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One of the big EFF lawsuits against NSA surveillance, Jewel v. NSA, which has been going for many years (since before the Snowden revelations) has just been dismissed by the 9th Circuit appeals court, for "lack of jurisdiction." The issue is really more of a procedural one, than on the substance, but it's still unfortunate. Without going into the details (you can read the full 17 page ruling if you want that), there was an effort to "expedite" (as much as you can use that word for a case that has been going on for almost a decade) a single part of the ruling, and the appeals court basically says you can't do that, and things need to wait until there's a full decision from the lower court.

A few months ago, we noted that the EU was working on its new General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protective Directive -- and warned that it was putting free speech and privacy on a crash course. We also had a podcast about this with Daphne Keller, from Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. While the intentions of the data protection efforts sound good, the actual impact could be quite devastating. The idea is that all these companies are collecting lots of data, and individuals should have more control over what's collected and how it's used (and abused). Conceptually, that sounds really valuable. But, in practice it can be a disaster -- especially if the people who are focused on privacy/data protection don't think about or understand the consequences of what they're doing.

There's a bizarre story about potential computer hackery this morning, involving the Democratic National Committee and the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton -- the two front runners on the Democratic side. Apparently, the DNC was doing some sort of upgrade to its computer systems, and in the process, there was a glitch that very briefly allowed a Sanders staffer, "data director" Josh Uretsky, to access confidential data from Hillary Clinton's campaign -- specifically confidential voter information gathered by Clinton's campaign. Uretsky realized he was able to access the data and did so -- and has apparently since been "fired." In response, the DNC has completely cut off all access to its systems to the Sanders' campaign, saying it won't allow the campaign back in "until it provides an explanation as well as assurances that all Clinton data has been destroyed."

There's a bizarre story about potential computer hackery this morning, involving the Democratic National Committee and the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton -- the two front runners on the Democratic side. Apparently, the DNC was doing some sort of upgrade to its computer systems, and in the process, there was a glitch that very briefly allowed a Sanders staffer, "data director" Josh Uretsky, to access confidential data from Hillary Clinton's campaign -- specifically confidential voter information gathered by Clinton's campaign. Uretsky realized he was able to access the data and did so -- and has apparently since been "fired." In response, the DNC has completely cut off all access to its systems to the Sanders' campaign, saying it won't allow the campaign back in "until it provides an explanation as well as assurances that all Clinton data has been destroyed."

This is hardly a surprise since Speaker Paul Ryan put his (weak, privacy destroying) version of CISA into the "must pass" omnibus funding bill, retitled as the Cybersecurity Act of 2015, but the bill was easily passed by Congress this morning, 316 to 113. Frankly, 113 votes against was much higher than I expected. Below are the votes: ---- YEAS 316 ---

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Well, well, well. Yesterday morning, Juniper Networks announced that it had discovered some "unauthorized code" in its ScreenOS that would allow "knowledgeable" attackers to decrypt VPN traffic on Juniper's NetScreen devices:

This wasn't a huge surprise after Judge Liam O'Grady's questionable reading of the DMCA a few weeks back (along with his general disdain for the internet), but a jury yesterday awarded BMG $25 million from Cox Communications, claiming that Cox was guilty of willful "contributory infringement" in not kicking accused file sharers off the internet. The jury found Cox not guilty of "vicarious liability," which is at least marginally surprising, as many people who don't spend their lives wrapped up in copyright law have difficulty distinguishing the difference between "contributory infringement" and "vicarious" (if you're confused too, Wikipedia's overview is a decent place to start). And based on that, the jury hit Cox with the $25 million award for BMG.

As we noted recently, the arrival of a new government in Canada has meant that the corporate sovereignty provisions in CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU, might be re-examined, even if they are unlikely to be dropped completely. The other major trade deal involving Canada, TPP, is much more complex, since there are 11 other nations to consider. Although that limits the Candian government's scope for changing course, it appears that it is nonetheless taking a radically different approach compared to its predecessor. Where Stephen Harper's government was unwilling to involve the public in any way, Justin Trudeau's team seems willing at least to ask for their views:

We said the trickle would eventually become a waterfall, and it appears to be happening. As cord-cutting continues unabated, the last strand keeping the cable television cancellation orders from avalanching in has been access to sporting events. But what began a ways back as a couple of leagues experimenting with stream offerings has more recently seen teams and leagues look seriously at the future of broadcast deals and how to wedge internet streaming into them. The king of the professional sports leagues is, of course, the National Football League. You may recall that the NFL experimented earlier this year by offering one of the worst games being played overseas only via streaming on Yahoo's site. Well, while the viewership numbers didn't mirror a television broadcast, pretty much everyone that matters realized that the 2.5 million viewers per minute that Yahoo's stream generated was a big win for the first ever streamed-only NFL game.

For many years, the ancient game Go has been held up as the game that artificial intelligence can't win. AI has beaten humans at several games quite handily, even games like Poker and Jeopardy! that should give humans a bit of an edge. Still, Go hasn't been cracked... yet. Any bets on when humans won't be so smug about Go?

During the GOP Presidential debate earlier this week, there was something of an awkward moment when Ted Cruz was defending the USA Freedom Act and Marco Rubio seemed to hint at the idea that Cruz had just revealed classified information. Here was the basic exchange, which came after Rubio attacked Cruz for supporting the USA Freedom Act and not for renewing section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Cruz argued that the USA Freedom Act actually gives the NSA more ability to track terrorists.

I have to admit that I find Donald Trump's presidential campaign fascinating. Or, rather, I find its survival to this point fascinating. What amazes me about it is that the Trump campaign exhibited a strong commitment to not actually putting forward any detailed policy prescriptions, except for a few general policy ideas that mostly conflict with the party whose nomination he's seeking. And those policy ideas he does express have generally been either despicable, impossible to implement, or both. Deporting six million Latin Americans? Yeah, that just isn't going to happen. Putting a hold, however temporary, on legal immigration by using a religious test to keep Muslims out of the country? That violates the very founding document an American President would be tasked with upholding. Also, it's disgusting.

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.

In the past, President Obama has threatened to veto any cybersecurity bill that undermines privacy and civil liberties. Of course, people didn't quite believe that was true, and now that we see the final cybersecurity bill, the bastardized CISA has been attached to the "must pass" omnibus spending bill, and clearly is a disaster on privacy issues, what do you think the White House is saying?

Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee (the Committee that has most strongly been pushing versions of cybersecurity bills that undermine privacy and provide more surveillance powers) apparently believes that as long as he says day is night and up is down, the world will believe him. In response to Speaker Paul Ryan's decision to shove CISA into the omnibus funding bill, Schiff insisted that this was necessary to protect our privacy:

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We warned earlier this week that Congress was going to make the cybersecurity bill CISA much worse on privacy, and then shove it into the "must pass" omnibus spending bill, and that's exactly what happened. The 2000+ page bill was only released early yesterday morning and the vote on it is tomorrow, meaning people have been scrambling to figure out what exactly is actually in there. The intelligence community has been using that confusion to push the bill, highlighting a couple of the predictions that didn't make it into the bill to argue that people against CISA are overstating the problems of the bill. That's pretty low, even for the intelligence community.

Nova Scotia's horrible cyberbullying law -- with its broad definitions of bullying, lack of due process and a wholly ex parte accusation process -- emerged from the suicide of a teenage girl. Like many laws written in the wake of a tragedy, it was a hodgepodge of good intentions bundled in "do something" legislating. The resulting statute was terrible and destined for abuse.

While it was overshadowed by the net neutrality debate, the FCC's decision last February to attack state protectionist broadband laws was notably more important. For fifteen years, companies like AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have used groups like ALEC to pass laws in more than 20 states hindering or outright preventing towns and cities from building their own broadband networks -- even in cases of pure market failure where incumbent ISPs refused to. In some states, towns are even prohibited from striking public/private broadband partnerships.

In a bit of an early Christmas present for the Internet, Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli was arrested early Thursday morning for securities fraud (less than a day after Bloomberg had a big article about what a stock trading savant he was). According to reports, the Internet's least favorite human being had been under investigation since January for illegally taking stock from a biotechnology company he started in 2011 (Retrophin) to pay off unrelated debts, using a number of shell companies:

It's a lower-level decision but it still means something. Well, a couple of somethings. First off, it appears Connecticut law enforcement probably shouldn't continue seeking "live" cell site location information without a warrant. It also appears the law enforcement agency involved doesn't have access to a cell site simulator (Stingray, etc.).

A few weeks ago, we wrote about a plan by the Montana Standard newspaper to change its commenting policy, publishing the "real names" of any commenters. While we generally think that's a silly policy for a variety of reasons, the real problem was that it was retroactively applying it to all old comments, despite clearly telling earlier commenters that their names would not be revealed (and potentially violate the newspaper's own privacy policy). In its defense, the newspaper insisted that (1) anyone who wanted otherwise could contact the paper and have their comments deleted and (2) that while it might have liked to have only applied the policy to new comments after January 1, its content management system wouldn't allow that. Of course, while that seems like something that, perhaps, should be fixed by the newspaper, I can understand that it might not have the resources to do so.

Making significant changes to digital images with software is getting more impressive all the time. As we've seen before, Photoshopping isn't just sticking to still-life, either. It won't be long before feature-length movies can be made with just some scraps of existing video clips (which has been done before) -- but it could be a bit better than What's Up, Tiger Lily? Or not.

Earlier this week, we wrote about the truly bizarre situation in which the Las Vegas Review Journal -- the largest newspaper in Nevada -- had been purchased for $140 million... and no one knew who the owner was. For fairly obvious reasons, this started to make a lot of people uncomfortable -- including the reporters for the NVRJ. Suspicion quickly focused on big time political funders, with some noting that Nevada is an early primary state, and may play a key role in the presidential election. The Koch brothers, who are big time funders of candidates flat out denied it, leading to more intense scrutiny on the other key guess: Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a key funder of Mitt Romney in the last election.

It's a struggle that Disney ought to know quite well, having taken over the Star Wars franchise. The struggle between good and evil; the light side of the force... and the dark side. And it looks like we're all getting a front row seat to the internal strife of Disney via the ongoing silliness surrounding the image of a Star Wars toy accidentally released to the public by a retailer.

Since the FCC passed net neutrality rules last February, ISP allies in Congress have been working tirelessly to either gut the rules, or shame and defund the FCC so it can't enforce them. This has included an endless number of House "fact-finding" hearings that usually involve using discredited ISP data to claim the rules are demolishing the Internet. Of course the opposite appears to be true; network investment (at least in competitive areas) continues undaunted, and the rules have actually helped stop a lot of the anti-competitive shenanigans that were occurring on the streaming video front.

It's not uncommon to see threats towards the press occur when someone has been embarrassed. Whether it's an idiotic presidential campaign mad over a rape allegation or an attorney general pissed off at reporters who are attempting to, you know, report, these things happen. Perhaps even more common are threats against the press when they report on security exploits, such as when Sony demanded the end of the publication of documents the press got after one of the many, many times Sony has been hacked.

Last week, we wrote about an important survey put online by the EU Commission, asking for feedback on its plans to regulate certain key aspects of the internet. We noted that the survey itself was cumbersome and confusing, and because of that, via the Copia Institute, we set up our own guide to filling out the survey called Don't Wreck The Net. We were a little mocking of the survey, as it does seem a bit silly that the people in charge of potentially putting all sorts of regulations on the internet... have a poorly designed and confusing survey (including the fact that depending on how you answer certain questions, the survey will appear quite different for you than it might for others). However, to some extent, we get it: government bureaucracies have some limitations on what technologies they can make use of.

Philips apparently wants more people to be "friends of Hue."

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Law professor Eric Posner is no fan of the First Amendment. Never has been. Back in 2012, he argued that Americans basically need to get over the First Amendment because free speech upsets people. Earlier this year, he argued for restricting the speech of college students because students are children who don't deserve free speech. A few months ago, he also argued that the US should adopt a "right to be forgotten," because sometimes it's better to make speech disappear entirely.

Yesterday we warned that Congress was quietly looking to do two horrible things: (1) strip all pretense from the "cybersecurity" information sharing bills and turn them into full-on surveillance bills and (2) then shove it into the "must pass" omnibus bill which is supposed to be about funding the government and nothing more. And... it looks like our warning was almost entirely accurate, as the bill has been released and within its over 2000 pages, it includes CISA and has been stripped of many of the key privacy protections (if you want to find it, it's buried on page 1728), while expanding how the information can be shared and used. In part, due to concerns raised yesterday, a few of the absolutely worst ideas didn't make it into the final bill, but it's still bad (and clearly worse than what had previously been voted on, which was already bad!).

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Last year, Techdirt noted that there was something of a concerted campaign to paint strong encryption as a real threat to intelligence agencies. That's continuing, except that for a number of recent attacks "encryption" has become a generic excuse for intelligence failures. To the extent that there was any real logic behind the attacks on crypto, the main one was that it was making things "go dark" by preventing the authorities from accessing vital information that could have stopped the attack/saved lives/led to arrests etc. if only it had been available. You can see why this phrase is such a favorite: it cleverly reminds us that once things have gone dark, all kinds of scary stuff could start happening, just like in our childhood nightmares. The only problem with this metaphor is that it is exactly wrong, as Phillip Rogaway points out in a recent interview in The Atlantic:

A Chicago police officer shot Laquan McDonald as he walked away from him, carrying a knife. Officer Jason Van Dyke emptied his service weapon in McDonald's direction less than 30 seconds after his vehicle arrived on scene. McDonald was hit 16 times, with a majority of those coming after he was already laying on the ground.

In our "why is this happening" trademark story of the day, we have a guy who runs a gospel music show in Chicago filing a trademark infringement suit against a high school in Omaha, Nebraska. Dr. Willie Wilson has a registered trademark for his gospel music show, called "Singsation", which bills itself as a television program that brings "good news and foot stomping music to viewers all over the world." It's been on the air since 1989. Meanwhile, halfway across the country in Omaha, Millard West High School hosts its annual choir contest, called "Singsation", which first started a decade ago and is attended by over 1,000 performers. And, despite a decade's worth of peaceful co-existence, Dr. Wilson has decided to bring the wrath of the trademark gods down upon this school over the term "Singsation."

Soap has saved countless lives by preventing the spread of disease and reducing the number of disease-causing microbes in our world. But we've become a bit too focused on killing germs with soap, and we might want to cut back a bit on the over-use of antimicrobial agents. The human microbiome is changing according to our habits and environment, and it might only take a few soapy showers to kill off a healthy microflora balance.

As you may have heard, Los Angeles closed all of its public schools today based on a bomb threat that the district deemed to be "credible." Later in the day, New York City's school district announced that it had received the same, or a similar, bomb threat, and had deemed it not credible and kept its schools open. Later in the day, it was reported that the bomb threats appeared to be a hoax.

Despite it being transparently obvious that non-disparagement clauses hidden in fine print serve the singular purpose of deterring complaints about bad products and services, companies still deploy them with little fear of retribution. To date, only one state has actually banned the use of non-disparagement clauses: California.

There's been a lot of back-and-forth recently over Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, combining widespread praise with a lot of disappointment in the details and the fact that he isn't really "giving away" $45 billion. There's a lot to be said on both sides of this question, and this week we're discussing the new initiative and the wide variety of reactions to it. 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 NSA's Section 702 surveillance program is massive. It provides the NSA (and the FBI) with access to the email content and internet activity of millions of people, some of them US citizens. Quite obviously, the intelligence gathered with it has led to prosecutions. But the government is still seemingly uninterested in informing defendants about the origin of evidence being used against them.

Verizon says it will soon join the growing list of companies collectively tap dancing around the country's net neutrality rules. The company says it will soon start engaging in "zero rating," or the process of letting some content (read: the companies willing to pay entrenched telecom providers a toll) bypass an ISP's monthly data usage caps. Company executive Marni Walden says Verizon's going to begin trials of a new zero rating program sometime in the next few weeks, with plans to more seriously deploy the efforts sometime in the early part of 2016:

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Remember CISA? The "Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act"? It's getting much much worse as Congress and the administration look to ram it through -- and in the process, removing any pretense that it's not a surveillance bill.

Earlier this year, we were fairly concerned when a court ruled in favor of the RIAA in saying that Cloudflare had to automagically block any site that mentioned "Grooveshark" in the URL. Thankfully the court walked that back a bit, saying that the RIAA still had to inform Cloudflare of specific sites, but it still seemed problematic. The issue involved a few "fake" Grooveshark clones (sites pretending to be Grooveshark clones, but which actually were not). The RIAA can go after those sites directly, but the court's willingness to drag in a third party like Cloudflare was immediately problematic. That was a key part of SOPA -- the law that did not pass, yet judges keep pretending it did anyway.

Comcast continues to play semantic patty cake as it defends the company's broadband usage cap plans. With about 12% of the company's customers now capped (and growing), Comcast insists the 300 GB monthly usage cap (with $10 per 50 GB overage fees) is simply a "trial" of a new, "balanced" relationship. You see, Comcast isn't just taking advantage of a lack of broadband competition to cash in on Internet video, it's simply experimenting with "flexible data consumption plans" that bring greater choice and freedom than ever before to customers of the least liked company in America.

The DOJ's counsel warned the DEA that its illegal wiretaps would get them into trouble.