Brindle

It had to happen. There was no avoiding it. It's quite common for individuals, and sometimes even businesses, to surf the wave of a popular news cycle and attempt to translate some story into a trademark to exploit. A good percentage of the time, this is done as something of a short-term squatting attempt, where some word or phrase becomes suddenly popular and someone races to trademark it in order to license or sell it to another entity. Other times, it's simply done to capitalize on the sudden popularity of a word or phrase directly.

You already know where this is going. Yes, the "Brexit" trademarks are starting to pour in, almost literally in the case of Sam Adams Boston Lager maker Boston Beer.

The Boston Beer, the maker of Samuel Adams Boston Lager, is seeking to trademark “Brexit” as a name of a hard cider. A patent attorney from Houston has also filed an application to register “Texit,” a term coined as the Texas version of Brexit. That application covers hunting apparel, T-shirts and baseball caps.

Yes, as the world reacts to Britain riding a wave of false-promises and barely-disguised tribalism towards an EU exit stage-right-into-an-economic-freefall, American companies are swiftly trying to lock up the word-mash used to describe this exodus for their own stupid business purposes. And, based on the findings of Alex Montgomery, it appears these applications were filed even as the results of the vote were in doubt.

On June 24th, as the world was contemplating the consequences of the United Kingdom's "Brexit" vote to leave the European Union, others were filing applications to register the term as a trademark. One of those entities was the Boston Beer Company (the owner of the Sam Adams trademark). Applications to register BREXIT as a trademark were also filed on June 24th by an individual in Chicago in Class 025 for clothing and by a company in Colorado inClass 005 for dietary and nutritional supplements.

For Boston Beer's proposed Brexit Hard Cider, the details for the rollout of this drink appears to elude even those within the brewery.

A Boston Beer spokeswoman couldn’t say exactly what the plans were for Brexit cider. She told Law Blog that the company has worked with cider makers from the U.K. and sources some apples from the country for its “Angry Orchard” line of hard cider.

That's quite a reach to rationalize trying to trademark a suddenly popular term coming out of an international news cycle. Let's be clear on this point: this kind of trademarking is goddamned annoying. First, it makes a mockery of what for most of us are very real and serious issues. The Brexit story is one that the entire world ought to be paying very serious attention to, because the vote was not only historic, but its consequences, whatever they are, ought to be instructive to other nations that want to use nationlism to propel this sort of agenda.

But on top of that, exactly what does any of this kind of opportunistic trademarking have to do with the purpose of trademark law? To be clear, all of these trademark applications are likely entirely legal. But that doesn't change how at odds they are with the purpose of trademark to begin with. The idea behind trademarks is that they serve as a source-identifier for particular companies. The general idea would be to come up with a term for a brand or business, trademark it, then grow it into recognition as associated with the trademark holder. These attempts reverse the order, attempting to ride a wave of an already well-known word or term and then trying to force association with brands through trademark.

And that's really lame.

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The market for red light cameras obviously can't sustain itself, even with certain legislators drooling over the prospect of installing these revenue generators at every intersection.

Part of the problem is the technology is still incredibly fallible. Cameras have issued tickets to walls, parked vehicles, and many, many drivers obeying all traffic laws. Millions of dollars of refunds have been paid out by municipalities who once thought they'd have to do nothing more than sit back and let the cash roll in.

Citizens aren't fans, so legislators have often pushed these through with a minimum of discussion. Major players in the traffic cam industry lobby hard for placement of their products -- sometimes going as far as to engage in good old analog bribery and corruption.

Officials, both public and private, have been indicted (and convicted) for their participation in the proliferation of traffic cams. Not that the cameras themselves were necessarily illegal, but because the only thing better than an uptick in public funds is an uptick in private funds.

Out in Texas, a judge is facing charges for sneaking ATS (American Traffic Solutions) in through the back door.

A Texas judge arrested for making a secret deal committing his county to a 10-year contract with a red-light camera company was suspended Tuesday for allegedly blowing right past the state's Sunshine Laws.

Judge Joel Patrick Baker of Smith County was arrested last week, after an activist group complained his 2014 meeting with American Traffic Solutions officials violated the Texas Open Meetings Act. Baker was charged with three misdemeanor counts of violating the act.

Baker allegedly hooked ATS with an exclusive 10-year deal to install its cameras in Smith County -- despite the technology being banned in Texas municipalities, despite county residents being deeply opposed to the cameras, and despite never consulting with county commissioners.

Now, Baker is suspended and facing three counts of violating the state's open records law. ATS did not comment so presumably its illegally-approved cameras are still in use -- even if it's now apparent that the tickets issued by the company will have approximately zero legal weight.

When an industry's market starts drying up, it will often turn to legislators in hopes of propping its business model up. In this case, ATS skipped most of the legislative process and found a judge willing to bypass local statutes on its behalf. If an industry can't support itself, it needs to stagger off in the direction of the graveyard, not seek assistance in screwing taxpayers in increasingly creative ways.

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In the aftermath of what is generally considered to be a Bad Idea, the forces behind the UK's exit from the European Union has pulled up stakes on its website and shut the whole thing down. The problem is that it looks more like an attempt to bury the past than to warmly greet the future it helped create, as Wired's Matt Kamen notes.

While this may simply be the campaign closing down in the wake of its victory, this removes all clear record of speeches, editorials, statistics, and information the Leave campaign used on the run up to the referendum on membership of the European Union on June 23.

The content is still there, but links to information have been removed and the landing page is nothing more than a static image. Visitors looking for promises that may be broken in the future (like rerouting of EU fees to the NHS) will have to know the page's URL in order to access it. Given comments made by those involved with the dubious promises and dubious math, the quasi-wipe of the site's content may not just be Vote Leave's idea of a victory lap.

Senior Leave politicians such as Iain Duncan Smith have, in the days since the referendum, denied the money was promised to the NHS, despite other figures in the campaign saying "the Government should use some of the billions saved from leaving the EU to give at least a £100 million per week cash transfusion to the NHS".

Vote Leave has yet to comment on its post-exit scrub, but others have noted that the internet (almost never) forgets. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has preserved Vote Leave's promises and other statements for posterity, ensuring that it won't be able to easily decouple itself from its assertions.

The movement spent plenty of its own money talking about all the money the UK was handing over to the EU, rather than spending on its own citizens. Tracing backwards from its still-live YouTube account, one can still access its £50 million giveaway -- supposedly the amount turned over every day to the EU. This number was referred to by the UK Statistics Authority as "potentially misleading," due to the fact that Vote Leave based it on gross contributions without factoring in rebates received from the EU or any flow of offsetting income resulting from trade agreements.

In addition, other claims made during the Brexit campaign -- mostly related to stemming the flow of immigrants into the UK and preventing Turkey and handful of other nations from joining the EU -- have proven to be just as false. The original narrative of cutting back the flow of immigrants to the UK by "tens of thousands" now appears to have been replaced with a more hesitant assertion that not a whole lot will change. As for concerns about Turkey joining the EU and bringing with it thousands of jihadists from neighboring nations, the best guess is that the nation's possible inclusion is still several years -- if not several decades off. (UK Prime Minister David Cameron suggested the year 3000 as a good estimate based on current progress. Turkey has been moving towards this since 1963 and hasn't budged the needle much over the past 50 years.)

If Vote Leave is truly trying to bury its misleading math and promises it can't keep, it made its first mistake by publishing them to the web where things tend to live forever.

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If you've been distracted by something like a coma, you may have noticed that the cable industry has developed an atrocious reputation for poor customer service, built over a generation of regulatory capture, prioritizing growth over customer service, and just generally not giving much of a damn. By and large, a Congress slathered in telecom and cable campaign contributions has ensured that nothing much changes on that front, with most politicians taking every opportunity to in fact defend this dysfunctional status quo from innovation, competition, or change.

As such, it was marginally adorable to see Congress hold a hearing last week designed to deliver a few light wrist slaps to cable executives for their inability to seriously improve. Senators Rob Portman and Claire McCaskill simultaneously released a study (pdf) exploring how a number of large cable companies routinely overbill consumers, and do little to nothing to actually resolve such errors. In fact, a study released by the Senate found that Charter and its recently acquired subsidiary Time Warner Cable routinely overbill customers to the tune of around $7.2 million per year:

Between January and April 2016, Time Warner Cable overbilled customers nationwide an estimated $639,948. The Subcommittee projects that, in 2016, Time Warner Cable will overbill customers nationwide a total of $1,919,844. Charter has not yet completed the underlying work necessary to determine how much it has overbilled customers. But it has informed the Subcommittee that it overbilled customers by at least $442,691 per month.

What's more, the study found that these two companies specifically have a habit of doing even less than other upopular cable companies (read: nothing) after customers were overbilled:

During the six and a half year time period covered by the Subcommittee’s investigation, Time Warner Cable and Charter did not automatically refund or credit customers for equipment overcharges they discovered. By contrast, Comcast and DirecTV provided full refunds to overcharged customers, and Dish’s sophisticated billing system is designed to prevent these types of issues from occurring in the first instance.

And as a reminder: Time Warner Cable and Charter just merged, potentially creating a Voltron of errant overbilling. And thanks to binding arbitration mouseprint now buried in every cable and broadband contract under the sun, overbilled customers can't technically sue.

While both Time Warner Cable and Charter have promised to implement systems to avoid overbilling customers moving forward, such inquiries are usually geared toward scoring some cheap political brownie points among cable-loathing constituents, and rarely result in much of a follow-up (and there could be follow-up, since much of this technically constitutes false advertising). Still, to her credit, McCaskill also touched on the practice of misleading below-the-line fees used by cable operators to covertly jack up the advertised rate of services post-sale:

"We found that customers are being charged a host of fees that are not included in advertised pricing, some of which are for programming that used to be included in a customer’s video package. We also found that, just as many customers have long believed, some of these fees, like the HD and DVR service fees, aren’t a true reflection of the cost to the company of the service, but rather are based on the revenue goals of the company, and the price a customer is willing to stomach.”

Again, that has been a problem for years in both cable and telecom, thanks in part to Senators and regulators that have a nasty habit of pretending it's not happening. From "broadcast TV fees" that bury the cost of programming below the line, to bizarre, nonsensical charges like "internet cost recovery fees" -- most of the "innovation" in telecom and cable these days occurs in the realm of adding misleading charges to your bill, not in improving actual service or support.

A second study presented at the hearing goes into more detail, examining how cable providers also make it difficult if not impossible to comparison price shop (another benefit of below the line fees). McCaskill even offered up a recording of her recent call with DirecTV, made after she realized the company for years had been charging her an $8 per month "protection plan" fee she neither wanted nor asked for.

"I said, 'well, were you going to tell me this?' They said, 'no you have to call in and ask,'" McCaskill said at the hearing (you can find a full video of the hearing here). "If I hadn't called in and asked, that $10 could still be on my bill today based on the billing practices of the companies represented at this hearing."

And while cable's best and brightest spent plenty of time at the hearing claiming they've learned the error of their ways and are doing everything under the sun to change, that's the same promise they've given every year for more than fifteen years. Surely this wrist slap will be the wrist slap that sends them running back to the drawing board with a heartfelt desire to change?

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Hillary Clinton's tech policy plan has been released, and it includes some new, potentially hollow broadband promises, a pledge to continue defending the FCC's net neutrality rules from telecom industry attack, some feel good commentary on the sharing and innovation economies, and continued support for the candidate's absurd war on encryption.

With the FCC's recent net neutrality court victory, the broadband industry's best path forward is to elect a President who'll stock the commission with revolving door regulators who'll simply fail to enforce the rules. But Trump's proven so divisive to some Conservatives, that even AT&T's top lobbyist Jim Cicconi this week came out in gushing support of Clinton:

"Mr. Cicconi, who worked in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said he has backed every GOP presidential candidate since 1976. “But this year I think it’s vital to put our country’s well being ahead of party,” he said in a statement provided by the campaign. “Hillary Clinton is experienced, qualified, and will make a fine president. The alternative, I fear, would set our nation on a very dark path."

Given AT&T's threat to take the neutrality fight to the Supreme Court, Cicconi's support is curious, but may say more about Trump's unpredictability than it does about Clinton. Regardless, the 14-page "technology and innovation agenda" includes upsetting her new BFF by continuing to fight for net neutrality:

"Hillary believes that the government has an obligation to protect the open internet. The open internet is not only essential for consumer choice and civic empowerment – it is a cornerstone of start-up innovation and creative disruption in technology markets. Hillary strongly supports the FCC decision under the Obama Administration to adopt strong network neutrality rules that deemed internet service providers to be common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. These rules now ban broadband discrimination, prohibit pay-for-play favoritism, and establish oversight of “interconnection” relationships between providers. Hillary would defend these rules in court and continue to enforce them."

The plan also makes some arguably vague promises on broadband, promising to deliver ubiquitous broadband to all Americans by 2020:

"Hillary will finish the job of connecting America’s households to the internet, committing that by 2020, 100 percent of households in America will have the option of affordable broadband that delivers speeds sufficient to meet families’ needs. She will deliver on this goal with continue investments in the Connect America Fund, Rural Utilities Service program, and Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), and by directing federal agencies to consider the full range of technologies as potential recipients—i.e., fiber, fixed wireless, and satellite—while focusing on areas that lack any fixed broadband networks currently."

While some outlets were quick to call this plan ambitious, historically vague broadband coverage promises haven't meant all that much.

A favorite pastime of politicians is to make broadband promises they know will be completed even if government doesn't lift a finger, then gobble up the easy political brownie points (with ample help from an unskeptical tech press) after the fact. Obama, for example, in 2011 promised wireless broadband coverage to 98% of all Americans, ignoring the fact that industry data at the time suggested we'd already met that mark (albeit poorly) with 2G and 3G wireless. Former FCC boss Julius Genachowski similarly received ample praise for issuing a "gigabit city challenge", knowing full well gigabit service was arriving without much help from him or other politicians at the time (mostly via frustrated towns and cities forced into the broadband business on their own).

And while the FCC will help us get to 100% broadband coverage by opening up spectrum for 5G, moving from the supposed 98% broadband coverage mark to 100% really won't require much government help. 5G is arriving by 2020 or so regardless of what Clinton does, as it's a cornerstone of AT&T and Verizon's plan to hang up on unwanted DSL customers they refuse to upgrade. That doesn't somehow mean the broadband that's "100% available" to you is going to actually be good or cheap, since that would involve the government acknowledging that lack of competition means Americans pay more for broadband than most developed nations. Fixing this will take significantly more than empty promises, and for Clinton, it will certainly involve pissing off new allies like Jim Cicconi.

The lion's share of Clinton's tech agenda consists of ambiguous promises that, as with all campaign promises, may or may not have any actual basis in fact.

Clinton's plan calls for improving government adoption of technology and efficiency, improving our patent system (which the Clinton camp declares "has been an envy of the world"), and other feel good efforts such as "facilitating citizen engagement in government innovation" and using technology to "improve outcomes and drive government accountability" (doesn't that sound lovely?). But Clinton also makes it clear she intends to continue waging war on encryption -- her plan for a "Manhattan Project" to "solve" (read: weaken) encryption still very much on the table:

"Hillary rejects the false choice between privacy interests and keeping Americans safe. She was a proponent of the USA Freedom Act, and she supports Senator Mark Warner and Representative Mike McCaul’s idea for a national commission on digital security and encryption. This commission will work with the technology and public safety communities to address the needs of law enforcement, protect the privacy and security of all Americans that use technology, assess how innovation might point to new policy approaches, and advance our larger national security and global competitiveness interests."

Yes, it's abundantly clear that Clinton and friends continue to struggle with the idea that encryption is simply a tool, and like any tool it can be used for a myriad of purposes. That doesn't mean you unilaterally declare war on said tool -- or work tirelessly to make that tool less useful or more dangerous via backdoors -- a conversation we'll apparently be having over and over and over again should Clinton's presidency ascend beyond the rhetorical, larval stage.

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More bad news for Hillary Clinton and her ill-advised personal email server. Another set of emails released by the State Department shows the government agency had to disable several security processes just to get its server to accept email from Clinton's private email address.

The emails, reviewed by The Associated Press, show that State Department technical staff disabled software on their systems intended to block phishing emails that could deliver dangerous viruses. They were trying urgently to resolve delivery problems with emails sent from Clinton's private server.

"This should trump all other activities," a senior technical official, Ken LaVolpe, told IT employees in a Dec. 17, 2010, email. Another senior State Department official, Thomas W. Lawrence, wrote days later in an email that deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin personally was asking for an update about the repairs. Abedin and Clinton, who both used Clinton's private server, had complained that emails each sent to State Department employees were not being reliably received.

After technical staffers turned off some security features, Lawrence cautioned in an email, "We view this as a Band-Aid and fear it's not 100 percent fully effective."

While trial-and-error is generally useful when solving connection problems, the implication is undeniable: to make Clinton's private, insecure email server connect with the State Department's, it had to -- at least temporarily -- lower itself to Clinton's security level. The other workaround -- USE A DAMN STATE DEPARTMENT EMAIL ADDRESS -- was seriously discussed.

This latest stack of emails also exposed other interesting things... like the fact that Clinton's private email server was attacked multiple times in one day, resulting in staffers taking it offline in an attempt to prevent a breach. (h/t Pwn All The Things)

In addition to the security issues, there's also some discussion about why Clinton was choosing to use her own server.

In one email, the State Department's IT person explains the agency already has an email address set up for Clinton, but offers to delete anything contained in it -- and points out that using the State Dept. address would make future emails subject to FOIA requests.

[W]e actually have an account previously set up: SSHRC@state.gov. There are some old emails but none since Jan '11 -- we could get rid of them.

You should be aware that any email would go through the Department's infrastructure and subject to FOIA searches.

So, there's one reason Clinton would have opted to use a personal email address and server. More confirmation of the rationale behind this decision appears in an earlier email (2010) from Clinton to her aide, Huma Abedin.

Abedin: We should talk about putting you on state email or releasing your email to the department so you are not going to spam.

Clinton: Let's get separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible.

There appears to be some intent to dodge FOIA requests -- either by ensuring "no documents found" when Clinton's State Department email address was searched, or by being able to control any release by being the chokepoint for responsive documents.

To accomplish this, Clinton's team set up a private email server that was insecure and did not follow State Department guidelines. In fact, her team brushed off the agency more than once before finally informing it that they simply would not comply with State Department regulations.

In a blistering audit released last month, the State Department's inspector general concluded that Clinton and her team ignored clear internal guidance that her email setup broke federal standards and could leave sensitive material vulnerable to hackers. Her aides twice brushed aside concerns, in one case telling technical staff "the matter was not to be discussed further," the report said.

The FBI investigation that Clinton refuses to call an investigation continues. There may be no criminal charges forthcoming, but there's already plenty of evidence that Clinton's use of a private email server was not only dangerously insecure, but put into place in hopes of limiting her accountability.

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Late last week, a proposal from the Department of Homeland Security was published in the Federal Register concerning forms tourists need to fill out upon entering the US. Specifically, DHS proposed adding the following to Form I-94W, which is the Nonimmigrant Visa Waiver Arrival/Departure Record:

“Please enter information associated with your online presence—Provider/Platform—Social media identifier.”

Why? Well, it's pretty much exactly as you guessed:

It will be an optional data field to request social media identifiers to be used for vetting purposes, as well as applicant contact information. Collecting social media data will enhance the existing investigative process and provide DHS greater clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections by providing an additional tool set which analysts and investigators may use to better analyze and investigate the case.

In other words, if you're following ISIS accounts on Twitter, DHS might not let you into the US. And sure, it's voluntary, but it looks like some in Congress are already saying that this sort of thing ought to be mandatory. Of course, for the vast majority of people, their social media profiles are going to be pretty boring for your average Customs and Border Patrol agent, but do we really think it's a good use of their time to be trolling through their Facebook and Twitter feeds or Instagram and Pinterest images?

Overall, this seems like a typical kneejerk response to various concerns about letting people with ill-intent into the country. Eventually, someone travelling here on a tourist visa will do something horrendous, and people will look at who was friends with that person on Twitter or Facebook and freak out. But the idea that the government should be asking travelers for their social media info feels fairly intrusive. What people say on social media or who they're connected with seems likely to be a pretty poor indicator of whether or not they're coming to the US to blow stuff up.

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KFCs in Delhi and Mumbai, India are offering 5-in-1 "Watt a Box" meal deals that come with an ultra cheap phone charger integrated into the box. Will that box catch fire and help keep your meal warm? MAYBE.

The power bank claims to have a 6,100mAh battery but the claims fell short during our brief test. We put an iPhone 5s to charge, which gained 17 percent battery after charging for half-an-hour. But the downside was that the power bank was drained during this process. We recharged the power bank to 100 percent and tried to charge a Redmi Note 3. But the power bank ran out of juice again with the phone gaining just 7 percent of charge...

Wow, that sounds awful. Of course who the hell is buying a KFC meal deal because it comes with a phone charger? Nobody, that's who. People don't eat at KFC for phone chargers, people eat at KFC because they stopped caring about themselves a long time ago. Keep going for a shot of the whole box and a commercial. Thanks to Tony, who's holding out for a meal deal that comes with a burner phone so you can make prank calls while you eat.

 Imagine having a perfect recall and a way to auto-edit your life into exciting, fun snippets (even if your life isn’t exciting or fun.) That’s what the Perfect Memory wireless camera aims to do. The camera, created by the team at General Streaming Systems, LLC, is an evolution on the traditional body cam. This device connects to a chain you can wear around your neck or can clip to… Read More

Tencent has purchased Supercell, the company behind the mega popular Clash of Clans game. The deal is valued at a staggering $10.2 billion. Supercell grossed $1.35 billion in 2015.

The Constitution-free buffer zone near our nation's borders ensures those who wander too far away from the center of our country will be robbed of their rights, thanks to ongoing wars vs. drugs and terrorism. They may also be robbed of their dignity.

There's apparently very little law enforcement personnel won't do when in pursuit of drugs. The gloves come off, only to be replaced with other gloves, which are then forcefully inserted into every orifice on a "suspect's" body. We saw this happen to New Mexico native David Eckert back in 2013. The list of invasions and indignities perpetrated on him by the Deming police and a far-too-compliant "medical professional" is long, ugly and comprehensive.

1. Eckert's abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.
2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
4. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
5. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a second time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
6. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a third time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.
8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert's anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found.

The police obtained no drugs, but Eckert obtained a $1.6 million settlement.

Perhaps that sort of payoff is in 18-year-old Ashley Cervantes' future. Cervantes did nothing more than cross the border to eat breakfast in Nogales, Mexico. Upon her return, things went from bad to worse to nightmarish. [via Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica]

The litany of abuses inflicted on her during a 7-hour search for nonexistent drugs mirrors that of Eckert's. From the lawsuit [PDF]:

The CBP Agent became more aggressive in his questions and accusations. That CBP Agent directed Ashley to follow him to a “detention” room, ostensibly for additional questioning. Over the course of the next few hours, Ashley:

a. was handcuffed to a chair;

b. had a number of CBP K9’s sniff her person (a violation of CBP policy, which prohibits the use of K9’s on a person); and,

c. was taken into a separate room, patted down, and asked to squat so female investigators could visually inspect her.

At no point was Cervantes advised of her Miranda rights, because forget it, Jake, it's Bordertown. The CBP's inability to locate the drugs the agent fervently believed Cervantes was smuggling into the country didn't result in the conclusion of the search. Instead, efforts escalated under the theory that Cervantes was just particularly skilled in the art of concealing drugs.

First, the CBP agent deployed his own questionable medical skills to fill out a "Treatment Authorization Request." In this Immigration Health Services' form, the agent "diagnosed" Cervantes as a "potential internal carrier of foreign substances" and ordered up an X-ray. Cervantes was placed in a CBP van and taken to Holy Cross Hospital, where an all-too-willing accomplice was found in the form of Dr. Patrick F. Martinez. Once there, more questionable paperwork was completed by those involved.

The Holy Cross records from Ashley’s time at the facility include a number of factual inaccuracies, including inaccurately setting out that Ashley was accompanied by her mother and arrived in a private vehicle. In reality, Ashley was transported in a CBP vehicle. Her handcuffs were not removed until she changed into a hospital gown for the alleged purpose of undergoing an X-Ray.

Cervantes never underwent an X-ray. Instead, she underwent a series of non-consensual penetrations -- something most people refer to as "rape."

Dr. Martinez, a male physician, entered Ashley’s room and, after asking a few cursory questions, brutally invaded her body on a warrantless and unjustified search for contraband.

Dr. Martinez forcefully and digitally probed Ashley’s vagina and anus.

Ashley had never before been to a gynecologist and, for the remainder of her life, will always remember that her first pelvic and rectal exams were under the most inhumane circumstances imaginable to a U.S. citizen at a hospital on U.S. soil.

[...]

The searches conducted by the CBP Agents, Holy Cross and Dr. Martinez injured Ashley physically, mentally and emotionally. Her labia, vaginal opening, and anus were left raw and sore and she felt violated, demeaned and powerless as a result of the searches.

Seven hours. No drugs. Multiple penetrations. No warrants. No consent. And all of this will likely be OK -- or at least not enough to leap the "qualified immunity" hurdle.

The courts have frequently held that the Fourth Amendment is nothing to get too concerned about near our nation's borders, what with drugs and terrorism on the loose. If the courts find it acceptable for the CBP to seize laptops and other devices and search them without a warrant, it stands to reason they'll probably find seizing and searching the lower half of a human being without probable cause to be just one of those things that happen in service of the public's "best interest."

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This one was so easy to predict. For the past couple of decades, completely clueless US politicians and bureaucrats (and tech company execs) have been screaming about how China "doesn't respect" our intellectual property. They demanded that China "get more serious" about patents and respecting IP. And for nearly a decade we've been warning those people to be careful what you wish for. Because, now China has massively ramped up its patent system, often by using odd incentives, but rather than helping American companies that demanded it, pretty much every patent lawsuit in China has been about a Chinese company punishing or blocking foreign competition. This is because the Chinese aren't stupid. It's a country that has thrived on protectionism, despite global efforts to "open up trade," and here it realized that the West was handing them the perfect trade barrier: one that let them say they were doing what the West wanted, while giving it the perfect excuse to block out foreign competition.

So, while clueless US and European IP bureaucrats celebrated China issuing so many patents, they totally missed that they'd actually given away everything.

And, now you get stories like this: Apple has been banned from selling the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6s in Beijing, because of patent infringement. Regulators found that the design was too similar to the design of a Chinese firm's phone.

Apple Inc. violated the design patents of a Chinese device maker and may have to halt sales of its latest iPhones in Beijing, the city’s intellectual property authority ruled, handing the U.S. company its latest setback in a pivotal market.

The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus infringe on Shenzhen Baili’s patent rights because of similarities to its 100C phone, the Beijing Intellectual Property Office wrote in its decision.

Live by rounded corner patents, die by rounded corner patents.

Many are speculating that Apple's recent $1 billion investment in the Chinese Uber clone Didi was in part to help deal with attacks like this. Basically every American company that wants to sell products in China ends up investing in Chinese companies for this kind of purpose. But, once again, just as we've been saying for years, the Chinese, unlike many in the West, absolutely recognize what patents are: a trade barrier, and they must love the fact that the US keeps asking them to build more trade barriers.

Until US patent officials finally understand that patents are not about innovation, but are really about restraints on trade, innovation and competition, we're only going to see more and more stories like this.

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Because I have a special place in my heart for world-destroying giant meteors, this is the $10 'Giant Meteor 2016' political bumper sticker available on Amazon. I know who I'm writing in on the ballot come September! "It's November." I know who I'm writing in on the ballot come November! I'm just praying that if enough of us write in Giant Meteor on the ballot that the universe will take notice and finally send us the candidate we deserve. I'm all The Way Of The Dinosaurs, 2016! We could even throw an End Of The World Party and everything. Don't act like that doesn't at least sound tempting. Thanks to Jake, who offered to vote for me which I graciously declined because I've already got way more than enough support to win this thing.

Where kawaii meets the KKK.

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This is a video of vape fanatic and hot chili grower Russel Hawkins deciding to combine his two passions into one huge mistake of a Youtube video. In the video Russel vapes, snorts and rubs some Carolina Reaper chili pepper in his eye. The Carolina Reaper is currently the world's hottest chili pepper, weighing in at up to 2,200,000 Scoville units (Russel says his average 1,500,000). For reference, a Carolina Reaper placed in your anus would immediately melt your intestines right out your butthole. They would just ooze out like squishing Jello between your teeth. Not the prettiest visual, I know, but I want you to understand the importance of not putting any ultra-hot peppers up your rump. Keep it chill with cucumbers and celery, only using blue cheese dressing sparingly. So yeah, anyways this guy is probably dead now but it was nice of whoever found the video to upload it to Youtube for us. There's no doubt in my mind it's what he would have wanted. Keep going for the video, which should start at 4:20. Feel free to watch from the beginning if you're into watching crazy people talk though. Thanks to hairless, who's convinced there is such a thing as being so stupid you're immortal.

This is a segment from the BBC series Life Story documenting an orchid mantis's attempt at using Kung-Fu poses to scare away a jumping spider that wants to eat it. Did I mention it's narrated by David Attenborough? Because it's narrated by David Attenborough! *lifts shirt to reveal 'I LOVE YOU MR. ATTENBOROUGH!' painted across tits on two lines with 'I LOVE YOU' on the first line and 'MR. ATTENBOROUGH!' on the second (just to give you a better visual -- oh, and the paint is red like the color of a Solo cup)* I know I've said it before, but I really could listen to David Attenborough talk all day. And I don't care what the hell he's talking about. He could recall every embarrassing moment in my life in chronological order and I would just sit there and smile and listen for hours until I couldn't take it anymore and tried to choke him out. Probably right around when he got to the time I was bent over on the starting block at high school swim practice and my Speedo ripped and everyone behind me saw my @$$hole winking at them. Because that happened. Keep going for the video, complete with surprise ending. Thanks to DW, who agrees the best way to scare a spider away is missing it with a shoe. You'll never see it again, but it's around.

Another injunction request has been filed in response to a Phil Mocek public records request pertaining to Seattle's power utility. This time, Mocek and MuckRock (through which Mocek's requests have been routed) are not named as defendants. It's only the city of Seattle and its public utility (Seattle City Light) being named as defendants, but Mocek's public records request is specified in the federal court filing [PDF]. (h/t Mike Scarcella)

This time, the plaintiff isn't a multinational corporation. It's the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The nexus for the FBI's attempt to block further disclosures to Mocek (and other requesters like local new station KIRO) is its remora-esque relationship with Seattle's public utility. After a long paragraph utilizing terms like "tradecraft," "concealments," and "advanced electronic surveillance," we finally get to the real reason the FBI wants the court to keep the city of Seattle from handing out any more public utility documents to requesters.

Among other types of video surveillance techniques and methods, the FBI may lawfully install a video camera on an existing utility structure, such as a power pole (“pole camera”), in furtherance of an authorized investigation, when use of the method is reasonably likely to achieve investigative objectives.

The FBI then goes on to argue that despite the cameras being attached to publicly-owned property, they're still sensitive and secret -- unlike countless other cameras serving pretty much the same purpose.

The FBI’s use of surveillance cameras must be distinguished from that of any other state or federal law enforcement agency on two principal grounds. First, in light of the FBI’s unique law enforcement and national security missions, there are particular sensitivities attached to the FBI’s use of surveillance equipment and the tradecraft associated with that use. Second, unlike the use of surveillance cameras by other entities, such as state and local governments or private businesses, which may operate video surveillance cameras in public locations to deter crime or promote public safety generally, the FBI utilizes surveillance cameras only in furtherance of an authorized investigation of a particular subject(s).

It also restyles its anti-FOIA "mosaic" theory into something a bit more relatable.

Disclosure of even minor details about them may cause jeopardy to important federal interests because, much like a jigsaw puzzle, each detail may aid adversaries in piecing together information about the capabilities, limitations, and circumstances of equipment’s use, and would allow law enforcement subjects, or national security adversaries, to accumulate information and draw conclusions about the FBI’s use of this technology, in order to evade effective, lawful investigation by the FBI.

If the location of these cameras were disclosed, suspects would seek to avoid being recorded by them. This is a logical argument. But it's followed by one that's much harder to accept at face value. The FBI claims -- engage your paradox-absorbing crumple zones now -- that disclosing the location of the cameras would result in the violation of privacy of suspects the FBI alread has cameras aimed at.

Because of their close proximity to the subjects of surveillance, unauthorized disclosure of the locations of current or previously installed pole cameras can reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy for those persons under investigation who have not yet been charged.

The FBI can watch anyone 24/7, but if a citizen works their way backward from a camera's location to speculate on who might be the target, that person's privacy will have been invaded.

But this sort of math has a low probability of arriving at the correct conclusion. Hence, the FBI also points out that location disclosure would violate the privacy of everyone in the general vicinity.

It can also reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of the privacy of innocent third parties not under investigation but geographically near the current or past location of the camera, who may falsely be assumed to be the subject of an FBI investigation.

Because the FBI doesn't want Seattle City of Light employees removing its concealed cameras, it has shared the locations of its extra eyeballs with the utility. But the FBI wants the city to withhold more than just the location of FBI cameras. It wants everything related to the FBI blocked from release in order to prevent jigsaw assembly by public records recipients. The city, so far, has refused to do so and appears to be challenging the FBI's secrecy demands.

In January 2016, the City informally notified the U.S. Attorney’s Office that, following the City’s release of the partially redacted FBI information to KIRO, City Light had received a second PRA request from Phil Mocek, challenging the City’s withholding of the redacted information. Shortly thereafter, the City formally notified the FBI of this request by letter. In the same notice, the City also stated that it did not intend to withhold any of the confidential and sensitive information which it had redacted in connection with the earlier request, and that it would release all FBI information at issue unless the FBI obtained an injunction prohibiting such release.

The city did agree to give the FBI time to seek an injunction. This may look like deference, but it could very well be that the city is hoping to have the court more clearly define the limits of public records disclosure exemptions. If this moves far enough ahead, the FBI will be forced to justify its demands for the redaction of all information related to its use of city property to conduct surveillance.

As a result of previous "unauthorized" disclosures, the FBI has stopped sharing the locations of its cameras with the city's light utility. The theoretical destruction of its cameras by utility employees is the basis for the FBI's "we've already been injured by records releases" claim. The FBI then goes on to claim that challenging federal agency demands for secrecy isn't in the public's interest.

[T]he absence of communications with City Light has placed FBI equipment at risk of inadvertently being removed or destroyed by City Light personnel. Such lack of coordination and communication between state and federal government entities is contrary to effective law enforcement and otherwise contrary to public interest in good government.

All the FBI wants is the complete control of any public records request response that might somehow involve it.

On the Fifth cause of action, for an Declaratory Judgment that any similar Protected Information the FBI has shared in the past or may in the future share with the City or City Light for law enforcement purposes is:

a. exempt under the PRA;

b. subject to the federal law enforcement privilege;

c. subject to a federal common law duty of confidentiality;

d. subject to a common law property interest; and

e. that the Protected Information may not be disclosed by the City for any other secondary purpose, without the express permission of the FBI.

The FBI, it would appear, wants the federal court system to put its weight behind an ad hoc non-disclosure agreement, a la the Stingray-related demands it places on every law enforcement agency that acquires this surveillance tech.

It's looking to have federal FOIA exemptions (along with some made-up stuff like "duty of confidentiality") override local public records statutes even as it's using city property as tripods for its cameras. Rather than try to have it all, it could simply cut the city out of the loop (as it's doing now) and run the risk of losing a few cameras. Instead, it's seeking to make the city of Seattle a wholly subservient "partner" in its surveillance efforts.

A judge has already granted a temporary injunction. If it's made permanent, it will give the FBI final say on public records responses in Seattle -- and presumably elsewhere in the same federal district.

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A little over two years ago, when the Commerce Department officially announced plans to "relinquish control" over ICANN's IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) we tried to explain why people should stop freaking out. There were a bunch of people up in arms, claiming that the US government was "giving away the internet." That was, and still is, complete hogwash. There are two important things to understand in this. First, the Commerce Department's "oversight" over ICANN and IANA is already basically non-existent. It was always more on paper than in reality, as the Commerce Department, rightly, took a totally hands off approach. Second, there has been a big effort by foreign governments, mainly Russia and China, to take control over the internet, and strip it from ICANN, and putting it in the ITU, a confusing mess of an organization that's a part of the UN, but heavily controlled by governments without input from actual technologists or public interest groups.

A key part of the Commerce Department's "transition" plan was that it would basically erase the almost entirely imaginary link between IANA and the Commerce Department, but only if a plan was created that kept IANA independent and not as a part of the UN or any organization that would lead to mostly government control, as opposed to what everyone (unfortunately) likes to call a "multistakeholder process" (which just means not just government in the room). And with that plan in place, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) has now come out in support of this plan.

The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced today that the proposal developed by the global Internet multistakeholder community meets the criteria NTIA outlined in March 2014 when it stated its intent to transition the U.S. Government’s stewardship role for the Internet domain name system (DNS) technical functions, known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions.

The announcement marks an important milestone in the U.S. Government’s effort to complete the transition of the Internet’s domain name system and ensure that the Internet remains a platform for innovation, economic growth, and free speech.

For the last 18 years, the United States has worked with businesses, technical experts, governments, and civil society groups to establish a multistakeholder, private-sector led system for the global coordination of the DNS. To accomplish this goal, in 1998, NTIA partnered with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California-based nonprofit, to transition technical DNS coordination and management functions to the private sector. In 2014, NTIA initiated the final step in the privatization process by asking ICANN to convene global stakeholders to develop a plan to complete the transition away from NTIA’s remaining legacy role.

Now, you would think that "small government" types would be happy about the US government completing its "privatization" of internet governance. But, that's because many "small government" types are only small government types when it suits them. Senate Ted Cruz and Rep. Sean Duffy have rushed out a bill, called the "Protecting Internet Freedom Act" that would block the Commerce Department from completing the privatization of the internet. This is both silly and counterproductive.

The Commerce Department's flimsy and never really used "control" over NTIA is basically meaningless yet it's frequently used by foreign governments and the ITU/UN as a reason for taking complete control over the IANA process. And that's only ramped up in recent years due to concerns about the NSA and surveillance. In other words, the US having any official control over internet governance is actually helping authoritarian governments by making the argument that US "control" over the internet is only helping the NSA. By separating IANA from the US government, but keeping the overall process as one that is not controlled by any government, you actually have a better chance of keeping the internet functioning in an open manner. Leaving it under the US government control, no matter how flimsy that link really is, only gives foreign governments useful fodder for a more complete move to take over control themselves.

Eli Dourado, who has spent a ton of time digging into and being involved in internet governance issues, has a great and detailed post about why this transition is a good thing and should be supported. It has all of the relevant history here (including my favorite point about how prior to ICANN, the IANA functions were controlled one dude, Jon Postel, who more or less declared himself the czar over how the domain name system was managed). But he also gets directly to the point: Congress forcing the US government to keep this "control" over IANA would do much more harm than good:

In truth, authoritarian regimes would love nothing more than to see the IANA transition fail. It would give them another shot at taking the issue to the ITU, this time with the added ammunition of pointing out that the United States does not keep its word regarding Internet governance. Oddly, this places Cruz and Duffy on the same side as Russia and China, against the world’s democracies, the Obama administration, sober Republicans, virtually every US tech company, the Internet Society, and virtually every freedom-loving intellectual or activist I have met who has participated on a US delegation to the ITU.

Separately, he also points out that for all the hype over this, the IANA function is actually not nearly as important as some make it out to be. The US government losing whatever sense of "control" it had over it is unlikely to have a huge impact on the internet itself. So the "costs" to this transition are basically nil. The cost to keeping the paper control in place, however, may be very large, in that it provides tremendous ammunition to foreign authoritarian regimes to push for much more extreme changes to internet governance that would be much, much worse.

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Because everybody needs a hobby, André Quirinus Zurbriggen has spent the last ten years scouring the Swiss Alps collecting a set of rocks that spell out the entire alphabet. No word what he's going to do now that's he's completed the set, but I suggest going for numbers 0 - 10 or risk falling into a deep depression now that your hobby is over. Same thing happened to me when I finished my matchstick Eiffel Tower. I got so depressed I didn't even want to get out of bed in the morning. So you know what I did? "Burned it to the ground and started over?" Shit, I wish I would have thought of that. No, I've just been struggling with it. Keep going for a couple writing examples. Thanks again to donkey, who's been trying to collect a complete set of Japanese characters with much less successful results.

The War on Shoplifters.

This is what was left of Leo Lech's home after the Greenwood Village police were done with it. Lech had done nothing wrong. In fact, he wasn't even home. By the point the local PD had decided to turn a standoff with a suspect into a one-house reenactment of the Battle of Fallujah, the only person inside was Robert Jonathan Seacat -- originally wanted for nothing more than shoplifting.

This was all fully justified, according to the police chief, because Seacat had opened fire on police officers during the standoff.

According to Lech's lawsuit, those shots -- five of them, nine hours into the standoff -- by Seacat were met by tear gas, flash bangs, and "72 chemical bombs." Sure, it turns out Seacat had a backpack (and lower intestine) full of drugs, but the police didn't know that when they began their assault. Of course, the complete destruction of an unrelated family's house was considered copacetic because no one died.

“I made the right call because we’re standing here instead of standing over a casket,” said Greenwood Village Police Cmdr. Dustin Varney.

After Seacat fired five shots through the floor at the SWAT team, the decision was made to "vent" the home so interior areas could be more easily viewed by police officers.

When it was all said and done, the PD had gotten their man, along with his drugs, weapons and five casings from bullets fired at officers. Lech was given back his house by officers who severely misrepresented the condition of the residence.

After the SWAT team arrested Seacat amid the rubble, police told the Lechs they could go home, but there was "some damage."

Lech was also given a check for $5,000, the "assistance" of a reluctant insurance company, the city's demand that he also build a new holding pond while rebuilding his house, and the assurances of the local PD that this destruction was not only necessary, but the best case scenario.

Things then got worse, according to Lech's lawsuit.

The Lechs suffered nausea for weeks from trying to rescue items from the rubble, and property inspectors sent there wore "full hazmat gear."

The Lechs had to move to another county. Leo Lech had to take a new job at a lower salary. The boy, D.Z., had to transfer schools and enter therapy.

All of this began with Seacat stealing two belts and a shirt from Wal-Mart. Twenty-four hours later he was in custody and a family was without their home or belongings. Lech is seeking recovery of costs sustained so far, along with additional damages for emotional distress, civil rights violations, trespass, and "taking without compensation."

The police continue to insist this couldn't have been handled any other way, but arrests of armed, barricaded suspects happen all the time without having to completely destroy the building surrounding them. What happened to Lech's house appears to be the end result of a PD with lots of surplus military gear and an excuse to use it. They rolled up in a BearCat and deployed a robot, rams, and explosives to turn Leo Lech's house into a literal shell of itself. And then they walked away from the total destruction patting themselves on the back for taking the suspect alive.

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The 3.5mm port is dying - at least when it comes to smartphones. If the persistent Lightning headphone rumor wasn't enough to persuade you, the fact that Motorola beat Apple to the punch should be. Motorola's new Moto Z and Moto Z Force don't have that familiar circular hole for your cans to plug into, and it now seems inevitable that almost every phone within a few years will forgo the port in favor of a single socket for both charging and using headphones. This is a change that few people actually want. It's driven entirely by the makers of our phones and their desire to ditch what they view as an unnecessary port. It's all about control. You can't put DRM on a 3.5mm jack, but you can do so on a digital port or wireless connection. Imagine only Beats headphones being certified to pull the best quality audio out of an iPhone, protected through Apple DRM. You know it's going to happen.

When Rep. Jason Chaffetz began asking the Secret Service about its string of high-profile failures, agents were quick to respond… with attempts to undermine the Congressman's credibility. Eighteen minutes after the hearings started, Secret Service agents -- dozens of them -- began poring through his 2003 Secret Service application in hopes of finding a few skeletons in his previously-vetted closet.

Even Secret Service Assistant Director Ed Lowery got in on the illegal fun, suggesting via email that "some information [Chaffetz] finds embarrassing needs to get out." Information did get out, but it had no effect on Chaffetz's reputation. The only people embarassed were the Secret Service and DHS head Jeh Johnson, who was forced to apologize on its behalf.

Johnson's press release, detailing the results of the DHS's investigation of the incident, shows dozens were questioned about this violation of the Privacy Act. Better yet, it shows dozens were punished for their misconduct.

In all, the conduct of 57 Secret Service personnel was reviewed, including 11 at the SES [Senior Executive Service] level. Of those, 41 are receiving some level of discipline. This discipline includes a letter of reprimand to one individual, suspended discipline contingent on no further misconduct for a period of five years, and suspensions from duty without pay for periods of up to 45 days. The one individual found by the Inspector General to have disclosed the private information to an outside source, the Washington Post, has resigned from the Secret Service.

As is often the case, the employee whose misconduct was the worst slipped out the door before the hammer could come down. As for the rest, the sheer number of Secret Service personnel involved shows this agency is no less susceptible to peer pressure and bandwagon jumping than the occupants of the average high school locker room.

Rest assured, this sort of misconduct won't rear its ugly head again, because top Secret Service officials say Things are being Done.

Like many others I was appalled by the episode reflected in the Inspector General’s report, which brought real discredit to the Secret Service. From Director Clancy, I have been told that tighter processes are now in place to limit access to personally identifiable information and to highlight for employees the consequences of a breach of that data.

I'd love to know what these "tighter processes" are. Hopefully it's something more than post-login clickwrap saying something to the effect of "user agrees to abide by all policies and statutes" with an "OK" button being the only thing standing between them and dirt on legislators they don't like.

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Soldiers have used the sticky party toy to help scan areas for explosives.

After months of surveys and testing, a recent study conducted by an agency hired by the Australian government has determined that Pantone 448 C (aka 'opaque couché') is the world's ugliest color. Why conduct a study to find the world's ugliest color? To put it on cigarette packaging to discourage people from smoking, of course. Heck yeah, throwing money down the toilet. They should just burn some too.

The new color was adopted for all tobacco packaging along with graphic health warnings. Now, other governments are following suit. The United Kingdom, Ireland and France have all passed "plain packaging" laws as well, using mockups using the same murky color.

First of all, people who want to smoke aren't going to be dissuaded by the color of a pack of cigarettes. Unless the color actually makes you physically ill, it's not going to do anything. Besides, you could just take the cigarettes out of the diarrhea colored box and put them in anything else. Secondly, I actually like this color. Green and brown are my two favorite colors and this is kind of a shit slurry of them. It's kind of relaxing, like being in the forest. Maybe there are a couple of bunnies scampering around. Is that a babbling brook I hear in the distance? I might try to cash in on this new cigarette pack design and start my own tobacco company named Tranquility. Except instead of tobacco my cigarettes will be all dried leaves and grass because my dad makes me do all the yard work. Thanks to my pal Dave L, who told me the perception of an ugly color is unique to every individual. Right? I think the ugliest color is my face.

A couple of years ago -- as the ugliness of asset forfeiture abuse was becoming a mainstream media topic -- the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's senior Washington correspondent published a cautionary article featuring a very blunt headline:

American shakedown: Police won't charge you, but they'll grab your money

In it, the CBC's Neil MacDonald pointed out that being "not from around here," coupled with rental vehicles and cash -- made visiting Canadians little more than rolling ATMs for "drug interdiction task forces" sporting nifty acronyms and friendly asset-sharing partnerships with federal agencies.

MacDonald listed a few tactics that might lower Canadians' chances of being robbed at badgepoint:

Avoid long chats if you're pulled over. Answer questions politely and concisely, then persistently ask if you are free to go.

Don't leave litter on the vehicle floor, especially energy drink cans.

Don't use air or breath fresheners; they could be interpreted as an attempt to mask the smell of drugs.

Don't be too talkative. Don't be too quiet. Try not to wear expensive designer clothes. Don't have tinted windows.

And for heaven's sake, don't consent to a search if you are carrying a big roll of legitimate cash.

Cash = guilt to many law enforcement agencies, even if they're only interested in pursuing cash, rather than criminal charges.

WHERE'S YOUR MOSES NOW?

[T]he Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards.

It's called an ERAD, or Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machine, and state police began using 16 of them last month.

Here's how it works. If a trooper suspects you may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan any cards you have and seize the money.

Well… fuck.

So much for keeping the thieving, non-prosecuting cops off your back by carrying prepaid cards rather than cash. Highway-patrolling drug warriors are now going to be pressing the narrative that drug dealers and other criminals now use cards, because asset forfeiture has severely disrupted the cash-based drug economy or something.

There's literally no way to win. Any amount of money is considered inherently suspicious when it's in cash form. Now any amount of money -- no matter where it's stored -- can be declared the fruits of criminal activity by a cop with an ERAD device. Law enforcement can now drain any prepaid cards in your possession all without you having to leave the driver's seat.

And they have every incentive to do so. ERAD sells these devices to cops for $5,000 and takes 7.7% of the haul. (Here's Oklahoma's contract [PDF] with ERAD for the devices.) These devices aren't going to pay for themselves. Nope, citizens will pay for them -- twice. First, during the initial outlay and a second time when their cards are drained by law enforcement officers.

But it's totally cool because there's an almost non-existent chance you'll be able to recover improperly-seized funds at some undetermined point in the future.

"If you can prove can prove that you have a legitimate reason to have that money it will be given back to you. And we've done that in the past," [Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. John] Vincent said about any money seized.

Sure, that sounds like due process, but it really isn't. Law enforcement agencies have at least 30 days before they have to officially notify those whose money they've seized. From that point, seized assets head into a labyrinthine adjudication process in which the government does everything it can to keep the owners of forfeited cash from participating, starting with in rem proceedings that pit the state versus seized money, rather than against the person from which the funds were seized.

To navigate this, you need a lawyer, preferably one with experience in recovering forfeited property. That isn't cheap. During the long, expensive process, agencies will often try to push people into accepting low-dollar settlements that allow the government to keep money it hasn't proven is tied to criminal activity.

In many cases, the dollar amount is low enough that the expense of recovering it makes it a losing proposition. But those lower dollar amounts can also be the difference between solvency and bankruptcy for someone who's had their money seized. With this technology, officers will literally be stealing people's paychecks, as those who aren't able to secure a checking account are now almost exclusively receiving their paychecks on reloadable prepaid cards.

And, in almost every state, including Oklahoma, there's no conviction stipulation tied to asset forfeiture, meaning the government only has to stake a claim based on dubious "evidence" -- like the driver was traveling on a major interstate, had one too many air fresheners in the car, an officer thought he smelled marijuana, etc. -- to hold onto money it can't prove is tied to criminal activity.

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General Petraeus, despite turning over "little black books" filled with classified info to his mistress/biographer (Paula Broadwell), is now serving out his mild non-sentence by suffering through high-paying speaking gigs. The government -- "punishing" one of its own -- ended up implying there was somehow a difference between Petraeus and others who turned over classified information to journalists.

But there appears to be zero difference between Petraeus and whistleblowers who received much harsher treatment. Josh Gerstein of Politico reports:

"There is a recorded conversation between Petraeus and, inter alia, Washington Post reporters, which, based on the information and belief of your affiant, occurred in or about March 2011," Special Agent Diane Wehner wrote. "In the conversation, Petraeus stated, 'I would really love to be on background as a senior military officer.' Later in the recording, Petraeus discusses sensitive military campaigns and operations, some of which, on the basis of a preliminary review ... is believed to contain classified information, including information at the Top Secret level."

Apparently, the difference between having your life destroyed and having your life slightly inconvenienced depends on how you've portrayed the government to the press with your links. Leaks made in support of government activity have always received a warmer reception.

The government may believe Petraeus is no common leaker, but it's also going to have to extend its hypocritical shrug to encompass the phrase, "He's no Hillary Clinton."

The FBI affidavit also indicates that investigators believed Petraeus "likely" agreed to help Broadwell gather classified information from others. In 2011, Broadwell wrote to an Army lieutenant colonel seeking details about his unit's operations. The officer replied by asking for "a good SIPR number," referring to a government network for handling classified information.

"If you have classified material, Gen Petraeus has been gracious enough to allow me to have you send the storyboards and material to his SIPR account; I'll pick them up as soon as you send the word! I've copied him on this email," Broadwell wrote.

Yes, General Petraeus sent classified info to several email addresses (both Broadwell and Petraeus used more than one account, along with burner phones, to communicate), none of which appear to have been designated as secure.

The FBI apparently pushed for felony charges under the Espionage Act, but the DOJ overrode it, allowing Petraeus to walk away with two years probation on a lesser "mishandling" charge. I'm sure the FBI feels the same thing will happen again with Clinton, no matter what it uncovers during its investigation of her private email server usage. According to former AG Eric Holder, Petraeus wasn't treated differently than any of the other leakers the DOJ has prosecuted over the past several years. It just looked that way because of reasons Holder won't discuss.

"There were some unique things that existed in that case that would have made prosecution at the felony level — and conviction at the felony level — very, very, very problematic."

In the context of Petraeus' actions, "problematic" seems to be another way of saying "embarrassing." Holder's statement to Politico tries to portray the prosecution as lacking in evidence to make a felony charge stick. But the evidence appears to be there. The only thing lacking was the will to do so, both by the DOJ and the administration guiding its moves.

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For all the idiotic things said about Ed Snowden, at least US bureaucrats appear to have come around to the idea that he helped kick off a necessary debate on surveillance powers and privacy. Just recently we had former Attorney General Eric Holder admit that Snowden "performed a public service by raising the debate." And regular surveillance apologist and former Defense Department lawyer Jack Goldsmith just said that "Snowden forced the intelligence community out of its suboptimal and unsustainable obsession with secrecy."

It appears that some of their counterparts in the UK are still in denial about all of this. GCHQ's boss Robert Hannigan, whose currently on a PR charm offensive (or should that be just offensive PR?) insists that Snowden has nothing to do with the ongoing debate, which he says was happening prior to Snowden leaking documents:

No, Edward Snowden had not sparked a global debate about privacy - that had been under way already - but terrorist targets GCHQ had been tracking had learned from his revelations with heavens knows what consequences, he said.

This is delusional, and calls into question whether or not the GCHQ has management that lives in reality or in a fantasy land. As someone who has followed this issue since well before the Snowden leaks, to argue that the debate was happening in any real way prior to them being splashed across the press is a flat out lie. You can disagree with what Snowden did -- as Hannigan clearly does. But to argue that the revelations did not spark the debate is clearly wrong.

As for the latter part of Hannigan's claim, that terrorists learned stuff from the Snowden documents that created "heaven knows what consequences," that's a load of bunk also. Actual studies showed basically no change in behavior by terrorists post-Snowden, as many already assumed that their basic communications were being tracked. And no one has yet to demonstrate any legitimate consequences from his revelations other than forcing people like Hannigan to have to answer questions about why the GCHQ and NSA seem to be spying on tons of people.

If this new PR campaign is about rebuilding trust in the GCHQ, Hannigan might want to recognize that spewing pure bullshit doesn't make people trust him more. It makes them trust him a lot less.

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Uber will pay its UberPool users $2 if the Uber shows up past the promised time of arrival.

I'll admit that very few things in this existence we all share give me as much pleasure at poking at the prudish censorship employed by Facebook. The overly broad puritanical guidelines, theoretically designed to save our sensitive eyes from anything as horrible as a breast or a penis, often instead results in the censorship of parody, renowned artwork, and bronze statues. That sincere but misguided attempt to keep things PG on its site is inherently funny, but nearly as inherently funny as is the fact that the following image was (rather innocently) included in one of a collection of children's books in France, entitled Images of Ponies and Horses.

Right about now you're thinking that you just witnessed a French how-to manual on having a horse be all that it can be inside of you. But it isn't! Honest! What this actually is is an attempt by the illustrator to show how similar the bone structure of human beings and horses are by aligning their respective physiology in this way. A rep from the publisher told BuzzFeed:

"Obviously, we never wanted to shock our readers with that drawing," a Fleurus spokesperson told BuzzFeed. "We publish educational books and make realistic or explanatory illustrations. In that case, our goal was to make the child visually comprehend that the bone structure of the horse and the human being are similar," they said. "Putting them in the same position makes the likening more understandable and concrete."

So, we have an unfortunately designed illustration that was supposed to be educational now going viral entirely because of the context our own dirty minds adds to the image. BuzzFeed wrote a post on the image, only to find that -- you guessed it -- Facebook had begun flagging the article as it was being shared on the site.

Well, things got even weirder with this horse thing. Facebook seems to be flagging this article — the one you're reading right now — as pornography. And then, after Facebook removes this article from your feed, it makes you go through your photos and verify that none of them are pornographic. In fact, Facebook's moderators seem to find this horse picture so inappropriate, a member of BuzzFeed's social media team received a 24-hour ban from posting on BuzzFeed's Facebook page.

And this is why Facebook should get out of the morality business to every last degree possible. An article about a hilarious, but innocent, educational illustration is being flagged, users are being hassled about their other photos on the site, and some folks are even getting banned. Because? Well, because it appears that Facebook moderators have the same perverse baseline psyche as the rest of us, resulting in an image of a man and a horse being compared physiologically becoming suspected horse-man-porn. And the article pointing out what it actually is is the one that got flagged. That's as much of a failure of this sort of thing as we could hope for.

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Google really wants the snapshots you take to have as much contextual information associated with them as possible. So much, in fact, the the Google Photos app can dip into your phone's location history (not just the GPS or other location data supplied by the camera app at the time of the shot) to tag it. At least one Android Police reader noticed that some of his photos had been amended with location data, despite the fact that he says he never turned the Save Location option on in the camera app.

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PSA: Google Photos Might Dip Into Your Location History To Retroactively Tag Photos Without Other Location Info was written by the awesome team at Android Police.