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The DOJ issued its formal guidance on Stingray devices and warrants back in September. While it was a nice afterthought, it sported an underdeveloped set of teeth. The biggest problem? It's nothing more than guidance. It's a set of internal policies that the DOJ's underlings are expected to follow. Any misuse will presumably be subject to written reprimands and little else.

The FBI wants to deputize the nation's schools into its anti-terrorism posse. At this point, it's unclear whether the program will escalate to the elaborate Rube Goldberg machinations the FBI currently employs to generate terrorism suspects (putting the "rube" back in "Rube Goldberg machinations"), but for now, it appears to be "edutainment" that applies a ridiculous metaphor with blunt force precision.

Over the last year, one of the FCC's major crackdowns has been on companies that block customer WiFi at convention centers in order to drive visitors and exhibitors to the center's own, absurdly-priced WiFi services. It began last year when the FCC fined Marriott $600,000 for blocking user WiFi to force them on to Nashville convention center services costing upwards of $1,000 per day. Marriott feebly tried to argue it was simply protecting consumers from security threats before it gave up the fight, realizing that both the law and public sentiment were both decidedly against them.

For the last few years, we've noted a worrying trend of a few law professors, who have decided that the best way to make people nice on the internet is to do away with Section 230 of the CDA. As we've noted repeatedly, Section 230 of the CDA is without a doubt the most important law on the internet. The internet would be a massively different (and worse) place without it. Almost every site or service you use would be very different, and the internet would be a much more bland and sterile place. Section 230 is fairly simple. There are two key elements to it:

While the FBI has apparently given up on trying to get a law passed to backdoor encryption, the ridiculous debate over "going dark" continues. Thankfully, at least some more knowledgeable folks in the government have been speaking up more loudly over the past few months. Just last week, the government's Chief Information Officer, Tony Scott, came out against backdooring encryption:

Searching for the right cable in your bag among a sea of tangled black and white cords is annoying... as are their tendencies to fray and break. The Titan M Cable/Titan Loop M Micro-USB Cable Bundle for micro USB-capable devices and the Titan Cable/Loop Lightning Charger Bundle for iOS devices keep your cables untangled and -- perhaps even more importantly -- breakage-free. You can get the micro USB bundle for $29.95, and the Lightning bundle is available for $44.95 (MFi certified). The cables are wrapped in two layers of flexible, high-strength steel with a sealed one-piece housing fused directly over the cable to keep the connectors in place. For each bundled deal (iOS or micro USB), you get two cables: one is 3.25 feet long, and the other is just 9 inches long, featuring the same heavy-duty construction with the ability to be folded in half to lock together to attach to a key ring or any sort of clip for portability. But if you don't want the bundle, the cords can also be bought separately -- just choose what you want in the drop-down menu when you order.

It's the ISP lobbyist and think tank meme that simply won't die. ISPs of course predicted all manner of doom and gloom should net neutrality and Title II reclassification come to pass. Tubes were supposed to clog, innovation was supposed to die, and investment in broadband networks was supposed to shrivel up completely. Of course, none of that happened. Instead what we've seen is broadband investment actually spike, many of the companies feuding before the rules came to pass suddenly getting along beautifully, and Netflix streams that no longer suck thanks to the threat of a regulator actually doing its fucking job.

Traditionally, we all know that the end user license agreement is used to try and give companies all manner of legal advantages, while attempting (often ridiculously) to strip away ordinary consumer rights. Of course, the legally binding nature of these agreements is dubious, and nobody bothers to read them anyway. We've historically noted that occasionally companies bury something fun in the ocean of mouse print to make just that point. Years ago, anti-spyware firm PC Pitstop promised to give away $1,000 to the first person to e-mail them at a specific address (it took 3,000 downloads for that person to appear).

For many years, law enforcement agencies used (mostly outdated) wiretapping laws to justify arrests and prosecutions of citizens who recorded them during their public duties. For a long time, they succeeded, with Illinois seeing a great many of these thanks to its (unconstitutional) law. That law has since been nullified by the courts, but there are still a few legacy laws out there being abused to shut down recordings of police officers.

On the heels of our recent story about Exxon entering a trademark spat with Fox Networks' FXX channel over the apparently confusion-inducing inclusion of interlocking "X"s in both logos, it appears that Exxon is attempting to make this a thing for some reason. That particular dispute ended in a settlement for which no terms were disclosed, but with, at least this author believes, little or no money changing hands. That said, one of the items of defense in Fox's response was to point out just how many other companies out there have logos with interlocking "X"s that Exxon wasn't annoying with its unintelligible views on trademark law. Judging by Exxon's recent suit against Nielsen Spirits over its Roxx Vodka beverage, which also has a logo using interlocking "X"s, Exxon apparently took Fox's defense as an impetus to go trademark-suit-hunting.

Living in northern California has plenty of benefits -- nice weather, plenty of cool stuff to do, tons of companies to work for, etc, etc. One of the downsides is housing. Crazy expensive rental properties are pretty much normal, but a few people have come up with some alternative solutions. If you don't mind living in small spaces or commuting long distances, you can save up quite a bit.

Over the summer, we wrote about a positively ridiculous lawsuit filed by the actor James Woods, who apparently took offense to an obviously hyperbolic tweet, calling him a "cocaine addict." Woods felt that such a joke tweet deserved a $10 million lawsuit. The anonymous Twitter user hooked up with Ken "Popehat" White as his lawyer and made an anti-SLAPP claim against Woods for his lawsuit that seemed obviously designed to silence criticism on Twitter. Amusingly, one of the things that White's response pointed out was that Woods himself had referred to others on Twitter in a similar way: One of the most important parts of California's very good anti-SLAPP law (which is a way to fight back against lawsuits that are clearly just designed to shut someone up), is that it blocks all "discovery" efforts in the case until the anti-SLAPP efforts are decided. This is especially important, because it's often the discovery process that destroys peoples' lives -- costing them tons of time and money in responding to requests. In this case, Woods and his lawyer still sought to use the discovery process to find out the identity of the Twitter user who went by the user name "Abe List."

Back in 2011, we wrote about a troubling ruling in the Supreme Court in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the case which basically said that it's perfectly fine for businesses to put in place "binding arbitration" clauses, that take away people's rights to take a company to court over some sort of wrongdoing. As I noted at the time, ever since taking a series of classes on arbitration in college, I've been fascinated with the process, which sounds like a good idea. But it's yet another case where theory and reality don't necessarily match up.

Ever since Larry Lessig announced his campaign for the Presidency a few months ago, we noted that it wasn't just a long shot, but seemed more like a gimmick to get the (very real) issue of political corruption into the debates. I like Larry quite a bit and support many of his efforts, but this one did seem kind of crazy. I'm glad that he's willing to take on crazy ideas to see if they'll work, because that's how real change eventually comes about, but the whole thing did seem a bit quixotic. That said, the last thing I expected was that the Democratic Party would be so scared of him as to flat out lie and change the rules to keep his ideas from reaching the public. Yet, that's what it did, and because of that, Lessig has dropped his campaign for the Presidency. You can see the video of him explaining this decision below: An article from one of his advisers, Steve Jarding, explains the situation in more detail. We already knew that the Democratic Party had tried to keep him out of the debates by not "officially" welcoming him to the race -- as it had done with candidates like Jim Webb and Lincoln Chaffee who had raised less money and were polling lower than Lessig. And many polling operations hadn't included Lessig in their polls because they relied on the DNC's official welcome to start polling.

If you were online last week, you probably heard the story about how the George Orwell Estate supposedly had issued a takedown to CafePress for some T-shirts made by a guy named Josh Hadley that merely showed the year "1984" on them. I first saw it when someone pointed me to Hadley's Facebook post about it, in which he's quite reasonably angry. This was the T-shirt image that Hadley said was taken down: Something about this seemed weird, so I reached out to everyone involved -- Hadley, Bill Hamilton (the literary agent who manages the Orwell Estate) and CafePress. While I was talking to all of them, the story exploded with stories in TorrentFreak, Consumerist and a number of other places, all attacking the Orwell Estate for such a (dare we say it?) Orwellian takedown. Clearly the image above is not infringing anything from Orwell's estate. The simple year "1984" is not infringing in any way.

If you are interested in a career in IT, having CompTIA certifications can help boost your resume to the top of the pile. The CompTIA Exam Prep Bundle is on sale now for $59 and includes 42 hours of certification prep course content. Completing these courses will get you ready for A+, Network+, Security+, Cloud Essentials, and Cloud+ exams (exams are not included in this bundle). You will receive certificates of completions for your work from the course provider, Simplilearn, and be ready to ace the exams to give your career that extra boost.

As happens periodically and predictably, a person who created something but hasn't seen the financial return he anticipated is now blaming the public for his financial woes. It's nothing this game developer did wrong -- according to him -- it's everyone else. They all want stuff for free. (h/t Techdirt reader Sneeje)

This seems to happen every year or so with tech companies that involve hosting photos: people totally misreading terms of service completely freak out that the company is claiming copyright on their photos. In 2011, it was Twitpic's new terms of service that everyone freaked out about. At the beginning of 2012, it was Pinterest. At the end of 2012, it was Instagram's new terms of service. In every case, it was kicked off by people who don't realize that these terms are pure boilerplate standard stuff that basically says, "if you use our platform, you're granting us a license to actually show your photos, so you don't then sue us for violating your copyright." There's nothing nefarious about this at all, but the freakout still occurs, and the media pushes it along.

Back in May, we noted that the UK government had decided to go totally Orwellian in pushing for a ridiculous "Snooper's Charter" that gave the government incredible snooping powers. David Cameron's speech in support of this contained a few incredible statements, including this: "For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone." Message read loud and clear: tolerance is over, Big Brother is here to smack you down for anything you say or do that it doesn't like.

Something long-believed but short of official documentation has now been confirmed: Stingray devices can intercept phone calls.

Once in a while, when a thread stays heavily active, our top comments of the week actually come from the previous week's post — and this is one of those occasions. Two of our winners (one on each side) come in response to our post about Nina Paley's talk on copyright as a form of brain damage. Naturally this drew come kickback and vitriol, and Karl won first place for insightful by responding at length to one of the detractors:

Five Years Ago Since we're talking about history, let's start with the end of an era: it was this week in 2010 that Sony officially stopped making the cassette Walkman, which was surprising news since most people didn't realize it was still making them. In the world of ACTA, the US more or less said that it would ignore anything it doesn't like, while a group of prominent law professors urging the president to halt his endorsement of the agreement and the government in India was asking questions about how it effects other trade agreements. Some countries were barrelling ahead with their own IP plans: France's HADOPI was sending out 25,000 first strike notices every day, Korea was kicking people offline under its recent new copyright regime, and Denmark was secretly working on a three strikes plan of its own. And again on the subject of history, we saw some preservation efforts after another recent end-of-an-era moment: a huge archive of sites from the recently-closed Geocities was released as a 1TB torrent for anyone to download. Ten Years Ago Not that much has changed, but back in 2005 it was still trendy to bash the internet for all sorts of silly reasons. This week, we saw Forbes publish an article bashing blogs for not being real journalism, and our old friend Nicholas Carr took up the mantle of attacking and belittling all the amateur content to be found online, with a flimsy focus on Wikipedia. TV networks, at least, were starting to hesitantly embrace the need for change (though as often as not, they screwed it up). Meanwhile, the internet was bracing itself further for the ever-growing onslaught of spam, while some were getting creative in spamming themselves, like the company that mass-emailed its competitors clients after the competitor accidentally revealed their emails, or the UK government's plan to spam the people with direct marketing messages, or the apparent trend of recruiting college kids to spam their friends in person. Fifteen Years Ago This week in 2000, we saw the first baby steps of Google's metamorphosis into an advertising juggernaut as the company starting selling keyword-based search ads. Similarly, we took a peek at the early clues suggesting Linux's future dominance — not as a desktop replacement, but as an OS filling all sorts of ubiquitous computing niches. (Little did we know Android would come along and connect these two things closely — at the time, Nokia was the king of wireless). In these innocent early days of the internet, people were still struggling with questions like "is it email or e-mail?" and "should I rearrange my home for my computer?" (though that last one was a little unclear...) The still-raging battle about whether the internet isolates people was in full force, and perhaps the only thing anyone could say with certainty is that predictions are difficult (and a lot of futurists are kind of silly). Forty-Two Years Ago Not all technical achievements are digital, and this week we mark one that was decidedly old-fashioned — in fact, it's something that has been dreamed of for 2500 years, since Darius I of Persia achieved a prototypical version by stringing a bunch of boats together. Since those days of antiquity, rulers have wished they could bridge the Bosphorous Strait in modern-day Turkey, the great and only link between Europe and Asia (unless you have a lot of seafaring vessels or feel like marching through Russia over the Caucusus). It was on October 30th, 1973 that this feat was first truly achieved with the completion of the Bosphorous Bridge, which at the time of its construction was the fourth-longest suspension bridge in the world and the longest outside the United States. It's since been joined by a second bridge across the historic strait, with a third set to open soon. Alexios Komnenos would be jealous.

As a growing number of web users have become more security-conscious, there's been an explosion of VPNs and encryption tools and other security services for the internet. But what about a device that lets you bypass the internet entirely? That's the goal of RATS, the Radio Transceiver System, an open source communication tool for the security-obsessed and/or the internet-bereft. The Good The RATS is simple: it's a small antenna that connects to computers by USB and lets them send encrypted messages and file transfers directly, via radio transmission. There are two obvious advantages to this: firstly, it doesn't rely on any network being up or even the power staying on — as long as your laptop has some batteries, you can send and receive — and secondly, it's a level of security and privacy that trumps most of what you can do online. Apart from being entirely separated from the internet, it employs AES-256 encryption with a randomized salt so even the same message sent repeatedly will produce completely different encrypted data every time. The range of the RATS antenna is about a kilometer in a city, but it can also be connected to superior antennas and, in areas with no obstacles, achieve ranges above 5km. Obviously this means it isn't suited to everything, but alongside the internet it could be extremely powerful for certain local applications in urban neighborhoods, workplaces, and other situations where we normally use the robust global internet just to send short messages to people within walking distance. But perhaps more than anything it could be a boon for people living under governments that censor and monitor online communications, allowing local groups to coordinate without so much as touching the compromised networks. The Bad As noted, the RATS obviously isn't for everyone or every situation, and the Kickstarter project page certainly lines up with the fact that this isn't a regular consumer product. If anything, it feels a little more like a hobby project, with the pitch video seemingly incomplete and the fundraising target extremely low. This could raise a few red flags for cautious Kickstarter backers, though in truth it feels more like a labor of love by the Swedish creator, and is somewhat refreshing in a sea of crowdfunded technology with overproduced pitch videos and product pages full of PR speak. One other concern with the RATS is the legality of the radio transmissions themselves. The software includes a system for downloading XML-based lists of available frequencies and selecting the appropriate transmitter power, but since this allocation differs from country to country, it will be up to the end user to make sure they aren't breaking any broadcast laws. The Open One of the first things early backers asked about RATS was why its software wasn't open source. The creator responded, saying that if that's what people want then it's what they'll get, and has now pledged to open-source the software as soon as its complete and the device is shipped. It would have been even cooler to see it go through a full open source development process and be accessible from the start, but it's great to see a creator rapidly and positively respond to these requests (especially since open source software makes especially good sense for a device like this, as it's certainly not the kind of thing that should rely on security-by-obscurity).

Last month, we wrote our very first "Content Creator of the Month" post all about Realm Pictures, a cool video production house in the UK. Realm had done some truly amazing things over the past few years, embracing the internet in new and unique ways, from their no-budget film Zomblies to the astounding Underwater Realm, for which they'd held a very successful Kickstarter campaign. In August, however, they had a massively viral hit when they created a "real first person shooter," while having some fun in their offices (which happened to be an old church), finding "players" via ChatRoulette (which, yes, apparently still exists). You might have seen it: It's currently got about 8.5 million views, and is still amazing. The week after it came out, I got to interview Dave Reynolds, who runs Realm and is the "director" (and the voice) in that video. A few times in the interview I pointed out that this was an amazing new form of interactive entertainment, though it felt like he was trying to push off that claim, saying it was just something they did for fun on a weekend. I also asked him this: "Have you thought about letting people pay to play this or future such games?" And he rejected the idea outright, saying:

On Thursday, Harvard Law School announced its Free the Law project, teaming up with a company called Ravel to scan all federal court decisions and all state court decisions, and then place them all online for free. This is pretty huge. While some courts now release most decisions as freely available PDFs, many federal courts still have them hidden behind the ridiculous PACER system, and state court decisions are totally hit or miss. And, of course, tons of historical cases are completely buried. While there are some giant companies like Westlaw and LexisNexis that provide lawyers access to decisions, those cost a ton -- and the public is left out. This new project is designed to give much more widespread access to the public. And it sounds like they're really going above and beyond to make it truly accessible, rather than just dumping PDFs online:

With Halloween upon us, some of you might be hiding out with the lights off to keep kids begging for candy off your front lawn. Or you might be generously handing out full-size chocolate bars instead of those "fun size" candy bars that aren't really that much fun at all. Either way, if you like candy, you might be replenishing your supply on the cheap soon.

It's not enough that lawsuit settlements for police misconduct, brutality or officer-involved-deaths come attached to "no admission of wrongdoing" statements. In far too many cases, they also come with stipulations forbidding recipients from making public statements about the lawsuit or its allegations.

Okay, damn it, fine, let's talk about Harris Faulkner and her insane likeness rights lawsuit against Hasbro over a toy hamster. I've been avoiding this stupidity since September, when the lawsuit was filed, because how do you even broach a topic like a cable news anchor suing a toy company over a tiny little inanimate hamster? In any case, Harris Faulkner, an award winning Fox News anchor, sued Hasbro over its "Harris Faulkner" hamster, alleging that the toy not only shared her name, but was an appropriation of her "unique and valuable name and distinctive persona." Her lawsuit, in fact, spends a great deal of time making sweet love to Faulkner's awesomeness for reasons I can't even begin to understand.

We've discussed many times now how zero rating, or the carrier act of letting some apps or services bypass a user's broadband usage cap, sets a horrible, dangerous precedent. By its very nature, letting one company or service bypass usage caps immediately puts non-whitelisted services, small businesses or non profits at a disadvantage, tilting the entire playing field and distorting the entire democratic nature of the Internet. For some reason, this is a very difficult concept for some consumers to understand, so lathered up they are by the initial lure of getting something for "free."

I have to assume the so-called "reputation management" business is working for someone, but so far all we have to go on are the spectacular flaming wreckage left behind by fools who insist on punching above their weight.

I have to assume the so-called "reputation management" business is working for someone, but so far all we have to go on are the spectacular flaming wreckage left behind by fools who insist on punching above their weight.

Want to travel from anywhere to anywhere in the United States without being hassled by law enforcement officers? Good luck with that, citizen.

It's hard to believe it's already the end of October. Here's a round-up of our 5 most popular deals from the last month.

Comcast continues to expand its usage cap "trial" into the company's less competitive markets, hitting these lucky customers with a 300 GB monthly usage cap. These users also now face a $10 per 50 GB overage fee should they cross this arbitrary limit, and in a new wrinkle -- have the luxury option of paying a $30 premium should they prefer to dodge these usage allotments altogether. To the non-lobotomized among us, Comcast's intention is obvious: drive up the cost of broadband to help counter the inevitable loss of TV revenues caused by Internet video.

In 2010, Mike Masnick wrote a post in which he made the analogy between the silly notion that the home taping of music was killing the recording industry and the oft-cited joke that home cooking must be killing the restaurant industry as well. Well, while we were all having a good laugh and slapping ourselves on our collective backs for our clever ingenuity, France suddenly had its restaurant industry under assault by, you guessed it, home cooking. Well, kind of home cooking, at least.

When Google Fiber first launched in 2012, many analysts (myself included) believed that while cool, Google Fiber was little more than a clever PR experiment. Having cities throw themselves at Google for $70, gigabit connections created wonderful PR fodder in papers nationwide, in the process drawing attention to the lack of broadband competition and spurring incumbent ISPs to action. But Google was never going to really follow through on the promise of better competition, and would probably get bored in a few years. After all, it would cost way too much to actually deliver competition on any scale, right?

Honor our troops and veterans. It’s something we hear a lot, especially in times of war. And while our troops and vets certainly do deserve to be honored, it appears the DOD hasn’t gotten the memo.

There are a few ways law enforcement agencies acquire cell tower spoofers. Very rarely do agencies pay for these expensive devices themselves. (Meaning with their funds drawn from their own departments. Obviously, no government agency is self-funded.) In most cases, funding in whole or in part is obtained from the DHS -- something nearly any agency can obtain simply by checking [X] BECAUSE TERRORISM when applying for a Homeland Security grant.

Sometimes it's pretty easy to track down the origin of how a meme gets popular. If you've ever seen gifs with the caption "Do Not Want" -- you might not have realized where that phrase came from (or just assumed it was just the typical bad grammar of the internetz), but it actually comes from a bootleg version of Star Wars Episode III with comically bad "Engrish" subtitles -- specifically the scene where Anakin Skywalker is first revived as Darth Vader and screams "Nooooo" which was hilariously translated from English to Chinese and back to English as "Do Not Want." That aside, some products have become unusually popular in unexpected demographic groups without clear explanations. Here are just a few things that have crossed cultures.

At the end of September, Brad Heath and Meghan Hoyer of USA Today published a DEA disciplinary log they'd obtained through an FOIA request. The document was obviously misnamed, as it showed plenty of misconduct by DEA agents, but not much in the way of discipline.

Not only are automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) in use all over the nation, but the companies behind them are less interested in securingtheir systems than sellingtheir systems.

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 help support Techdirt.

The EU's new net neutrality "protections" are largely deserving of the scare quotes, what with their myriad loopholes and built-in provisions that allow ISPs to throttle/manipulate traffic to prevent "congestion" -- something that has yet to be the actual source of any ISP's "traffic $haping" efforts.

We recently wrote about some concerns about the new Data Protection Directive that is being set up in Europe. The law is driven by people with good intentions: looking to better protect the privacy of European citizens. Privacy protection is an important concept -- but the current plans appear to be so focused on privacy protection that it gives very little regard for the unintended consequences of the way it's been set up. As we wrote in our last post, Daphne Keller at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society is writing a series of blog posts raising concerns about how the new rules clash with basic concepts of free speech. She's now written one about the immensely troubling setup of the "notice and takedown" rules included in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For years, we've been concerned by problematic notice and takedown procedures -- we've seen the DMCA frequently abused to stifle speech, rather than for genuine copyright challenges. But, for some reason, people often immediately leap to "notice and takedown solutions" for any kind of content they don't like, they and the drafters of the GDPR are no different.

Have you ever wanted to try your hand at computer animation? For $19.99, Anime Studio Debut 11 software could help you get started. You can create your own characters from the Character Wizard, draw them directly in the program, or import your own drawings and turn them into vector files to play around with. Tutorials will show you how to add skeletons to the drawings to allow you to create realistic movements. You can record sound files or import ones you already have and learn how to sync character's mouths to those files. When you're ready to show off your work, you can download your animations in AVI, MOV or Flash or upload creations directly to Facebook or YouTube.

One of the worst ideas that the copyright maximalists have managed to foist on the world is that there should be anti-circumvention laws forbidding users from doing a range of entirely sensible things with their own possessions, simply "because copyright". Required by the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and implemented by the DMCA (pdf) in the US, and Copyright Directive in the EU, anti-circumvention laws have reduced people in the US to begging for permission to unlock their mobile phones, or to check whether software in their car is lying about emissions. In the EU, they are not even allowed to beg. If anyone had any doubts about the inherent ridiculousness of anti-circumvention laws, they might like to consider an extraordinary decision by a judge in Canada, reported by Teresa Scassa on her blog. It concerns a certain Dan Pazsowski, who was quoted in an article published by a news service called Blacklock's Reporter. When Pazsowski heard about this, he naturally wanted to find out more:

The EU Parliament has just approved a measure (by a narrow 285 to 281 vote) telling EU member states to "drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender." That's pretty huge. Of course, as a resolution, it's more symbolic than actually meaningful, because the member states may not follow through on the request. But it is an important step in the right direction.

It looks like another company wants to ruin its reputation by "protecting" its reputation. Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen is helping an unhappy customer fight back against the litigious threats of Fertility Bridges, which allegedly promised her one thing, but delivered another.

Mason v. Machine Zone, Inc., wherein a Game of War player falls prey to Gamblor and expects the judicial system to extract her pound of flesh ~$100 from its neon claws.

The FBI's call for more data on officer-involved-shootings is welcome, if belated and somewhat half-hearted. For years, the federal government has been "collecting" this data via purely voluntary contributions by law enforcement agencies around the country. This is why the federal numbers on citizens killed by police officers is usually half that of any data collection put together by private parties.