There are several reasons law enforcement agencies would take care not to associate themselves with Clearview. First off, Clearview is the NSO Group of the facial recognition tech world. Its actions — which begin with scraping data from any publicly accessible website and end with selling its product to whoever expresses an interest — have […]
Last week the recently formed California Privacy Protection Agency held “pre-rulemaking stakeholder sessions” to solicit input on the regulations it intends to promulgate. I provided the following testimony on behalf of the Copia Institute. Thank you for the opportunity to speak at these hearings. My name is Cathy Gellis, and I’m here representing myself and […]
Like other EU Member States, Finland is grappling with the problem of how to implement the EU Copyright Directive’s Article 17 (upload filters) in national legislation. A fascinating post by Samuli Melart in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice reveals yet another attempt by the copyright industry to make a bad law even worse. […]
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As you probably recall, former President Donald Trump sued various social media companies for kicking him off their platforms, claiming (absolutely ridiculously) that private companies deplatforming the President of the United States violated his 1st Amendment rights, and claiming that Section 230 was unconstitutional. As we noted at the time, this is not how any […]
The Trump FCC spent four years being a giant rubber stamp for giant U.S. telecom monopolies. That included rubber stamping mergers before even reading the details, gutting FCC consumer protection authority, and demolishing decades-old media consolidation rules crafted with broad bipartisan consensus, and stripping away your town and city’s ability to stand up to giant carriers. The Trump GOP […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a response to Josh Hawley’s tweet saying “woke corporations shouldn’t get sweetheart deals”: This statement heavily implies that non-“woke” corporations should get sweetheart deals. Someone would do well to ask him about that. In second place, it’s Jeffrey Nonken with […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the NSA was shutting down its 702 program, but with a whole lot of caveats and some questionable statements, while the public dump of the agency’s hacking toolkit was causing privacy problems. Meanwhile, James Comey was testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and hinting at expanded […]
Prosecutors have an obligation to turn over evidence — exculpatory or otherwise — to criminal defendants. They often don’t. In rare cases, this refusal to play by the rules results in dismissals or sanctions. But, for the most part, they tend to get away with it, allowing the government to stack the prosecutorial deck in […]
There has been a trend over the past decade or so in which a very specific part of America’s political spectrum appears to be simultaneously advocating for “free speech” in ways that have nothing to do with the American system while also attacking all kinds of other speech and insisting that speech not happen. Hypocrisy […]
Putting cops in schools is a terrible idea. It tends to encourage school administrators to abdicate their disciplinary duties and allow cops to decide which school policy violations should be treated as criminal acts. Turns out it’s also a bad idea to have compliant cops adjacent to schools. A new report from ProPublica, sourced from […]
This one is just absolutely bizarre. The Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana are now suing President Joe Biden and a whole bunch of his administration, including press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr. Anthony Fauci, DHS boss Alejandro Mayorkas, and newly appointed Disinfo czar Nina Jankowicz, in a nearly incomprehensible complaint that the Biden administration forced […]
Following the brutal killing of an unarmed black man (George Floyd) by a Minnesota police officer (convicted murderer Derek Chauvin), protests against police violence erupted around the country. Police agencies reacted predictably. Rather than dial back their aggression in response to vocal complaints about their aggression, they gave protesters everything they wanted: more violence. This […]
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There are all sorts of silly and made up reasons to be mad at Disney, but those shouldn’t take away from the many legitimate ways in which Disney is a terrible, awful company. For years, it was one of the most aggressive in pushing for ever expanded copyrights, and was one of the chief lobbyists […]
We’d already noted how telecom and media giants are engaged in a last ditch attempt over the next few weeks to derail Biden’s nomination to the FCC, Gigi Sohn. Sohn is widely admired by folks on both sides of the aisle, and is eminently qualified on stuff like expanding access to affordable broadband, media consolidation, […]
The justice system loves a stacked deck. Well, certainly the prosecutorial side loves it. Courts are, at best, ambivalent. Occasionally, this behavior gets called out. When the DOJ made it clear it wasn’t really interested in a thorough examination of its many dubious forensic techniques, Judge Jed Rakoff resigned from just-formed “Forensic Science Committee” by […]
A few days ago, Motherboard revealed they were able to purchase the location data of visitors to Planned Parenthood clinics for just $160 from a company named SafeGraph. While SafeGraph refused to comment at the time, they’ve since written a blot post announcing they’ll be ending the practice. But not without spending much of the […]
We had just written about the great difficulty national governments are having in transposing the EU Copyright Directive into local law. That’s largely because of the badly drafted and contradictory Article 17. It effectively calls for upload filters, which have obvious problems for freedom of expression because of the impossibility of crafting algorithms that encapsulate the subtleties […]
There are not enough words to describe the horrors of what Russian troops have been doing to their Ukrainian neighbors. But it should go without saying that stealing their stuff is, on its own, not ok. But it turns out that some of what they’ve stolen is farming equipment. And modern farming equipment at that, […]
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