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We've seen a lot of silliness this political season, most of which I happily lay the blame for at the feet of what has to be the lamest group of candidates for President this esteemed country has ever seen. What these good-for-nothings have bred is a deeper level of hateful rhetoric and toxic partisanship than what was present already, which I didn't even think was possible. Yet they achieved it anyway, meaning that my social media feeds are overflowing with the kind of know-nothing memes and claims about all of the candidates that have me thinking about downing a bottle of rat poison just to make my brain stop hurting. Add to all of it the involvement of SuperPACs for all of these candidates, with their un-subtle messages and self-serving advertising, and it's enough to wonder if we should scrap this whole America thing and try to start something new from scratch.

We've written quite a lot about National Security Letters (NSLs) over the years. This widely abused tool allowed the Justice Department/FBI to issue simple letters (technically administrative subpoenas) demanding information from companies with no prior judicial review -- and frequently with a perpetual gag order, so that a company can't even say that it had received an NSL. The FBI hands these out by the dozens. Back in 2013, there was a somewhat surprising, but important, district court ruling in California saying that national security letters were unconstitutional, and that legislation was needed to fix them.

I already wrote a post about how the FISA Court rejected the arguments of the public advocate that it appointed to review the legality and constitutionality of the infamous backdoor searches. However, I wanted to put up a second post as well, digging a little deeper into what the ruling itself means, rather than just focusing on the public advocate part of it. Because it's pretty scary. We already knew that, once that data was collected under the Section 702 PRISM program, the NSA opened it up to both the CIA and FBI to search on for other purposes.

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On Tuesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released some redacted versions of three previously secret FISA Court rulings. There are a few interesting things in them, but one notable point, found in a ruling from last November regarding the NSA's 702 PRISM program, is that the FISC took advantage of the provision in the USA Freedom Act to appoint a public advocate to argue on behalf of the public. One of the big complaints in the past, is that the FISA Court is no court at all. Only one side -- the government -- gets to present its case, and then the judges decide.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are a popular topic here on Techdirt. We've discussed how important FOIA rules are... and how the government seems to go out of its way to try to ignore both the letter and spirit of the law. Because that's just how secretive governments act. However, it's certainly true that some FOIA requests are a little more ridiculous than others. Take, for example, Refinery29 reporter Vanessa Golembewski's amusing decision to file a FOIA request for Game of Thrones Screeners after finding out that the producers have been sending advance screeners to President Obama. Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss admitted in an interview that they sent the screeners:

On Thursday, FBI Director James Comey suggested that the FBI paid over a million dollars to a group of hackers who helped it get into Syed Farook's encrypted work iPhone. Of course, just as pretty much everyone predicted, the FBI found nothing of value on the iPhone. This was hardly a surprise. It was a case where we already know who did it, and that they were already dead. We also know that they destroyed their two personal iPhones, leaving open the question why anyone would think there was anything valuable on the work iPhone.

Back in February, we noted that the TPP has been officially signed, and that the focus now moves on to ratification by each of the 12 participating countries. On this score, there's been plenty of sound and fury in the US, including bizarre demands to re-negotiate TPP, but less coverage of what is happening elsewhere. As we noted, Canada's ratification has ground to a halt as the new government there launches "widespread consultations." Japan, too, won't be ratifying TPP for a while, for reasons explained by The Mainichi site:

We noted several years ago that Atari, once the king of the video game industry, has since devolved into a zombie company built only for intellectual property trolling. Copyright, trademark, or patents: Atari will use all of them to try to milk the modern gaming industry for cash. In fact, in past public statements, Atari has made it clear that it has no interest in producing any new games, instead relying on its remaining staff to license its trademarks and port a few decades-old games over to the mobile market. Quite a fall for the once giant of the industry.

It's actually pretty easy to fool tastebuds when it comes to aged wine -- a more expensive-looking bottle or just a good story is sometimes enough to make people think a wine tastes better than it does. No one trusts wine that comes out of a plastic spigot on a box, but if you tell people you've gone to extraordinary lengths to store wine for years, some folks are willing to cough up thousands of dollars for the chance to drink it. If you're a knowledgeable wine drinker with a lot of disposable income, check out a few of these aged wines.

It appears that more fully encrypting messaging and content is really catching on. Following Whatsapp's big move to roll out end-to-end encryption, the super popular communications app Viber has announced it intends to do the same for its 700 million (and growing) users. It's already testing encryption in a few markets, before rolling it out globally. The company claims that the encrypted system will also let you know if your content is encrypted based on color coding.

A week or so back, we had some fun discussing the 2011 incident in which campus police for UC Davis calmly pepper-sprayed the shit out of some seated students, because young people are scary. We did this specifically because news had just come out that the school had paid nearly $200k to a reputation/SEO management company to try to obscure this bit of history from these here internets. Because the Streisand Effect is a cold-hearted mistress, instead of burying the incident, the internet began discussing it yet again, all while having some fun pointing out that UC Davis' efforts were equal parts misguided and cynical.

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 judicial system doesn't seem to have a problem with the FBI acting as admins for child porn sites while conducting investigations. After all, judges have seen worse. They've OK'ed the FBI's hiring of a "heroin-addicted prostitute" to seduce an investigation target into selling drugs to undercover agents. Judges have, for the most part, allowed the ATF to bust people for robbing fake drug houses containing zero drugs -- even when the actual robbery has never taken place. Judges have also found nothing wrong with law enforcement creating its own "pedophilic organization," recruiting members and encouraging them to create child pornography.

We've talked about how ridiculous it is that many news sites (including Wired and Forbes -- and apparently, now, the NY Times) have started using annoying anti-ad blocker software, in which it will block visitors from viewing their content if those sites detect (or think they detect) that you're using an ad blocker. This is ridiculous on any number of levels, but most of all because it is forcing people to put their computers at risk. Plenty of people have tried explaining to publishers that this practice is a bad idea, but to no avail.

We discuss privacy a lot around here at Techdirt, so you should know that it's important to use a VPN to help keep your information protected online. For $25, you can get a lifetime subscription to VPNGhost and help yourself stay anonymous online. VPNGhost does not keep logs and has multiple servers worldwide. You can connect to 2 devices with the service, and it works across multiple platforms.

Late last week, the DHS's Chief Information Officer Luke McCormack (or someone from his office) posted comments to GitHub arguing against the proposed policy of making 20% of its code (whatever that means) open source in the interest of better sharing between agencies. The rationale is that shared code could save tax dollars by preventing paying developers to perform redundant work. The DHS felt strongly about this and said as much using an Excel-based parade of horrors.

With Google already facing antitrust issues in the EU over Android (and likely over search as well), News Corp has decided to pile on and to file a complaint with the EU Commission claiming that Google News is also an antitrust problem.

Here comes the inevitable government backlash against WhatsApp rolling out end-to-end encryption for one billion users worldwide: if governments can no longer demand access to communications, the next best thing is to demand access to WhatsApp users.

Last summer, we wrote a bit about the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a trade agreement that is being worked on by a bunch of Asian countries, and which is often described as an "anti-TPP" or, at the very least, a competitor to the TPP. It's being driven by China and India -- two countries who were not in the TPP process. Given how concerned we were with the TPP, we had hoped, at the very least, that RCEP would be better on things like intellectual property. Unfortunately, some early leaks suggested it was even worse. And while the TPP is still grinding through the ratification process in various countries, RCEP has continued to move forward, and the bad ideas have stuck around.

We've been covering the ridiculous saga of the Harvard Law Review Association and its pricey legal threats to Carl Malamud for daring to publish a public domain set of legal citations. As a bit of background, legal citations tend to follow a standard found in the Bluebook, which is put out by the Harvard Law Review Association (which, confusingly, is actually made up of four top law schools). Many have criticized the Bluebook heavily, including appeals court judge Richard Posner who has ripped into the Bluebook, and suggested a much simpler form of legal citations, leading (in part) to something called the Maroonbook, from the University of Chicago Law Review. And, yet, the Bluebook has still mostly remained atop the heap, generating a ton of money for the law schools that back it. A few years ago, the Bluebook ran into some intellectual property issues, when Professor Frank Bennett sought to build support for the Bluebook into his open source citation tool, Zotero, and the Harvard Law Review Association obnoxiously said no, claiming copyright over citations (which seems... questionable).

Successfully re-using a rocket seems to be on the cusp of being an economically practical technology. The traditional aerospace industry is going to see a bit more competition from cheaper rockets that can still launch satellites into high orbit. Private space companies are starting to catch up with NASA's experience, but the business is still tricky because there's always a chance a very expensive rocket with just explode on the launchpad.

An unidentified Techdirt reader sends in the news that Arizona law enforcement is going to be handing over $10,000 to Madji Khaleq as a result of a failed asset forfeiture attempt. This would be in additionto the $41,870 the DEA already handed back to Khaleq -- every cent of the cash federal agents seized from him at the Tucson airport.

It's only been a couple months since we discussed some of the problems stemming from the US Treasury Department's terrorism scary names of brown people list, namely that non-scary people with names similar or identical to maybe actual scary people suddenly can't seem to use online services. Some term this "Islamophobia", whereas I prefer to mark it as the type of government laziness combined with carpet-bomb approaches to governance that is far too common. Add to that the fact that banking institutions are also suddenly being tasked with checking their payment services against this watchlist, nabbing all kinds of innocents in the process, and you have a process that could be funny if it weren't so frustrating.

Given the heightened interest in the government's efforts to compel companies like Apple to break into their own products for them, the EFF figured it would be a good time to ask the government whether it had used FISA court orders to achieve these ends.

With multiple redactions and having survived a declassification review, another FISA court opinion has been released to the public. The opinion dates back to November of last year, but was only recently dumped into the public domain by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While the five-month delay seems a bit long, the alternative is no public release at all. The small miracle that is the public release of FISA court opinions can be traced directly to Ed Snowden and a handful of FOIA lawsuits -- not that you'll see either credited by the ODNI when handing over documents.

This was widely expected, but the EU Commission, led by Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, has officially announced that it's going after Google over some of its practices concerning Android. This comes just a day after Canadian antitrust officials went in the other direction, finding no evidence that Google's activities stifle competition. The EU has a few specific concerns about Android:

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When you testify before Congress, it helps to actually have some knowledge of what you're talking about. On Tuesday, the House Energy & Commerce Committee held the latest congressional hearing on the whole silly encryption fight, entitled Deciphering the Debate Over Encryption: Industry and Law Enforcement Perspectives. And, indeed, they did have witnesses presenting "industry" and "law enforcement" views, but for unclear reasons decided to separate them. First up were three "law enforcement" panelists, who were free to say whatever the hell they wanted with no one pointing out that they were spewing pure bullshit. You can watch the whole thing below (while it says it's 4 hours, it doesn't actually start until about 45 minutes in):Lots of craziness was stated -- starting with the idea pushed by both chief of intelligence for the NYPD, Thomas Galati and the commander of the office of intelligence for the Indiana State Police, Charles Cohen -- that the way to deal with non-US or open source encryption was just to ban it from app stores. This is a real suggestion that was just made before Congress by two (?!?) separate law enforcement officials. Rep. Morgan Griffith rightly pointed out that so many encryption products couldn't possibly be regulated by US law, and asked the panelists what to do about it. You can watch the exchange here:You see Cohen ridiculously claim that since Apple and Google are gatekeepers to apps, that the government could just ban foreign encryption apps from being in the app stores:

When Netflix recently expanded into 190 different countries, we noted that the company ramped up its efforts to block customers that use VPNs to watch geo-restricted content. More accurately, Netflix stepped up its efforts to give the illusion it seriously cracks down on VPN users, since the company has basically admitted that trying to block such users is largely impossible since they can just rotate IP addresses and use other tricks to avoid blacklists. And indeed, that's just what most VPN providers did, updating their services so they still work despite the Netflix crackdown.

Drug dogs here in the US are mainly one-trick ponies, to clumsily mix a metaphor. Domesticated canines aim to please. Training of drug dogs involves giving them treats or toys upon alerting. You don't have to be Pavlov to see how this plays out in the real world. Dogs will alert in hopes of a reward or be nudged in that direction by conscious or unconscious "nudges" by their handlers. Hence, we have drug dogs in use with horrendous track records. (But, notably, not horrendous enough to result in judicial smackdowns, for the most part.)

One of central claims made by supporters of corporate sovereignty chapters in trade deals is that companies "need" this ability to sue the government in special tribunals. The argument is that if the extra-judicial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) framework is not available to a company, it will be defenseless when confronted with a bullying government. A new case in Australia shows why that's not true. A column in The Sydney Morning Herald provides the background, which concerns a US company called Nucoal:

Plenty of people like a big, rare steak every once in a while. It's probably not the healthiest meal, but everything in moderation, right? How about insect protein for "meatless Mondays" or seaweed salads before dinner? Everything in moderation, right? Here are just a few interesting ways to expand your palate and maybe eat in a more sustainable fashion -- if you can stomach it.

We don't talk a great deal about online dating here at Techdirt, which is actually kind of strange, because it's a digital evolution of a sort. But the very good Priceonomics site recently had a fascinating post about some of the visible impacts the prevalence of online dating is producing, namely that anecdotal evidence suggests that it is making so-called "mixed-attractiveness couples" more rare.

Billing itself as a sort of Uber-for-eye-exams, telemedicine startup Opternative recently came on the scene offering a quick, inexpensive alternative to traditional optical exams that uses your computer and smartphone. Following a 25-minute online exam, an ophthalmologist will approve your results and issue a prescription for a cost of $40. No doctor visit is required.

In a world defined by borders for thousands of years, the global nature of the internet has caused all sorts of confusion and absurdity. Geographically restricted content, fuzzily defined jurisdictions, libel tourism — these are all symptoms of a border-filled world coming to terms with a borderless network. Since attempts to carve up the internet along geographical lines aren't likely to stop anytime soon, this week we ask the question: are such attempts futile, and could online borders really serve any purpose to begin with?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.

BlackBerry has finally responded to Motherboard's story on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's apparent full access to encrypted communications -- something that hinted the RCMP may have been given BlackBerry messaging's "Golden Key." Sort of. It's mostly an indirect Glomar followed by a statement that confirms something people already know.

Yesterday we wrote about the fairly unsurprising, but still good, news that the Supreme Court had rejected an attempted appeal by the Authors Guild of the really excellent fair use decision by the 2nd Circuit appeals court over whether or not Google scanning books to build a giant, searchable index was fair use.

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Here's a bad idea. California Assemblyman Mark Stone is trying to get state and local governments to register copyright on basically anything they can. He may be doing so for what he thinks is a good reason, but the logic is very, very flawed.

Yesterday morning, things kicked off with a ridiculous tweet from the NY Police Department, announcing that it "stood with" the Manhattan DA in calling for "encryption" legislation. Of course, that's inaccurate. What it was really calling for was anti-encryption legislation.

Techdirt readers know that the Chinese authorities have been steadily tightening their grip on most aspects of online life in the country, but there's one area that hasn't been mentioned much: the Web browser. Recently, a new report from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab identified security and privacy issues in QQ Browser, a mobile browser produced by the China-based Internet giant Tencent. Here's a summary:

Alongside the better-known trade deals that aren't really trade deals, TPP and TAFTA/TTIP, the smaller one between the European Union and Canada, CETA, is still trapped in a strange kind of political limbo. It was "celebrated" way back in October 2014, and has been officially in the "legal scrubbing" phase where the text is tidied up and translated into all the relevant languages (lots of them for the EU). Cleverly, the EU has used this period to sneak in the "lipstick on a pig" version of corporate sovereignty in an attempt to head off revolts among EU nations worried about growing public resistance to the idea. But just when the European Commission thought it had everything nicely sewn up, this happens:

El Paso's (TX) government keeps screwing around with local public records laws… and for some truly unexpected reasons.

Plastics are everywhere. It's hard to imagine all the modern conveniences that exist because of the existence of plastic and polymers, and it would be difficult to continue living a modern lifestyle without plastics. Maybe we're starting to try not to use plastic bags to carry groceries home in some places, but the bad environmental reputation of plastic might have some solutions. Plastics could be made to be easier to recycle. Also, we could replace some of the more problematic plastics with more environmentally-friendly materials.

"Our word against yours," says law enforcement. The accusers are almost always deemed eminently credible. Presumption of innocence and all that, but the accused are almost always deemed… incredible[?]... right up until law enforcement shows its narrative can't hold hydrogen or oxygen, much less water. (via FourthAmendment.com)

As we've been discussing, the House has been pushing a new bill dubbed the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act" (pdf). As the name implies, the bill is being framed as a way to keep an "out of control" government from imposing new price caps on broadband, not coincidentally as the broadband industry increasingly eyes usage caps and overages to take advantage of a lack of sector competition. The bill has numerous problems, not least of which being that a special definition of "rate regulation" included in the bill would effectively prevent the FCC from doing, well, anything.

Here we go: three invasive searches -- each more invasive then the one preceding it -- without even the slightest shred of the Fourth Amendment intact by the end of it. Radley Balko has the details.

Last fall, the 2nd Circuit appeals court gave a clear and convincing win to Google in the long-running Authors Guild case against Google's book scanning program. And, really, the decision was a massive win for the public, in that it was a strong defense of fair use (even in commercial settings). But, of course, the still clueless Authors Guild -- which doesn't seem to actually represent the interests of most authors (many of whom have found Google Books to be a profoundly useful tool) -- decided to ask the Supreme Court to overturn the case.