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Although it would be naive to think that the tide is turning, it's heartening to see a few wins against government attempts to formalise and extend surveillance of their populations. The passage of the USA Freedom Act, however flawed and limited it may be, is one example. The various rulings against the UK government are another. While rightly celebrating these, it's easy to overlook other battles being fought elsewhere, perhaps not so high profile, but just as important. Here's one that has been fought for over a year in Paraguay, and which recently concluded in a victory, as the EFF reports:

Oh great. So after we learned late yesterday that the hack of all sorts of data from the federal government's Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was likely much worse than originally believed -- including leaking all Social Security numbers unencrypted -- and that the so-called cybersecurity "experts" within the government weren't even the ones who discovered the hack, things are looking even worse. That's because, late today, it was revealed that there was likely a separate hack, also by Chinese state actors, accessing even more sensitive information:

Genetically engineered organisms already produce some highly valuable products for us. Insulin used to be harvested from the pancreases of pigs, but now stockpiles of human insulin can be made using a fermentation process with bio-engineered bacteria. Various kinds of yeast can produce different kinds of breads and beers, but if we can modify these tiny organisms at will, yeast could produce an incredibly wide variety of products. Just check out these links on the versatility of yeast.

It seems like only days ago that we had written about Valve's Steam platform finally adopting a method for customer returns. Oh, wait, it was only a few days ago. I was confused because given the way that some game developers are reacting to Steam allowing refunds, I'd have thought that there would be some massive sample size against which to judge how it all was working.

Screwing backers of crowdfunded projects may no longer be as free from consequence as it used to. The Federal Trade Commission has (finally, some might say) decided to tackle a failed Kickstarter and hold the person behind it responsible (sort of) for walking away from a dead project with over $100,000 in backers' cash.

We already described how the recent hack into the US federal government's Office of Personnel Management (OPM) appears to be much more serious than was initially reported. The hack, likely by Chinese state hackers, appear to have obtained basically detailed personal info on all current and many former federal government employees.

Here on Techdirt, we have been following with a certain bemusement attempts by a number of European governments to bring in laws that would grant newspaper and magazine owners a special "ancillary" copyright over snippets -- actually a thinly-disguised attempt to tax Google. Despite the miserable failure of this ploy, Austria has decided it wants to join the club, as reported here by the Initiative Against Ancillary Copyright site:

Without getting too down in the procedural weeds, just a little while ago, the House of Representatives effectively blocked "fast track authority" for the White House on trade deals -- for now. There was a lot of political maneuvering, and apparently the President started pushing hard on Congressional Democrats to support the trade deals. Many thought the last minute push would make it happen, but with Nancy Pelosi saying that Congress needed to "slow down" fast track, fast track basically came off the table. Again, how this was done involved a lot of gamesmanship and technically a later vote on fast track actually passed very narrowly (219 to 211), but it doesn't matter, because an earlier vote on a different, related measure, needed to pass as well, as the two issues were bundled together. After a bunch of confusing procedural moves, it appears that the House of Representatives will take another shot at this next week, but considering that the key provision went down by a 302 to 126 vote, a lot of arms need to be twisted in the next week and that may not be possible. If the vote next week fails, then things are extremely bleak for the future of "fast track" and the various trade agreements the USTR is pushing.

Wherein the Justice Department declares instructions on how to use Bitcoin to be "material support for terrorism."

Headphones are a popular, must-have item for many folks. The over the ear models are usually more comfortable than in the ear buds for long listening sessions. For 65% off of the list price, we have the stylish Brooklyn Headphone Company BK9 Headset available in the store. These headphones feature 40mm drivers for crisp sound and the over the ear design is made to reduce outside noise intrusion and come with a carrying case to help keep them looking sharp. The 48" cable has a built in microphone and an answer/end button for taking calls while you're listening to your tunes. The BK9s are available in blue or black and the deal includes free shipping to the continental US.

The Federal Election Committee has admitted it couldn't regulate itself out of a wet paper bag filled with "anonymous" donations, but it is still doing its damnedest to justify its existence. Unable to prevent the wholesale auction of political positions, it has turned its attention to a political action committee aimed only at preventing a certain candidate from being elected.

Over a decade ago, I pointed out that every single time there were reports of big "data leaks" via hacking, a few weeks after the initial report, we would find out that the leak was even worse than originally reported. That maxim has held true over and over again. And, here we go again. Last week, we noted that the US government's Office of Personnel Management had been hacked, likely by Chinese hackers. And, now, it has come out that the hack was (you guessed it) much worse than originally reported.

Almost exactly a year ago we wrote about a troubling lawsuit in British Columbia, where a court ruled that Google needed to block access to a website globally. The case involved one company accusing another of selling counterfeit or copied equipment, and despite Google not even being a party to the case, said that Google needed to make sure no one could find the site in question via Google anywhere in the world. As we noted, this had tremendously problematic consequences. For example, China doesn't think anyone should be able to learn about the protests in Tiananmen Square. Can it now order Google to remove all links to such references globally? That result seems crazy. And, of course, there was a separate issue of how the court even had jurisdiction over Google, seeing as it does not have any operations, staff or servers in British Columbia. Google stepped in to protest the injunction at the appeals court.

Two weeks ago, the House Agriculture Committee voted 38-6 to repeal country-of-origin-labeling. (COOL), and now it's the full House's turn. In a 300-131 vote yesterday the "country of Origin Labeling Amendments Act" (HR 2393) passed with the support of a significant number of Democrats as well as the majority of Republicans.

After a rather quiet period, WikiLeaks seems to be back on form. After the big TISA leak last week, it's released the Healthcare Annex to the Transparency Chapter of TPP. The document itself is short (pdf), and fairly opaque, so WikiLeaks has helpfully provided some expert commentary from Deborah Gleeson (pdf) and Jane Kelsey (pdf), both well-known academics in this field. Here's a key part of Gleeson's summary:

Sentencing revenge porn extortionists seems to be all over the place. Craig Brittain, who basically originated the extortionate process of not just running a revenge porn website, but combining it with a (pretending to be) separate "pay us and we'll get your naked photos taken down" service, had his wrists duly slapped by the FTC earlier this year. Shortly after that, Kevin Bollaert, who more or less copied Brittain's plan, got sentenced to 18 years in jail (which he's currently in the process of appealing). Hunter Moore, who is often credited with being the first one to set up a big revenge porn site (without the corresponding extortionate takedowns, but apparently with hiring people to hack into computers to get copies of naked photos to post), took a plea deal with somewhere between two and seven years in jail.

The idea of space-based telecommunications seemed so promising in the 1980s, but the delivered services didn't quite live up to the dream of ubiquitous global communications. Al Franken's one-man satellite reporting didn't really address the latency issues associated with geosynchronous satellite orbits, but the future of satellite communications was still a bad joke. Perhaps after a few decades, we're ready for another try?

Earlier this week, we noted that Senator Mitch McConnell, hot off of his huge flop in trying to preserve the NSA's surveillance powers, had promised to insert the dangerous "cybersecurity" bill CISA directly into the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). As we discussed, while many have long suspected that CISA (and CISPA before it) were surveillance bills draped in "cybersecurity" clothing, the recent Snowden revelations that the NSA is using Section 702 "upstream" collection for "cybersecurity" issues revealed how CISA would massively expand the NSA's ability to warrantlessly wiretap Americans' communications.

Last night, we noted that an amendment from Reps. Thomas Massie and Zoe Lofgren was on the docket that had two provisions to stop two different kinds of surveillance: the first, taking away funding from "backdoor searches" which are a hugely problematic "loophole" that the NSA uses to do warrantless surveillance of Americans. In many ways, this is much worse than the bulk collection programs that were just hindered by the USA Freedom Act. The second part of the amendment was barring funds from being used to mandate "backdoors" into technology products -- another hugely important move. Thankfully, the amendment passed by a wide margin earlier today: 255 - to 174.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has denied the broadband industry's requested stay of the FCC's reclassification of ISPs as common carriers under Title II, meaning the agency's shiny new net neutrality rules will go live tomorrow as scheduled, much to the chagrin of the nation's broadband duopoly. Incumbent ISPs requested the stay last month, claiming the FCC's rules were "arbitrary and capricious," "vague and onerous," and act to create "significant uncertainty about the introduction of new services" while "exposing providers to costly litigation."

Cops kill a lot of people. Depending on who's counting, they've already killed between 385 and 470 people this year. This isn't to say that some of these killings weren't justified, but when details begin leaking out about the those killed, the amount of force in relation to the threat posed is often questionable.

It's beginning to look like a US-based encrypted communications platform may be headed for a Lavabit-esque future. As we're well aware, agencies like the FBI and NSA are firmly opposed to encrypted communications, which is something Surespot -- a text-messaging service -- offers.

Everyone has had the idea at one time or another for the perfect app. This pay what you want Mobile-First Developer's Bundle can help you turn that idea into a reality. Pay whatever you want and you will receive the Monetize Your App and The Complete Android Lollipop App Development courses to get you started with 9 hours of content covering how to add ad networks and the Android ecosystem. If you beat the average price listed in the store (at the time of writing, it is under $7), you unlock 8 other courses to help you master developing iOS and Android apps. Get your name on the top of the leaderboard of buyers and you'll receive the 10 courses plus 5 entries for the Pick Your Apple Toy giveaway (see the store for details). If you end up on the leaderboard at any time during the promotion, you'll receive the 10 courses plus 1 entry to the giveaway.

Last December, we warned that Australia was about to get its own version of SOPA. The key aspects of the proposed law were exactly the parts of SOPA that so concerned millions of people in America: the ability of someone to make a copyright complaint that would force an ISP or other third parties to block entire websites with little to no due process. In March, just such a bill was introduced, pushed by Attorney General George Brandis, who refused to listen to consumer advocates and their concerns (though he met plenty of times with Hollywood reps). Also, more importantly, supporters of the bill did not conduct any sort of cost/benefit analysis to see if it was worthwhile.

We've written a few times about Zenefits, a really interesting company that has been super innovative and creative in rapidly building a unique and useful company. In short, the company took on the market for "HR software" by building a nice web-based tool for managing HR. But that's not the interesting part: it's the business model innovation that was really smart. It gives away its software entirely for free. However it then also acts as an insurance broker for companies, for which it takes in fees. This is kind of brilliant on a variety of levels. Currently, businesses have to go through brokers to get required insurance, and those brokers take a big cut for doing basically nothing other than connecting two companies. Zenefits realized that by building great HR software, it could give it away free, and then tack on an insurance brokering business and basically everyone is better off for it. Companies get free (really good) HR software plus an insurance broker that actually adds value, rather than the typical broker.

Well, here's a possible first in open government: a Congressional Representative issuing a pull request on a government policy posted to GitHub, leading the US CIO to merge the request into the document. The White House has actually been using GitHub a bit lately. In fact, we had just noted how the White House CIO, Tony Scott, had been using Github to solicit feedback on various proposals, including the one to require all federal government websites go HTTPS only.

For most of the last few months the House has been holding a series of "investigative" hearings into the FCC's passage of net neutrality rules. On the surface, the hearings claim to be aimed at ensuring the FCC is operating transparently and within the confines of its authority, but in reality the hearings have been about one thing: publicly shaming the FCC for standing up to deep-pocketed campaign contributors like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Of course this never-ending "fact finding mission" has accomplished absolutely nothing in relation to finding notable facts, but it has proven useful in riling up a base utterly convinced that net neutrality rules destroy the Internet. All on the taxpayer dime, no less.

The House Intelligence Committee is supposed to be providing "oversight" of the intelligence community and preventing it from violating our civil rights. That's why it was formed in the first place, out of the Pike Committee, when Congress actually investigated abuses by the NSA, CIA and FBI. But, over the decades, the House Intelligence Committee has, instead, turned into a cheerleader for the intelligence community and seems to work to better hide its activities from the public, rather than oversee them. That's part of the reason why we now have a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) who is actually supposed to be investigating these programs and protecting our civil liberties.

Techdirt readers with a good memory may recall that back in 2010 a Spanish woman with entirely too much time on her hands claimed to have found a legal loophole that allowed her to register her ownership of the sun. Yes, the sun. You know, Sol, that star that allows us to exist, and it apparently fell into the hands of Maria Angeles Duran. The law had been constructed to prevent any nations from declaring ownership of planets or stars -- but not individuals. Maria laid her claim by registering it and announced plans to charge us lowly citizens of the Earth for all beneficial uses of "her" sun.

Last year a decent, but not great, patent reform bill looked poised to pass... until it was killed off at the last minute, thanks mainly to trial lawyers afraid of fee shifting provisions. The common wisdom was that this year a similar reform bill would likely sail through Congress, since the Senate had shifted and the Democrats (who are more closely aligned with the trial lawyers) were no longer in power. The eventual bill was just so-so, but had a few good and useful provisions, taking people a step in the right direction.

Last year, the controversy around corporate sovereignty was such that the European Commission felt obliged to slam the brakes on this particular part of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations in order to try to defuse the situation. The ostensible reason for that unexpected pause was to hold a public consultation on the "investor-state dispute settlement" (ISDS) mechanism. It turned out to be of a very limited kind. Rather than asking whether people wanted corporate tribunals passing judgment on their laws and regulations, the European Commission instead presented the ISDS chapter of another agreement, that with Canada, and posed some rather technical questions about the subtle changes it incorporated. The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is nominally finished, and is currently undergoing what is known as "legal scrubbing", during which it is checked and polished for final ratification by Canada and the EU, although that's looking much more problematic now than it did a year ago. In the consultation, CETA's ISDS chapter was offered as a kind of template for TAFTA/TTIP. The Commission's argument was that it incorporated many improvements over traditional corporate sovereignty chapters -- which even the EU admitted were flawed -- and could be tweaked further to produce an even better solution for the US-EU negotiations. Techdirt has already written about one detailed analysis of the claimed improvements in CETA's ISDS that found them seriously wanting. Confirming that view is a new paper from Gus Van Harten, who is Associate Professor of Law at York University in Toronto, Canada. He has taken advantage of the fact that we now have two recent EU free trade agreements with corporate sovereignty chapters: the one with Canada, plus a less well-known deal with Singapore. Van Harten's paper looks at both of them in order to explore to what extent the European Commission's new model for ISDS represents an advance over previous versions, and is therefore something that might usefully form the basis for a possible corporate sovereignty chapter in TTIP. Here's his concluding summary:

In the last few weeks, we've pointed out that the House of Representatives have been attaching a bunch of interesting amendments to appropriations bills to block surveillance. Last week, for example, there was overwhelming support for an amendment to an appropriations bill that would block funding from NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology) for helping the NSA or CIA undermine encryption. Other amendments blocked funds being used by the DOJ/FBI to force companies to put backdoors into encryption. Other amendments stripped out funding for warrantless use of stingrays.

Some surgeries that were really risky just a couple decades ago are nearly routine now -- though the risk of death and/or complications is always going to exist. However, the idea of a head transplant is more than a little "out there" when it comes to extreme medical procedures. There are some people working on transplanting heads (or switching bodies, depending on your point of view), but early adopters aren't expected to get any life extension benefits just yet.

It looks like the government might be forced to hold another uncomfortable discussion about who is/isn't a journalist. Among the many amendments to the DOJ's appropriation bill was one from Rep. Alan Grayson, which forbids the use of DOJ funding to force journalists to turn over sources.

We've been pointing out for ages that, contrary to what some claim, one of the biggest problems with including things like copyright and patents in international trade agreements like the TPP and TTIP is that it effectively binds Congress' hands, by blocking them from fixing problems associated with those laws. We've highlighted in the past, for example, how the currently leaked draft of the TPP's intellectual property section would require copyright terms to be at least life plus 70 years, which goes directly against what even the Copyright Office's boss, Maria Pallante, has been arguing for, in terms of (finally) reducing copyright terms for the first time, ever.

The FBI doesn't just stonewall FOIA requesters. It also stonewalls its in-house investigator. Remember all those deferrals to "lawful authority" and "rigorous oversight" the agency makes when not commenting on controversial surveillance programs? Those really don't mean anything if you lock out the oversight and prevent his office from verifying whether surveillance is being carried out in accordance to laws and FBI policies.

Last week, we wrote about how the city of Inglewood was trying to silence a longtime vocal critic of its mayor, James Butts, by attempting to abuse copyright law. The guy in question, Joseph Teixeira, had posted a series of videos critiquing Mayor Butts, using clips from city council meetings that had been posted to YouTube, and adding a lot of commentary over them. As we noted, it was questionable if the city could even claim copyright on the videos, but even if they could, there was no way the lawsuit could pass First Amendment muster. If the work could be covered under copyright, its use was obviously fair use. Despite this being explained to the city's lawyer -- an experienced IP attorney named JoAnna Esty of Majesty Law Group -- the city filed a brief that is so ridiculous and so laughable, many have argued that she has likely opened herself up to sanctions.

Last week, we wrote about how the city of Inglewood was trying to silence a longtime vocal critic of its mayor, James Butts, by attempting to abuse copyright law. The guy in question, Joseph Teixeira, had posted a series of videos critiquing Mayor Butts, using clips from city council meetings that had been posted to YouTube, and adding a lot of commentary over them. As we noted, it was questionable if the city could even claim copyright on the videos, but even if they could, there was no way the lawsuit could pass First Amendment muster. If the work could be covered under copyright, its use was obviously fair use. Despite this being explained to the city's lawyer -- an experienced IP attorney named JoAnna Esty of Majesty Law Group -- the city filed a brief that is so ridiculous and so laughable, many have argued that she has likely opened herself up to sanctions.

You knew that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wasn't going to just leave things alone after his strategy to renew the bulk surveillance provision of the PATRIOT Act failed somewhat miserably. He's now announced that he's going to dump the absolutely terrible CISA bill into the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). CISA, as we've discussed, is the latest in a long line of "information sharing" bills, that are really surveillance bills in disguise.

A growing number of consumers use VPNs to access out-of-market Netflix content, quite often because Netflix has yet to reach their market --something that's less of an issue as Netflix pushes to launch in 200 markets internationally before the year's end. However, even in launched Netflix markets, customers often still use VPNs to access the broader U.S. Netflix catalog. For Netflix competitors, the solution to this is fairly obvious (offer better service, more content, and stop using geo-restrictive licensing as a weapon), but of course many companies would instead rather focus on vilifying VPN usage itself.

The explosive rise of Uber, ride-sharing programs, and other on-demand mobility services has led many to wonder if the whole concept of car ownership is on its way out, at least for city-dwellers. This week we're joined by Upshift founder Ezra Goldman, who recently wrote a manifesto for the future of mobility and helps us delve far beyond a surface analysis of transportation trends. 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.

Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka is certainly no stranger to ridiculous and misguided legal threat letters -- and it appears that he's now got another one. On Monday, he posted to Twitter an image of a threat letter from law firm Higbee & Associates, claiming that this April 2014 review of the Scarlett Johansson film Under the Skin is infringing on Higbee & Associate's "client's" copyright because it includes a still image from the film. Here's a screenshot of the image in the page with the review: The review itself is fairly positive on the movie. And, if you're wondering, that same exact image was used on tons of reviews. Like this one and this one and this one and this one, and I'm getting tired cutting and pasting, but trust me, there are plenty more.

Last week, an Indian blogger, Thejesh GN, discovered that mobile operator Airtel was injecting javascript into subscribers' browsing sessions, which is both incredibly sketchy and a huge security concern (not to mention raising net neutrality issues on the side). He posted the proof to GitHub and tweeted about it: He posted the evidence showing that javascript was being quietly inserted, and that it apparently tried to insert some sort of toolbar:

It's baaack! The KeySmart 2.0 Compact Key Organizer that helps you get your keys under control is back in the Techdirt Deals Store and available at 26% off. You can fit up to 10 keys in about half the space they would normally take. This time for a few dollars more, you can also choose to get an organizer with an attached 8GB USB key so you can take your files with you. There are only a few days left for this deal and, last time, some of the options sold out quickly.

The story of Russ Faria is already fairly bizarre. Convicted of killing his wife, he was just granted a retrial after a news investigation by the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the local Fox affiliate turned up serious questions about the original prosecution and newly discovered evidence that was not presented at the original trial. But that's not what caught my attention about the story. It appears that just before the judge was going to decide whether or not there would be a new trial, the prosecutor in the case, Leah Askey, issued subpoenas to the two main journalists involved in the investigation, demanding all texts and emails between them and Askey's ex-husband.

Back in 2011, as some of you may recall, we received a note from the US Marshals service, telling us that they were "investigating" a comment that had been placed on an article about a ruling by Judge Beryl Howell, who had received some criticism, given that she had previously been an RIAA lobbyist, and was now issuing rulings friendly to the legacy copyright industry. The comment in question was:

Techdirt has been writing about major trade deals like TPP, TAFTA/TTIP and -- most recently -- TISA more than most. But there's one that we've not mentioned so far: the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). As Wikipedia explains, RCEP is:

Wrongful imprisonment happens for any number of reasons, but the first thing law enforcement agencies can do to lower the likelihood of this happening is to make sure they're arresting the right person.

Diamonds are usually considered expensive rare gems, but they're also just an allotrope of carbon that could be a useful semiconductor material someday. Giant diamonds floating in space could be relatively common, but there's no practical way to go space mining for them. Diamonds aren't easy to make, but some folks are getting better at it.

It looks like Team Prenda has been smacked around once again. This is in the Lightspeed case -- which is one of the rare earlier cases where they were actually representing a real third party, rather than a made up entity that they really owned themselves. This was the case where they tried to drag Comcast and AT&T into the lawsuit and it all failed terribly. If you don't recall, in late 2013, the district court smacked them around as judge Patrick Murphy clearly figured out what was going on: "The litigation smacked of bullying pretense." Yup, you got that right. The defendant, Anthony Sweet, represented by Prenda killers Booth Sweet, asked for attorneys' fees and got them at the end of 2013, with the court ordering Team Prenda to pay up $261k, saying that Team Prenda "flat-out lied" to the court.