comments to the IP Czar, while Senator Al Franken was still fighting for COICA and internet censorship. On the side of creators and the IP industries, we saw Hollywood complaining that Oscar-winning films get downloaded more, HarperCollins trying to limit library ebook lending, Righthaven was suing a radio giant over a caption contest, Rosetta stone was calling Google "a gateway for criminals", and the Tolkien estate was trying to block the mere mention of Tolkien's name. To counterbalance all this, we did at least see Minecraft creator Markus Persson pushing back against the "lost sale" fallacy, and Moby calling for the reinvention (or death) of the major record labels. Ten Years Ago There were plenty of similar shenanigans this week in 2006. Hollywood techies were raising concerns about the industries fervent push to plug the analog hole, schools in Australia were facing a bunch of new copyright fees, we discovered just how insane Canada's blank CD tariff situation is, photographers emerged as one of the few groups opposed to orphan works legislation, and the RIAA was still indiscriminately suing everyone (and recently started targeting satellite radio) while its boss was trying to coin the term "songlifting" to replace piracy. Fifteen Years Ago Five years before that, in 2001, the RIAA had similarly acquired a new target: internet service providers. Lots of people were mulling over potential business models for a legitimate Napster, with some suspecting we'd be seeing the offering very soon. Meanwhile, alternatives were everywhere, such as Gnutella (which was facing trademark threats from the makers of the popular hazelnut spread) and a curious, hacker-ish alternative called ShareSniffer (the methodology of which seemed related to a big data breach at Indiana University). "Weblogs" were catching on; the CueCat was not. Early discussions about 3D printers were underway. Some were wondering about the future of booksellers in an Amazon world, and others were looking even further ahead to the future of books in an ebook world. Seventy-Seven Years Ago Online resources are not without their errors, but at least those errors tend to get rapidly found and corrected. In the world of print, an error that crept into a book could often remain there for years. Such is the case with "dord" — a "ghost word" that was mistakenly added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1931 and wasn't discovered until February 28, 1939. Merriam-Webster's excellent Ask The Editor videos include an explanation of how exactly this happened.

It's another good week for makers and tinkerers on Kickstarter, with some cool new tools that make traditionally high-end technology available on a budget, plus another kid's toy that might catch the attention of a few grownups too. Sweep For vehicles and robots of all sorts, autonomy is the biggest and most exciting innovative trend these days, and autonomous vehicles are generally powered by one core technology: scanning LiDAR. This is the laser-based sensory system that can map environments, detect objects, and let a computer "see" its surroundings — and while it's not entirely beyond the grasp of smaller-scale projects, until now getting a decent system was not cheap, and the LiDAR sensor was often the single most expensive component in a robot. That's what these two creators discovered when they were trying to build their own autonomous robots, so instead they set out to build Sweep: a high-quality LiDAR sensor that clocks in at a mere $250 but attempts to match the performance of systems that cost several thousands. If it works, the ultimate effect could be an explosion of autonomous devices for the average consumer, as makers and engineers everywhere can start having a bit more fun with this critical technology and keeping down the price of products they end up creating. Bela This one isn't especially fancy or revolutionary, it's just good. The Bela is a low-latency audio processor that does what it says on the tin, and aims to do it really well. One of the liveliest maker frontiers is music: digital technology enables an essentially infinite list of possibilities for modding instruments, building entirely new ones, and connecting instruments to other systems. But music is also still a precision art for many, and any fun or fancy new instrument needs one thing if it's going to be seriously usable: low latency. Any noticeable delay between hitting a key (or whatnot) and hearing the sound is infuriating and often intolerable. Bela is a tiny, embeddable, programmable audio processing board that boasts a response latency of less than 1ms — a fraction of that achieved even by MIDI on a powerful computer, or one of the iPhone's many high-end audio apps. If it can consistently deliver on that, it could end up in a whole lot of experimental synthesizers, circuit-bent keyboards and creative audio installations very soon. Tio Two weeks ago, I highlighted another tech toy that lets kids build robots. That one took the form of a single unit, with the focus primarily on the programming. The Tio is a neat twist, taking the form of two (or more!) controllable "blocks" that are designed to be mashed together with all sorts of other stuff — Lego pieces, paper and craft materials, old toys, 3D-printed components, and some custom accessories like wheels and pulleys. The focus is more on building (though programming with the app is possible) which opens them up to kids who might still be too young to dive headlong into code — but that's just a guess, because I'm not a parent. Truth is I just think I'd have fun playing with them myself.

Support our crowdfunding campaign to help us keep covering stories like these! Like many, we wrote about the bizarre filing from San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael Ramos in the Apple/FBI encryption fight -- you know, the one where he speculates randomly that the iPhone might contain evidence of a "dormant cyber pathogen" that is waiting to infect computer systems everywhere? Of course, that was found in his 4 page application to file the full brief, and as far as we can tell, no one else has explored the full 40 page brief that Ramos eventually did file, after magistrate judge Pym granted permission. And, it probably won't surprise you that in a filing that's 10x as long, it's got much more room for crazy arguments, many of which seem to be in the "day is night, black is white" variety. Let's dig in:

Consumer group Public Knowledge has waded into the zero rating debate by filing a formal complaint with the FCC (pdf) over Comcast's use of usage caps to give its own streaming video service a notable advantage in the market. As we've long noted, Comcast hits less competitive markets with usage caps and overage fees its own documents suggest are entirely unnecessary. The company then announced it would be launching a new creatively-named "Stream" streaming video platform that would not count against these usage limitations.

The original Rubik's cube puzzle was invented in 1974, but there were similar puzzles made before -- such as a 2x2x2 cube puzzle and a spherical 3x3x3 puzzle. The patents for these toys have expired, but people playing with these puzzles are still going strong. Speedcubing or speedsolving is a competitive sport, and there are variations on the activity to solve it blindfolded or with feet only or with just one hand. If you have a scrambled Rubik's cube sitting in drawer somewhere, maybe you'll be able to buy a robot to solve it for you soon.

While Id Software is not a complete stranger to lame and opportunistic intellectual property disputes, I have to say the latest dispute involving the video gaming giant has me scratching my head. Via Newsweek, we learn that a small three-person game studio out of Costa Rica, called Green Lava Studios, is being forced to change the name of a port of its PC game, Fenix Rage, for its console release. Have you guessed why yet? No? Well, that's probably because the issue is over Id Software's game R.A.G.E., originally released in 2011. Id Software sent Green Lava Studios a cease and desist letter, citing its trademark on the word "rage" for the purposes of video games.

Mike Masnick took a very in-depth look at the recently declassified legal rationale for warrantless surveillance, authored by torture aficionado John Yoo back in 2002. The long and the short of the letter is this: executive power trumps everything, even the Constitution. The letter was "given" to the FISA court, much in the way an expensive and fragile item is "given" to a toddler. FISC Judge Kollar-Kotelly was allowed to lookat it, but not keep a copy or take notes.

Late last year, we told you about a worrisome effort by the European Commission to saddle the internet with unnecessary regulations. They had released an online "consultation" which was ostensibly part of the effort to create a "Digital Single Market" (a good idea in the world of a borderless internet), but which appears to have been hijacked by some bureaucrats who saw it as an opportunity to attack big, successful internet companies and saddle them with extra regulations. It's pretty clear from the statements and the questions that the Commission is very much focused on somehow attacking Google and Facebook (and we won't even get into the fact that the people who are looking to regulate the internet couldn't even program a working online survey form properly). However, as we noted, Google and Facebook are big enough that they can handle the hurdles the EU seems intent on putting on them: it's the startups and smaller tech firms that cannot. The end result, then, would actually be to entrench the more dominant players.

Global terrorism has accomplished one thing: the continual generation of stupid legislation. Add some panicked law enforcement voices to the mix and some lawmaker is going to feel compelled to throw a Kneejerk Convention.

Support our crowdfunding campaign to help us keep covering stories like these! So, we already wrote about the nutty amicus filing in support of the FBI by San Bernardino's District Attorney, as well as the tons of amicus briefs in support of Apple. However, there are two more amicus briefs that were filed in support of the Justice Department, and we didn't want to leave those out of our coverage either. The main one is a brief from a ton of law enforcement agencies, namely the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, and the National Sheriff's Association.