Brindle

As we do with each passing iteration of the Samsung Galaxy Note, we expect Samsung to go all out with the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 in terms of specs and unique features. Rumors are already telling us to expect ridiculousness such as 4GB of RAM and 4K video recording, and now you can add another one to the list.

According to info received by SamMobile, Samsung is planning to introduce an “ultrasonic cover” that can help visually impaired people make their way around. The ultrasonic sensor will send waves out in front of the user for purposes of identifying objects ahead of them. It could detect a wall or a pole and help you avoid it, for instance.

We’re not sure how accurate the technology is, but Samsung’s nowhere near confident enough to suggest you ditch a good ol’ cane or a seeing-eye dog. Here’s a quick alleged excerpt from the Note 4′s user guide about the thing:

The Product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. This Product is a non-medical device.

It cannot replace a cane and should never be used as a mobility aid or substitute for any mobility aid tool. It must always be used in combination with a cane, a dog guide, or a human guide because, by itself, it does not provide information necessary for safe travel.

The manual goes on to detail some of the pitfalls, including the accessory’s field of vision narrowing the further you set the sensor’s distance (you can set it to detect stuff from a short, medium or long distance). They also warn of objects dropping off at certain angles and distances, meaning it might miss an upcoming object if it’s not positioned or angled the right way.

It certainly doesn’t sound safe enough to be used alone, but it could be a pretty nice companion to your typical medical solutions. The feeling is that Samsung will look to introduce this thing alongside the Note 4 at their upcoming Unpacked event on September 3rd, so we’ll have to wait to see it for ourselves before passing final judgment.

Would this accessory help you or someone you know in their day-to-day life? Let us know in the comments below, and let us know if that alone would move you to buy a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 over any other phone this year!

Seen here with a hornet's nest on his head, 16-year old Alex Stone of Summerville, South Carolina, was arrested at school after writing a short story about killing his neighbor's pet dinosaur. A really short story. Like, it was two lines. My erotic dino fan fiction? Twenty-two 800+ page volumes. Six-point font.

Stone said he and his classmates were given an assignment to write a few sentences about themselves, and to list a "status" as if they were completing a Facebook post.

Wait -- what? An assignment to write a few sentences about yourself and a Facebook status? WHAT THE F*** KIND OF ASSIGNMENT IS THAT?! These are 16-year olds. I don't even remember doing anything so stupid on the first day of 3rd grade.

The teen wrote "I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur." In the status section, Stone said, he wrote "I bought the gun to take care of the business." His mom said she was angry that school administrators did not call her before contacting police, who arrested her son and charged him with disorderly conduct after he argued with officers.

Admittedly, that is really f***ing creepy to have written. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Alex, but I'm not saying there isn't anything NOT wrong with Alex either. Actually, the more I reread his writing the more I'm starting to wonder just what the hell is going on in this kid's head. "Says the guy who daydreams about boning dinosaurs." Hey -- those feelings are NATURAL. They're part of the human genetic code from our days as cavemen. Thanks to PYY, who agrees maybe Alex should have stuck to, "I need a haircut and I don't like to smile."

More than four years ago, we wrote about all the buzz that you were hearing about "cyberwar" was little more than an attempt to drum up FUD to get the government to throw billions of dollars at private contractors. We noted that Booz Allen Hamilton (yes, the last employer of one Ed Snowden) had hired former NSA director and also Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell as its Vice Chairman. He was the leading voice out there screaming about the threat of "cyberwar" getting on TV and having lots of opinion pieces in big name publications -- all of which mentioned his former government jobs, but almost none of which mentioned that his current employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, stood to make billions selling "solutions" to the government. And, indeed, Booz Allen has been raking in the cash on "cybersecurity."

This is worth keeping in mind as you read this fascinating interview with NSA whistleblower, Bill Binney, in which he lays this out plain and simple. The real reason for all this NSA surveillance is about money and power. "Stop terrorism" is secondary. After pointing out that all of this data collection has been basically useless in stopping terrorism (as confirmed by multiple independent accounts of the NSA's activities), the interviewer asks Binney why the NSA keeps doing it:

So why do they keep doing it?

Money. It takes a lot of money, you have to build up Bluffdale [the location of the NSA's data storage center, in Utah] to store all the data. If you collect all the data, you've got to store it, you have to hire more people to analyze it, you have to hire more contractors, managers to manage the flow. You have to start a big data initiative. It's an empire. Look at what they've built! Have you ever looked around all the buildings they've built up because of 9/11?

So that's what it's all about, expanding the budget for the intelligence community?

If you have a problem, you need money to solve it. But if you solve that problem, you no longer have the justification to get money. That's the way they view it - keep the problem going, so the money keeps flowing. Once you build up this big empire, you have to sustain it. ... Look at the influence and power the intelligence community has over the government. They [the government] are giving them everything they want, they're trying to cover up all their tracks and their crimes. Look at the influence and power they're gaining.

As Clay Shirky famously noted years ago, "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." That appears to absolutely be the case here. It's why there's so much FUD. The NSA and the rest of the intelligence community has built up the threat to be this huge issue that requires huge dollars as well. And once they have the huge dollars and the giant staff, they have to keep that up. So they have to create a continuing problem for which they are the solution -- and since it's all (mostly) done in secret, you get this nefarious circle (as opposed to virtuous), in which more FUD is spread, more money flows in and everyone has to justify themselves to keep it all going.

Whistleblowers like Binney and Snowden actually disrupt that circle and put a threat to the money flows.

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The European Court of Justice's awful "right to be forgotten" ruling is continuing to memory hole perfectly factual stories -- but publications like the BBC are bringing them back to light. Google has informed the BBC of 12 more stories that it is removing from its index thanks to requests from individuals who'd prefer that their history no longer be accessible to the public. While Google does not reveal who is making the request, it's often not too difficult to figure it out -- even though Google is now warning the BBC that sometimes the requester's name may only be in the comments.

Two stories relate to the high-profile case of a British woman found guilty of running "one of Europe's biggest prostitution rings" in 2003.

Other stories taken down covered a wide range of incidents. Google removed a 2002 story concerning a dispute between two Somerset families over the ownership of a wire-haired terrier called Wellie.

Another removed story concerns a car thief branded an "idiot" by his own barrister, while yet another features an 18-year-old Bristol student convicted of drink-driving after crashing his Mini into the steps of his university campus.

Some of the other listed, but memory-holed articles:

A man cleared of a stabbing in London in 2010

The jailing of a former Daily Mail employee who threatened to hack the newspaper in 2000

A 2009 diary entry from the BBC's then-Jerusalem correspondent Tim Franks on the merits of hummus

A 2005 page of appeals from those looking for family members missing after the Asia tsunami

A selection of readers' comments on the terror threat posed by al-Qaeda in 2005

I'm still trying to figure out what good this effort accomplishes. Deleting factual things makes no sense. Allowing people to go back and erase perhaps embarrassing things from their past may have a visceral appeal, but it's just silly. People do embarrassing things that they later regret. It's a part of life. Part of maturing is being able to admit that you did silly things in the past and that you learned from them. Trying to disappear them down the memory hole seems to highlight how an immature person remained immature.

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Today's copyright-induced stupidity is brought to you by… a whole host of regulatory institutions. An anonymous Techdirt reader sent in a pointer to this ridiculous warning that greets those accessing the National Association of Legal Assistants practice tests. (Press "Sign In" to view the legal threats pop-up.)

These online practice tests and all items contained herein are protected by federal copyright law. No part of this examination may be copied, reproduced or shared in any manner, in part or whole, by any means whatsoever, including memorization or electronic transmission.

While I realize there have been several attempts to broaden the coverage of copyright and extend its length towards the far end of perpetuity, I was unaware that federal copyright law now provides remedies for the creation of infringing memories.

This would be merely inane (but still noteworthy), if this stupidity began and ended with the NALA's stern warning. But a search for that wording finds examples elsewhere.

Here's the National Board of Chiropractic Examiners making the same ridiculous claim:

These sample tests and all items contained herein are protected by federal copyright law. No part of these tests may be copied, reproduced, or shared in any manner, in part or in whole, by any means whatsoever, including memorization or electronic transmission.

Here's Michigan State University going one step further than the previous two and basically stating that studying for a test is copyright infringement.

The examination and the items contained therein are protected by copyright law. No part of this examination may be copied or reproduced in part or whole by any means whatsoever, including memorization, note-taking, or electronic transmission.

Who else thinks copyright law forbids the storage of infringing copies in the original cloud storage system, the human brain?

• American Board of Perianesthesia Nursing Certification
• Texas Pharmacy Technician Certification Board
• American Association of Veterinary State Boards
• Oncology Nursing Certification Corporation
• National Commission for Health Education Credentialing, Inc.

The list goes on from there, but as you can see, anyone offering some sort of expensive testing process/licensing claims you can't memorize their tests. How they aim to prevent this remains unanswered. Presumably, if someone duplicates the test from memory and offers these materials to others, they would pursue this as infringement.

It's clear they're trying to head off students selling questions and answers, something that could undermine the certification system. (Of course, these agencies could change their questions from year-to-year to head this off, but that would be far more difficult than just smacking around applicants with highly-dubious legal language.) But claiming that memorization is forbidden under copyright law is just idiotic. Unauthorized duplication and distribution might be, but creating cached copies in your mind while studying certainly isn't. It's an integral part of studying for tests. Throughout their educational existence, students use memorization to become familiar with the subject matter, and now, when they attempt to apply that in hopes of receiving certification, they're greeted with notices that say this practice is against the law.

Then there's the question of fair use, that awkward part of copyright protection that many rights holders tend to ignore. A few sample questions being reproduced would be an obvious case of fair use, but according to the (literally) "don't even think about it" warnings, this would also be an actionable offense.

A better solution would be to simply strike that asinine wording and deal with actual duplication of test materials that stretch beyond the limits of fair use. Those performing these acts of infringement are generally in it to profit from those who can't be bothered to learn the material. Chances are, most people wouldn't view the edited legal preamble as providing a but-I-can-store-it-in-my-brain loophole. The same goes for note-taking, which a few of these notices also single out. The problem isn't the person's notes, which are still personal. It's the duplication and distribution to the public. You can still keep people from taking notes during the actual tests, but you certainly can't keep them from remembering what they've seen.

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We've been writing about the militarization of police, and why it's problematic, for years -- but the events of the last week in Ferguson, Missouri, have really shone a (rather bright) light on what happens when you militarize the police. Annie Lowrey, over at New York Magazine, highlights what may be most disturbing about all of it: all of this has happened while violence has been on a rapid decline, and, no it's not because your local suburban police force now has a SWAT team and decommissioned military equipment from the Defense Department:

Since 1990, according to Department of Justice statistics, the United States has become a vastly safer place, at least in terms of violent crime. (Drug crime follows somewhat different trends, though drug use has been dropping over the same time period.) The number of murders dropped to 14,827 in 2012 from 23,438 in 1990. The number of rapes has plummeted to 84,376 from 102,555. The number of robberies, motor-vehicle thefts, assaults — all have seen similarly large declines. And the number of incidents has dropped even though the country has grown.

[....]

And there’s no evidence that giving police officers the weapons of war has had anything to do with that decline in crime, either, with researchers pegging it to a combination of factors, among them the removal of lead from paint and gasoline, an increase in abortion rates, and improved policing methods.

So, instead, we get a very militarized police -- and tons of cases where it is being used in cases that absolutely don't warrant it. At all.

And here's the really disturbing thing. It may get a lot worse. As Vanity Fair notes, on June 19th, Rep. Alan Grayson had offered up an amendment on the Defense Appropriations bill, which would have limited the militarization of police. And it failed by a wide margin. Included in those voting against it? The guy who represents Ferguson.

The amendment attracted the support of only 62 members, while 355 voted against it (14 didn’t vote). Included among those voting against it was Rep. William Lacy Clay (D), who represents Ferguson. Clay was joined by every senior member of the Democratic Party leadership team, including Reps. Nancy Pelosi (CA), Steny Hoyer (MD), and Assistant Democratic Leader James Clyburn (SC). Democrats did form the bulk of support for the amendment (with 43 votes in favor), with 19 Republicans supporting as well—led by libertarian-conservative Rep. Justin Amash (MI), who lamented that “military-grade equipment . . . shouldn’t be used on the street by state and local police” on his Facebook page.

Apparently, arming the police with military equipment has powerful lobbying support. Because why expect people to think about what actually makes sense when there's money and FUD on the line:

Why was there such tremendous opposition to the Grayson-Amash effort? Two very powerful constituencies in Congress may be to blame: the defense industry, and the police lobby.

Take Rep. Clay. He has been all over the news media calling for justice in his district, and demanding an investigation of Brown’s death. Yet like every House member, he is up for re-election every two years, and his fourth-largest donor is the political action committee of the weapons maker Boeing.

So there's that. And then, let's take things up a notch. Scott Greenfield alerts us to the news that a judge over in Colorado has determined that the Cinemark Theater where James Holmes opened fired on the opening night of the Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises" may have some responsibility because it should have known that such an attack might happen. Despite the fact that there has never been such a shooting in a theater, the judge says that the theater should have been prepared for such a possibility:

Noting "the grim history of mass shootings and mass killings that have occurred in more recent times," U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson ruled that Cinemark — owner of the Century Aurora 16 theater — could have predicted that movie patrons might be targeted for an attack. Jackson's ruling allows 20 lawsuits filed by survivors of the attack or relatives of those killed to proceed toward trial.

"Although theaters had theretofore been spared a mass shooting incident, the patrons of a movie theater are, perhaps even more than students in a school or shoppers in a mall, 'sitting ducks,' " Jackson wrote.

That makes absolutely no sense. But the inevitable result, as Greenfield notes, seems to be a lot more militarized police -- and now, private security guards... everywhere. Just in case.

Consider, if what happened in Aurora, the duty of businesses to be prepared for the act of a one-in-a-million crazy. The biggest growth job in America will be armed guard. Every theater will require its own SWAT team, perhaps a MRAP or Bearcat. Office buildings, parks, skating rinks, pretty much anywhere more than three people gather, could be the next target of a madman. They will all need security, armed with the weapons needed to take out any crazy.

Don’t blame the businesses. They’re just trying to cover their foreseeable obligations. Sure, there is almost no chance, almost no possibility whatsoever, that they will be the target of the next insane shooter, but Judge Jackson says it’s still foreseeable. In fact, that no one has ever shot up a skating rink makes it even more foreseeable, by his rationale.

It is difficult to comprehend how profoundly screwed up all of this is.

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A man in line at a Burger King bought all 23 pies available (links to Reddit post with more info) to spite the little jerk behind him screaming, "I want a f***ing PIE" and punching his mother. You know, because sometimes you need to parent people's kids for them. The whole worthwhile story:

So a while ago I had decided to treat myself and go to Burger King. I hadn't had the greatest of days and I had a headache coming on. It was a very long line and I was at the end of it waiting patiently. When behind me comes this woman yapping on her cellphone with a little monster of a child. This kid was out of control, screaming, punching his mother throwing around a gameboy whenever something didn't go right in the game. The mother didn't seem to pay any attention to him and his continued yelling of 'I want a F***ing PIE'. After about 5 minutes of the line with these people behind me, I had gone from a headache to a full on migraine, but nothing was going to stop me from getting those burgers. I calmly turn and ask her nicely if she can please calm or quiet her child down. Immediately she gets up in my face telling me I can't tell her nothing about raising her child and to mind my own business. I nod and turn around, shes still yelling at the back of my head when the child cries out again how he wants a pie, the mother consoles him, calling him sweety and ensuring they'll get pies for lunch because she loves him so much. Things immediately go back to the they were and I wait another 5 minutes before getting to the front of the line. It turns out it was so slow because they had 1 trainee on cash during the lunch hour rush. All I can think of is how the people behind me ruined my splurge and gave me this headache. I then decide to ruin their day. I order every pie they have left in addition to my burgers. Turned out to be 23 pies in total, I take my order and walk towards the exit. Moments later I hear the woman yelling, what do you mean you don't have any pies left, who bought them all? I turn around and see the cashier pointing me out with the woman shooting me a death glare. I stand there and pull out a pie and slowly start eating eat as I stare back at her. She starts running towards me but can't get to me because of other lineups in the food court. I turn and slowly walk away.

Wow, what a solid performance. I think I need a minute. "Wait -- are you crying?" I'm sorry, this just makes me so happy. I saw we all hit up BK tonight and buy out the pies to honor this brave soul. He also deserves a holiday named after him. I suggest BK Pie Guy Day. It can replace Presidents' Day. Thanks to Silvermidnight and Luc, who are now convinced real-life superheroes do exist.

According to their recently published earnings report, 2.3-million people still pay for AOL internet access. For reference, that is 2.3-million people too many. But presumably they're all going to die soon and the problem will right itself.

...every quarter the company reports its remaining subscription service suckers, a delightful yet depressing nugget of intel. AOL took home $143 million of operating income from that division--more than the rest of the company combined did--meaning those unfortunates pay out, on average, $20.86 per month for a service that's at best redundant and at worst utterly useless. That's up over a dollar from a few years ago. There's some good news, though; the rate of decline in subscribers appears to be strong, down about a third since the beginning of 2011.

As someone in the Gizmodo comments pointed out, there are still some places in the US where dial-up service is the only option. Those places are what most people refer to as "shitholes". We get it, you're stockpiling weapons and trying to start a militia. Luckily for you, the Anarchist Cookbook is a quick download, even on dial-up. Thanks to BBQ, who misses the hissing and screeching of a dial-up modem connecting.

The next Netflix won't stand a chance if the largest US Internet service providers are allowed to merge or demand extra fees from content companies trying to reach their subscribers.

Color me unamazed. Politicians who are in favor of the government's 1033 program -- which distributes excess military gear and weapons to police departments engaged in our country's two favorite "wars" (v. Terror, v. Drugs) -- received a lot more money from defense contractors than those who oppose it.

Maplight, which tracks contributions to politicians, uncovered more evidence that private companies can get the legislative results they want if they just a$k nicely.

In June, the House of Representatives voted on an amendment from Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) that sought to partially defund the 1033 Program. The amendment failed on a bipartisan vote of 62-355.

Representatives voting to continue funding the 1033 Program have received, on average, 73 percent more money from the defense industry than representatives voting to defund it.

Fifty-nine representatives received more than $100,000 from the defense industry from January 1, 2011 - December 31, 2013. Of those only four supported defunding the 1033 Program.

This amendment didn't even target some of the common transfers: assault rifles, night vision goggles, etc.. These common indicators of police militarization would have continued to flow from the US government to law enforcement agencies unabated. Instead, 355 legislators voted that local law enforcement should still be allowed access to the following equipment:

Aircraft (Including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), Armored Vehicles, Grenade Launchers, Silencers, Toxicological Agents, Launch Vehicles, Guided Missiles, Ballistic Missiles, Rockets, Torpedoes, Bombs, Mines, or Nuclear Weapons

One wonders if armored vehicles and drones had been struck from the list, the vote might have been more even. But phrased the way it was, if you still wanted your local PDs to acquire MRAPs, silencers and helicopters, you had to also give them the theoretical ability to requisition toxicological agents and ballistic missiles.

I don't imagine the government will be handing out guided missiles and nukes to law enforcement EVER, but what can be requisitioned is still partially a secret and information released to Muckrock by the Defense Logistics Agency only denotes which state received what, rather than indicate which law enforcement agencies were involved.

But even if the government has no intention of turning local law enforcement into full-fledged armies with nuclear/biological weapon capabilities, it's still handing over weapons and vehicles with little to no discretion. As Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post notes, if you can fill out one very simple form, you'll be able to roll down Main Street, USA in an armored tactical vehicle bristling with military assault rifles.

Applying for federal student aid? You'll need to fill out a 10 page application. Social Security retirement benefits come with an eight-page form, a passport application is six pages, and the shortform Obamacare application is five.

But if you are a law enforcement agency in the U.S., you can apply for a free armored tactical vehicle from the Pentagon with a simple one-page form, below. You can even apply for multiple vehicles using the same form!

Ingraham's article oversimplifies the process somewhat (a few layers of pre-approval are needed), but the fact remains that it's incredibly easy to outfit local law enforcement units with military gear. A vetting process with some teeth would likely have prevented small towns from acquiring vehicles designed to protect soldiers in combat zones from explosives.

Crime is way down and police are more heavily-armed and well-protected than ever. Part of it is defense contractors making sure there's still a growing market for their wares. As Maplight points out (quoting an ACLU report on police militarization), 36% of the equipment transferred to law enforcement via the 1033 program is brand new. What may have seemed to be a fiscally responsible program -- making use of excess military equipment rather than simply scrapping it -- is now another way to blow tax dollars. Only this time, it's having other adverse effects on the general public.

When the Defense Logistics Agency is buying brand new and transferring these purchases to law enforcement at pennies on the dollar (using DHS grants to pay the difference), the government is screwing taxpayers multiple times, at multiple levels -- and that's just in a financial sense. We shouldn't need an amendment to tell the Defense Dept. to stop turning locals cops into makeshift occupation forces, and we certainly shouldn't need to tell the government that no law enforcement agency needs ballistic missiles or bombs. Local cops really don't need armored vehicles either, but until legislators are willing to enact some serious limitations, the downhill slope from the DoD's excess property storage to the United States' police departments will continue unabated.

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With some of the proceedings unsealed in the EFF's long-running Jewel vs. NSA lawsuit, more details can finally be exposed. Not that what's already been exposed hasn't been damning enough. Over the past several months, the DOJ has run interference for the NSA, traveling from courtroom to courtroom, destroying and saving (or at least pretending to...) collected data amongst a flurry of contradictory orders.

Not that it ultimately mattered. The NSA just kept destroying relevant evidence, claiming the system was too complex to do anything with but allow to run its course. Evidence would be destroyed at the 5-year limit, no matter what preservation orders were issued. The NSA, of course, has a vested interest in destroying evidence that its 215 and 702 programs collect the data and communications of Americans. Thanks to Snowden's leaks, it can no longer pretend it doesn't. But despite this, the DOJ still claims Section 702 targets only foreigners and American suspects located outside of the US.

The mock concern about compliance with court orders was a hustle. The DOJ wants as much evidence that might be useful to plaintiffs gone as swiftly as possible. Thanks to the unsealing of Jewel court documents, the EFF can now relate that the DOJ's efforts went much further than simply letting aged-off collections expire. It also actively tried to change the historical record of the Jewel case, as Mike covered here recently.

Citing classification concerns, the DOJ sought to editorialize its statements to the court, removing them (not redacting them) from the public record… and it didn't want anyone to find out. Take a moment to soak in the audacity of this request, made by the US government in a federal court.

If the judge had sided with the DOJ, there's a good chance some of the transcript embedded below would have gone missing… forever. Even after the documents were eventually unsealed, whatever the government had managed to convince the court was "classified" would no longer exist -- despite the fact that one week earlier these statements were made in an open court room.

It's likely that the judge's decision to notify the plaintiffs changed the DOJ's mind about retconning its own statements. It's a good thing nothing's missing. What's in there is terrible. The DOJ basically mounts the argument that no plaintiff should ever have standing to challenge either the Section 215/501 or 702 programs, unless they are Verizon Business customers… and even then they should only be able to challenge the former. (Apologies for the all caps, but that's the way the court transcribed it.)

AND WE SET THIS FORTH, AGAIN, FOR THIS COURT IN OUR MOST RECENT FILING IN WHICH THE DNI ASSERTED THE STATES SECRET PRIVILEGE AND EXPLAINED TO THE COURT THAT NOTWITHSTANDING ALL THESE TERRIBLE DISCLOSURES THAT OCCURRED OVER THE PAST YEAR -- IN FACT, THIS IS THE ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY -- DISCLOSURES THAT WE ARE CONVINCED THAT HAVE SERIOUSLY HARMED THE NATIONAL SECURITY OF THIS COMPANY, WE HAVE CONTINUED TO PROTECT THE IDENTITY OF PARTICULAR TELECOMMUNICATION CARRIERS THAT ARE ALLEGED TO HAVE ASSISTED THE NSA, NOT ONLY IN THE SECTION 215 PROGRAM, WHICH WAS AT ISSUE IN THE CASES YOU CITED, BUT ALSO IN THE PRESIDENT'S SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM, ACTIVITIES WHICH ARE AT ISSUE IN JEWEL AND SHUBERT, AS WELL.

SO WE HAVE NOT CONCEDED THAT STANDING COULD BE FOUND BASED ON THE MERE EXISTENCE OF THE BULK TELEPHONY META DATA PROGRAM, IF THAT IS YOUR QUESTION.

Got that, citizens? Because we have made the choice to protect telcos withhold information, you will only have standing to challenge these programs under very narrow circumstances. The government is looking out for the best interests of its partners in surveillance. The rights of citizens are much further down the list.

And while acknowledging that it has withheld info on the telephony metadata program, the DOJ's lawyers simultaneously claim the plaintiffs should have been prevented from amending their case to include the recent Section 702 revelations, because that program has supposedly been out in the open and fully transparent since 2008.

SO I HARDLY KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN. BUT I WILL START WITH THIS. FIRST OF ALL, THE CONTENTION THAT 702 DID NOT EXIST WHEN THE COMPLAINT WAS FILED IS A FALSEHOOD. 702 WAS ENACTED IN 2008, IN JULY OF 2008, AS PART OF THE FISA ACT AMENDMENTS OF 2008.

NOT ONLY DID IT EXIST BEFORE THIS COMPLAINT WAS FILED, THE JEWEL PLAINTIFFS KNEW ABOUT IT, BECAUSE IT'S PRECISELY WHY THEY FILED SUIT. THAT LEGISLATION CREATED IMMUNITY FOR THE TELECOMMUNICATION COMPANIES.

THE ACLU OVER IN NEW YORK, KNEW QUITE WELL IT EXISTED. THEY FILED A COMPLAINT, I THINK, THE DAY IT WAS ENACTED INTO LAW. AND THAT MADE A LOT OF HEADLINES, AND IT WAS LITIGATED. AND IT WAS ALL, ALL PUBLIC. NO SECRET PROGRAM. AND IT WAS OUT THERE. SO THAT STATEMENT IS JUST NOT TRUE.

THE SECOND THING THAT'S NOT TRUE IS HER PROGRAM DESCRIPTION. 702 IS A PUBLIC STATUTORY PROGRAM. IF YOU LOOK AT THE AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL DECISION, IT DETAILS HOW THAT PROGRAM OPERATES. AND SO THAT IS THE SOURCE OF WHAT SHOULD BE THE COURT'S UNDERSTANDING FOR THIS PROGRAM AND HOW IT OPERATES.

Completely disingenuous. The program was never "out in the open." It protected telcos and helped codify warrantless wiretapping, but there was never any indication given that it also allowed the NSA to tap into the internet backbone and siphon off communications of Americans. And it certainly wasn't presented as a tool to be used as an untargeted dragnet.

This is only a small part of a document the DOJ wanted to selectively edit and present later as an untouched factual record of a federal hearing. The government claims no one has standing because everything related to the NSA's programs is "rank speculation" -- basically pretending the "terrible disclosures" never happened. In the same breath, it claims the programs have always been transparent and completely above board, therefore no one should be able to amend their complaints when additional info is exposed by leakers.

The government not only wants it both ways, but it has the breathtaking gall to ask to touch up its talking points after delivering them. After a dozen attempts to wrap up this post with something that pithily highlights the anger the government's editing attempt (and the horrible arguments contained in the transcript) has generated in me, I'm left with little more than this: FUCK THE DOJ -- it and every agency it oversees.

It witholds information about the companies involved in its dragnet surveillance programs, covers up everything else and pretends unauthorized disclosures "don't count," at least not when it comes to citizens being granted standing. It could easily clear up this "rank speculation," but it would rather shelter telcos from irate customers and give itself an easy way to get lawsuits dismissed. Then it spins everything around and claims the plaintiffs are misrepresenting the programs to the court -- something the DOJ has actually done itself -- and should not be allowed to amend complaints to reflect additional evidence gleaned from leaked documents.

Hey, I'm sorry the leaks have made it harder for these agencies to do whatever the hell they want, but they are all part of a government that's supposed to be accountable to the citizens picking up the check. But when faced with unhappy citizens and their diminished rights, all the DOJ's lawyers can say is that the public doesn't know shit and has no right to question the government's activities.

The government has somehow managed to come to a conclusion others reached weeks ago -- there's more than one leaker out there. GOOD. Burn it down. In the DOJ's hands, the government isn't by or for the people. It's despite the people. The DOJ can't be trusted to protect the balance between privacy and security. As it sees it, what the public doesn't know will likely hurt it, and it's damned if it's going to allow citizens to seek redress for their grievances.

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An anonymous reader writes "In an attempt to keep you from having to explain to your crazy relatives that despite what they read, Vice President Biden *didn't* get a grow light delivered to the White House under a fake name, Facebook is testing a "satire" tag on news feeds. A Facebook representative issued the following statement to Ars Technica: "We are running a small test which shows the text '[Satire]' in front of links to satirical articles in the related articles unit in News Feed. This is because we received feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After covering the militarized police fiasco in Ferguson, Missouri the past few days, including highlighting Anil Dash's rather simple point that the way to deal with angry protestors isn't to make them angrier, it appears that someone finally got the message. Missouri's governor kicked out the St. Louis County police, who were responsible for much of the previous escalation, and sent in the Missouri State Highway Patrol, who almost immediately set a very different tone -- one that involved a much smaller police presence, and one that was a lot friendlier. It even involved talking with (not just to) protestors in a cordial manner. The most striking image -- a complete reversal of the day before -- has to be Captain Ron Johnson, who was put in charge, walking with the protestors (in ordinary police garb) rather than having militarized police aiming high powered weaponry at them.

Capt. Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol walks along with the Ferguson march. Compare this to Wednesday. pic.twitter.com/Vtezu4MuHk

— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) August 14, 2014

It's almost as if treating the public as people with rights who the police are supposed to be serving, rather than as an enemy that needs invading... works better. Who would have expected that, other than, well, most normal people?

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"If you see something, say something" is the (hilariously trademarked) phrase that has become something of a ridiculous "spy on your neighbors" cliche in the years following September 11, 2001. Law enforcement types use it all the time. However, apparently, they don't want you to say (or, more specifically, tweet) something, if the "something" you see happens to be the police themselves. We've written so many stories about uninformed police insisting that it's illegal to photograph or videotape them in action -- even though they're completely wrong about that. Amazingly, even the Justice Department has found itself constantly reminding police that it's perfectly legal for citizens to photograph and videotape police.

However, over in Washington State, the police are apparently taking a preemptive approach to citizen criminal-enablers and their mobile phones. They've kicked off a marketing campaign telling people not to share photos of SWAT teams and police on social media.

Police in Washington state are asking the public to stop tweeting during shootings and manhunts to avoid accidentally telling the bad guys what officers are doing.

The "TweetSmart" campaign began in late July by a coalition of nine agencies, including the Washington state patrol and the Seattle police, and aims to raise awareness about social media's potential impact on law enforcement.

They claim, of course, that this is about not tipping off criminals about what's going on:

"All members of the public may not understand the implications of tweeting out a picture of SWAT team activity," said Nancy Kolb, who oversees the Alexandria, Virginia, organization's Center for Social Media.

"It's a real safety issue, not only for officers but anyone in the vicinity," Kolb said.

But that seems ridiculous and unsupported in so many ways. First of all, it assumes that the "criminals" being gone after with SWAT teams are actively watching Twitter for the latest reports of SWAT teams mobilizing. Hell, you'd think it would be a lot "safer" for everyone else in the area to find out that there's something going down and to maybe stay inside until it's over.

It seems a hell of a lot more likely that this campaign is really an underhanded way to shut down the public's civil liberties in overseeing what the police are doing by photographing and videotaping them. In fact, a spokesman for the Washington State police, Bob Calkins, more or less admits that this is all about stopping people from taping the police:

"We have to respond with a smart phone almost as fast as we respond with a gun," said Calkins, who along with Kolb commended the Seattle Police Department for its use of social media.

That seems rather chilling, especially given the number of times we've seen police claim that a phone might be a gun. Police across the country need to realize that they serve the public. Treating smartphones as guns and encouraging censorship doesn't seem to be achieving those goals.

Indeed, as reporter Mónica Guzmán notes about all of this:

When any entity that holds power over us encourages us to limit our expression for any reason, it is probably better for us to err on the side of expressing more than it would want than less.

Guzmán also counters the narrative that the Washington Police want to spread. Calkins, the guy who talked about responding to a phone like a gun, claims that his feelings on this date back to the well-known manhunt in Lakewood five years ago:

"I saw it personally as far back as Lakewood," said State Patrol spokesman Bob Calkins, referring to social media traffic during the manhunt for a man wanted for killing four officers in Washington state in 2009.

At the time, people speculated online about why police were combing a Seattle park while a search was on for the man, Calkins said.

The AP article says that this event contributed to the police's determination that they need to train people to shut up on Twitter. Yet Guzmán remembers the event very differently:

During the 2009 manhunt of Lakewood, Wash., police shooter Maurice Clemmons, Seattleites were scared. Neighbors gave each other peace of mind by sharing what they saw, where, and where danger seemed to be headed, in real time. All that buzz drew attention to the effort, resulting in hundreds of tips to police from all over and a sense of unity that brought the city together in support of our officers.

In other words, seeing the police and tweeting about it actually helped that situation, rather than hurt it. While the police in Washington may claim they're just trying to keep people safe by asking them to not tweet what they see, it really seems that the safety they're protecting is their own reputation.

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Recently, the FCC released most of the comments it has received so far -- commenting is still open for a few more weeks -- concerning its (pretty bad) net neutrality proposal as XML files for people to analyze. There have been a few attempts, but the most interesting so far has to come from data analytics firm Quid on behalf of the Knight Foundation and revealed in an NPR article. The key reasons pulled from the comments that standout and cluster are definitely interesting and worth noting, but what's much more noticeable is what's missing from the map: any significant argument against having the FCC step in and stop the broadband companies from screwing up the internet. The folks who put this together note that there were certainly some such comments, but just not enough to matter:

The comments did include "anti" net neutrality positions. They included statements opposing the "FCC's crippling new regulations," as commenters wrote. But they came from a form letter, or template, and all comment clusters that came from templates (five separate ones in all, four of five supporting net neutrality) were collapsed into a single node.

Taken with the entire body of comments sampled, there weren't enough unique or organic anti-net-neutrality comments to register on the map.

The analysis shows that about 50% of the comments came from templates (again, many of them coming from "pro net neutrality") folks, but it's fascinating to see that once you get outside of the form letters, the number of anti-net neutrality letters basically doesn't register. That's kind of interesting to me, because I've actually been building a list of just those letters (I've found a few) and trying to reach out to the folks who wrote them to find out what made them write those letters. I've made contact with a few, but as soon as I explain what I'm doing... they all stop responding. I hope to have more on this soon.

Either way, it seems fairly clear that, of the people who actually took the time to express their full opinions about net neutrality, almost all of them are in favor of having the FCC actually do something real. The only question is if the FCC will ever actually listen.

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As the Ferguson, MO saga continues to unfold, there are certainly lessons to be learned. An overly-militarized police force coupled with the oppression of free speech and the press aren't good ways for managing an angry population, for instance. Conversely, a police force that actually connects and serves with the community they're tasked with policing produces far better results. And, of course, we're all forced to have yet another discussion about race-relations in this ostensibly free and equal country of ours. These are good conversations to have.

Strange calls to video game companies that will be releasing a long-produced game featuring militarized police, insinuating that they must somehow be cognizant of Ferguson now that it's happened, are not useful in any way. That link serves as the kind of Kotaku article that features the gaming website occasionally going completely off the rails and twisting itself into angsty-wrong for reasons unknown to this writer. The piece starts with some of the frightening images we've all seen from Ferguson and then tailspins into this:

Into a world where Ferguson has now happened, where people around the world are confused and outraged at this type of police appearance and presence, EA is going to release a video game about heavily-armed police blowin' shit up on the streets of the USA. Nathan wrote about people's concerns (and EA's responses) with Battlefield Hardline's subject matter earlier this year, but that was a piece inhabiting a vacant plot of the media and cultural landscape, where the only thing present were those concerns. Now, we have some reality to sit alongside them.

Ah, yes, fantastic point. The company that made a fictional game set in real-world American locales must now be concerned because said game features aggressive and militarized police and Ferguson just happened! Because prior to Ferguson, police were never militarized. Before Ferguson, a militarized police forces had never scared the shit out of everyone. That whole thing after the Boston Marathon bombing where the police shut down a major city and rolled SWAT tanks through the streets? Never happened, yo. Police brutalizing civilians wasn't a thing until Missouri.

Except that none of that is true. The game is a work of fictionalized entertainment and, just because the subject matter might somehow remind some folks of a police issue this country is facing, there isn't a whole lot to do from EA's standpoint. As this article admits, before then wishing upon a rainbow that somehow EA would treat their game product like not-a-game product.

So what are EA to do? Well, there's not much they can do, or to be honest anyone should ask them to with regards to Hardline. The game was announced months ago and is well on its way to being completed...What I'd hope EA do, however, and this goes for all video game publishers, is to take the subject matter a little more seriously next time they want to approach it. There's a deeply unsavory element to casting police as assault rifle-toting warriors, one that in the wake of Ferguson - and its inevitable successors - video game companies would do well to remember and be a little more careful with.

I mean, you can say that if you want, but then you had damned well better be calling for the same thing when it comes to the issue of crime in this country and Grand Theft Auto, the issue of war in this country and something like a third of the games ever produced, the issue of animal cruelty and trades-workers in this country and the Mario Bros. franchise. Or, instead, we could realize that slamming makers of entertainment and art for not flinch-reacting to the news of the day, even really important news, is probably a silly thing to do.

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The message arrives on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. “Change in plans,” my contact says. “Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.”

Just over a year ago, Techdirt reported on big pharma's application to run a new .pharmacy domain, and later on an attempt by Canadian pharmacies to prevent that happening. They failed, apparently (found via Intellectual Property Watch):

As the registry operator of the new .pharmacy domain, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP), under a contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), will soon provide a means for identifying safe online pharmacies and resources. Under the Association’s Registry Agreement, executed with ICANN on June 19, 2014, the new .pharmacy generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) will be available only to legitimate online pharmacies and related entities located in the United States or other countries. The Registry Agreement also includes a number of safeguards intended to protect consumers around the world.

The question is: what will "only available to legitimate online pharmacies" and "intended to protect consumers" mean in practice? The concern is that these are euphemisms for big pharma shutting out those competitors offering lower-cost products, particular foreign pharmacies, and manufacturers of generics. That fear is not assuaged by the following comment from the NABP in its response to such concerns (pdf)

the .PHARMACY TLD will provide a powerful tool to educate consumers, distinguish legitimate Internet pharmacies from the thousands of rogue Internet drug outlets, and reinforce the value of purchasing medications only from trusted online sources.

Big pharma is clearly as keen as the copyright industries to "educate" consumers about what they ought to be doing. The danger here is that such "education" will include not trusting perfectly safe pharmacies outside the US (in Canada, for example), and not using much cheaper generics. Since NABP now controls this entire domain it will have a free hand to block any outfit that does not subscribe to those views, and thus to attempt to delegitimize them in the eyes of the consumer.

This is something new. Hitherto, there has been no danger of this kind of discrimination against particular classes of Internet users, since registry operators were focused on maximizing profits by getting as many domains issued as possible. That won't be the case for .pharmacy, where the aim is to police the online pharmacy world, and to protect the generous profits of big pharma -- not make a few dollars selling a domain or two. Assuming that happens, we can probably expect other industries to follow suit in creating and controlling new domains, and for the Internet to become less free and neutral.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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In the wake of Eric Garner's death via cop chokehold, the NYPD is coming under all sorts of additional scrutiny. This is in addition to the appointed oversight ordered by Judge Scheindlin after finding that elements of its infamous stop-and-frisk program were unconstitutional. Scott Greenfield has a very stark recounting of the incident, as well as a recording of Eric Garner's last moments. (Here's additional footage, which includes the officer who applied the lethal chokehold waving at the camera, as well as several officers gamely pretending Garner is simply passed out.)

The unexpected happened when the official medical examiner's report failed to find that the 400-lb Garner (who is heard repeatedly telling officers he can't breathe) had simply dropped dead of a heart attack or pre-existing health conditions -- something that supposedly would have happened with or without a cop applying direct pressure to his windpipe. Instead, the report contained a word rarely found in examinations following in-custody deaths: homicide.

The largest union within the NYPD -- the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association -- couldn't have been expecting that. But PBA president Pat Lynch still managed to find something spinnable about the entire situation, greatly aided by the convenient arrest of the cameraman on weapons charges.

The New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest union representing NYPD officers, said in a statement that it was “criminals like Mr. Orta who carry illegal firearms who stand to benefit the most by demonizing the good work of police officers.”

It wobbles horribly, but it still spins. Here's Scott Greenfield:

Come on, you have to be impressed by the statement. The problem is no longer [Officer] Pantaleo killing Garner, but “criminals like Mr. Orta who carry illegal firearms who stand to benefit the most by demonizing the good work of police officers.” This is poetry. This is genius. It was all about criminals demonizing cops, not cops killing people.

As nearly impossible as it is to "demonize" someone with an unaltered recording of their actions, Lynch found a way to at least attempt to flip the narrative. Orta is a criminal. Pantaleo is a police officer. Lynch's statement asks the public to choose a side. Do you want to side with criminals, or do you want to let bygones be bygones (including the occasional homicide) and side with New York's finest?

It may well be the reddest of herrings, the most irrelevant of questions, but it will be the focus of the attack on the video necessary to show how Police Officer Pantaleo killed Garner. And no doubt Lynch took a deep breath upon learning of Orta’s arrest, and how his tenure as PBA president was again secure by the opportunity to show that “police officers routinely risk their lives for the benefit of the community,” and so the least we can do in return is forgive them the occasional killing.

But it's not just criminals the police (and their supporters) are looking to, well, demonize in hopes of steering the narrative. It's everyone. Everyone who doesn't wear NYPD blue. (via The Honest Courtesan)

Under the misleading* headline "Why assaults on the NYPD are on the rise," the New York Post gathers the following quotes from NYPD officers, ranging from obnoxiously self-centered to truly heinous.

* How many people have been booked for assault for simply touching an officer or worse, being on the receiving end of a beating?

Assaults on police officers are up 4 percent this year compared with last year — a disturbing new trend that’s part of an emerging disrespect for authority on the street, cops and experts told The Post.

Disrespect, like respect, is earned. You can earn respect, or you can squander it. Disrespect doesn't arise on its own. If "authority" doesn't like this, it has ways of changing this. Unfortunately, it means making difficult changes and dealing with ingrained attitudes and prejudices.

“The biggest thing is that you’re going to see more cops get hurt, and that’s the sad part,” said one Manhattan cop, blaming it on the decreased use of “stop, question and frisk...”

This may be partially right but for the wrong reasons. When the NYPD could stop nearly anyone for no reason at all, it had basically ordained harassment and intimidation. With this gone, fewer people are going to keep their heads down and eyes averted and simply allow the police to shove them up against the nearest wall or bend them over the nearest squad car hood.

So, who's to blame for this rise in assaults? It's the citizens themselves, apparently. It's their fault that it's hard (or slightly harder) to be a New York cop these days.

“The streets are absolutely more dangerous for other people, too,” said the officer, adding the rise of cellphone videography is also problematic, since suspects “want to put on a show for the camera.”

(And cops don't want to be watched...) So, First Amendment-protected activity is part of the problem. What else?

“People feel they have more rights and they can’t be stopped. There is no respect,” said a Brooklyn cop, who recalled a recent arrest of an armed man who used the crackdown on stop-and-frisk as a reason to resist arrest. “People feel like they know the law better than we do.”

Too many rights for citizens. Also a problem. (And there's the demand for unearned respect again...) Maybe people don't know the law better than NYPD officers, but they can't go above the law, as officers do when they deal out excessive force, tell people to stop recording, hassle people for walking while black, or book people on bullshit charges simply because they don't like their attitude. All in all, the imbalance of power has hardly shifted. But to hear these cops tell it, you'd think the city was a half-step away from mob rule, with officers holed up in well-fortified precinct houses. All the NYPD is receiving is pushback it hasn't felt in years. And it's killing them. (Not literally, of course...)

Ideally, what can citizens do to ensure the (im)balance of power returns to normal?

Well, one Manhattan cop, using the citizen killed by an NYPD officer (homicide, remember?) as an example, says this is how citizens should behave when approached by police.

“Obviously, he resisted, and he could have avoided all of that by just going through the process,” another Manhattan cop said. “Everybody likes to point fingers, but no one wants the fingers pointed at them. If people think they are being treated unfairly, they should sue the city after they go through the process instead of resisting.”

"All of that" being shorthand for "choked to death by a police officer." New Yorkers should just submit to any form of police harassment and go through "the process," something that could easily give them a criminal record when they haven't truly performed a criminal act and then spend their time, money and energy fighting in the city's courts to have their grievances addressed and their good names restored.

This police officer is actually saying that people should just deal with cop bullshit and sue later. The only "right" you possess is the option to file a civil lawsuit. Cops, on the other hand, should be given free rein to act as they please, and when the lawsuit finally arrives, possibly be held accountable for their actions if the court somehow manages to find the officer(s) in question don't qualify for full or limited immunity.

A much better idea would be for the NYPD to make massive efforts to restore the trust and respect it has destroyed under Ray Kelly's "leadership." If you want respect, GO AND EARN IT. Demanding full compliance is something autocrats do, not public servants. You've forgotten who you actually work for. You don't work for the NYPD. YOU WORK FOR THE PUBLIC.

If the NYPD can't get that straightened out, then it needs to learn how to take a punch. It's certainly delivered enough of them. Every police department asks for patience while they investigate their own wrongdoing, but every cop starts swinging and/or shooting when someone takes a shot at one of their own. An officer kills a citizen and suddenly cops start fretting about the "antagonistic" behavior of the public. Have one cop simply think he hears gunfire possibly aimed in his direction and the wrath of an entire department will focus in that person's direction -- and it won't stop until every officer's gun is empty.

If the NYPD is feeling a bit more apprehensive about its interactions with the public after the death of Eric Garner, so be it. It's all earned. Maybe now they'll have the slightest empathy for the countless citizens who lived with this feeling day in and day out during the decade-plus run of stop-and-frisk.

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One final story to highlight from James Bamford's really wonderful Wired profile of Ed Snowden. This one might not be that surprising, but the NSA was building an internal automated "cyberwar" system called MonsterMind, which would seek to detect an incoming "cyber attack" and then automatically launch a counterattack. Here's how Bamford describes Snowden's explanation in his article:

The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology.

Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement.

Yeah, because false alarms never happen at all. Hell, just this week I was hearing about a series of false alarms when the US thought that Russia had launched thousands of nuclear missiles at the US. Imagine an automated system taught to respond to that?

And, of course, this only works... if the NSA has access to private company's networks:

In addition to the possibility of accidentally starting a war, Snowden views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy because, in order for the system to work, the NSA first would have to secretly get access to virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the US. “The argument is that the only way we can identify these malicious traffic flows and respond to them is if we’re analyzing all traffic flows,” he says. “And if we’re analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.”

This puts into context some stories from last year, which noted that Keith Alexander seemed particularly focused on getting companies to give the NSA access to their networks. Last October, he gave a speech in which he pitched exactly that:

Drawing an analogy to how the military detects an incoming missile with radar and other sensors, Alexander imagined the NSA being able to spot "a cyberpacket that's about to destroy Wall Street." In an ideal world, he said, the agency would be getting real-time information from the banks themselves, as well as from the NSA's traditional channels of intelligence, and have the power to take action before a cyberattack caused major damage.

And in a Washington Post profile of Keith Alexander from over a year ago, a similar idea was discussed:

His proposed solution: Private companies should give the government access to their networks so it could screen out the harmful software. The NSA chief was offering to serve as an all-knowing virus-protection service, but at the cost, industry officials felt, of an unprecedented intrusion into the financial institutions’ databases.

The group of financial industry officials, sitting around a table at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, were stunned, immediately grasping the privacy implications of what Alexander was politely but urgently suggesting. As a group, they demurred.

“He’s an impressive person,” the participant said, recalling the group’s collective reaction to Alexander. “You feel very comfortable with him. He instills a high degree of trust.”

But he was proposing something they thought was high-risk.

“Folks in the room looked at each other like, ‘Wow. That’s kind of wild.’ ”

This all should probably make you wonder why those very same financial institutions seem willing to shell out somewhere between $600,000 and $1 million per month for Alexander's "patent-pending" solutions to "cybersecurity."

Furthermore, this should shed some light on why the NSA was so in favor of CISPA and now CISA -- cybersecurity bills in Congress that would give private companies liability protections if they... shared network data with the NSA (and other parts of the federal government). The NSA needs those liability protections to get some companies to be willing to open up their networks to do this kind of MonsterMind offering, or they won't participate. It's also why Congress shouldn't pass such a bill.

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If your irony detector seems to be malfunctioning, this video of Los Angeles police officers confronting some activists flying a drone over a LAPD parking lot should reset it. At the very least, it should at least indicate whether the batteries need to be changed, as any powered irony detector should have the needle buried within minutes.

With a straight face and zero self-awareness, this was the message delivered to the drone operator and camera crew.

“What concerns us is that they are filming over private property and it's gated – you’re looking at the layout of the police station, how we operate, personnel license plates,” police Lt. Michael Ling said. “It’s kind of like if it was your house, if they’re flying over your backyard you’d start asking questions about it.”

Really? Can we start asking questions now? From June of this year:

On Friday, the [LAPD] announced that it had acquired two "unmanned aerial vehicles" as gifts from the Seattle Police Department.

The Draganflyer X6 aircraft, which resemble small helicopters, are each about 3 feet wide and equipped with a camera, video camera and infrared night-vision capabilities.

The LAPD says these drones will be deployed for "narrow and prescribed" uses, which even at its tightest reading means more than a few flights over private property. And considering the LAPD has been completely obfuscatory about its Stingray usage, there's no real reason to believe it will handle this technology any more responsibly than its cell tower spoofers.

Oh, and I thought license plates were public and could be gathered by the millions without raising privacy issues.

In its 2012 guidelines on ALPR, the International Association of Chiefs of Police remind us that a license plate “identifies a particular vehicle, not a particular person.” When the Drug Enforcement Agency wanted to install ALPR along Utah highways in 2012, an official told local legislators, “We're not trying to capture any personal information--all that this captures is the tag, regardless of who the driver is.”

While the LAPD has acknowledged the privacy implications of its massive license plate database (though mainly used as an excuse to thwart public records requests), it has also said this:

Releasing the subject ALPR data held by the Department would likewise "expose to the public the very sensitive investigative stages of determining whether a crime has been committed." All ALPR data is investigatory - regardless of whether a license plate scan results in an immediate "hit" because, for instance, the vehicle may be stolen, the subject of an "Amber Alert," or operated by an individual with an outstanding arrest warrant... The very process of checking license plates against various law enforcement lists, whether done manually by the officer or automatically through ALPR technology, is intrinsically investigatory - to determine whether a crime may have been committed. The mere fact that ALPR data is routinely gathered and may not --initially or ever-- be associated with a specific crime is not determinative of its investigative nature.

All license plate data is "investigatory." So, capturing plate data from LAPD officers' personal vehicles is nothing more than evidence gathering, whether or not any crime has been committed. This drone is the new Neighborhood Watch, no different than the LAPD's newly-acquired drones.

This interaction led to the following rebuttal.

"They bring up the expectation of privacy, I’m not buying it,” [drone operator Daniel] Saulmon told the Los Angeles Times. "Suddenly they’re talking about how I’m trespassing on a public sidewalk. They do not have an expectation of privacy…if you want privacy, build a roof."

The LAPD can't have it both ways. It can't claim the right to "film" citizens and prevent them from reciprocating. Or can it?

Los Angeles police on Friday said they have asked the city attorney’s office and county prosecutors to explore whether they can legally prohibit civilians from flying drones with cameras over department-owned parking lots.

Really? If the city attorney has even the smallest amount of self-awareness and/or spine he or she will laugh the LAPD right out of the office. If these entities support a prohibition of drone flights over their public buildings, they should be asked to ground their drones and disable their plate readers. I'm sure the words "officer safety" will be thrown around to justify yet another double standard, but screw the LAPD for having the temerity to think this idea should be entertained, much less having crossed its mind without tripping all over itself.

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While you would think this position exists at multiple agencies (NSA, FBI, CIA, the NYPD), it's never been captured in stark black-and-white. Morgan Smith, reporter for the Texas Tribune, recently tweeted out a photo of a rejected FOIA request. A rejected FOIA is not necessarily newsworthy. But it is when it's been rejected by someone bearing the unlikely title of "FOIA Denial Officer."

Here's to transparency in job titles! #foia pic.twitter.com/x3nxnDL29a

— Morgan Smith (@MorganSmith) August 12, 2014

Taylor D. August, of the Dept. of Education's Office for Civil Rights, is also a FOIA Denial Officer. Considering the government's general antipathy towards transparency, you'd think several agencies would have a full-time request denier on staff. But while many agencies spend more time stonewalling and denying requests, only the Dept. of Education actually has designated employees on hand solely to reject requests.

A look at the DOE's FOIA FAQ gives us the first clue:

10. Who has the authority in ED to withhold documents (in part/whole)?

The FOIA Officers, the Office of Inspector General and the Regional FOIA Denial Officers have the authority to withhold documents.

It appears this agency is extremely well-equipped to handle numerous rejections. Three tiers of rejection are available to requesters, running all the way up to the OIG. There's no reason given as to why the DOE would need regional "denial officers," but this position traces back to 2006.

In a section titled (of all things) "Customer Service," the DOE details its FOIA response automation, which routes through the Office for Civil Rights. Citing the "significant number" of requests it receives (at that point averaging around 900 per year), the agency detailed its efforts to keep up with the paperwork.

To further customer service with respect to FOIA and Privacy Act requests, OCR has been a significant participant in the Department’s initiative to automate case management under these laws. Executive Order 13392, “Improving Agency Disclosure of Information,” issued on Dec. 14, 2005, emphasizes the need for more efficient and effective processing of FOIA and Privacy Act requests.

What most of us would believe was an order intended to increase the release of responsive documents, the DOE read it as an indication it wasn't rejecting requests efficiently enough.

In addition, in FY 2006, consistent with Executive Order 13392, OCR established new FOIA procedures, including delegation to the 12 OCR office directors of the authority of FOIA denial officers. This allows FOIA requests to be processed in a more efficient and timely manner, and establishes clear accountability for FOIA processing.

As of 2006, the DOE had 12 more officials dedicated solely to rejecting FOIA requests than all other government agencies combined. (Unofficial numbers obviously impossible to obtain, much less verify, but the term "FOIA denial officer" produces search results that indicate only the DOE has such a position.)

More details on the "Denial Officers" can be found in the agency's FOIA policies and procedures (embedded below.) Here's the definition of the term:

Denial Officers. The FOIA Officers, the Secretary's Regional Representatives, or officials designated by them (Regional FOIA Review Officers), and the Office of Inspector General (OIG) who are authorized to withhold records, in whole or in part, that fall within one (1) or more of the nine (9) exemptions or three (3) exclusions of the FOIA.

Initial determinations are made by regular FOIA officers who look for possible withholding exemptions and consider fee waivers. This is handled regionally and requests possibly eligible for rejection are passed on to one of the 12 regional denial officers.

In each instance in which it is recommended that record(s) or portion(s) thereof be withheld, carefully separate materials to be withheld from those to be released, redact (e.g., remove) all exempt information from the records, and forward a copy of the redacted materials, along with an unredacted version for comparison, to the appropriate denial official. Indicate where in the records the redactions occur and why the relevant exemption(s) apply;

In each instance where "no responsive records" are located, forward (a) a memorandum to the appropriate denial official describing with particularity what records (both electronic and hard copy) were searched, search times (differentiating between computer search times and manual searches since there is a different fee rate assessed for each of these searches), and who conducted the search, and stating that the search results were negative together with (b) a draft denial letter to the requestor to be signed by a FOIA Officer;

Denial officers will always be the be the bearer of bad news.

If the denial official agrees with the recommendation to deny the request, the denial official notifies the requestor in writing of the decision to withhold the information, in whole or in part, and informs the requestor of his/her appeal rights.

However, the denial officer isn't solely limited to writing rejection letters. He or she can also push back.

If the denial official disagrees with the recommendation to deny the request, he/she notifies the FOIA Coordinator and the PO Action Office and directs the FOIA Coordinator to provide the records to the requestor.

At which point, the requester receives the responsive documents thanks to a denial officer, but from someone whose title is less resolutely negative. As much fun as it might be to press the REJECT button, denial officers will never know the joy of making a requester happy. It's a thankless job with a brusque title… unless you're the sort of person who enjoys doling out rejection or simply takes pride in your work, no matter what that work might mean.

It seems odd that the DOE would stand alone in its creation of a FOIA Denial Officer. So many government agencies are more than happy to reject request after request (and appeal after appeal), but none have been so brutally honest as to create a position solely for this purpose. The DOE's system may actually be more streamlined than those at comparable agencies, but only the DOE has the strength of character to let requesters know that a fully and specifically trained expert is behind their request's rejection.

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We've been debating internally whether or not to cover the mess that is currently going on in Ferguson, Missouri. There has been plenty of attention paid to the protests and the failures by police there -- and we frequently cover problems with police, as well as the militarization of police, which was absolutely on display in Ferguson (if you've been under a rock, police killed an unarmed teenager there last week, leading to protests over the past few days -- and the police have been handling the situation... poorly, to say the least). However, the situation was changing so rapidly, it wasn't entirely clear what to cover. The pictures from Ferguson of a very militarized police force were disturbing, and we've been thinking about writing something on that (and we may still). However, this evening, things got even more ridiculous, as not only did the SWAT team show up, but it then arrested two of the reporters who had been covering the events: Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post and Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post. Both had been vital in getting out the story of what was happening on the street.

Here are a few of their tweets (prior to being arrested):

I counted 70+ SWAT officers. Guns trained on crowds. Insanity. pic.twitter.com/stev2G6v4b

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 13, 2014

Overkill in #Ferguson. Officer won't answer my question about why this is needed. pic.twitter.com/iSPsP1Rxa1

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 13, 2014

This exchange-> RT @AntonioFrench: State Senator asks the #Ferguson police chief if she's going to be gassed again. https://t.co/bXTjTbc7kM

— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) August 13, 2014

And then, soon after those and other tweets, another reporter, Jon Swaine from the Guardian, reported that he saw two reporters detained by police in a McDonalds:

Two reporters just cuffed and put in cop can outside Ferguson McDonald's where @WesleyLowery said he and @ryanjreilly were working

— Jon Swaine (@jonswaine) August 13, 2014

Lowery and Reilly each had live tweeted the police entering the McDonald's, followed by a long silence from their accounts:

Police come into McD where me and @ryanjreilly working. Try to kick everyone out.

— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) August 13, 2014

SWAT just invade McDonald's where I'm working/recharging. Asked for ID when I took photo. pic.twitter.com/FOIsMnBwHy

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 13, 2014

A fourth reporter on the scene, Matt Pearce of the LA Times, contacted the police chief about the situation, who was apparently surprised at the turn of events and said he'd order them released:

I just called Ferguson police chief to ask about @WesleyLowery and @ryanjreilly, told him what I knew. His response: "Oh, God."

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) August 14, 2014

I just talked to the Ferguson chief again about Wes and Ryan. "I told them to release them," he said of the riot command.

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) August 14, 2014

Ferguson chief tells me @WesleyLowery and @ryanjreilly's arresters were "probably somebody who didn't know better."

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) August 14, 2014

Soon after, both Lowery and Reilly tweeted about their experiences, which were not exactly pleasant.

Officers slammed me into a fountain soda machine because I was confused about which door they were asking me to walk out of

— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) August 14, 2014

Detained, booked, given answers to no questions. Then just let out

— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) August 14, 2014

Also Ryan Reilly of Huff Po. Assaulted and arrested

— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) August 14, 2014

@ryanjreilly and @wesleyLowery have been arrested for "not packing their bags quick enough" at McD's #Ferguson

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 14, 2014

Unfortunately my last Vine featuring the officer who assaulted me was deleted when other my phone died.

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 14, 2014

I'm sure that we'll have more on this whole thing, but as GideonsTrumpet notes, Lowery and Reilly were technically detained, not arrested, "which is far more insidious" because there's no accountability. No charges to challenge. Nothing. It's just a way to silence the press who were diligently getting the word out there on what they were doing.

There are all sorts of very questionable activities going on in Ferguson, including intimidation and threats against the protestors exercising their right to assembly and free speech. Detaining reporters in the middle of that is just the latest in a long string of "fuck your constitutional rights" by the (very heavily militarized) police down there.

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James Clapper is pulling out all the stops to try to keep the details of the CIA torture report from seeing the light of day. He apparently made the decision (without asking the White House) to have the National Intelligence Council put together a memo explaining that releasing the details of how the CIA tortured people would "inflame anti-U.S. passions in the Mideast, resulting in potentially violent street protests and threats to U.S. embassies and personnel." Except, of course, this is bullshit. It wouldn't be the release of the report inflaming such passions -- it would be the torture performed by the CIA at the direction of the US government. If the intelligence community is so worried about the details becoming public then it shouldn't have engaged in torture in the first place. Otherwise, the intelligence community has all the cover it needs to do horrible things, because any move to expose those actions could be stopped under this same idiotic theory that the revealing of those actions would create anger, rather than the actions themselves.

And, yet, the memo is being passed around and used by the supporters of the surveillance state to protest the releasing of any details from the Senate Intelligence Committee's CIA torture report:

The Mideast is a tinderbox right now and this could be the spark that ignites quite a fire,” said one U.S. intelligence official who was briefed on the findings.

That concern was echoed Friday by a former top U.S. intelligence official who helped oversee the interrogation program. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out if you release a report like this at a time when terrorism is surging all over the Mideast you are handing the other side a recruitment tool,” John McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director, told Yahoo News. “It’s blindingly obvious.”

Of course, the response to McLaughlin ought to be "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you release a report like this, it might embarrass folks like John McLaughlin for his role in the torture program. It's blindingly obvious." And, really, if McLaughlin is so concerned about how folks might react to this program, perhaps he should have, you know, stopped it.

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As the technology we hold in the palms of our hands continues to become more immersive, the narrative is pushed that smartphones and tablets are turning us into anti-social screen gazers, more interested in the world contained in the cloud than the world that surrounds us. But is this really a new narrative? Is it only now that we've become so entranced by streams of information that we've begun shutting out the sensory underload of everyday life?

This image, sent to us by Techdirt reader techinabox, shows that not much has changed over the last 100 years.

Yes, the printed word, applied to paper, is more interesting than conversing with others or simply staring vacantly into space. For most people in a forcibly "social" situation -- like waiting for mass transportation -- having a smartphone or newspaper to "disappear" into rather than trying to engage in conversation with dozens of people they don't know or care about is a plus, rather than an indicator of societal collapse. Put these people into situations with friends and acquaintances and its very likely the distractions will recede into the background. And even if they don't, there's likely a lot more "sharing" going on than can be perceived with the predisposed eye.

This "smartphones are inherently antisocial" narrative leads us directly to this -- a wholly hilarious dismantling of a restaurant's haughty pre-judging of its potential customers.

If you can't read/see it, it says in boldly hand-written letters:

NO 'WiFi' ……….
TALK TO EACH OTHER.
CALL YOUR MOM.
PRETEND IT'S 1993.
LIVE.

The internet has no time for your neo-Luddite attitude, unnamed restaurant. Commenters quickly followed the line of thought to its logical conclusion.

NO “TELEPHONES”. TALK TO EACH OTHER. FACE TO FACE ONLY. WRITE A LETTER. SEND A TELEGRAM TO YOUR MOM. PRETEND IT’S 1860. LIVE.

NO ‘WRITING’… TALK TO EACH OTHER. THROW A ROCK AT YOUR MOM. PRETEND IT’S 10,000 BCE. LIVE.

NO ‘HIGHER BRAIN FUNCTIONS’ …USE YOUR REPTILIAN BRAIN
EAT YOUR MOM’S CORPSE SHE DIED TO PROVIDE YOU WITH SUSTENANCE
PRETEND YOU HAVE JUST AROSE FROM THE SEA
SURVIVE

NO “MULTICELLULAR TRAITS”….. USE YOUR SYMBIOTIC MITOCHONDRIA
REPRODUCE ASEXUALLY, YOU’RE YOUR OWN PARENT
PRETEND IT’S 2BYA
EVOLVE

NO “LIFE.” USE FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICAL FORCES TO FORM SPHERICAL OBJECTS REVOLVING AROUND ONE ANOTHER IN SPACE.
FUSE HYDROGEN INTO HELIUM USING GRAVITATIONAL PRESSURE TO PRODUCE HEAT AND LIGHT.
PRETEND IT’S 4.5BYA.
STABILIZE INTO EQUILIBRIA

NO “MATTER”. EXIST IN THE VOID WITHOUT PURPOSE OR MEANING.
THERE IS NO “YOU”, ONLY THE VAST CONCEPT OF NOTHING.
TIME DOES NOT EXIST.
BE

Nobody likes to be talked down to by a handwritten banner, especially one that insinuates that anyone without a WiFi signal will be forced to "live," rather than engage with their electronics. The world was a better place in 1993, according to this sign. It so, then it follows that life was at its truest form before life even began.

Which brings us to restaurants and their uneasy embrace of technology. A number have already declared they will kick out Google Glass wearers and cell phone users. Some chefs have insisted that photographing their food "robs" them of their "intellectual property." And one restaurant in particular blamed smartphones for its slow service, using a lot of anecdotal evidence disguised as research. Oddly, this "message" was delivered in the most "new media" fashion possible, via a (now deleted) Craigslist "rant."

Here's a portion of it.

26 out of 45 customers spend an average of 3 minutes taking photos of the food.

14 out of 45 customers take pictures of each other with the food in front of them or as they are eating the food. This takes on average another 4 minutes as they must review and sometimes retake the photo.

9 out of 45 customers sent their food back to reheat. Obviously if they didn’t pause to do whatever on their phone the food wouldn’t have gotten cold.

27 out of 45 customers asked their waiter to take a group photo. 14 of those requested the waiter retake the photo as they were not pleased with the first photo. On average this entire process between the chit chatting and reviewing the photo taken added another 5 minutes and obviously caused the waiter not to be able to take care of other tables he/she was serving.

Even if everything presented as fact were indeed true, the restaurant blames its service issues on its customers, rather than realizing two things: 1.) a comparison of two nights roughly a decade apart is hardly evidence of anything and 2.) there's a whole lot of positive aspects that are being ignored out of concern over turn time.

As a common venue for celebratory dinners, birthdays, and bachelorette parties, TAO Downtown does take lot of photos, Duxbury says, but that’s “absolutely not” bad for the restaurant. “Those pictures go up on social media, some of them instantly on Instagram and Facebook, and it gets us out there,” he says.

Other chefs, waiters, and restaurateurs echo this sentiment. John Kapetanos, owner of Ethos in Manhattan’s Midtown East—the same neighborhood as the anonymous Craigslist poster—says maybe 10 percent of his customers ask the waiter to take a group photo; it’s a favor that takes less than a minute and doesn’t slow down service. Over the 12 years Ethos has been in business, Kapetanos says cellphones have added maybe five to 10 minutes to the average table time, but that he doesn’t mind as long as diners at one table aren’t bothering those at another. Jean-Marte, a waiter at a French restaurant in Midtown who declined to give his last name, concurs that taking photos of customers doesn’t slow his stride. He adds that smartphones can even be quite helpful when dealing with foreign tourists who don’t understand the menu. “It’s easier for them to go on the website or on Yelp, and they can show you a picture and say, ‘This is what I want,’ ” he explains.

Going further, the march of technology has sped up other aspects of food service, including inputting orders and settling bills.

It’s just part of our lives now,” says Michael Scelfo, chef and owner of the recently opened Alden & Harlow in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Back in the old days, if you wanted to pay with your credit card, someone had to physically go and carbon-copy it and write information on it. Now they can swipe it on their phone tableside. How much time does that save?”

The fear that technology controls our lives rather than vice versa is omnipresent and moves towards smart cars, connected household devices and Google Glass only feed into that. It's very tempting for even those who tout technological advances to express apprehension about the perceived progression towards a more introverted society that interacts mainly through third parties. This fear isn't entirely misplaced, but the real question is whether it should actually be viewed with trepidation.

Technology has changed the way we communicate, but it hasn't eliminated communication. The supposed dearth of face-to-face interaction can be traced all the way back to dated pursuits like reading newspapers or playing chess. Nothing really changes. We may find more people blundering down the street staring at a phone screen rather than the sidewalk in front of them, but extrapolating carelessness and (yes) rudeness into some sort of societal collapse isn't an original idea, or even a recent one. Anything beneficial is ignored to portray an army of dead-eyed techno-captives ruining the world, one Tweet/Instagram/Facebook update at a time. It's not any truer now than it was back when people stood shoulder-to-shoulder staring intently at the newspaper in front of them.

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Four Silicon Valley companies including Apple and Google failed to persuade a U.S. judge to sign off on a $324.5 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit by tech workers, who accused the firms of conspiring to avoid poaching each other's employees. In a ruling on Friday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, said the class action settlement was too low, given the strength of the case against the companies. Intel and Adobe were also part of the proposed deal. Good on her. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook, and the other criminals behind this crime belong in jail. If a poor member of a minority steals a wallet, he gets jail time. Rich CEOs steal hundreds of millions - and if you do the math, it actually comes down to billions - and they can get away with a paltry sum and walk free. This is unfair and unjust. Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook, and the others are criminals. They belong in jail.

FOIA enthusiast Jason Leopold isn't going to sit back and let former NSA head Keith Alexander recede noisily into the background. Alexander's transition from spy-in-chief to $1 million-a-month rockstar security consultant to our nation's most easily-impressed banks is currently on everyone's minds. First off, how many state secrets is he selling? And just how many hacker-beating patents will he be filing for?

But while slipping loudly out the front door with a quick wave of the hand and an accidental admission that his long tenure at the NSA's helm has done nothing to beat back the terrorist horde, Alexander may have felt his move to the private sector would keep his financial records out of the public eye. Leopold, however, has just filed a lawsuit against the agency for its continued refusal to release these public records.

[S]ome aren't simply laughing off the retired four-star general's new endeavor. Some, like Leopold, are concerned that Alexander might actually plan on selling high-level state security secrets for his hefty price tag.

In the Baltimore division of the federal district of Maryland, the law offices of Jeffrey Light have served the NSA with a complaint, listing Leopold’s multiple attempts to retrieve Alexander's records, and the utter refusal by the agency to fulfill the journalist’s requests.

Citing the Ethics in Government Act, Florida Congressman Alan Grayson wrote on behalf of Leopold, in a letter addressed to NSA Deputy Counsel Ariana Cerelenko, pressing that the public release of Alexander’s financial records are required—“unless the President finds that the release of the form would ‘reveal sensitive information,’ or ‘compromise the national interest.’"

As Daniel Stuckey at Vice points out, the NSA is the lone holdout when it comes to financial records. Even the CIA and the ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) have made these documents available. But the NSA wants to hold onto Alexander's records even though there's no established legal reason for doing so.

Notably, this is not a FOIA request. This is a document that can be requested by any member of the public simply by filling out a form. These financial disclosures are to be made public under the stipulations of the Ethics in Government Act (EGA) of 1978. But the NSA has held the (now former) agency head above the requirements of this law, even though there's nothing in the law that indicates the agency is outside of its jurisdiction. Obviously, Alexander's departure for the private sector raises questions about his prior connections to companies that may have benefited from expanding surveillance programs or may be potential purchasers of his $1 million/month protection plan. These are questions that need answers, and the NSA is arbitrarily withholding mandatory financial disclosures. If the White House has given the agency super-secret permission to ignore the stipulations of the EGA, hopefully Leopold's lawsuit will force that out into the open. If not, the NSA will need to start explaining why it's not being responsive, and it won't have the handy b(5) exemption [for FOIA requests only] to lean on.

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Given the stories we've covered in the past in which schools and their administrators massively overreact in the name of children's safety, I suppose these stories really shouldn't surprise me as much as they do. I mean, given that we've seen administrators lose their minds over pop tarts, fingers, and even drawings, should I really be shocked that a fourth grader was suspended from his Georgia elementary school for bringing in a nerf gun? No, probably not, but a lack of surprise doesn't mean I can't get angry that a kid that properly completed his damned assignment was suspended for it.

So why did young Ramsey McDonald bring the nerf gun, which shoots terrifying soft little foam balls out of it, to class? Because he was told to, that's why.

After a couple of days into the school year, fourth grader Ramsey McDonald of Warner Robins was given what he thought was a fun assignment. Bring in some of your favorite toys to talk about.

"They were trying to get the kids to know each other," his father, Scott McDonald said.

Well, bang up job, Warner Robbins Elementary, because Ramsey dutifully completed that assignment, but it's going to be pretty hard for his classmates to get to know him now that he's serving a 3 day in-school suspension. For bringing in a toy, mind you, that is rated for six-year-olds and up, since it is about as harmful as a really tiny pillow covered in a newborn puppy's love. It's a toy. He was told to bring in a toy. Hell, it could have even served as a simple teaching moment for Ramsey about thinking of the larger context of things before making a decision. Instead, all he's learned is that bureaucracy breeds this kind of overprotective nonsense. Well, that plus he learned that he has more common sense than the adults at his school.

"He told me he didn't know they would think it was a weapon or he wouldn't have brought it to school," McDonald said.

Well, of course not, because it's not a freaking weapon, it's a toy, which is exactly what he was asked to bring in. Sitting this kid outside of his class on suspension for three days for properly completing his assignment is crazy-pants.

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The San Jose Police Department has spent more than two years denying it has a drone in its possession, having returned no responsive documents to MuckRock during its 2012 and 2013 "drone census" document requests. The drone the SJPD pretended to not have in its possession (until just recently) may have not been acquired until early 2014, but its grant application was actually submitted sometime prior to November 30, 2012. But this is how the SJPD responded during previous requests.

On December 17, 2012, an analyst within the SJPD Research and Development Unit specifically responded that the department had no records regarding research into drones or plans to use unmanned aerial vehicles.

In October 2013, SJPD swatted away a second request for records.

“Our Department does not use aerial drones, remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs), remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs), unmanned aerials (UAs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and/or unmanned aerial systems (UASs), nor does our Fiscal Unit have any records related to these items,” wrote Monique Villarreal, an R&D analyst in the SJPD chief’s office, on October 16, 2013.

Unfortunately for the SJPD, its drone-acquisition activities were generating paperwork elsewhere -- documents it couldn't hide, like city council meeting minutes in which funding for an unmanned aerial vehicle was discussed.

Now, the SJPD has turned over all of its drone documents, along with an apology for hiding this information from the public.

In hindsight, SJPD should have done a better job of communicating the purpose and acquisition of the UAS device to our community. The community should have the opportunity to provide feedback, ask questions, and express their concerns before we move forward with this project. To this end, we will first develop a community outreach plan before we take steps to deploy the UAS.

Following the completion of the community outreach efforts, the Department will then develop the policy and procedures that will provide an appropriate and practical framework to guide our operation of the UAS. At the same time, we will continue to research legal implications and Federal Aviation Administration requirements for the operation a UAS by SJPD.

We are confident that this technology can improve certain police operational efficiencies and help enhance public and officer safety in specific critical incidents. However, SJPD will not use the UAS until these outreach and procedural steps have been completed and approved.

This might be of some comfort going forward, but what the SJPD claims was just a failure to communicate was actually a more proactive effort to keep this information out of the public's hands.

The drone documents that came bundled with an apology also contain assertions by the department that its new toy doesn't fall under the FAA's (very vague) regulatory policies. For one, the department doesn't consider its unmanned aerial vehicle to be a "drone." Despite its use by a law enforcement agency, the SJPD -- citing an "advisory" issued in 1981 by the Dept. of Transportation -- claims its UAV is completely indistinguishable from a hobbyist's. But its decision to go with a hobbyist-style "drone" doesn't make it automatically exempt from FAA regulation.

[T]he FAA has long made clear that all government agencies require authorization to operate an unmanned aerial vehicle in domestic airspace, regardless of the particular body type or where the unit was purchased. Hobby UAVs that weigh less than 55 pounds and fly under 400 feet are exempt from licensing requirements, but hobbyist rules do not apply to governmental applications.

This assertion also contradicts other memos released by the department, which state that the drone must remain shelved until its compliance with FAA regulations is determined.

The SJPD says the drone will have a very specific use -- to act as eyes for its bomb squad. If that's true, there's no reason it should have kept its plans a secret for two years. A large percentage of the public would be on board with narrowly prescribed usage. Mission creep is always going to be an issue, but being open with the public (and asking for its opinion) is one of the best ways to prevent abuse of new surveillance technology. Having to be forced into openness isn't exactly encouraging, but at least the SJPD will have more eyes on it going forward.

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Earlier this week, Tim Cushing wrote about The Intercept's latest scoop, concerning the makeup of the US government's federal terrorist watchlist, and the fact that a large chunk of it isn't affiliated with any terrorist groups. While most of the article focused on that point, he made two other notes in passing -- the first was that it was obvious that this release was from a second leaker, not Snowden, and the second was about how the government "leaked" the story in a "friendlier" manner to the AP in order to beat The Intercept. We thought both of these asides were interesting, but they've both turned into big stories on their own.

CNN later confirmed that US government officials are now searching for the second leaker (though "second" may not be accurate either...), more or less confirming what many people had been suspecting. Meanwhile, the "scoop spoiling" by the federal government actually resulted in a semi-apology from the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) who gave the scoop to the AP. The NCTC claimed it had been working with the AP on a story for a while, and after seeing what The Intercept was doing, felt it needed to give them the heads up, though it also says it could have handled the situation better. Of course, this also makes it more likely that The Intercept won't bother giving the government much time (if any) to respond on future stories. Why risk the chance of having the government spoil the scoop again?

However, with all this concern about the "second leaker," Chris Soghoian asks a very good question. If the Justice Department is going to go hunting for whoever leaked the information to The Intercept, will it similarly go after whoever at NCTC was apparently providing the same basic information to the Associated Press? Or how about the person who told CNN that the US government believes there's a "second leaker"? Because that information is also a leak, and potentially a big one, given that it will alert the leaker that the government is searching for him or her.

Somehow, we don't think the DOJ will be too concerned about those leaks. "Official" leaks happen all the time and no one cares. It's just the leaks that make the government look bad that somehow are seen as criminal.

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