Brindle

The folks behind Google Fiber have fired a not-so-subtle shot at Comcast and Verizon for their recent efforts to make companies like Netflix pay extra. As we've noted, the big last mile access broadband access providers have realized that they can effectively get companies to pay twice by clogging certain points in the network. Even more nefarious, they're able to do this without violating a narrow view of "net neutrality" because net neutrality is focused on the last mile, rather than interconnection and peering. It's a really scammy process, which is part of those big broadband providers' attempts to extract monopoly rents out of their control over the last mile.

Google Fiber has stayed out of this debate for a while, but just fired a clear shot in the fight, with a blog post that never mentions Comcast, but more or less screams: You know that bullshit that Comcast and Verizon are pulling? We don't do that. Instead, they note two important things: (1) contrary to the claims of Comcast, online video traffic is in no way overwhelming the network, and (2) it's easy to help upgrade the setup for Netflix and others for free:

We have also worked with services like Netflix so that they can ‘colocate’ their equipment in our Fiber facilities. What does that mean for you? Usually, when you go to Netflix and click on the video that you want to watch, your request needs to travel to and from the closest Netflix data center, which might be a roundtrip of hundreds or thousands of miles. Instead, Netflix has placed their own servers within our facilities (in the same place where we keep our own video-on-demand content). Because the servers are closer to where you live, your content will get to you faster and should be a higher quality.

We give companies like Netflix and Akamai free access to space and power in our facilities and they provide their own content servers. We don’t make money from peering or colocation; since people usually only stream one video at a time, video traffic doesn’t bog down or change the way we manage our network in any meaningful way — so why not help enable it?

But we also don’t charge because it’s really a win-win-win situation. It’s good for content providers because they can deliver really high-quality streaming video to their customers. For example, because Netflix colocated their servers along our network, their customers can access full 1080p HD and, for those who own a 4K TV, Netflix in Ultra HD 4K. It’s good for us because it saves us money (it’s easier to transport video traffic from a local server than it is to transport it thousands of miles). But most importantly, we do this because it gives Fiber users the fastest, most direct route to their content. That way, you can access your favorite shows faster. All-in-all, these arrangements help you experience the best access to content on the Internet — which is the whole point of getting Fiber to begin with!

So, what's Comcast and Verizon's excuse?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

All too often we seem to see people making copyright claims over public domain works. It's especially egregious when we see museums do this kind of thing, as happens every so often. While museums in some other countries like to try to claim that they can create a new copyright on the digital scan of a public domain image, in the US it is generally considered settled law that museums cannot create such a new copyright. Public domain is the public domain.

Thus, while it's exciting to see that the famed Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has released a treasure trove of high-res images of public domain works for people to search and download, it's ridiculous and depressing that they're effectively claiming copyright over them, even while stating the images are in the public domain. And, no, this isn't just a case where the Met's terms and conditions discussing copyright don't even take into account the possibility that some works may be in the public domain. It has a separate section, specifically labeled "public domain" -- and then tries to tell you what you can and cannot do with those works: If you can't read that, it says:

Images of Works of Art that are in the Public Domain. Images of works of art that the Museum believes to be in the public domain which are identified as Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) on the Site may be downloaded for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws. In addition, authorized non-commercial uses for such images shall include scholarly publications in any media. Users must, however, cite the author and source of such images, and the citations should include the URL "www.metmuseum.org," but not in any way that implies endorsement of the user or the user’s use of the images.

Except that's not true. You can't put any restrictions on works in the public domain. They can be used for commercial use. Fair use doesn't even apply, because there is no copyright. Users do not have to cite the author and source, though it might be a nice thing to do.

You would hope that the folks at a museum like the Met would actually understand the basics of copyright like this. However, it's yet another indication of how we now live in a "permission culture" where even people who should understand what the public domain is, don't seem to get it. Last year we wrote about a museum in Amsterdam that did things right: offering up not just high-res images of public domain works, but additional tools to help the public do more things with those works. The Met should take some notes from the folks over at the Rijksmuseum.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The use of hydraulic fracturing -- aka fracking -- to extract gas is a controversial practice, with opinions divided on its risks and benefits. But irrespective of those differences, you might have expected people to be united on the need for health and safety to be a priority. But in North Carolina it seems that they see things differently, as this story in Newsweek explains:

A bill introduced in the North Carolina Senate would charge individuals with a felony if they disclose trade secret-protected information about fracking chemicals, EnergyWire reported Thursday. The bill includes a provision that would allow emergency first responders like fire chiefs and doctors to obtain the chemical information in an emergency. But information disclosed outside of emergency settings could land an offender in prison for several months.

It's not clear why the chemicals used for fracking should be secret in the first place, since that makes it hard for public health authorities to monitor the environmental and health impacts of fracking on local communities -- although a cynic might suspect that's a feature, not a bug, as far as the industry is concerned. The latter's justification for secrecy certainly doesn't stand up to scrutiny:

Large amounts of chemical fluid, water and sand must be injected into a fracking well to fracture underground rock and let gas flow from otherwise hard to reach deposits. That fluid can be made from a number of different chemicals. In many cases, fracking companies claim that disclosing their ingredient list, in whole or in part, would damage their ability to compete in the market.

Whatever those mysterious chemicals might be, there's no doubt that they can be lethal for the people working with them:

Much is still unknown about the health effects of fracking. Water samples taken near fracking sites have found elevated levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health wrote that at least four well workers have died since 2010 due to "acute chemical exposure" from flow-back fluid at fracking sites.

What's particularly worrying about North Carolina's proposal is that it seeks to establish that "trade secrets" trump things like health and safety. Nor is it unique in this respect: as we've reported, the pharma industry is fighting efforts to make key clinical trials data available for independent analysis on the grounds that such test data is confidential -- again, asserting that this would outweigh public health concerns.

All these are part of a larger move to create yet another class of powerful corporate rights alongside patents, copyright and trademarks. That's clear from the proposal to include greater protection for trade secrets in agreements like TAFTA/TTIP and TPP. Indeed, for the latter, we know from the leaked intellectual property chapter that there are proposals for the disclosure of every kind of trade secret to be criminalized, not just ones about fracking's toxic cocktails.

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

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Glenn Greenwald spends the last third of his excellent new book, "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State", exposing the mentality and function of pseudo-journalists like David Gregory, who are in fact better understood as courtiers to power. So it was kind of Michael Kinsley to offer himself up today as living proof of Greenwald's arguments.

In a New York Times book review, Kinsley says:

"The question is who decides [what to publish]. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government."

Pause for a moment to let that sink in. How can the government have ultimate decision-making power consistent with the First Amendment with regard to the publication of leaks? As Kinsley himself goes on to say, "You can't square this circle." Indeed. Unless you believe the government should be able to impose prior restraint on the publication of anything it deems secret. Unless you want to argue that the Constitution should be amended accordingly. Unless you believe the government should have been able to prevent the publication of, say, the Pentagon Papers (it certainly tried).

By the way, that "in a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are)" is worth pausing to consider. Not just for the pretentious use of pace, which I admit is amusing, but more for the childlike notion that America is a democracy and there's nothing more to be said about it. It's almost like Kinsley has never heard of gerrymandering, or doesn't understand that when voters are no longer choosing their politicians and politicians are now choosing their voters, democracy isn't what's at work. It's almost like he's never heard of former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson's argument that modern America is best understood as an oligarchy (pro tip for Kinsley: oligarchies and democracies are not the same thing). It's almost like he's never even heard of Noam Chomsky (more on whom below — for now, suffice to say that Chomsky is great at explaining people like Kinsley, who are simultaneously sophisticated about irrelevancies and simple-minded about fundamentals).

Anyway, never fear, "No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay."

“Whatever it turns out to be”? Kinsley has already explained the “decision must ultimately be made by the government." By comparison, does it really matter what specific mechanism the government then decides on? This is a lot like conceding that the government should have the power to execute American citizens without any recognizable due process, then confining the argument merely to mechanics (Terror Tuesdays, anyone? Due Process just means there is a process that you do?). In both cases, the government's arguments and those of its media flunkies are indistinguishable.

(Again, see Chomsky below on the propagandistic technique of narrowing the range of acceptable debate, and then permitting vigorous discussion only within that narrow range.)

And here's a bit of the current reality of what Kinsley breezily refers to as a government "usually overprotective of its secrets." Secrecy metastasis would be a far better way of describing what's going on in America, where the government knows more and more about the citizenry and the citizenry knows less and less about the government (otherwise known as "Kinsleyan Democracy").

By the way, if we were to implement the Kinsleyan notion that the government be vested with ultimate decision-making authority with regard to the publication of any information the government itself has stamped secret, what do you think would be the impact on secrecy metastasis? Do you think there would be less secrecy? Or even more secrecy abuse?

Ah, forget I said it. Silly question. It's not like the government has any history at all of using secrecy to cover up incompetence, corruption, and criminality.

Kinsley is a guy who's spent his adult life as a journalist — or at least pretending to be one — and it's as though he has no notion at all of George Orwell's pithy definition: "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." Now, if Kinsley wants to cede his journalistic autonomy to the government (I think Matt Taibbi would have said "journalistic balls," but there is only one Taibbi. I'm halfway through his new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, another study of Kinsleyan Democracy, and it is awesome), that's fine. Kinsley pretty clearly prefers the role of servile government flack to that of independent journalist. But would it really be healthy for the republic if all people calling themselves journalists were in fact doing government PR work? Surely we have enough of that already?

There are so many other unintentional instances of Kinsley's status as an exemplar of regulatory capture, of his own person functioning as elegant proof of Greenwald's arguments. He calls Greenwald "the go-between for Edward Snowden and the newspapers that reported on Snowden's collection of classified documents." I'm guessing he settled on "go-between" because James Clapper had already used "accomplice"?

Also, did you know that Greenwald a "self-righteous sourpuss" (my God, who still uses this word)? Or maybe you didn't care? I get so tired of these astonishingly shallow critiques. How much you might want to disguise your disgust with the Kinsleys of the world is primarily a tactical question, and different people will arrive at different conclusions. But if you're not disgusted, if you're not in fact outraged, by the government criminality and journalistic complicity Greenwald chronicles in No Place to Hide, then at best you're not paying attention. Criticizing the demeanor of someone uninterested in concealing his disgust reveals a warped set of priorities and a pernicious set of allegiances.

As for substance, for all his flamboyant displays of largely irrelevant erudition (Henry James, Michael Frayn, Herbert Marcuse… bingo! And this guy calls Assange a narcissist?), Kinsley comes across most fundamentally as… a simpleton:

"Greenwald doesn't seem to realize that every piece of evidence he musters demonstrating that people agree with him undermines his own argument that 'the authorities' brook no dissent. No one is stopping people from criticizing the government or supporting Greenwald in any way. Nobody is preventing the nation's leading newspaper from publishing a regular column in its own pages dissenting from company or government orthodoxy. If a majority of citizens now agree with Greenwald that dissent is being crushed in this country, and will say so openly to a stranger who rings their doorbell or their phone and says she's a pollster, how can anyone say that dissent is being crushed? What kind of poor excuse for an authoritarian society are we building in which a Glenn Greenwald, proud enemy of conformity and government oppression, can freely promote this book in all media and sell thousands of copies at airport bookstores surrounded by Homeland Security officers?"

There are several problems with this bit of self-indulgence.

First, Greenwald never argues that the authorities (and why the scare quotes? Kinsley's the one who wants the government to be able to enforce total secrecy. If that's not "the authorities," what is?), "brook no dissent." This is just a straw man, the kind of fake argument people trot out when they can't respond to the real one, or when the voices in their heads get so loud they can no longer hear the actual conversation. Greenwald never argues that there is no dissent in America or that the First Amendment Kinsley is so keen to abridge is doing nothing to protect free speech. His argument is more akin to what Noam Chomsky has said about propaganda:

"One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there's a debate going on, but making sure that that debate stays within very narrow margins. Namely, you have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions, and those assumptions turn out to be the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, then you can have a debate."

Chomsky also had this to say. See if you can recognize Kinsley in here:

"Propaganda very often works better for the educated than it does for the uneducated. This is true on many issues. There are a lot of reasons for this, one being that the educated receive more of the propaganda because they read more. Another thing is that they are the agents of propaganda. After all, their job is that of commissars; they're supposed to be the agents of the propaganda system so they believe it. It's very hard to say something unless you believe it. Other reasons are that, by and large, they are just part of the privileged elite so they share their interests and perceptions."

And here's how Kinsley misinterprets the section on David Gregory's infamous Meet the Press "To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden… why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?" question:

"But Greenwald does not deny that he has 'aided and abetted Snowden.' So this particular question was not baseless. Furthermore, it was a question, not an assertion — a perfectly reasonable question that many people were asking, and Gregory was giving Greenwald a chance to answer it: If the leaker can go to prison, why should the leakee be exempt?"

As Greenwald notes in the book, Gregory's "perfectly reasonable question" was in fact a rare textbook instance of "When did you stop beating your wife?" Someone with Kinsley's ostentatious learning ought to know that such a loaded question is by design impossible to answer. It can only be responded to via an attack on the question's false premises, which is what Greenwald did in that interview and then again in the book. Kinsley ignores all this and tries to argue instead that, "A-ha, Greenwald does not deny beating his wife, you see: Which is as asinine as it is dishonest.

"Greenwald's determination to misinterpret the evidence can be comic. He writes about attending a bat mitzvah ceremony where the rabbi told the young woman that 'you are never alone' because God is always watching over you. 'The rabbi's point was clear,' Greenwald amplifies. 'If you can never evade the watchful eyes of a supreme authority, there is no choice but to follow the dictates that authority imposes." I don't think that was the rabbi's point."

I'm sure it wasn't — it was merely the rabbi's unavoidable implication. Similarly, though it may be that the de facto end of the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press, and the advent of a new system of prior restraint, might not have been Kinsley's point, it's certainly his unavoidable implication. You'd think a guy who tosses around references to James and Frayn and Marcuse and all that would understand the difference. That he doesn't isn't comic at all. It's sad.

"As the news media struggles to expose government secrets and the government struggles to keep them secret, there is no invisible hand to assure that the right balance is struck."

Well, there kind of is, though it takes an actual journalist to describe it. Here's Washington Post go-between — sorry, reporter — Barton Gellman explaining how he handles classified information in reporting on war and weapons. If you follow only one link in this post, make it this one — it's that thoughtful, thought-provoking, and nuanced. I doubt Kinsley could understand it, but most people will find it illuminating.

"So what do we do about leaks of government information? Lock up the perpetrators or give them the Pulitzer Prize? (The Pulitzer people chose the second option.)"

Yes, clearly these are the only two options. I know I'm being hard on Kinsley, but… is he dishonest? Or is he really this simple-minded?

"This is not a straightforward or easy question."

Pause for a moment to gaze in wonder at a guy who self-identifies as a journalist… and who just said that whether to lock up a journalist for publishing something the government wanted kept secret is not a straightforward or easy question.

"But I can't see how we can have a policy that authorizes newspapers and reporters to chase down and publish any national security leaks they can find."

It's technically correct to say we can't have such a policy — anymore than we can have a policy that the people's right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; or a policy that the people will be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures; or a policy that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Because these things are not "policies." They are constitutional guarantees — explicit carve-outs from the broad powers we the people have otherwise granted the government. What we really can't have — literally can't, because of the Bill of Rights — are policies against those things. Like the policies Kinsley advocates.

Kinsley claims that, "Especially in the age of blogs, it is impossible to distinguish between a professional journalist and anyone else who wants to publish his or her thoughts."

Really? I think a good working test of whether someone is a journalist, professional or otherwise, is whether he or she agrees with Kinsley. Because if you believe the government should have ultimate decision-making authority over what leaks to publish, you might be many things. But a real journalist isn't one of them.

Reposted from Freedom of the Press Foundation

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

From the farm/factory/lab to the plate/tray/takeout container, technology is constantly changing the things we do with food every step of the way. Here are three recent intersections of food and tech that range from the novel to the potentially revolutionary:

• IBM's Watson AI supercomputer has designed its own barbecue sauce recipe — and apparently it's pretty damn good. Far from traditional, it contains (among other things) rice vinegar, dates, cilantro, tamarind, cardamom and turmeric . [url]
• This $1,000 toaster uses glass-embedded semiconductors instead of metal heating elements, and can cook steak and shrimp. It looks cool too, and it's coming to the US next year. [url]
• LEDs with finely-tuned wavelengths could be the future of indoor farming and market gardening. In addition to giving crops the exact light they need, LEDs have a host of other benefits over traditional fluorescent grow-lamps. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Obviously, there have been an awful lot of patent lawsuits in the past few years concerning smartphones and various software and hardware associated with smartphones. The folks over at law firm WilmerHale have now released a paper, which conservatively (and thoroughly) estimates that the patent royalties that need to be paid by smartphone manufacturers currently exceeds $120 per device -- which they note is right around the price of the components themselves (found via FOSS Patents, which notes that the estimates in the paper almost certainly lowball the patent royalties, so they may be much higher). Basically, more than half the cost of making a smartphone these days is in paying off patent holders. The authors of the paper are pretty clear that they don't even have data on many other parts of the smartphone where patent holders have demanded licensing payments, meaning the number is probably actually higher. Though, on the flipside, they admit that some companies likely negotiated lower rates in private than the "headline" rates that were publicly revealed. Either way, the $120 estimate is likely fairly conservative.

Talk about a massive tax on innovation -- that all of us are paying for.

And, of course, many of these fees are going to pure trolls, who have contributed nothing to making actual smartphones. The paper highlights the explosion of troll lawsuits in the past few years: Though, to be fair, some of that is because of the America Invents Act of 2011, which made it more difficult for trolls to file a single lawsuit against multiple defendants, meaning that many started more lawsuits against individual defendants.

Either way, this should be seen as a massive problem. Rather than going towards innovation and better, more affordable products for the pubic, money is going to lawyers and patent trolls who have contributed nothing to society. It's a massive dead weight loss to the economy.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The general public knowledge when it comes to diet and nutrition is an absolute mess, and it's no surprise given the number of mixed messages, bad scientific studies, deceptive marketing slogans and pseudoscientific quacks out there making noise. Even in the true scientific community (once you find it underneath the sensationalist journalism), there are a lot of unanswered questions about fueling a human body. One of the most notable things about the world of nutritional science is how fast myths are adopted and how frequently the common wisdom is genuinely overturned — here are just a few recent examples:

• More and more studies are suggesting that the number of calories you eat isn't as important as where they come from. People have been calorie-counting for years, and it rarely achieves long-term results. [url]
• Our fear of fats might be somewhat overblown, too. The original study that linked fat to heart disease (and many others that followed) had some serious flaws, and since a lot of fat gets replaced with carbs in the average diet, people may actually be worse off. [url]
• A researcher who found key evidence of non-celiac gluten sensitivity has done another more rigorous study that yielded opposite results. It's going to be hard to stop the multi-gazillion dollar industry that's formed around gluten sensitivity — expect further studies to provide more mixed results. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

It should be clear by now that Apple sees most of us as the proverbial unwashed masses and is on something of a mission to immolate immoral thought patterns by trying to put everyone's head in the collective sand. That seems to be the only explanation for their app store censoring process, which has in the past removed historical context from games, the human body from consideration, comic books it deems to be immoral, and literature. All, mind you, in the name of a corporate moral code that probably wouldn't hold up under closer scrutiny.

But even if Apple wants to play the morality card, it presents the problem of consistency. Moral stances, after all, don't allow for picking and choosing due to outside factors. Yet that appears to be exactly what is occurring with the latest app store nixing of a popular game about growing marijuana, called Weed Firm.

As you might have noticed the game is no longer available on the Apple App Store. This was entirely Apple's decision, not ours. We guess the problem was that the game was just too good and got to number one in All Categories, since there are certainly a great number of weed based apps still available, as well as games promoting other so-called 'illegal activities' such as shooting people, crashing cars and throwing birds at buildings...If we let hypocrites determine what content is suitable for us we will soon all be watching teletubbies instead of Breaking Bad and playing... oh I don't know… nothing good comes to mind, without some form of 'illegal activity' or other really.

A couple of things to note. First, for those of us that are older than, say, fifteen, the rapid decriminalization of all things marijuana in this country is on a pace that can be described as no less than staggering. If you simply chart out what's gone on over the past decade and extrapolate into the next, it isn't off base to expect marijuana to go the way of tobacco and alcohol within that time. So the morality play is on shaky ground to begin with. Add to that, as Kotaku does, that the only thing consistent about Apple's app removal standards is its astounding inconsistency, and we should probably all begin asking ourselves exactly what the point of any of this is.

You can find places to buy weed on the app store. You can rate different strains of weed. You can download apps that teach you more about marijuana, or get apps that will give you various cosmetic weed changes to your phone. You can even roll fake joints. You can't, however, download a game where you grow marijuana. Other games, such as Weed Farmer and Weed Tycoon, remain active on the app store for now—but these games weren't as popular or as well-rated as Weed Firm was.

What, on the face of it, might have appeared to be a genuine, if misplaced, attempt to apply some kind of moral code suddenly dissolves into a PR response. As long as the marijuana-related games are generating money without being popular enough to draw any kind of wider attention, Apple's moral qualms go by the wayside. They either don't have the interest or the actual capacity to actively police all such offending games. Either answer renders the morality play moot to begin with: either you can enforce your strict guidelines in general or you can't. Apple, in the case of games revolving around marijuana, clearly can't. So what are we all doing here?

Well, we're suffering under Apple's delusion that we're children, of course. Children in need of a firm hand and the guidance of our parents, which apparently somehow became Apple. I suppose it isn't all that different from the old AOL walled-internet days, which I happily note went the hell away over a decade ago when the internet and its average denizen grew up. Maybe it's time now for Apple to stop it with the whole Puritan routine and start trusting their customers a bit more?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

We've highlighted a number of stories recently about the City of London Police, who have partnered with a few legacy players from the entertainment industry, and are using a bunch of taxpayer money to try to shut down websites the copyright industry doesn't like -- based on no clear legal reasoning or authority. They often seem to just rely on their name and bogus threats to get registrars to kill sites -- a process that has been found to violate ICANN policies for registrars. However, most registrars just give in, because the City of London Police just look so damn official.

Over the weekend TorrentFreak noted that a few more sites have been shuttered based on no court order, no judicial findings, but just the City of London Police's say so. This includes FileCrop, a site that hosted no infringing files at all, but which is just a search engine. Once again, the police make no effort whatsoever to hide the fact that they're doing the bidding of the legacy entertainment industry -- directly linking to their favored sites and flat out saying that they're supported by BPI, IFPI, FACT and the Publishers Association. Whether or not the sites that are being taken down are, in fact, violating the law, everything about this process is highly questionable. Taking down websites without a court order is a blatant attack on free speech. And, yes, while the UK does not have the same free speech traditions as the US, it does still hold itself out as being a believer in free speech. It is difficult to see the shuttering of a website without any due process as little more than blatant censorship.

Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that this censorship is proudly done to support legacy industries who see the internet as something to be shunned and attacked. How would people respond if the City of London Police suddenly, with no court order, shut down BSkyB and proudly announced it was doing so with the support of the BBC? Or shut down AirBnB and announced it was doing so with the support of the British Hospitality industry? Or shut down EasyJet and did so with the support of British Air? Wouldn't people be outraged?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Last fall, we noted that the popular disk encryption software TrueCrypt was undergoing a security audit, inspired by the Snowden revelations. At issue: TrueCrypt is open source and widely used and promoted (hell, Snowden himself apparently taught people how to use it), but no one really knew who was behind it -- raising all sorts of questions. A little over a month ago, we noted that the first phase of the audit didn't find any backdoors, but did note a few (mostly) minor vulnerabilities.

However, a little while ago, TrueCrypt's SourceForge page suddenly announced that " WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues" and furthermore: "The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP." While some initially questioned if this was a hoax, others quickly noted that a new version of the program was signed with the official TrueCrypt private key -- meaning that it's either legit, or TrueCrypt's private key has been compromised (which would obviously present another serious issue). If you happen to use TrueCrypt, you should be very, very careful right now.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

One of the commonest accusations flung at Edward Snowden is that by revealing the massive scale of the NSA's global surveillance, he has tipped off terrorists that they are being watched all the time, and thus caused them to move to stronger encryption to protect their secrets. An article in Recorded Future would seem to support that claim:

Following the June 2013 Edward Snowden leaks we observe an increased pace of innovation, specifically new competing jihadist platforms and three (3) major new encryption tools from three (3) different organizations -- GIMF, Al-Fajr Technical Committee, and ISIS -- within a three to five-month time frame of the leaks.

And yet security expert Bruce Schneier not only doesn't think that's a problem, he believes Snowden has made it easier to break the encrypted communications of terrorists:

I think this will help US intelligence efforts. Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight. Last fall, Matt Blaze said to me that he thought that the Snowden documents will usher in a new dark age of cryptography, as people abandon good algorithms and software for snake oil of their own devising. My guess is that this an example of that.

That's a great point. For obvious reasons, terrorists won't be able to draw on the knowledge and skills of the global crypto community when they create a new "home-brew" encryption program to replace an existing tool they fear may be compromised. Instead, they will be forced to depend on a limited circle of experts, who are likely to miss subtle or even not-so-subtle flaws in the new code. It's a good demonstration of how the open, collaborative approach that produces the best encryption tools makes it very hard to subvert the process for malicious purposes.

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

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

For all the exaggerated talk of how much "damage" Ed Snowden has done, he hasn't actually revealed the names of any spies or put them in any danger. No, that's the White House's job. An apparent slip-up meant that the White House distributed a list of people at a press briefing in Afghanistan that clearly identified the CIA's top spy in the country.

The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops.

The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.

Perhaps even more incredible is that, at first, the White House denied there was a problem with the list, until someone apparently figured out what happened:

In this case, the pool report was filed by Washington Post White House bureau chief Scott Wilson. Wilson said he had copied the list from the e-mail provided by White House press officials. He sent his pool report to the press officials, who then distributed it to a list of more than 6,000 recipients.

Wilson said that after the report was distributed, he noticed the unusual reference to the station chief and asked White House press officials in Afghanistan whether they had intended to include that name.

Initially, the press office raised no objection, apparently because military officials had provided the list to distribute to news organizations. But senior White House officials realized the mistake and scrambled to issue an updated list without the CIA officer’s name. The mistake, however, already was being noted on Twitter, although without the station chief’s name.

Meanwhile, back in the US, the guy who blew the whistle on the CIA's waterboarding program is sitting in jail for "revealing" a CIA agent's name, when he actually did much, much less (simply confirming to a reporter the name of someone that reporter might want to talk to about a story). But, as double standards tend to go, I would imagine no one will be going to jail over this much more serious leak. After all, whoever fucked up and put it in the list probably hasn't blown the whistle on a program like the US torturing people.

Obviously, mistakes happen, but it's fairly incredible how the same people will brush off "mistakes" like this one, while going absolutely crazy over claims that John Kiriakou or Thomas Drake or Ed Snowden somehow caused a tremendous amount of "harm" despite no evidence to actually support those claims.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Since the very first Snowden leak a year ago, one of the more common refrains from defenders of the program is "but it's just metadata, not actual content, so what's the big deal?" Beyond the fact that other programs do collect content, we've pointed out time and time again that the "just metadata, don't worry" argument only makes sense if you don't know what metadata reveals. Anyone with any knowledge of the subject knows that metadata reveals a ton of private info. Furthermore, we've even pointed out that the NSA regularly uses "just metadata" to pick targets for drone assassinations. As one person called it: "death by unreliable metadata."

So we know that the US kills people based on metadata, but given how hard the NSA and its defenders have sought to play down the collection of metadata, it's somewhat amazing to find out that the always on-message former director of both the NSA and CIA, Michael Hayden, flat out admitted that "we kill people based on metadata." According to David Cole:

Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person's most intimate associations and interests, and it's actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, "metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody's life. If you have enough metadata, you don't really need content." When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker's comment "absolutely correct," and raised him one, asserting, "We kill people based on metadata."

You can see Hayden make that statement at the 18 minute mark of this video -- though he immediately tries to qualify the statement by saying we don't kill people based on this metadata. Of course, what he leaves out is that the DOJ believes that the federal government has the legal authority to kill Americans based on this metadata. So that kind of matters: It's a bit scary to watch Hayden's awkward snarky smile after making this statement.

Separately, if you rewind the video to the 15 minute mark, David Cole does a great job laying out why metadata is so powerful, though even he didn't go so far as to highlight "death by metadata."

As stated above, we knew that the CIA kills based on metadata -- but it's still fairly amazing that Hayden was willing to admit this. Either way, the next time you hear anyone invoking the "it's just metadata" or saying "but it's not the actual content" perhaps point out to them this simple statement: the former head of the NSA and CIA, and one of the biggest defenders of the metadata collection program (some of which began under his watch) has admitted: "we kill people based on metadata."

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

This insight into how police think the public should interact with them is certainly enlightening. (via this tweet and Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess blog)

The backstory is this: a woman was walking down the street when a motorcycle cop approached her, asked her if she lived in the area and if she would talk to him. She says his approach made her feel uncomfortable, so she refused and continued on her way.

"I thought that maybe he was flirting," she said. "I just thought it was odd, I thought it was odd. I wasn't really sure but I felt uncomfortable because there wasn't anyone around."

She says she was worried he might not even a real cop, so she refused to stop and began jogging away from him.

"He just crept along beside me on his motorcycle and he started saying, 'Hey ma'am! I want to talk to you. Hey stop, ma'am! I want to talk to you.' Then my anxiety rose even higher," she said.

This was followed shortly thereafter by the cop dismounting, chasing her down, tackling her and placing her under arrest. The police chief claims this arrest was for "walking on the wrong side of the road," (as well as "evading arrest" and "resisting arrest") despite the fact that the woman wasn't ultimately charged with anything.

Even if the preceding events could possibly be dismissed as hearsay, or something tainted by false impressions and emotions, there's the police chief's responses to questions about this interaction.

Whitehouse Police Chief Craig Shelton says this:

Shelton says by law you're not required to stop and talk to an officer if there's not a lawful reason for them to be stopping you.

But then he says this:

"Normally if a police officer pulls up, in my opinion, it's awful odd for somebody just to take off and not want to speak to the police officer," Shelton said.

Yes, this may seem "odd" to a police officer, but it's not all that odd for citizens, even those committing no real crime (Shelton justifies the stop with the "walking on the wrong side of the street" crap) to have no desire to talk to police officers. A huge imbalance of power makes conversation uncomfortable. Anyone who's attempted small talk with their boss understands this. If someone doesn't want to talk to a cop, it's not odd, it's normal.

Only a cop -- someone who doesn't understand the strain caused by the imbalance of power -- would consider this response "odd." And when law enforcement officials use the word "odd," they actually mean "suspicious." (Hence this woman being chased, tackled and arrested -- all for "walking on the wrong side of the street.") Holding a conversation with a cop without somehow appearing nervous, fidgety or otherwise strained (all natural body responses that will be read by most cops as signs of guilt) isn't something many people can do. Knowing that these common reactions will only serve to "alert" cops to theoretical criminal behavior further exacerbates the situation.

Beyond that, there's the other assertions Shelton makes in defense of his officer's actions. First, he claims the cop's motorcycle and uniform clearly indicated he was a cop and not some bad guy seeking to do harm.

"The motorcycle has a patch on both sides of the gas tank. It's black and white and says 'Whitehouse Police,' and has red and blue lights on it," Whitehouse Police Chief Craig Shelton said. "So you have to take it for what it is. Do you think he's a Whitehouse police officer? Why would you think he's someone impersonating a police officer?"

Why would you assume he isn't? Shelton is completely divorced from reality. For one, most people can't determine the difference between a cop and an impostor, especially if they're making active efforts to disengage from the interaction.

For another, plenty of cops -- real cops -- have been charged with rape and sexual assault. So, being a legitimate cop doesn't really eliminate the danger for a woman walking on her own with no one else around. Sure, this cop may not be a rapist, but I would imagine those who have been raped by a cop probably thought the officer who violated them wasn't a rapist right up to the point they were being raped.

The fact is that the woman probably would have extricated herself from the situation no matter what. A strange man -- in uniform or out -- persistently trying to get a woman to talk to him in an area with few other pedestrians is almost always going to be treated as a possible threat. It's the persistence that sets off the alarms. If you're rebuffed and go away, the threat subsides. But if you persist, whether you're just some stranger or a guy in full uniform on a police motorcycle, it will continue to push the needle toward "threat."

But that's the problem. Despite all of this, Chief Shelton just thinks it's "odd" the woman wouldn't stop. Shelton makes things even worse by making this contradictory claim.

Bonnette hasn't been charged with anything, but the entire incident was caught on dashcam video and Shelton says it will be investigated further. He also says Johnson acted appropriately and won't be reprimanded.

There go the odds of ever seeing the video. Shelton has already cleared the officer ahead of his promise to investigate further. How does that even add up in his head? He's already made his decision. Unless, of course, he means he's going to investigate to see if any further charges can be brought against the "odd" woman who refused to talk to his officer until he had her pinned on the ground and handcuffed. But that would just be vindictive and surely the Whitehouse PD is above that. If that's not what Shelton meant, then the investigation he's performing will be open-and-shut, caged in by air quotes and quite possibly doing away altogether with the bothersome "open" half of open-and-shut.



Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Samsung seems to be doing a bit of executive shuffling over at headquarters. Reuters reports that head of mobile design team — Chang Dong-hoon — has offered his resignation of the position to underling vice president of mobile design Lee Min-hyouk.

Immediately, we wonder why. Samsung obviously didn’t indulge our curiosity, but the feeling around the water cooler is that the lukewarm (and borderline hostile) reaction to the design of the Samsung Galaxy S5 had something to do with it.

Main criticisms shared by most were that its dimpled faux leather backing felt and looked cheap, and that the phone’s overall design is uninspired. Rob Jackson wrote in his Samsung Galaxy S5 review that he felt this was a step in the right direction, even if that step wasn’t very big.

Sure, it’s just a phone, but people like devices they carry around all day to look as well as they work. The original Galaxy Gear was also no spring chicken, and while the new Tizen-based gear products have improved in that area they aren’t the most attractive smart watches on the market.

Challenging the theory that Chang Dong-hoon was pressured to resign due to design shortcomings is the fact that he is putting more focus on his role as head of Samsung’s design strategy team. Samsung says the team is responsible for the design direction for all of their products and businesses — that means mobile, too.

Also challenging that theory is the fact that his replacement, Lee Min-Hyouk, was largely responsible for designing the Galaxy S line in its early years, a feat which has earned him the nickname of Midas. Lee likely had just as much influence over the design of the line now as he did back then, so it’s tough to imagine that this move was anything more than a bit of corporate shakeup to cut down on redundancy.

Of course, we’ll never know the true reasoning unless we’re able to wiggle our way into a Samsung board meeting or two, so we’re left to our imagination and speculation. Let us know what you think of the Samsung Galaxy S5′s design in the comments below, and be sure to stop by this thread at AndroidForums.com where people are making a strong case for the Galaxy S5′s craftsmanship and design and drop an opinion of your own.

In the ongoing saga over the NSA's snooping on just about everyone, the one message the NSA and its defenders keep going back to is this idea that we need to "trust" them. And they insist that the trust is fine because everything they do is carefully monitored and audited. In John Oliver's recent interview with former NSA boss, General Keith Alexander, Alexander insisted that this kind of tracking and auditing was fool-proof, claiming that it had caught the twelve people who had abused their authority to spy on specific individuals. Except that Alexander was flat out lying there. First of all, internal investigations have shown thousands of abuses, not just twelve. As for the twelve that Alexander is talking about, when we looked through the details, it became clear that only three of the twelve were caught because of audits. And many were only caught because the guilty party later confessed -- sometimes many years later.

In other words, all this talk of how we should "trust" the NSA because its audits are so good... don't pass the basic laugh test. Yes, twelve people were caught, but nine of them were caught because they confessed themselves or others turned them in. Your guess is as good as mine about how many others abused the system without getting caught at all. Alexander insists that number is zero, but he has no way to know that.

Meanwhile, every time the NSA talks about how wonderful its auditing system is, it seems worthwhile to remind them that Edward Snowden walked out the door with a bunch of documents and no one noticed. At all. As we've been pointing out for months, that should call into question just how good those "audits" are.

And, to make this point even clearer: nearly a year after Snowden walked out the door with all of those documents, the NSA still has no idea what he took. As Glenn Greenwald points out, Alexander is still saying the NSA has no idea how much Snowden took:

AFR: Can you now quantify the number of documents [Snowden] stole?

Gen. Alexander: Well, I don’t think anybody really knows what he actually took with him, because the way he did it, we don’t have an accurate way of counting. What we do have an accurate way of counting is what he touched, what he may have downloaded, and that was more than a million documents.

In fact, the NSA keeps changing its story on how many documents. Early on, Greenwald had suggested it was in the 60,000 to 70,000 range. Just a few days ago, Ewan MacAskill, the often-overlooked Guardian reporter who was with Greenwald and Laura Poitras when they first met Snowden, told a conference that Snowden had 60,000 documents. Yet, by November, the NSA was claiming it was over 200,000 documents. And in December it suddenly jumped to 1.5 million, and then days later, 1.7 million -- based on the assumption, as Alexander admits above, that Snowden took everything he "touched."

But just that very admission highlights that the auditing system the NSA keeps insisting we should trust is completely broken. As we've noted, if the NSA can't tell how its own systems are being used, then it has no idea how they're being abused. Even worse, the NSA has no idea if other people with powers similar to Snowden may have taken other documents and given them to those who actually mean to do us harm, rather than reporters looking to serve the public interest.

In admitting that the NSA has no way of knowing what Snowden did, Alexander is admitting that all this talk of the infallible audit system is all smoke and mirrors. And, because of that, the claims that we can trust the NSA not to abuse its systems are equally untrustworthy.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Just stop.

"Fixing" bullying through rushed, stupid, reactionary laws does nothing to address the issue and generally just makes things worse. Carson, CA, Mayor Jim Dear thinks he's going to beat bullying and he's going to use a new law to do it. His plan is a real gem, though, requiring only a one-paragraph summary to encompass its utter vapidity. (via Adam Steinbaugh)

Under an ordinance that will go before the City Council next week, it would become a misdemeanor in the small Harbor-area city to cause anyone from kindergarten through age 25 to “feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed or molested” with no legitimate purpose.

1. This wording suggests there are legitimate reasons to "terrorize, frighten, intimidate, threaten, harass or molest" people aged 5-25. Sadly, the mayor fails to provide examples.

2. Thicker skin is apparently grafted on at age 25, at which point people can expect to be terrorized, threatened, etc. right up to the limits of existing laws. The subtext here is that people are expected to "grow up" and deal with bullying better at some point in their lives. That arbitrary point appears to be four years past the legal drinking age.

3. This bill is entirely subjective -- the key word being "feel." No one is allowed to make anyone "feel" any of the above forbidden feelings. As presented here, there's no "reasonable person" subjectivity bar, which makes everyone in Carson subject to everyone else's feelings.

This bill also covers "cyberbullying," which is incredibly redundant considering all of the feelings listed above. But it goes beyond simple redundancy, offering additional actionable feelings specific to electronic communications.

It cites “hurtful, rude and mean text messages” as a key form of cyberbullying, along with “spreading rumors or lies about others by email or social networks.

"Hurtful?" "Rude?" "Mean?" Have you not met children, Mayor Dear? They can be all of these things without being bullies, simply because their sense of perspective has yet to mature. The most amazing things fall out of kids' mouths. Some grow brain-mouth filters as they mature. Others don't. But most start out without a knowledge of societal norms -- the unspoken agreement that specifies that you don't point out what's different or strange or funny about someone else to their face. But to Dear, these childish statements may be treated as misdemeanors.

For additional unintentional hilarity, here's a statement from the bill's co-sponsor.

Councilman Mike Gipson, a co-author of the measure, said the goal was to make Carson a “bully-free city.”

Gipson's idealism would be admirable if it weren't completely indiscernible from the sort of thing politicians who have long since kissed their ideals goodbye would make. It's a promise that can't be kept, stated as a lofty goal towards which the city will e'er strive, even if it means criminalizing protected speech and non-criminal behavior. If this effort fails (and it will, at one level or another), the goalposts can always be moved, or the definitions changed, so that Carson, CA is constantly approaching the "bully-free" ideal.

The problem with unquantifiable goals is that someone will want to quantify it, if only to justify the arrest and booking of schoolchildren. And when you make certain activities the target, that will be what's counted. The more "bullies" it prosecutes, the closer it must be to achieving Gipson's and Dear's utopian goal. This provides twisted incentives for law enforcement and prosecutors, both of whom are now involved in a problem that used to be solved by parents and schools. Good work if you can get it -- especially if you've got a crusade on your mind -- but it's hardly a solution to a societal problem.



Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

When we discuss book bans, we typically discuss them in terms of being revolted by the myopic viewpoint of those doing the banning. For instance, Tim Cushing recently wrote about one book that was banned, despite being an award-winning novel, for including some fairly mild language dealing with sexuality and masturbation. In that case, some parents went to the police to keep teenagers from passing out the books anyway, as if some kind of school book ban had the force of law. That was, obviously, quite a silly situation.

But we shouldn't let this taint all book-banning activities. After all, some books are truly dangerous. Take the tome of violence-advocacy recently targeted for banishment by the Toronto library system, for instance, and see if you can't find it in your heart to admit that some books are too dangerous to be allowed.

Librarians at the Toronto Public Library were asked to remove copies of Dr. Seuss’ 1963 children's book "Hop on Pop” from the establishment’s collection because it allegedly promotes violence. A document detailing the seven books the library has been asked to remove over the past year was posted online on Monday.

The book “encourages children to use violence against their fathers,” according to the complaint.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, Tim, it's a harmless rhyming children's book. It isn't promoting violence!" Well, you're not fooling anyone. It seems pretty clear to me that this book, written by some guy named Dr. Seuss (probably a terrorist), is being actively promoted as a way to quite literally stomp out fathers. Think of the children.....that will never be born because other children are stomping on men's two-bits at the behest of some 1960's love-child Dr. of death! This will not stand!

The Materials Review Committee pointed out that the book is “humorous,” “well-loved” and that it has “appeared on many ‘Best of’ children’s book lists.” The MRC also pointed out that the children in the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s book are actually told not to hop on pop.

Nobody's buying it, MRC. These are probably the same people that told us there were WMDs in Iraq and that 9/11 wasn't just a false-flag operation orchestrated by a zombie Hitler that's kept in an underground bunker beneath the Grand Canyon. You can't fool us. A tiny fraction of people in Toronto want this book banned, damn it.

Despite the complaint, the library opted to retain the book in the children's collection.

Does government overreach know no bounds? We say "don't tread on me," and they house this book that literally tells children (except it doesn't) to tread on their fathers? Canadians, write your Congressmen (or whatever it is you call them up there). Something must be done.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

If you have (a little less than) 2 hours this weekend, find a way to sit down and watch the mother of all debates about the NSA surveillance program, in which former CIA and NSA boss Michael Hayden and reporter Glenn Greenwald debate each other. Hayden had (in)famous law professor Alan Dershowitz on his side, and Greenwald had Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian on his side, and they both had their interesting moments, but this debate was all about Greenwald v. Hayden and they did not disappoint. Greenwald knocked it out of the park. Hayden came off as condescending and evasive, while Greenwald had facts readily at hand. Hayden said he wanted to debate on the actual facts, and Greenwald brought a bunch, which Hayden didn't respond to. Dershowitz kept insisting that it was all okay because the people at the NSA had proper motives (I don't recall where in the 4th Amendment there's an exception for motives). Meanwhile, Ohanian highlighted how the NSA is actually making us all less secure and massively harming the economy. The video of the debate is below, but you have to skip ahead to 29 minutes. It might not surprise folks to find that I found Greenwald convincing, but I was not the only one:

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Note: Lower your volume, screaming and street collapsing. This is a video from Baltimore of an entire street collapsing onto the train tracks below as a result of heavy rain and erosion. We get it Mother Nature, you're pissed. Hopefully these folks all have full coverage car insurance. Hello, GEICO? I'd like to file a claim. "What happened?" Mother nature. "What do you mean?" She's a giant bitch. Keep going for the video, but skip to 1:10 to see the collapse in case you're in a hurry. Thanks to lilco, who

The Techdirt comments section is to thank for this one. After we just talked about Chase Bank appearing to close the personal bank accounts of a bunch of employees in the adult performing business, a few of you pointed us to reports that this may just be Chase Bank dancing to a federal piper. That report has expanded upon Teagan Presley, a former porn star, and her comments upon finding out she was suddenly no longer a Chase customer.

When Presley went to the bank in person to ask why, she was told it's because she's considered "high risk."

"And then they told me that they canceled my husband’s account too, because our social security numbers are linked," Presley told VICE News. "They told him that it was because I'm a notorious adult star. Which is funny, because I'm kind of a goody-goody in the business, and I'm not even doing porn anymore."

So, the obvious question to ask next is what makes her "high risk"? After all, Chase Bank really likes money, even when it is generated by doing some pretty crappy things, so what's the deal? Well, the latest is that this may be a part of the US Department of Justice's "Operation Choke Point" program, in which the government has apparently decided that some extremely legal businesses don't get to exist anymore, but since they can't just disappear companies and industries in good standing, they've decided to route around the whole "freedom" thing and get the financial industry to act as contract hitmen.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday, American Bankers Association CEO Frank Keating wrote that the Justice Department is "telling bankers to behave like policemen and judges."

"Operation Choke Point is asking banks to identify customers who may be breaking the law or simply doing something government officials don't like," Keating wrote. "Banks must then "choke off" those customers' access to financial services, shutting down their accounts."

Keating said the highly secretive operation was launched in early 2013. That's when porn stars started to complain to the media that their bank accounts were being shut down without explanation.

Let's not mince words: a program that was built upon the goals of stopping financial fraud has devolved into a massive government overreach into private businesses that are operating within the law. The way it works is that the DOJ informs financial institutions that certain industries are more likely than others to be involved in unauthorized charges of consumer credit and bank cards. They likewise inform the banks that the DOJ is going to keep a special super-awesome close-eye on these industries, with the implication being that there will be a great deal of prosecutorial action, subpoenas, and scrutiny on those industries, not mention penalties on the institutions that work with them. The intention of the government, it would seem, is to make the banks unwilling to deal with the government harassment and simply cut anyone in those industries off from the financial institutions. Nobody is happy about this.

Even the former chairman of the FDIC, William Isaac, wrote in American Banker magazine this week that Operation Choke Point is "way out of control," adding that 23 bipartisan members of Congress wrote a letter to the DOJ stating that the operation is driving legal business into the ground. That includes banks themselves.

Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, wrote a letter to the Justice Department in early April, saying that Operation Choke Point makes it too tough for small community banks to compete with the big chains.

It's worse than that. The federal government is lording over legal industries operating within their respective states' laws and single-handedly directing banking institutions to cut their legs out from beneath them. It would be bad enough if we were just talking about business accounts, but personal accounts are getting swept up in this as well. That's how you end up with individual performers in the adult film industry suddenly finding themselves unable to open up a bank account. This is done, by the way, in the name of morality. It represents a violation of a free and legal marketplace by a government that has as much moral authority as can fit in a thimble.

And, no, it isn't just the porn industry we're talking about.

In 2011, the FDIC listed 30 "merchant categories that have been associated with high-risk activity," likening pornography to Ponzi schemes, racist materials, "lifetime guarantees," and sales of fireworks and tobacco. At a March hearing before a Senate Banking subcommittee, the Washington Post reported, Senator David Vitter (R-La.) said "there is a determined effort, from [the Justice Department] to the regulators... to cut off credit and use other tactics to force [payday lenders] out of business. I find that deeply troubling because it has no statutory basis, no statutory authority."

This should be terrifying to business owners in every industry. Sure, this time they're going after some companies that you may not like, be they porn, or payday lenders, or people making racist materials, tobacco, or fireworks. But if those industries are operating within the law, they have the right to exist. The law is the only measure by which the DOJ should be invoking banking policy. The federal government doesn't get to pick and choose which businesses exist outside of their legality. If the federal government wants to make porn illegal, they should try to do so. They won't get very far, but they should try. This underhanded attack on free enterprise is simply un-American.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The RIAA is not exactly known for its positive treatment of musicians. If you're at all familiar with the art of RIAA accounting, you'd know about how they structure deals to totally screw over musicians, doing everything possible to make sure they never get paid a dime. Yes, many are given advances, but those advances are "loans" on terrible terms in which the labels add on every possible expense that needs to be "paid back" before you ever see another dime. Very few musicians ever "recoup" -- even after the labels have made back many times what they actually gave the artists. For the most succinct example of how the labels make out like bandits, profiting mightily while still telling artists they haven't recouped, here's Tim Quirk, who a few years back explained how it worked with his band, Too Much Joy (TMJ):

A word here about that unrecouped balance, for those uninitiated in the complex mechanics of major label accounting. While our royalty statement shows Too Much Joy in the red with Warner Bros. (now by only $395,214.71 after that $62.47 digital windfall), this doesn't mean Warner "lost" nearly $400,000 on the band. That's how much they spent on us, and we don't see any royalty checks until it's paid back, but it doesn't get paid back out of the full price of every album sold. It gets paid back out of the band's share of every album sold, which is roughly 10% of the retail price. So, using round numbers to make the math as easy as possible to understand, let's say Warner Bros. spent something like $450,000 total on TMJ. If Warner sold 15,000 copies of each of the three TMJ records they released at a wholesale price of $10 each, they would have earned back the $450,000. But if those records were retailing for $15, TMJ would have only paid back $67,500, and our statement would show an unrecouped balance of $382,500.

In other words, musicians don't get paid anything in most cases, while the labels can earn a tidy profit for years and years, still insisting the band hasn't recouped. It's why a band can sell a million albums and still owe $500,000.

I bring this up, because of the latest ridiculousness from the RIAA, claiming that it "stands behind" artists who aren't making enough money. We've already written about the latest lawsuit against Pandora, in which the RIAA/Soundexchange are saying that Pandora isn't paying pre-1972 artists (despite the fact that the RIAA itself refuses any attempt to put those recordings under federal copyright law, which would mandate compulsory licenses). We've also covered the ridiculousness of the RIAA releasing bizarre statements from artists like Steve Cropper, pretending that programmers still get paid for code they wrote in 1962.

But now it's reached truly ridiculous levels. musicFirst, a lobbying group put together by SoundExchange and the RIAA (potentially violating some laws), has put out an astoundingly ridiculous blog post, in which it discusses these lawsuits over pre-1972 sound recordings, by arguing that it is standing up for pre-1972 artists and not letting them "fade away" (a weak reference to a Buddy Holly song).

What a shady move. Fans will go to record stores to pay for this timeless music, but billion dollar corporations won’t pay a dime. And these services sell those same fans stations like the “60s on 6” and the “Buddy Holly station” yet refuse to give one dime of subscribers’ payments to the artists that made the music on those stations.

No matter what the outcome is in courts of law, Sirius XM and Pandora will pay a hefty price in the court of public opinion and in Congress. We love and respect our pre-72 artists and we will stand up for them. We will not let them fade away.

Oh really? You won't let those artists fade away? Then I assume you'll be going back and paying all of those artists you screwed over for decades, right? Let's start with Lester Chambers, for example, who got some attention a couple years ago, for how the RIAA totally fucked him over and let him fade away: Of course, it wasn't the RIAA, SoundExchange or musicFirst who helped him out. It was the internet, led by Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, who helped Chambers raise over $60,000 on Kickstarter for a fantastic new album (it really is great, if you haven't yet heard it) -- and that money went to Chambers, not to a label who then refused to pay royalties. Or how about all of those artists who are seeking to take back their copyrights thanks to the copyright termination clause, which the RIAA is fighting tooth and nail against -- the same copyright termination clause that the RIAA's number two guy tried to secretly delete from copyright for musicians, while he was a Congressional staffer (months before taking his $500,000 salary at the RIAA, where he's remained until today).

So, whether or not Pandora and Sirius XM are right or wrong in how they handle the streaming royalties on pre-1972 works, the idea that the RIAA is somehow out there "protecting" older artists and not letting them fade away is a sick joke.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Crime numbers are down. Police militarization is up. The War on Drugs continues to be fought with as much intensity as ever even as the country sides with legalization. So, when a lack of crime meets budgets, weaponry and expectations -- all primed for battle -- what's a poor law enforcement officer to do?

Former deputies Julio Cesar Martinez, 39, and Anthony Manuel Paez, 32, have been charged with two felony counts of conspiring to obstruct justice and altering evidence, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. Martinez faces two additional felony counts of perjury and filing a false report.

The two deputies had already had one charge -- possession of ecstasy -- but that apparently wasn't enough. Why settle for a low ball possession charge when you can add months or years to the sentence?

Before he got a search warrant, Martinez kicked a wall outlet and shut down power to the room, according to the complaint. Paez then allegedly opened a drawer, pulled out a gun and put it on a chair.

The complaint alleges Paez also planted a gun on top of an office desk, next to some ecstasy pills. At some point, Paez allegedly crawled under the desk and disabled the security camera system.

This led to Yang being charged with "possessing ecstasy in the presence of a firearm" (firearms are apparently very impressionable...), to which he pleaded no contest. Another person was charged with possession of an unregistered handgun.

One year later, after Yang had already served his sentence, Internal Affairs discovered the video from inside the pot dispensary was "inconsistent" with filed reports. Or worded more accurately, the deputies' reports weren't backed up by the unblinking security camera. The unnamed "suspect" was cut loose. Yang, however, had already spent several months in jail, time the Sheriff's Department can't give back to him. Both officers face up to seven years in jail if found guilty and are currently out on $50,000 bail pending arraignment.

Is this an outlier, one of the exceptions to the rule? Probably. But there seems to be way too many of these "exceptions."

A police car dash cam captured Santa Clara deputies plotting to plant drugs in a woman’s home after their first illegal search turned up nothing, the woman claims in court.

Allison Ross, who was arrested after the second search of her home, sued the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department, its crime lab, Sheriff Laurie Smith, and 12 of her officers, in Federal Court.

Once again, officers primed for the "War" found themselves faced with a dearth of combatants. No drugs and nothing to do but walk away empty-handed. For some reason, these deputies believed a lack of criminal activity would somehow be marked up as a loss in the War on Drugs. So, they decided to make a second "search" of the premises, this time while the fix was in.

Deputies then re-entered the home and ransacked it, opening and rummaging through drawers in the bedrooms and kitchens. They placed personal property from around the house into one area in an effort to make it appear that the items were in plain sight, the complaint states...

Because the deputies failed to find any drugs in the home, "they planted narcotics which were kept in one of the sheriff's vehicles. Statements to this effect can be heard over the vehicle dash camera on one of the defendant's vehicles," the lawsuit states...

[T[he officers are heard on the recording saying: 'the house is clean, there is no meth in the house', 'we're gonna spike that and we're gonna spike him.' 'I got the meth in the ——- car,'" the complaint states.

These LEOs must be learning from their FBI heroes. If criminal activity fails to present itself, feel free to manufacture it. Of course, the FBI's tactics are a bit more subtle and require months of leading the easily-led until they've fallen into the agency's "terrorism" traps.

These deputies apparently didn't have the time or willingness to play the long con. They had made two (apparently illegal) sweeps and still hadn't come up with anything actionable. So, they took it upon themselves to "find" the justification they needed for their actions.

Another outlier? Sure, if you still have an inordinate amount of faith in your fellow human beings and believe law enforcement officers are less likely to be swayed by perverse incentives than, say, the guy a couple of cubicles over. But humans do human things, and those with a lot of power and very little accountability do human things that seriously damage other humans. And they do it more often than we'd hope, as Radley Balko points out.

And it certainly wouldn't be the first time drug cops have been caught doing so. Nor would it be the first time a crime lab analyst has been caught faking the results of drug tests.

We know cops lie and that judges oblige them. Planting evidence is a physical lie and it's just as simple (simpler, even) as looking the defendant in the eye and telling him or her, along with the assembled court, things the person facing months or years in prison knows aren't true. And then going back to work, secure in the knowledge that if the suspect wasn't exactly guilty of what you claimed, they were probably guilty of something. They all are, even the ones that aren't -- and the cops have the tools, ability and access to ensure the "evidence" is exactly where it needs to be to make the charges stick.



Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Search engines own the internet. The rest of us are just renting space. At least, that's what a Texas court seems to believe. Google is in court fighting a gag order telling it to chase down and remove certain mentions of a certain lawyer from the internet. (via WaCon)

[I]n a stunning and all-encompassing gag order signed over a year ago and now being appealed to Houston's 1st Court of Appeals, attorney Calvin C. Jackson, who was accused of forging attorney signatures on court records, demands Google erase all mention of those accusations from the entire Internet including other websites.

Jackson, who settled over these allegations (details also under a gag order), now wants it all to just go away. And he's gotten a Texas court to agree with him. Not only does he want the past erased, he's also seeking to bar "Google" from ever mentioning this unpleasantness again. So, we have both prior restraint and an impossibility, all wrapped up in a terrible gag order.

The requests Google is fighting play right to the edges of the "ridiculousness' envelope. Cleaning the internet isn't like expunging a criminal record, but this Texas court apparently feels Google (and other search engines) should be able to just go around deleting stuff, even stuff they doesn't own (which would be pretty much all of it).

The gag order, signed by visiting San Antonio Judge Richard Price in February 2013, forces Google and other search engines to wipe out all record of the allegations from the Internet. It also compels the search engine to find third parties who posted the information to get it back and destroy it.

"Get it back?" The hell? Does this judge really believe Google can just knock on the door of other sites and demand they hand over the "hard copy?" Once again, we have someone with power mistaking his home page for "The Internet." Google and other search engines index the web. They are not in charge of the web.

Judge Price doesn't seem to have any idea how Google is supposed to prevent future discussions of this case from appearing anywhere on the web. He just seems to feel a big company like this should be able to do anything he imagines it can. If he ever decides to leave the judicial racket, I'm sure the MPAA can set him up with an office, if UK Prime Minister David Cameron doesn't snatch him up first.

Let's not worry about that First Amendment. Let's just let Calvin Jackson control his past and future via court orders. Except that's not working out very well for him. The order may be sealed but the gag order doesn't cover this sort of discussion, or Google's arguments against prior restraint and impossibility. All he's done (with the court's blessing) is ensure more discussion of past allegations. And until this order gets reversed, every site discussing this (like us) will apparently be waiting for Google to knock on the door and ask that we turn over our "originals."



Permalink | Comments | Email This Story